Good Morning,

I am still recovering from this harvest and the fermentation is moving along perfectly, but I wanted to share my thoughts and the first thought about making wine in the 2011 harvest is the song from the movie 8 Mile by Eminem, You know the beat, that thumping, heart pounding and the tension he creates with his lyrics to “Lose Yourself”. The line, You only got one shot…that resonated through my head and heart.

When I made wine as a hobby, I had no pressure to get everything perfect, just learn and have fun and in the end at least I will have wine for myself and my friends. But now this is my livelihood, I want to be more focused and serious but you really just have one time to do this right…so in some ways a winemaker might feel like Santa Claus, he makes it look like one night’s work a year. But really you spend the year and you learn, work, adjust, watch, prepare all year to create the best environment for a great harvest and then crush and press and the list goes on in the process.

I try to never let myself feel all tense about anything, when I act scared or nervous I do not make as good of a decision maker as I do when I am fearless. So this being my second harvest (not including my apprenticeship with Lapostolle wines in Chile last year), I learned so much from last harvest, but this vintage is very different from 2010. I purchased grapes from 2 awesome growers and I watched and watched weather reports and received updates all spring and summer long.

Once I started watching the sugar levels in the grapes to determine when we would pick the grapes, I swear the Eminem song kept playing in my head…that thumping, that tension was building and I knew when the grapes hit the range of Brix (sugar level measuring standard) I would only have a few days to make it all happen. It is really easy to prepare all the rest of the”stuff”, the tanks, barrels, manpower, resources, that is easy, but deciding when to pick is crazy exciting. I compare it to putting $1000 on red on a table in Vegas and letting someone else spin and you wait to see if it hits.

You can do lots of research but until you have some “game time” experience I am not sure you ever relax. I was talking to a guy and he said, I have been a winemaker for 30 years and you would think I felt good about when to pick, but some years, certain grapes are easy to determine, some years you question yourself, he said until years later and you taste the wine, well, that’s when you will know if you should have waited or if the acid or balance could or should have been different. His words made me feel better in some ways, but in other ways, his words just gave me chest pains. He said, I have only done this 30 times, every year brings new circumstances.

Well, I am really proud of how the harvest went and the choices I made, I am excited to see how these wines develop and I will remind myself that when all is said in done, I will be making a wine that is for myself and my friends to enjoy! I am just going to relax and enjoy the process and when all is said and done, I will prepare more next year, I will learn more over this next year and each year I hope to take a deep breath and love all my wines just like my kids!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi