August 5 - September 13, 2025 
Tuesday August 5, 2025
We are so happy to say we are harvesting! See below our great warriors who just finished harvesting 0.73 tons of Sauvignon Blanc and 0.2 tons of Riesling. The combined fruit will be used to make a Sparkling wine and we will call it Blanc de Blancs. The sugar came in at 18.6% which should produce a still wine of about 10.8 alcohol. We will then add sugar and yeast to create bubbles and then the alcohol will rise to about 12% alcohol.
Wednesday August 6, 2025
We pressed all the Sauv Blanc and Riesling yesterday which produced about 100 gallons of juice. We then put the juice in our chiller, freezer (A 12x20 foot fiberglass box that can be chilled down to zero degrees). As you know 40% alcohol Gin will not freeze at zero degrees but wine and grape juice will freeze at higher temperatures. We store wine at 15% alcohol at about 22 degrees to settle tartrates. Yesterday, I think Jose stored the fresh sparkling grape juice at about 40 degrees. That helps settle out most of the solids so we can have a cleaner fermentation. The final sugar content came in at 19%. We also added a Champagne yeast to the juice so we are off and running! We assume the fermentation will take over two weeks at about 50 degrees in our chiller. When all the sugar is gone and we have a wine at about 11% alcohol we will add more sugar and yeast to start a fermentation in individual bottles. I will have more information on that process in a few weeks.
Friday August 15, 2025
The first harvest of Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling for our 2025 Sparkling Blanc de Blancs is off to a slow start. The fruit was too cold at first after setting some solids to clarify the juice. So finally the fermentation started earlier this week and the sugar level is down to 9% now. We are having trouble with the acid levels. As we suspected Sauvignon Blanc at low harvest sugar levels of 19% contains a lot of acid. I like acid in a sparkling wine but our special yeast does not work well with too high an acid. The special yeast I am talking about is the yeast and sugar combination we use when we put in the bottle for the second fermentation, which will be sometime next year. So the PH is still around 2.7 and we need it to be around 3.0. We have been adding some Potassium Carbonate slowly day by day to make sure the acid does not go down to much. Every fermentation is different. Sauvignon Blanc has more acid than Pinot Noir which we have been using in past Sparkling wine.
We have been doing some sugar samples in our Pinot Noir section of the vineyard. Today the sugar was about 22% and we want 25+ for our red wine this year. Also we will be making a Rose and we need about 24%. It looks like we have another week or two before the fruit is ready. We also checked some of our whites, with Chardonnay at 20 and we want 25 and Gewurztraminer at 23 which is close. It will be warm next week, maybe over 100 degrees, so we will check sugars again on Wednesday.
BTW, I have been tasting our newly bottled 2024 Chardonnay which was aged for 6 months in 100% heavy toast French barrels and then aged 4 months in neutral barrels and at this stage I think it is showing too much oak. Pat and eye love white wines with a lot of oak so we are still very happy with the wine. I still have a few more weeks to try the wine before I have to make sure how much oak to use in this years Chardonnay.
Like I have mentioned, we will be bottling all our wines in January instead of July and January. That means some of the wines like Grenache and Pinot Noir will be in neutral oak longer than wines like Cabernet and Petite Sirah. I will have to decide during the 16 months of aging how much new oak to use in all our 25 Red Wines. The question is whether the less oaked wines, like Block 4, Grenache, Block 6 etc should have Green labels and caps or Red? Of course we will need green for our white wines. It becomes more complicated because we found another company that does screwcaps and they are over half the price of the one we have been using for over 20 years. Part of the reason is they offer a cap that uses printing on the top without embossing. We have obtained samples and think the ones without embossing look very nice. Another consideration is this company has a minimum of 60,000 capsules and we only need 3,000 for our white wines. That means we will have to bottle some of our red wines in green labels and caps if we want to get closer to the minimum amount that can be ordered. If we do some of our Red wines in green, I estimate we will probably use 20,000 Green capsules so we will have enough for 3 years. In the past for the embossed screwcaps we paid 40 cents a cap. Now we will pay 11 cents. Sure we will have to order 60,000 Green and 60,000 Red and will have many caps left order but we have new storage buildings and they can be stored in a cool dark building.
Friday August 22, 2025
I have made a decision to use all green screwcaps. If you look at a green cap you will see a very dark green color. It seems to match the green on the back label and the border on all our front labels. See below:
Take a look, I think the red labels look great with the green capsule! That means I have fewer decisions to make re: which wines will have green labels and which will have these red labels. There was another development: Right now we found out there is a 50% tariff on Aluminum! for our screwcaps. I got an idea from Amcor and they said at this time it looks like they can offer us a price with no embossing on the top for 13.9 cents. I have not heard back from the new company but I assume their price could be about 13 cents. Since I know what I get from Amcor, over 30 years, I probably will go with them. There are other things to consider: The problem I have is we do not need more green until January 2027 when we switch to all green caps. We have enough capsules for this January because we already have the Red that was delivered two months ago, which we will be using for the last time. But Amcor was charging 40 cents for the embossing cap so switching to printed top saves us a lot of money, 65% less. For instance, I just paid $40K for one year of capsules but if I ordered 150 thousand capsules it would only cost $22K, and that would cover two years of bottling, I am considering ordering now, BUT could the tariff be eliminated or delayed, no one can guess our crazy president.
