Drinking, bottling, and hiking wine

I responded to a posting from a local Lodi winery last week to help them hand cork to barrels (50 cases) of wine. It was one of my favorite Lodi wine-maker, M2. So Mom and I headed up Saturday to help out. We tasted their wines, got fed pizza, and started the assembly line. I being the young strapping male of the group, took the role of corker.


They had a huge bench corker, that was very particular. You really needed to put your whole weight into each pull to keep the pressure even and therefore get a flush cork every time (well almost).





They kept pouring us different vintages that hadnt been released asking for notes, and there was a plethora of sampling of the Syrah we were bottling.



The first barrel was a hybrid, meaning every other stave was french oak, and every other one was American oak. Layne, the head winemaker, explained he liked these best with syrah because you get the spicyness of the american oak, and the smoothness of the French. "best of both worlds" as he said it. The second barrel was straight French oak Syrah.


These 2 barrels we bottled were for the grower as partial compensation for supplying grapes. Seemed both parties win, the winery gets a slight discount on grapes, and the grower get 600 bottles made from his fruit to show off, or go make friends with.

Our "cut" for helping bottling was 2 bottles each and as we heard them discussing plans for the big ZinFest next weekend, I offered to make a half a dozen or so loaves of bread for the event. They seemed pretty happy about that. Happy enough to shove 2 bottles of old vine zin in my pockets and tell me to email them my info so I when and where to bring the bread.

Lets hope they like the bread and pictures.




For mothers day, Mom and I went out to Calistoga and went for a hike in the palisade mountains. It was absolutely gorgeous out and we had a picnic lunch and scenic views of the local vineyards.






Wild flowers were everywhere, and red tail hawks and turkey vultures were more abundant than I have ever seen. The people behind us saw a rattle snake, but no luck for us. The top of the hill was this huge expanse of volcanic and metamorphic rock. It looked like the surface of the moon.