Week 39
September 23, 2001 to September 29, 2001 

	Tuesday, September 25, 2001 We had a fast and furious  thunderstorm yesterday, similar to a summer storm in the midwest. There was a lot of lightning, but little rain-not enough to do any damage to our grapes. We will do a sugar test tomorrow to see how our petite sirah and cab fruit remaining on the vines is fairing. I would not be surprised to see that we are ready to harvest some on Thursday. Our carignan that was fermenting slowly responded well to more yeast and thus is nearly dry, so I transferred it to barrels today. Brendan and I are feeling withdrawal pains since that leaves us with no wine fermenting that is not in barrels. We are anxious to harvest again so that we can smell the infectious fermentations again. I am still trying to figure out the quality of our newly bottled 2000 wines. It may be me, but I find that I have recently not been too interested in drinking them. I know they are very young and that they could probably be going through a backward stage. Most of the time these newly bottled wines do not show very well until November or December. I did try the two zins again last week and enjoyed them both. I still feel the 2000 Neighbors' zin is showing better than the Estate Zin at this time.    Wednesday, September 26, 2001 I have to start off tonight with a clarification of what I said about my 2000 wines last night. I know I said I was questioning the quality of these wines. I was told I better cover my bases and explain what I meant. After all, I must force myself to be a salesman at times, otherwise you might think I do not like my wines. As I have said before I have to like my wines, otherwise I would have to pick another line of enthusiasm.  I like other wines also. I buy at least 10 cases from other producers, including Pezzi King, Rafanelli, Cline, and especially Ridge.  Tonight I tried our 2000 Mourvedre, Pinot Noir and Zp2C. I was surprised that I liked all these wines tonight. I had a good nights sleep and was probably more in the mood. I was also surprised that I could not identify the Zp2c. I do taste all my wines blind and at first I thought the ZP2C was the Pinot. I ended up preferring the Zp2C to the other two. As I said they were all enjoyable, but I do still think they are very young and will show much better in two or three months. Our sugar tests today showed little change from the last two weeks. We are still waiting to harvest our petite sirah and cabernet. There is one section of petite sirah that we might want to harvest by Saturday; otherwise it looks like we are off another week. After the rain Monday, we have started to warm up. Today was warm and tonight seems to be warmer than in the last several weeks. Hopefully tomorrow will show a spike up to the high 80's. It would not be unusual to see 100 degrees within a week. That would mean we will have all our remaining 20 plus tons within two weeks.
	Dave
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