Over the next few days you’ll most likely see the first guest blog that I’ve allowed on this site. When I first started this wine blog I hadn’t given much thought to having guest bloggers, but when the opportunity presents itself to lend a hand to other small businesses working in the wine field that’s something I’d like to be a part of, even if my business itself is still very much a start up. If you fit that profile, or generally have something interesting to share in this space, please feel free to Email Me .
Hopefully as my wine club continues to grow I can become a resource of sorts for others in the start up stages of their business, I don’t plan on ever forgetting both the tribulations and excitement that comes in these early days.
Oh and a short editorial note, if you’re leaving a comment for a SEO backlink….try to follow general blog decorum. Read the post. Watch the video. Remember this is a wine blog, so if you hope to be published…perhaps share something wine or at least business related. Oh, and I don’t need you to tell me that I wrote a good post (I have family and friends for that), thanks anyway. I’m not trying to be harsh, but the amount of spam is bordering on annoying once again.
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, at Uncorked Ventures Wine Clubs we were excited to have shipped Stolpman Vineyards Hilltop Syrah for a variety of reasons, but to sum them up in a few points: quality of the wine, unique farming practices and the outstanding people that own the winery.
As with all wineries, if the wine isn’t good we aren’t interested. We were excited to taste what Stolpman had to offer because they’ve received some quality scores from major wine critics and have a very good reputation in the industry.
When we started tasting we were immediately struck by a couple of things. To start we got along quite well with Peter Stolpman whom is running the winery that his father purchased and has gotten off the ground. We appreciated immediately Peter’s candor in regard to the quality of certain wines (ie which were showing the best right now) and frankly on price for our wine clubs. The main thing that stuck out for both Matt and I was the wine though. The La Coppa Blanc was incredibly complex and balanced at once and may be the best white wine we’ve had the privilege of trying since beginning Uncorked Ventures.
Interestingly, Stolpman isn’t known for it’s white wine though. It’s generally known around the industry for Syrah and other Rhone varietals. We found that the Hilltop Syrah hit the spot for what we’re looking to source for Uncorked Ventures. Aside from the general quality which was incredibly high we think it offers some unique flavor profiles, including a sense of blueberry and honeysuckle which are rare flavor traits to be found in a Syrah. It’s a great mid palate (for a Syrah) wine that can easily be aged for 5-10 years to lend richer and even more complex flavors.
The second significant factor that led us to be interested in Stolpman was their unique farming practices. In the video below Peter Stolpman talks about one of their experimental farming practices where they are leaving the umbilical chords of the vines attached which may help prevent disease, may allow the mother vine to produce fruit for a longer period of time and allows them to plant a larger portion of their vineyard.
Lastly, as I mentioned we not only enjoyed our time with Peter but have a lot of respect for the type of business that Stolpman Vineyards is running. They are currently the only winery in the state of California (that we’re aware of and no one has even heard of anyone doing this currently, or ever before) with a full time vineyard staff. They do not use day, or seasonal laborers with the intent being that their farm workers will do a higher quality of work if they feel attached to the vineyard. To that end the Stolpman’s give their 11 full time workers access to a portion of the land in order to make their own wine. They have called this their La Cuadrilla Project. The workers participate in all aspects of the winemaking with lead winemaker Sashi Moorman, with the goal being to provide their workers another way to not only feel connected to the company, but to also make a better life for themselves. Lastly, during our trip through the vineyard we saw a ranch style home that looked new. Immediately we thought that the home must belong to the family. After pointing out that they truly believed the old wine mantra that wine is made in the vineyard, Peter informed us that they had built the house for their vineyard manager whom lives there. Needless to say this type of socially conscious farm is one that we’re incredibly happy to represent. Tom Stolpman got his start as a lawyer and has been instrumental at raising capital for the Legal Aide Society.
For our Special Selection Club members you’ve already received a bottle of the Hilltop Syrah in your shipment last month. If you’re not a member of our Special Selections Club, we’re happy to offer this incredible wine in our online wine store.
