October 14 - October 20, 2012

	Tuesday October 16, 2012  Too many sports events on in the last few days and nothing much was happening here, but action has begun again. A heat spell has started. We harvested some of our Carignan and all of our Barbera. They are coming in heavier than expected. We are planing to pick some Lagrein and my RaiZIn tomorrow before we all have to pack up our wine club shipment which will go out next Monday. After that we will harvest our Cab Franc and almost everything else is ready. I will have more to report tomorrow. Wednesday October 17, 2012 3:00 Pm: Rain,rain is on the way. Even though it is close to 100 degrees right now and may be warmer tomorrow, the forecast is for some heavy rain next week starting Monday or Tuesday. I missed calculated the amount of Zin we are harvesting today so we may be finished harvesting everything but Mourvedre by Sunday. We picked some Lagrein and 1.7 tons of my RaiZin today. The Zin for RaiZin came in with a sugar close to 27 brix. I wanted it ripe to get the ripe flavor and will dilute it to produce a wine at about 15.5 alcohol. I need to go check the Lagrein and will report back later.  3:30 Pm: The Lagrein came in over 25% and there are a lot of raisins. The Zin has a bunch of raisins so we expect a swell up to over 30% sugar. What I meant earlier about miscalculating the zin, I forgot to include the zin in block 5. This Demple clone Zinfandel was planted on our knoll several years ago and then we budded over some Petite Sirah in our 5th block to this Demple clone. That section was harvested earlier so the total was over 5 tons, just what I thought for the total of both sections. I had included 5 tons in my calculation of what we had still to pick and was concerned about whether we had enough barrels. Now it looks like we will be in fine shape. We will harvest Cab Franc tomorrow and finish the Lagrein. We will also pick Tannat and Souzao. On Friday we will start on Cabernet.
	For any comments or questions I encourage any of you to e-mail.....david@coffaro.com Dave
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