I was reminded of my first impressions of the wine industry by a conversation with my wife yesterday after she returned from a day long tour of Sony Pictures with a group of her high school students. To start, yes not everything in movies is, as they appear which is similar to the wine industry. Things are often not as fancy, sophisticated and pretentious as they seem. I know she enjoyed her trip and I appreciate Sony providing a scholarship for one of her very deserving students whom have overcome so much on their way to college. Very cool that she got to see some of the voiceover effects and part of the Spiderman 4 set being built, let alone being able to hold an academy award….which evidently is quite heavy.

The other thing on my mind from yesterday is the fact that California makes some really good wine. Last night we had part of a very cheap bottle of Merlot marked simply with the California AVA. For more information on AVA’s please click here. So often I think people forget that wine, improves from the company of both good people and good food. Although this bottle wasn’t anything I would ever suggest to a friend, or ship to a club member, we enjoyed it along with each others company.

I hope everyone has a nice weekend! As always please stop by and join our interest list over at Uncorked Ventures.

So, over the weekend I had one of, if not the most, enjoyable day since starting Uncorked Ventures. My wife and I went to Eagles Nest Winery in Ramona, CA about 15 miles east of where we live) to help with the bottling of their free range Cabernet Sauvignon.

We arrived around 9am and had a couple of moments to chat with Dennis and Julie, who fill the multiple functions of winery owner, vineyard manager and winemaker. They were both extremely pleasant and both my wife and I enjoyed chatting with them both throughout the day, even though I imagine my thoughts about meeting the two of them are similar to what people think about my wife and I….Julie is much more chatty then Dennis is….just as Michelle is much more chatty then I am.

After meeting some of the volunteers, including Bill Eyer of Cuvee Corner we went with Julie down to another part of the farm to help organize some of their standing inventory because we would be bottling approximately 75 cases later in the day. We spent about two hours moving boxes, organizing wine and generally trying to create some extra space where available. I’m not the most organized guy in the world (far from it) so it was good to have Michelle there to help….plus we weren’t complaining in being an air conditioned room as summer has made another appearance in California.

After getting last year’s vintage organized we moved up to the bottling room with the other volunteers. What we found there was a bottle filler….A pump moves the wine from the barrel up into a holding tank and then four bottles can be filled at once, there is a sensor to shut off the filler once a bottle is filled to the correct level.

After being filled they are moved over to be corked. As we found throughout the day the ladies did a better job with the new corking machine as they weren’t as impatient as the guys. The guys typically moved too quickly and would cause the machine to lose pressure and necessitate a couple minute wine drinking break….maybe it wasn’t such an accident lol!

After corking it came time for the seal to be placed over the cork. Here we found another new machine of Italian origin. After getting a good laugh at the instruction manual (yes it was in English as well as Italian) because it never suggested a setting for the heated element, we tried out a few different techniques. It seems that the correct technique to have a balanced melt of the seal is to move downward quickly and then slightly pause at the bottom, before moving up again quickly. I can definitely say, this was not a strong suit of mine….I enjoyed filling the wine bottles much more!

Normally you’d also apply the label at that time and near the time when we left they started applying some of the labels, but Eagles Nest does a lot of custom labeling for customers so much of the wine is not labeled until directly after sale….which also necessitates part of the organizing of the wine storage area!

A picture of some of the wine going down to the storage area:

All in all both Michelle and I had a great time. Eagles Nest served a lunch of lasagna, garlic bread, salad and wine as well as sending us home with two of their dessert wines. They have a cottage on the property which is like a really, really nice studio apartment which is available for rent. It is just a ways down from where Julie and Dennis (the owners) live and is in the middle of the vines as well as having an amazing wrap around porch with a view of the entire Ramona Valley.

Since this is mostly a wine blog and I am starting a wine business it would not be complete without a mention of the wines we tasted.

During the bottling process we were able to taste their free run Cab…which we generally thought was ok. At lunch we had a glass of Souzaoo which I thought was pretty good and an excellent pairing with the lasagna.

