NEWSLETTER
Spring has Sprung!
April 27, 2006While the first day of Spring is officially March 20th, this year it was pushed back a few weeks. But this week we're seeing budburst and rapid shoot growth all over the place… and this includes around the winery (our little vineyard outside is taking off!). I don't know how to describe it but this sunshine is putting some serious fire in our bellies this year to produce our best wines ever. We've made many excellent wines to date… but this year we're going to make !@#$%^ insane wines. We have enough experience with our vineyards, people and equipment to knock it out of the park this year… and that's what we're going to do!
Crushpad Hosts Television Casting Call for The Wine Makers – May 2nd
Next Tuesday is going to be a very busy day for us as we host two major wine events. The first one is the auditions for the new television reality show “ The Wine Makers ” (it's sort of The Apprentice for the wine world). There will be hundreds of people lined up all day auditioning for a shot to spend a month of their lives creating a wine brand and participating in a harvest… it's going to be great fun. They're going to shoot the auditions and hopefully we'll see a bit of Crushpad when the show airs next year. And, yes, if you're making wine with us, you're entitled to gloat that you've been doing this for years when the show comes out!
Crushpad Hosts Paso Grand Tasting – May 2 nd
While the casting call is going on in the barrel room, 40 Paso Robles wineries will be pouring for hundreds of trade and consumers. This weekend, we're tearing the place apart to set up for the Paso Robles Grand Tasting Tour. You'll be able to taste a bunch of great wines from some of Paso's leading producers and you'll even be able to taste samples from our new Paso Vineyard, What new Paso Vineyard? Glad you asked….
New Vineyard Source
Last month we added a new source – our first from Paso Robles. There are some fantastic Paso wines being made (e.g., track down almost any producer's James Berry syrah or roussanne), but these come from the cooler climate Westside vineyards – especially hillside vineyards with heavy limestone soils that force the vines to work extra hard and create a strong element of minerality in wines. Well, we finally have found what we were looking for with a dramatic, high-elevation site with white limestone soils and a quality-driven grower. We're sourcing both syrah and zinfandel. This is on top of the roughly two dozen vineyards we already have. Please shoot dave@crushpawine.com an email if you want to get the latest list.
Movin' On Up
We have recently acquired about 5,000 square feet of additional space on the 2 nd and 3 rd floors, bringing our total to over 16,000 square feet. We are finally getting real offices with a window(!), instead of crouching with our laptops behind fermenting barrels. This also provides additional barrel storage space that frees up more room at harvest for fermentation. For those of you that witnessed all the stacking and unstacking last harvest, you'll see a lot more smiling faces come September.
Crushnet Beta Launch – May 10th
We've been banging away internally on Crushnet (the successor to MyCrushpad) and we're going to start our beta program on May 10th. If you like playing with early versions of technology, send me an email for the beta program. As a reminder, Crushnet is the online community for winemaking. It will make it easy for you to find and manage groups and get all the winemaking information before, during and after harvest. Ultimately we will be putting label design, third party wine reviews and a bunch of other fun stuff on it.
Send Us Your Group's Info
We are working to put together more group events such as private group tastings. If you have multiple people participating in a barrel, we really would love to get their contact info (at least names and email addresses). This way you can ensure that everyone gets communications from Crushpad and any samples we send out will go to everyone.
Reminder: Pinnacles Wine Festival – This Saturday, April 29th
As we mentioned last month, we'll be pouring at the 3 rd annual Pinnacles Wine Festival, held at Inn At The Pinnacles near the town of Soledad. This is a great event that showcases the wines of the Chalone AVA and some great producers and restaurants will be plying you with wine and food. BTW, the Inn at the Pinnacles is a fantastic place to stay if you're exploring the Monterey wine scene.
Open House – June 10th
Crushpad is having its third annual Open House on Saturday, June 10 th . Last year we had over 500 people and I have no clue how many will show up this year. We'll have lots of food, barrel samples, a DJ and the whole thing will be simulcast on the Internet for folks that are remote. Like last year, we need volunteers to man tasting areas… it's a great way to make friends! Please RSVP by sending an email to RSVP@crushpadwine.com with the number of people who are coming. I promise it'll be a great time.
2006 Barrel Sales Continue
Dave Gifford is staying pretty busy with 2006 vintage sales (and getting the remaining 2005 barrels adopted) but the sooner we get our sales work done for the year, the faster we can turn to the winemaking season. So if you're still trying to figure out what you're going to do for 2006, please contact Dave… he still looks a bit too relaxed.
...Michael