September 25 - October 1, 2016

	Wednesday September 28, 2016 I have had a difficult time with my sister Lynda and Richard her husband. I know it is my diary so I have to document everything in my mind which is hard. We have harvested every day except for Sunday. This has been I complicated time as usual around here so we love what we do. I have a lot of trouble with my sister re: my Mother, my diary................ We finished our first crop today and started our second crop harvest which goes into our 2016 Dave's Cuvee There's a storm a coming in, maybe Sunday so we decided to work again on Saturday. We are happy with the quality and Catarino and the crew are ready to make a big finish............ 2nd crop is hard to pick......We go through the first time and pick the best bunches, BUT there are a lot of leaves on the vines so it is hard to pick fast, but these great people all Mexicano and Mexicana warriors. So Catarino and Martha have to send these great workers out and walk 700 feet one way, down 4 rows and look for tiny bunches and maybe a big bunch at probably 36+ sugar, missed on the first run through a month ago, then that bunch was 24 sugar. OK 25 sugar would produce a wine at over 15% alcohol so there are ways to control that.........I digress I do not like my sister so I have to digress, more tomorrow? Did you hear, last week there were big sales and shorts on Solar City? These crazy people, maybe they will be right, speculated that the deal would not go through. So I bought 400 shares of Solar city at 17 and I see it is up to 20 now, maybe too high? The exchange is 0.11 shares of Tesla for every one for Solar City........ Thursday September 29, 2016 Like most years we have slow fermentations this Harvest. Again it is mostly Zinfandel based. We harvested 3 tons of our Block One fruit on September 3rd and it still had about a half percent sugar left a few days ago. That fruit goes into our Block 4 blend. On September 26th we harvested two thirds of a ton of Petite Sirah. On Tuesday we started a fermentation with the Petite Sirah fruit and added twice the amount of yeast to it. Yesterday we started adding the 9 barrels of Block one wine to it. This should produce about 11 barrels total when hopefully the fermentation goes completely dry. All 11 barrels will go into Block 4. As some of you know, Block 4 always has Petite Sirah. This year we have done similar fermentations with slow fermenting wine that will be blended into our Estate Cuvee and RaiZin. We even had our Merlot slow down so we added it to some Cabernet fermenters which will go into our Aca Modot. It is fun because this year we are doing a lot of the blending by refermenting and thus less to do in January when we usually do all the blending with 200 possible barrels.
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