After seeing the winery up close and seeing the amount of time, effort and capital that Eagles Nest is spending to improve its product I have a new appreciation for the struggles that new wineries face. It also makes me understand the old adage from Napa that in the wine industry it takes a large fortune in order to make a small one.

This is the type of family owned, small production winery that we’d love to be able to work with, assuming they are producing world class wines.

At this time, to be perfectly honest I’ve tasted wines in that same price range that I’ve been more impressed with. We have been invited to come back and taste some other wines with Dennis and Julie and may take them up on that offer in the future.

I would encourage anyone in the San Diego area, if you want to spend a night at a very nice location with very nice people and take home some wine that’s better then what you find in Temecula, give Eagles Nest a try.

The winery itself is much as you would expect with the vines surrounding the tasting room and some construction still going on, the one point of interest is definitely the fountains that they have between the tasting room and highway 29. It really is a beautiful location and the tasting room is situated in such a way, and slope, that you don’t notice highway 29 while you are there.

After arriving and meeting Jean he took us into a side room which had a long table with seats for approximately 10 people, leather chairs, rustic orange chandeliers which we later found out had been installed that morning and place settings for the three of us.

We spent the next 90 minutes or so talking with Jean about his wine-making philosophy, the history of Alpha Omega and how our two companies could work together in the future.

It was definitely a fascinating conversation especially because Jean’s passion for his work definitely shined through and he was completely at ease talking about everything from why they use only naturally occuring yeast, to how he was recruited to Alpha Omega, to his like for new ventures.

Our conversation was intermixed while tasting their 6 different wines, so I’ll go over conversation first and wine second.

A couple of things especially stick out in my mind:

*Alpha Omega uses only naturally occurring yeast in their wines. Instead of using one type of industrial yeast they allow their wines to spend more time in barrel (100% French because the grain is finer and imparts a more even flavor) in order to allow the 7 types of yeast that occur naturally on grapes to work without an outside addition.

* He tastes each wine daily as it is barrel to check and make sure it is being blended appropriately, it is definitely a more hands on approach then most winemakers use.

*98% of wine sold in the USA is consumed within 48 hours of purchase. Although this isn’t hugely popular in winemaking circles, he understands this fact and needs to create wine that will be good when consumed immediately as well as aging well when cellar-ed.

*Specifically in regards to both the Proprietary Red and ERA, asked what the blend was exactly. Interestingly Jean said he wasn’t sure off the top of his head because he never wants to think that he made the perfect wine a couple of years ago and now he needs to try and duplicate it. Each year will have a different blend because different fruit gives different results.

As for the wines:

I thought everything offered would stand the test of time, some notes on the 4 wines which stick out in my mind to this day:

Chardonnay Napa Valley 2006: By far the best Chardonnay I’ve ever tasted. I typically find the varietal too acidic but this was quite smooth and the flavor combinations which I found to be unique really did shine through-specifically honey and almond. When we got into the car we were wondering why we didn’t bring home a couple of bottles. To give you an idea of the winemakers taste he said he would bury this wine in the vineyard and drink it in about 15 years. I’m not sure I’m quite that patient.

Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2006: I thought this was simply put an outstanding wine. It is quite masculine because you do get a sense of pepper as well as cherry. The three of us all remarked that this would be an outstanding Cab to pair with a slice of grilled meat. We took home two bottles of this wine.

Proprietary Red Wine Napa Valley 2006: To me, if you want to see what Alpha Omega does differently in their winemaking then many of the other wineries around the world, you need to try their blends. To start the wine is a beautiful purple color and on the nose you really can easily pick up red cherry. On the tongue the wine is smooth and overall it comes across as balanced. I would gladly drink this by itself, or with a meal. We took two bottles home with us.