Since I began writing this blog I’ve enjoyed passing on the stories of wineries that we’ve visited and the people that make the wine happen at those wineries. Although it’s great that we’re now permitting and shipping wine, one of the off-shoots of that is that we can no longer be quite as free with sharing stories about wineries that we visit, until we have purchased wine from them for our wine clubs and online wine store.
Most of the time you’ll hear about the wines and stories about people involved in the wineries after the wine has been delivered to our club members and the small amount of extra wine has either been re-ordered by those same club members, or the bottles have been placed for sale on our store.
In some rare cases where we find what we consider to be a perfect fit in so far as a winery is producing outstanding world class wine and they are the type of people we’d love to do business with over the long term, we’ll make sure we have an adequate supply for our clubs and the store moving forward.
One of these wineries that we consider such a partner is Stolpman Vineyards, based in Los Olivos, California.
We met with Peter Stolpman and had a very enjoyable afternoon with both a tasting session in their Los Olivos tasting room and an eventful trip to the vineyard which including taking a short time out from the (very serious lol) business of wine to do a little off-roading. You can see the brief video below, car makes and models have been left off to protect the innocent (ie warranty), but the ground cover had grown at least six inches higher then usual because of the unusually wet weather we’ve experienced of late in California.
I’ll fill in the details tomorrow with why we enjoy Stolpman so much as we have an affection for their wine and their socially conscious winery operations, but generally speaking this is how I expect the blog to be set up in the future.
As many of you know and I’ve mentioned before I live in San Diego. Over the past 5-6 days my little section of inland north county has been gripped by the story of Chelsea King, a missing 17 year old student from Poway High School who was discovered in a shallow grave after being assaulted and killed late last week.
It’s a story that hits peculiarly close to home given that my wife and I have walked, hiked and jogged on the exact trail that she was (presumably) killed on last Thursday. It’s an exceedingly safe area that we’ve been surprised, in the past at the amount of people you see walking, jogging and biking on in the afternoons.
This wasn’t a kid doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, she was simply going for a jog to stay in shape and as a cross country runner in high school she must have done this literally hundreds of times before.
It’s hard to deal with, given I haven’t been blessed with my own children yet, but I have friends and family with young children and this has brought up a ton of concerns for me and our local community. In many ways it has made people feel incredibly unsafe in an area that they should feel anything but unsafe. It also is hard to see close friends and family friends be among the adults tasked with helping to pick up the pieces at her high school, despite needing to deal with their own grief. I hope everyone can appreciate the difficulty of the tasks being asked of the principal, counselors, teachers and the athletic trainer who knew her well. The candlelight vigil was held at the church that my wife and I have both regularly attended for some time both as children and adults.
I hope we’re able to bring some type of change from this event to make it less likely in the future. It appears that the person being charged with the crime, literally as I write, is a convicted sex offender that could have been in jail for 30 years, but the judge gave him an 11 year sentence and he was out in 5 on good behavior despite the psychologists recommendation that he stay in custody. Clearly something went wrong when the offender would still have been in jail serving his 11 year sentence if he were not released early. Additionally, why given Meghan’s Law in the state of California are sex offenders able to list only a primary address even if they live multiple places? In this case he listed his Lake Elsinore address (about an hour’s drive north) but did not list his parents address which would have been ineligible based on being 1,000 feet or so away from a school (the requirement is 2,000 feet).
As of now I hope her family can take some comfort in the outpouring of support that has come from our local community.
I do have hope that something good can come of this terrible tragedy.
Every so often you get a piece, or three of good news. Today the biggest event for Uncorked Ventures was getting a spot from a very good wine blog, see the interview with my business partner at
Additionally, I took some time to check our SERPS on Bing (which I’ve frankly never used before today) and found our site at #80 and #91 for a couple of our keywords which is a very good sign since I haven’t taken any time at all to work on improving those. It’s not like those positions are going to bring in business, but they will certainly continue to improve over time and it makes sense to pay attention to them in case Bing is able to cut into Google’s market share over the coming months and years.
