Tuesday December 2, 2008
I have made a few trades in the last few days and actually made a little money, but I decided to sell most of the stocks I was trading in for the short term. Those stocks were GE, Ford, Cisco, Amazon and Google. I am still holding on to my core investments which I have loses in. Since I am usually wrong on my sales, it is probably a good time to buy. I may trade again if the market goes down and tests the lows of Friday the 21st of November. This weekend is our open house and there will be no fee to come in and taste wine, look at videos, and have a little barbecued turkey. Come one come all. Monday December 8, 2008 I wasn't surprised that we had less people stop by at our open house Saturday. We were expecting as many as 300 and I don't think we had 150. Sales of course were down also. The economy may be part of the reason but we are hopeful that things will pick up next year. In the past, December through February has been our slowest time so I won't get concerned until March. Since we have gone completely back to using just our Estate fruit a small drop in sales will not put us in a big bind. We have plenty of cash in the bank at this time. We also may see more sales by the end of this month before our extra 5% discount goes away on December 31. It will be interesting to see if sales of some of these expensive wines from mostly Napa wineries continue to be firm. Pat and I will be away for a week on a short vacation so I will be in touch shortly. Friday December 26, 2008 We are back from our vacation. I hope everyone had a nice xmas and will have a happy New Year. There is only a few more days for our extra 5% discount on our bottled wines. If you need wine please take advantage of this offer. We also still have some 2005 wines so let us know if you are interested. I am excited about our 2008 wines and can't wait to see how the blends come out. We will taste many types of new barrels on January 5th and start blending on January 6th. We will bottle our new 2008 Rose and our 2007 Ultimate Cuvee in the last week in January. Wednesday December 31, 2008 Happy New Year!! We are trying something new. We are chilling down our wine while it
is cold outside. We moved all our 135 barrels of 2008 vintage wine into
our parking lot. Here is what I said last year in July:
Tuesday July 17, 2007
When I started moving the barrels outside on Monday the temperature of the wine 6 inches down into the barrel was 62 degrees. Yesterday in the morning the wine moved down to 53 degrees. Steve put a two foot thermometer into the same barrel and we found out that in the lower part of the barrel the wine was at 50 degrees yesterday. These barrels are right out in the open during the day and the high temperature yesterday at our winery was 62 degrees and I was happy to see at 4:00Pm the temperature in the barrel was the same as in the morning. This morning the temperature 6 inches down in the barrel is 48 degrees and the thermometer down two feet is at 45 degrees. Next Monday we will move into the winery barrels to put into a tank on Tuesday. That will be the start of creating our blends for our 2008 wines. Depending on how low the wine goes down to I may put the barrels after blending back in the parking lot until the outside temperature starts rising. It would be nice to see the overnight low reach into the 20s again like it did two weeks ago. If I can get the wine down to 40 degrees for several days I may achieve what I am looking for: wine that has settled most of the tartrates. I'll keep you in touch.
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