We have great news, we harvested all our Gewurztraminer grapes yesterday, only 650 pounds, enough for about 15 cases. I really like our 2024 we bottled in January so I have high hopes for this 2025. The sugar came in great at 24%. Monday we are going to harvest all our Pinot Noir fruit. We are planning to make a rose and a red wine. It will be fun!
Monday August 25, 2025
Today we are harvesting all our Pinot Noir grapes. I will have all the readings later.
We are nearing the end of he day. We ended up harvesting about 2.5 tons of of Pinot a little less than half will go into a Rose. The sugar game in about 25-26%. After settling we will check the Rose because we want about 24%. The Red Pinot could be 26% making it about 15% alcohol so that could be adjusted down a little. It was very warm over the weekend so we will check our Zinfandel Friday and may be picking early next week...........
Wednesday August 27 2025
We have been doing many sugar samples. The Chardonnay was about 22% and we want 24+. The Viognier was 23.6% so that should be ready next week. As usual our Zinfandel has bunches showing ready and some red bunches not ready, anywhere from 22% to 27%. Since we want 24% we will pick a ton on Friday and see where we are. Zinfandel will take several days to harvest and we will leave unripe bunches to save for our wine called Dave's Cuvee. In two weeks it looks like Grenache and Sagrantino will be ready........
Sunday August 31, 2025
I lost yesterdays diary entry so let's try again........Friday we did harvest almost a ton of our oldest Zinfandel. It has been hot here and will be over 100 degrees for the next two days so even though we had sugar of 23-24%, a little lower than we want, we will start picking again on Wednesday and probably harvest all our old vine zinfandel in the next 7 days. After that we will start on our Block 4 section.
Monday September 1, 2025
Maia at 3.5 years old is our dynamic Grandchild. She can even punch down a fermenting one ton of Zinfandel grapes with course skins!
Tuesday September 2, 2025
Harvest is really here now. It looks like we will be picking grapes for several days in a row, probably Saturday also. Today we harvested another ton of Old Vine Zinfandel and the sugar roared up to 25+%. We did some sugar tests on the Grenache, Viognier and Chardonnay also. The Chard should be ready next week but the Viognier and Grenache are ready now. We will be picking some Viognier first tomorrow since we want it cold and then another ton of Zin and a ton of Grenache.......fun, fun ,fun.
Thursday September 4, 2025
Here is an update on my health and weight. I have had several C scans and an Echo since my kidney was removed in March. In June 2024, 15 months ago my weight was 225 pounds, and that was a weight I had maintained for 55 years. And then I had a fall and went in the hospital with new fractured bones in my back. At that time I also lost my appetite and actually also decided to eat less. By September 2024, one year ago, I had lost 23 pounds and weighed 202. Since then, one year later I have lost another 10 pounds, actually in the last 3 months. I now I weigh 192. I needed to lose weight and I am so happy I have. It actually has been easy, I seem to know when I have had enough food. I only eat two times a day, about 10am with leftovers from the night before and then again at around 6:30pm. One reason I have lost this much weight is because I consume less alcohol. I still enjoy tasting wine and I have a drink of mostly Campari and Gin at 5pm. Pat and I also eat far less red meat so mostly poultry and fish. I will fight to maintain my weight under 200 pounds.
Yesterday we harvested all our Viognier, a little over a ton. We also picked a ton of Grenache and 2 more tons of Old Vine Zinfandel. All the sugars were great! We will continue to harvest our Old Vine Zinfandel and then start on our Block 4 section.
Monday September 8, 2025
Friday with 3 tons, we finished our Old Vine Zinfandel, and then Saturday we harvested 2.4 tons of Block One which goes into our Block 4 field blend. All the specs were good. There is 1.2 acres in Block One. That is only 2 tons to the acre. Most newly planted vines produce over 10 tons to the acre. That is why most old vines are gone, removed because vineyard owners can get more money. But there are a lot of grapes out there that wineries do not want now. Wineries are looking for quality! Since I am not greedy and want to produce the best wine I can, I choose to keep 11 acres of old vines, about 60% of our land. Our newly planted vines over the last 20 years, like our Cabernet and many Italian varieties also make great wine but we make sure we keep the crop levels down by pruning in the winter and thinning during the growing season.
The next few days will bring some cooler weather, probably under 80 degree highs so we have decided to hold off the harvest on our Block 4. We will start again on Thursday and harvest also on Saturday.
Dave
For any comments or questions I encourage any of you to e-mail.....david@coffaro.com
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