So I was quite happy a few weeks ago to join the blogging community at Cork’D. Aside from the chance to get to chat about wine with some interesting people within the industry Cork’D is one of the industry leaders at allowing and encouraging wineries and consumers to interact. I think both Matt and I at Uncorked Ventures have plenty to share from our tasting experiences and I look forward to continuing to be a part of the conversation there.
Please check out my first article which features two of my absolute favorite wineries, Copain and Audelssa, as my readers know I don’t believe either of them receives the type of attention and media accolades they deserve.
As I sit here on the last work day of this week and also this month of February quite a few things are going on.
To start the Paso Robles Grand Taste event was quite a bit of fun. I met some incredibly interesting people whom I’ll write a short post about each in the coming days and weeks, but it was nice to see a big turn out in San Diego, which isn’t exactly known for its wine.
It great to get some taste some very good wine from places that are familiar like L’Adventure and also to get an unexpected treat when I realized Terry Hoague whom wasn’t on the website list was pouring at the event.
So what’s coming up in March for Uncorked Ventures? We’ll be featured on perhaps the biggest wine radio show in the United States, my columns over at Cork’d will start being printed and the long talked about magazine that I’m writing for, called Metro Citizen should start.
BTW, if you know anyone looking for a unique advertising opportunity while supporting a quality start up, check out MetroCitizen on Twitter for more information and a media kit.
As always please stop by and say hello over at our wine club page.
Hope everyone is having a good start to their Wednesday.
This afternoon I’ll be out at the trade and media event for the Paso Robles Grand Taste here in San Diego. Given the relative lack of quality wine being produced in Southern California (no Santa Barbara and Paso Robles are not Southern California, they are part of the central coast) it’s nice to get such a large scale and high quality event here in town. I’m especially happy to be able to attend today because this is the first event of this nature in San Diego since Matt and I started Uncorked Ventures.
I have a number of wineries on my tasting list, some of them for possible inclusion in one of our upcoming wine club shipments and others simply for my personal enjoyment.
The event features some big names in the Paso Robles wine scene and most of the high profile up and coming wineries will be represented as well which is really nice.
Hopefully I’ll be able to grab some video and interviews while I’m there. The only winery I wish was attending that isn’t (no, I’m not going to say Turley) is Terry Hoague whom is starting to build a nice reputation for himself as a winemaker.
One thing that I think helps to make us all unique is the different places we’ve lived and the experiences that we had in those places. Having been born in Western New York I have been able to experience some of what Syracuse basketball means to the community and additionally have spent some time on campus as a middle schooler at basketball camp, which I have fond memories of.
This comes to mind because Syracuse plays Villanova in mens’s basketball on Saturday night with ‘Cuse having the chance to win their first outright Big East regular season title since 1992. It’s amazing to think it’s been that long given the history of the program and the fact that the years since have included a national title, another title game appearance and 20 wins in all but one season since then. The Big East is certainly the type of college basketball conference I wish we had anywhere on the west coast. At least I can count on great wine out here for my wine clubs.
Saturday night should be an interesting scene at the Carrier Dome with over 30k in attendance.
A quick entry today, to start a rather large event that seems somewhat anticlimactic given processing orders for our 2nd month of shipments as well as writing newsletters etc etc…but Uncorked Ventures now shows up on the first page of Google search results for the term: wine clubs.
It was one of the first terms we targeted and are incredibly happy with the progress, although there is still plenty of room for improvement until we hit #1 and gain the lions share of the search results that come with that ranking.
Also, a funny video from our recent trip to Paso Robles and Los Olivos in SB county.
As you can see we basically ran out of gas at our last appointment. Demetria makes some good wine and the drive in to the winery is certainly worth the trip, but it is tucked into the central coast’s rolling hills pretty good, about 2-3 miles past the main gate even….which is when we realized that we weren’t going to make it to a gas station and needed to ask (embarrassing huh?) for a little gas. More on Demetria and the other outstanding wineries we visited in coming days. The Rhone Rangers certainly are still doing well on the California central coast.