ERA: Ok, so yes we did taste the $160 a bottle ERA. Did it live up to expectations? Yes it did, it is the smoothest wine I’ve ever tasted. The three of us all agreed that it is perhaps a more feminine wine then the others we tasted, most likely because it has a much higher amount of petit verdot, which incidentally is Jean’s favorite wine grape. Matt and I didn’t take a bottle home but would certainly buy a couple of bottles for a special occasion, especially if our wives and mother in law would be drinking because we know without doubt that all three of them would love the wine. I did especially enjoy the wine as well, frankly if we weren’t allocating funds to our business purchases we would have loved to bring home a few bottles and cellar them for a while.

Lastly we were able to talk with Jean about moving forward with a business agreement between our two companies. We are extremely happy to say that we will be featuring an Alpha Omega wine in one of our first shipments. Jean was very gracious and shared our opinion that having a long term partnership between our two companies would be good for both of us moving forward. I can’t say that at Uncorked Ventures we disagree, we’re very happy to add Alpha Omega to our growing list of partner wineries.

At the end of the day, this was a great meeting for Uncorked Ventures and we can’t thank Jean Hoefliger and the staff at Alpha Omega enough. We’re looking forward to working a day of harvest with the staff in the next few weeks.

At Uncorked Ventures our trip to Napa next week is really coming together, we’re very much looking forward to tasting and speaking with Alpha Omega, Cornerstone, Copain and Audelssa, all of which have been confirmed.

I’m very happy that we’re going to be able to source the type of high quality wine that our customers will demand for our different wine of the month club options. As always the winemakers and everyone involved in the business has been a joy to work with and I’m very much looking forward to the trip and meeting everyone in person.

I hope everyone is able to have a good glass later tonight and that the weekend gets off to a great start!

Tomorrow will bring a rather lengthy blog about our tasting as well as anything else we try along the way.

So we’re working out some fine details about Uncorked Ventures as we speak, we’ve made some conclusions with some interesting notes that go along with them.

We will keep our original pricing structure where we charge a different price each month for our wine shipment(yes each club will have a limit) while charging each customer individually for shipping.

It almost didn’t go this way for a couple of reasons. More then anything else, it adds a ton of work for the resident **web developer** no that isn’t a title I ever expected to have. Realistically we’d be ready to launch the website if we set a price and stuck by it monthly. Neither Matt nor I felt great about that option because some months we’ll find great bottles for our Special Selections wine club for $30 and other months it is going to be $50. We don’t want to have to refund money and we definitely will not gouge our customers.
Additionally charging everyone for shipping individually stops our closer customers from in effect subsidizing shipping for other customers. Charging individually for shipping based on what it actually costs to ship is the only equitable and fair way to bill for a wine club.

Lastly I’m left with a substantial dilemma. I know for a fact, with proof, that the company I consider to be our main competition is buying links. Yes buying links is, well I can’t say illegal because I don’t know if it technically breaks a law, but I do know for sure that it is against Google’s terms of service. How do I they are buying links? They’ve posted on a message asking for referrals for link purchases and now have links from “interesting” sources showing up on Yahoo Site Explorer. I’m left with some of the following choices:
Do I risk alienating a company exponentially bigger then my own by reporting it to Google?

Do I wait until we’re on the #1 page on Google then report them so we gain the market share?

Do I do nothing and simply beat them?

Matt and I have decided to simply beat them.

When we decided to start this business we had a number of other options, but wine and the culture that surrounds it is something we’re both passionate about. We’re convinced that by putting ourselves out there that our winery partners and potential customers will be able to get to know us. You’ll see pictures of us with the winemakers whose wine you’re drinking and we’ll hold yearly events for our wine club members. I don’t ever want our customers or partner wineries to think they’re simply being used for their product or monthly payment.

I turn 30 tomorrow and one thing I’ve found lately is that I’m valuing personal relationships more and more. Maybe I’m turning more sentimental but turning the largest possible profit isn’t the number one goal on my list for this wine club. Don’t get me wrong, a profit is essential otherwise I’d be letting my own family down, but I want everyone reading this to feel like they’re going on this journey with us….because you are.

To that end I’ve added a couple of pictures of myself to this post. Please say hello when you stop by.

In Paris last year

With my wife