Wednesday was bottling day for our 07 vintage Zinfandel. We got to the winery in Dry Creek by 7:45 and the place was alive with the giant bottling truck, a dozen workers plus people from the winery. All under the firm direction of winemaker Ashley. Hoses to connect, pallets of bottles to be put in place, corks and labels on the ready, adjustments to the bottle labeling machine to be sure the labels were where we wanted them on the wine bottle, one or two sample bottles filled for inspection.
By 8:15 with all in order four or five workers in the giant trailer the others all along the steep conveyor. The filled cases came cascading down the steep conveyor at the rate of one every 20 seconds . The job of outside jcrew was to catch them, slow them down and put two identifying labels neatly - not crooked but precisely on the exact same side of the case and position. The now finished cases of wine were then moved off the conveyor and neatly stacked on wooden pallets at 56 cases per pallet. When complete the pallets were moved out of the way with a forklift and then tightly wrapped with tough clear plastic by lady winemaker Ashley. Altogether 325 cases.
I was one of the `outside` team doing all the catching of the 40 pound cases and labeling them. It sort of reminded me of a calf round up where the calf is caught and then branded with the home ranch brand. But as I was doing this my mind drifted to the story of the product itself. Our ranch team had taken years to develop the vineyard source of the grapes, for the wine itself we had started back in winter of 07 with vine pruning of the individual vines, then irrigation, vine care, thinning of bunches, cultivation, observing the first purple grapes in late July, watching the slow maturation of each bunch, counting and weighing them, and finally taking multiple samples to the winery for evaluation to make certain the grapes had reached the harvest day with the joyful men of the Mexican Army, hauling to winery and temporarily turning them over to winemaker Ashley.
The journey of the grqpes through crushing, fermentation, pressing, decanting, ageing in oak barrels for a year in a mixture of one third new barrels, one third one or two year olds, and one third three or four year old barrels, more decanting and filtering and finally this morning into the bottles. After several months of bottle ageing we will be shipping these bottles all over the country to share this wonderful vintage with friends and loyal clients. The wine itself has a beautiful color, aromas and flavors of blackberry. raspberry with hints of chocolate and vanilla. Truly a splendid personal product years in the making. One that hopefully will ….”gladden the hearts of men…” and women too! Frankly we don`t know if this lovely wine will ever really return a cash profit to compensate enough for all of this effort. But to all of us MacLeods and the Zinfandel vines and winemaker Ashley involved in creating this great vintage it has been a personal and group triumph that truly trumps all the other mundane issues such as cash and profit,. As Scarlet O`Hara would say …… we can think about that tomorrow.