Market's Down but Sugar's Up

September 30, 2008

I'm not sure why all the talk about Wall Street and Main Street... the real action is on Third Street. After a flurry of picking in early September and a couple weeks of waiting for the weather to warm up, we're now seeing things come fast and furious. As we mentioned, yields are way down from what people were expecting but the quality of fruit is extremely high - the best we've seen yet. This will be short as I've got to get back to the sorting line. Here's what's up...

Crushnet - A New Season Earlier this month we launched the new version of Crushnet that has an improved user interface and a lot of nifty new features such as a more comprehensive wine lifecycle, more videos and a Crushpad Cam that is a million times more reliable. But the big news here is that this is the first version released by our 10 person San Francisco software development team that we have built this year. Previously we had to outsource all of the development and that was quite challenging. Having our own awesome engineering team is going to allow us to crank out new features very quickly and fix problems even faster. Very excited about this.

Crushpad Blog Launches Yeah, it's a little embarassing that with all of the technological stuff we've built, we have yet to write a blog with consistent content. Well, thanks to Patrick Hurley, we finally have made the commitment with the cleverly-named Crushpad Blog. Seriously, it's a good way to keep up to date on things that are happening at the winery. Check it out at [drumroll please] crushpadwine.com/blog.

Wine Sales & Marketing Workshop DVD We recently held a Crushpad Commerce Sales & Marketing Workshop in Sonoma and for those that couldn't make it, we've created a DVD of the sessions. It was a great event, packed with lots of info. If you're interested in receiving a copy of the DVD, please contact Dan Lintz.

Stu's Crush Camps If this is your first time making wine or if you are looking to share the winemaking experience with friends & family, our harvest Crush Camps are great places to start. A lot of the weekend slots are nearly full and there are still some available weekday slots. Check out the remaining Crush Camp dates and sign up.

Great Vineyards Still Available for Harvest 2008 Time-wise, we're about halfway through harvest, although we've only received about 1/3 of our fruit. We'll be picking the remaining vineyards over the next three weeks, so if you are thinking about jumping in on a great vintage, contact Dave Gifford (dave@crushpadwine.com) to get started.

Congratulations on the launch of SUNBOXeleven SUNBOXeleven

Just in time for the election: US Vintner USVintner

Community Crush Now Has Five Neighborhoods Here's a fun program for San Francisco residents not ready to jump into a barrel yet. Community Crush