The trust fall

As a first generation winemaker, hell as a first generation wine-anything, I have no vineyard ties which meant no readily available fruit to start this project. We were very lucky to have found an incredible group of people who were willing to work with our very limited budget. In this case, that meant we could buy ~half~ a ton of fruit, ~1~ macro bin. My viticulture peeps know that is quite the ask. We were already the pain in the ass client so the least we could do is let them make the pick call so they could harvest for their grapes and our half ton of grapes all in the same run. I truly believe the universe and I are homies because it was to our great luck that the pick call would be made by someone who I would have to spend a lifetime of learning to hold a winemaking conversation with. Someone whose grand dad, mother and father's marks on the wine industry have all had greater effects in my career, winemaking, and business philosophies than I could ever put into words. Someone who took all the anxiety of not being able to walk the vineyard, taste the fruit and make the call away with the first sip of her incredible Albarino. Needless to say, it was a great fucking call. Thank you Chelsea, thank you to her team and thank you to one of my favorite connections created during this saga, Gary, for the introduction. You'll all hear a lot more about Gary soon.

Oh this part... Half of me wanted to block it out of my memory to be honest but now that this wine is in bottle, I can step back and truly appreciate it for what it was. A huge learning opportunity. Soooo as is typical in the broke but stubborn baby winemaker community, we had some help. One of Deniro and I's winemaker friends Kurtis had a truck and we needed a truck to pick up our fruit. Maybe you can see where this is going, but we sure couldn't. It was a ~20 mile drive to Obsidian from the Viognier vineyard, easy pickup, easy drop off, we naively thought. We drove up to Materra bright eyed and bushy tailed to pick up our ~1~ macro bin of Viognier. The Materra team was weary but trusted our call and tried to load the bin onto the bed of Kurtis' Toyota Tacoma. My eyes pushed out of my head just about as quickly as the air pushed out of his tires. Our grapes were picked and needed to get to the winery so there was no time for crying. Deniro, Kurtis, and I drove down to a certain home improvement warehouse parking lot and met a wonderful man with an 8ft bed truck who picked up our fruit while we dropped off snacks for the Materra team to thank them for their hard work and for not judging our oversight. Gracias Reynaldo por toda su ayuda al ultimo minuto. Thank you Kurtis for being delusional with me and thank you Alan and Deniro for keeping us from floating away with the wind. 

I had to, I'm sorry.  When our new friend dropped off our ~1~ macro bin at Obsidian, we were lucky to find out that Casey was pressing fruit we could use in replacement of rice hulls. I'm gonna nerd out for a second so skip to the shopping cart if you're here for giggles. We're super lucky to have access to Obsidian's fun toys, like their bladder press. But here's the thing about trying to press half a ton of fruit in a commercial bladder press.  Think of a bladder press like giving the grapes a firm, respectful hug. Now think of what it'd be like to try and hug a broom stick. In a commercial press, a rubber bladder inflates in the middle of the press like a balloon, this process gently squeezes the fruit against the sides to extract juice while keeping harsh tannins and bitter seed compounds to a minimum. Well, when you only have half a ton of fruit to press, you have less mass which means less bladder contact, less pressure and less juice. Now Napa fruit is not cheap and I am an annoying human being so rice hulls in the press were something I did not love the idea of. Our mentor, Casey, saw our predicament and very generously offered to, press the shit out of, his Grenache Gris so we could use it to add mass and traction and the ever important part, get more juice to turn into amazing wine. We agreed with his hypothesis that the small amount of color that the Grenache Gris could add, would fall off with our first SO2 add. It did not.