July 12 - July 18, 2015

	Tuesday July 14, 2015 8:30 Pm: Too much has happened so I will say a little than I would like to say some............... We finished bottling today and I have to say Josh and Jose were great. We did have problems in the first week but now we have it going smoothly. We did over 1000 cases in the last two days with no incidents. It will be nice to relax so I booked an Amalfi stop on a cruise next year, we can cancel in February so we have time to decide to head back to Europe since 1975. There in Paris in 1975 we saw the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrilla_in_Manila between Frazer and Ali. Pat and I saw it for free in a basement in Paris. We had to see many programs, like Maxwell Smart in French but at about 4 am I saw the whole fight, maybe the most violent fight I had seen at that time. We will go back on business class, if we go Today we bottled 2014 Pinot, Rai Zin and Zp2c. The Rai Zin is great even compared to 2013. Who says old vines are better????????? We strip more than half the crop in the Rai Zin section, and it makes a different wine than our Old Vines. After 36 years I still have been learning about my vineyard. Old Vines block 1,3 and 4 are mostly zinfandel planted around the turn of the last century. As I have said before these vines are more consistent from year after year. They produce about 3 tons per acre every year. That is one acre will produce 100+ year consistent wine about 200 cases. To me that is enough. Now The new vines where we harvest Rai Zin wanted to produce 8 tons to the acre...............so we strip half the crop off in the siring time and now we are going to harvest another half crop to produce a new vine, but most important to produce a great wine, like 2014 Rai Zin I am trying to convince Pat to make a sale of either 2014 Zp2c, a great wine and 2014 Dave's  a great wine also. These are our two big blends and they two of the best wines from 2014.............I will win, we will see a sale before our open house on 15 and 16............. 9:00 Pm: I have a new plan. I am the master blender, I am almost believing that. I don't know other winemakers experimenting with different blends unless it would be some one from Gallo, but have those winemakers been making wine from the same vineyard for 36 years........I digress So the new blend may be OK. It will be a challenge to make a blend from three different types of wine......... I am exited to try, Josh and everyone here will help........I will watch except to weigh the grapes....sorry, I digress again So we have wine we collected last week and this week. We had to collect 2.5 gallons of wine from the bottom of all 85 barrels so we collected over three barrels of wine. We had been concerned to make our unfiltered wine clear. So I will mix this wine with equal amounts of 10 month aged 2010 wines which are very high in alcohol and high in acid, good luck, Dave, I talk to myself often, it keeps in in control............. And then the real THING: We are going to pick low sugar crop from Petite Sirah and this Zin section I was talking about before. That will help out Petite Sirah and The 6th Zin section and it is free fruit, we would have dropped it to the ground like we did a few years ago. This is free money to us except about $2 a bottle, for caps and bottles. If this crazy experiment works out I will sell this wine for $99 a case.........  9:15 Pm: I digress again So we will bring in about one ton or so of low ripe fruit that is ahead of the other crop. long story....Then we will start a hot fermentation to ferment this new fruit from 2015. It will be low in sugar and will blend well with the high alcohol 2010 wine and the high alcohol 2014 wines we just bottled which will be added in the third day as the temperature rises. As you can imagine when everything finally reaches 90 degrees, the sediment in all these lots will rise up to the top and then in two months all will settle to the bottom and we will rack off the clear wine. We have one other big problem, this blend may be high in acid so we will have to monitor it..We will have some to taste at Barrel Tasting next year, but I may sell it for $99 later this year if it turns out OK..........BTW, I thought the 2014 Barbera was the best one in a long time it usually is too high in acid for me,.........Tomorrow is another day 9:35 Pm: It is getting late but I think I forgot to mention that the 2014 Pinot was real nice. All the 2014 wines in the last two days have been better than the 2013s so I may have fun, I have to try more 2013 and 2014 wines in the next few days.............
	For any comments or questions I encourage any of you to e-mail.....david@coffaro.com Dave
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