Sometimes, I take a weekend day off and just do a nice all-day wine tasting with one of my retailers. Which retailer depends on where I’m staying and what I want to do that night. This past Saturday was at The Butcher’s Block in Sarasota. I got some video footage that should demystify my job and help people realize exactly how glamorous and fantastic being a winemaker can be. ugh. 😀

I finally had a bit of time to compile some of the vineyard footage. Please excuse the low quality. I’m recording all of this with my laptop’s built-in webcam and the macbook icam is not meant for these sweeping outdoor shots. Add Internet compression to that and some psychotic time-lapse editing and you have video that I hope is just on this side of watchable. Anyway, people have been requesting some outdoorsy footage and some footage of the town around the vineyard. Hopefully these clips will satisfy.

The music is “quelle classe!” by Les Auditeurs (my friends and I just recorded it this week!).

You can see the town hall of Villemoustaussou, the fruit orchard on the vineyard, Muse the Wine Dog, and some pretty blossoms. Excitement abounds on the outskirts of Carcassonne, France.

I made a sister video to accompany the barrel music video. It wraps up the barrel trifecta with a couple of shout outs and an answer to one of the questions I got from the Vayniac forums.

I posted a youtube video about the different pruning methods. There’s spur pruning and cane pruning. These are known here as Cordon Royat and Guyot, respectively. At O’Vineyards, we’re in the process of converting from Guyot to Cordon Royat and this video explains why we think this will be good for the wine.

PS – I’m confirming this blog’s entry into Technorati. Technorati Profile It’s a site that catalogs blogs and helps spread the word.

I just celebrated my 23rd birthday at the beginning of the month and after an incredibly busy pair of weeks in Florida, I flew back to the vineyard. I am currently typing from my office above the winery and I am excited to announce that I finally got around to making a short vineyard video. Hopefully, I’ll keep these coming as a web series on O’Vineyards that can shed some light on some of the cool things we get to do, the way we tend to grapes and wine, our love for this work and this area, all the sweet toys I get to play with, etc.

This installment is on a topic I’m very excited about. I’ve been gone since crush at the end of 2007. In my absence, my parents installed a brand new oxoline system to shelve our barrels. This actually sounds a lot like an ad for them, but I’m not getting paid. (We should look into the sponsorship opportunities, but) This is just a friendly look into one of the cool new gadgets I get to use.

For people who can’t see the video cause they’re at work or on dialup or somesuch:
My barrels used to be stacked on top of each other which is the way it’s been done for a long time. Once they’re full, they’re exceptionally heavy and it’s a little difficult reaching the bunghole (that’s the hole in the barrel, not the naughty part of your body). The shelving system uses space age innovations like wheels and tubes to shelve each barrel independently. This makes the hole accessible, makes it possible to turn the barrel around while full with minimal effort, and turns the difficult process of emptying the last bits of the barrel as easy as turning it upside down. I’m sort of surprised it took centuries of winemaking before an affordable shelf with wheels was invented, but at least we have it now.

(warning: mild cursing)

Okay,

This is only peripherally related to O’Vineyards in that I am O’Vineyards and I made this delicious dish with my friends.

We just made an enormous, decadent pizza sandwich. That’s a sandwich where you put something delicious in between two large slices of bread except that each slice of bread is a full-sized pizza!

The pizzas were delicious. We had one pizza with mashed potatoes and gravy. One classic Italian pizza with black olives, tomatoes, onion and peppers. We clasped them together with some fried okra inbetween. Yum. All vegan too.

I’ll probably be making more of these, and I’ll try to work wine into the picture in the future.