NEWSLETTER

It's a Wrap

November 30, 2007

All of our fruit is in and we're doing our last pressings... but then there's a call. Argh, we forgot about the two tons of late harvest Pinot Gris in Anderson Valley. It still doesn't have enough botrytis but it's going to rain next week which will push it over the edge and we're picking it the week of Dec 10th. That'll officially be the wrap. In the meantime, I'm writing this from my mom's house in Tampa, a day before my 43rd birthday and wondering how much more Cuban food I can cram down before I head back to the land of sensible temperatures (it's 80F here today). OK, here's what's happened in November...

Get Your Blend On
If you've worked with our winemakers on blending, you know first-hand how fun it is and what a huge impact blending has on your wine. After threatening for a long time, we finally created a version of this you can do remotely for your wine (more on this in a separate message)... and then we took it one step further and created an "at-home edition" of fusebox. It's a very cool, 15 pound box filled with six wines, blending paraphernalia, guidebooks and even a "Guess the Mystery Blend" game - everything required for 4 people to have a great time spending a couple hours learning about blending Bordeaux varietal wines. It's $120 and, IMHO, makes an awesome holiday gift for people who won't be getting an $8,000 barrel of wine! Go to fuseboxwine.com, enter in the code HKWYTYSD and you get free shipping.

Crushpad on Today Show & in New York Times, Forbes
For those of you who aren't related to me and didn't TiVo the Today Show, you can still catch the Today Show segment featuring Crushpad in all its streaming media glory. The day after the segment aired, we popped up in The New York Times. And then just yesterday Forbes recommended fusebox as a great holiday gift.

2007 Tasting Notes Arriving in December
Mike Zitzlaff and his team of reasonably well-rested winemakers are tasting through each 2007 barrel now and writing up tasting notes and any thoughts on how to best raise each of these wines. The vast majority of these will go out to the owners in December. However, there are probably 15% of the barrels that are awkward (either still have a lot of sugar or are at the height of malolactic fermentation) and are difficult to accurately describe - so they'll be pushed to January. Look for an update in December.

Adopt a Barrel (Before It Gets Issues)
You've already heard from me how great 2007 is and how we made as much wine as humanly possible (it now looks like we've pressed nearly 1400 barrels!). Dave has been cranking through these pretty quickly but there still is a whole bunch of great stuff in the bouncy baby phase. You can contact Dave Gifford at dave@crushpadwine.com.

Bottling and Labeling are in Full Swing
Without missing a beat, the winery crew got the bottling line up and running and we've been cranking through 2006 Pinots, some long-aged 2005 Cabernets, as well as labeling pallets full of wine that were bottled but didn't get the labels done before harvest. If you think your wine is in this group, you should get a notice when the wine is fully labeled and heads over to the fulfillment center for pickup/shipping. Just to make sure, if you think your wine should be ready and you haven't heard from us yet, please contact shipping@crushpadwine.com and we'll confirm it.

Need Wine for the Holidays?
Is there any turkey left in your fridge? Thought so... go right now and throw it out. Now. If you want to pick up wine or have it shipped to you, please shoot a message to our crack shipping team (shipping@crushpadwine.com). It gets especially busy in the second half of the month, so for xmas delivery, the last day for ground orders is the 10th and the 18th for 2 day air. The last day to pick up is the 22nd. Please try to give a day's notice if you're going to pick it up. Remember that our fancy new logistics center is at 566 Minnesota Street, a few block away from the winery.

Upcoming Crushpad Financing
Last month we mentioned we were evaluating options to help us finance our fast growth while also improving the client experience and keep pushing the quality of wine. Well, we're still evaluating our approach - individual investors vs. VC/private equity. If you have interest in looking at the opportunity and you haven't reached out already, you can send me an email at michael@crushpadwine.com. I will contact you when we've come to some conclusion.



...Michael