David Coffaro Winery and Vineyard Winemaker's Diary 2001 week 4

David Coffaro Vineyard and Winery Winemaker's Diary

Week 4

January 21, 2001 to January 27, 2001

Tuesday January 23, 2001
WinterWineland was what I feared. We had relatively low turnout (700) and sales ($10,000). These customers seemed to be more into having a good time and less into buying wine--especially "Futures". Most had not been here before and had not heard of buying on "Futures". Since the event cost us atleast $4000 (food and wine), we most likely will not do the event again. I am not complaining about the sales, but I must be realistic: Fortunately we can sell our wine without this event. Many of these customers were expecting to cart off with a bottle of our wine and I can't blame them. But we only sell "Futures" and 2000 vintage at that. We found out later that most of the wineries were still selling 1998 wine, so we suspect that it must of been a shock when they saw that we were only offering 2000. Some still wanted our 2000 wines and expected that they were already bottled and thus they thought they could take them away with them. We do have this happen all the time, but it seemed to happen more at this event than others.
I am still trying to decide on the final blend totals for our wines. I have three barrels that are blends that we had left over. To be more clear, when we transfer the wine from our many barrels that I have picked for the ultimate blend, we lose wine from sediment (lees). We don't know exactly how much that will be until we start refilling the cleaned barrels with the blended wine. Almost every time we have less than a barrel left over. We must decide whether to leave this small amount of wine in the tank for the next wine or make up a combined barrel. This year we have 4 such barrels. One is mostly Cab Franc from the Jones vineyard, but does contain some Aca Modot. The dilemma is that if I add Jones Cab Franc to my Aca Modot blend (even though I have some of our Estate Cab Franc), I will have to drop the Estate classification. Some of you noticed last year that I did that very thing. I feel that this addition to the blend would increase the complexity and of course give us 25 more cases to sell. Right now, though I am leaning to keep the wine as Estate, mainly because the wine in the barrels is tasting so fine now.

Dave

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	*Tuesday January 23, 2001* WinterWineland was what I feared. We had relatively low turnout (700) and sales ($10,000). These customers seemed to be more into having a good time and less into buying wine--especially "Futures". Most had not been here before and had not heard of buying on "Futures". Since the event cost us atleast $4000 (food and wine), we most likely will not do the event again. I am not complaining about the sales, but I must be realistic: Fortunately we can sell our wine without this event. Many of these customers were expecting to cart off with a bottle of our wine and I can't blame them. But we only sell "Futures" and 2000 vintage at that. We found out later that most of the wineries were still selling 1998 wine, so we suspect that it must of been a shock when they saw that we were only offering 2000. Some still wanted our 2000 wines and expected that they were already bottled and thus they thought they could take them away with them. We do have this happen all the time, but it seemed to happen more at this event than others. I am still trying to decide on the final blend totals for our wines. I have three barrels that are blends that we had left over. To be more clear, when we transfer the wine from our many barrels that I have picked for the ultimate blend, we lose wine from sediment (lees). We don't know exactly how much that will be until we start refilling the cleaned barrels with the blended wine. Almost every time we have less than a barrel left over. We must decide whether to leave this small amount of wine in the tank for the next wine or make up a combined barrel. This year we have 4 such barrels. One is mostly Cab Franc from the Jones vineyard, but does contain some Aca Modot. The dilemma is that if I add Jones Cab Franc to my Aca Modot blend (even though I have some of our Estate Cab Franc), I will have to drop the Estate classification. Some of you noticed last year that I did that very thing. I feel that this addition to the blend would increase the complexity and of course give us 25 more cases to sell. Right now, though I am leaning to keep the wine as Estate, mainly because the wine in the barrels is tasting so fine now.

	*Dave*
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