Green Shoots

May 31, 2009

With the Bordeaux launch behind us (and winning 7x7 Magazine's prestigious "Best Way to Make a Bordeaux From Home" category!), we're turning back to all of the stuff that's lined up for us in San Francisco. We're bottling up the 2007 Syrahs and Cabs, launching several new blending-based products (Fusebox: The Next Generation), bringing on several interns, overhauling Crushnet, and feeling pretty good about an growing stream of 90+ scores from major reviewers (kudos to the winemaking team). Lots of talk about green shoots in the economy and we're definitely seeing them on the vines. And if the Fed remembers to sulfur regularly, we should all be OK. Oh, and I bought a Smart car. You know the poindexter driving in the 81 hp glorified go-kart. That's me. Here's what's up...

Open House 2009 - Saturday, June 20th, 2PM to 6PM Unbelievable... this is our 6th open house. I assume like previous years, it will all start at 1:59PM with the eye contact-avoiding mother and son team that descend and gobble up as much food and wine as possible and are gone by 3:00 (I'm going to make a point of it to introduce myself this year!). And it ends five hours later with us prodding a half dozen red-eyed souls with a stick to get them to go home. But in between, it's always a blast. Last year we had 1200 people tasting through lots of wines, getting intimate with the taco truck and generally having a great time. Please do come this year!

Allocation Swap Meet - Same Time as Open House Have a little too much of one wine you made at Crushpad? Want to swap some of your allocations for wines made by others? Well, on June 20th we're going to try out our first allocation swap meet. We are roping off the "warm room" at the winery and will set it up so everyone with wine still in storage can swap allocations with others. As I write this, it occurs to me that our clients who live outside of the Bay Area and can't make it in on June 20th (shame on you) can still benefit through a Crushpad proxy. That is, if you trust folks like Stu, Noah and other Crushpad power tasters, give us some direction (in the Comments section) and we'll do your bidding for you.

Non-Profit Affiliate Program To Be Launched in June As we talked a bit last month, we are just about to launch a new program designed for non-profits, schools, country clubs and pretty much any organization that has members and would like to make some money while getting those members some great, uniquely blended wines. We've got some final user interface tweaks to the technology and have been working with some beta partners (La Jolla Playhouse, St. Lukes, Snow Leopard Conservancy, and others) to go through the entire process. This program is pretty cool as it eliminates any financial risk for our partners and it doesn't matter if people buy 5 cases or 5,000 cases. We are going to be expanding from 5 to about 20 partners in June and July, so if you're interested please contact Noah Dorrance (noah@crushpadwine.com).

Make Your Own Sparking Wine Every year, we get a couple dozen requests to make sparkling wine (that's American Champagne to you). Since it requires special equipment and we've had our hands full, we've always said "maybe next year." Well, it's next year and we're trying to figure out whether we want to make a bit of sparkling this year from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. This will be the real deal (low yielding fruit, some oak fermentation) and we're thinking of making it available in as little as 1/4 barrel (6 case) increments. Pricing will be comparable to normal white wines. But we'd like to get a show of hands before committing (we'll actually be making this with a partner who has a state-of-the-art sparkling wine facility). If you're interested, drop an email to Dave Gifford (dave@crushpadwine.com) and if we get enough support, we'll do it!

1540 Vineyard is Back! Through a series of blunders and miscommunications, we lost one of our favorite Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards from Howell Mountain this year. But we checked Google Maps and it's still there! Seriously, the vineyard was unavailable until now and we've even got the same block as last year. Check out the 2009 vineyard list.

2009 Barrels from California and Bordeaux are Available Just a reminder that 2009 barrel sales (both California and Bordeaux) are underway and we still have some awesome 2008 adoption barrels if you want to accelerate things by a year. We still have a bunch of excellent vineyards available and we are off to a great start this year with excellent fruit set. Check out the list here or contact Dave Gifford (dave@crushpadwine.com or 415-864-4232 x222).

Congratulations to Rockroom with 3 Wine Enthusiast 93 Point Wines www.rockroom.com Not a bad launch for a venture capitalist from Austin

Welcome Patel Wines www.patelwines.com Awesome new Cabs

Upcoming Events