Trip Report Coming Soon

Marc and Lori have been really busy catching up on everything we had to drop for our last-minute trip out to Crushpad. We hope to have a complete wine update soon. For now, enjoy a couple of pictures from our visit.

Here's the before (our zinfandel grapes before sorting and crushing):



And here's the after (zinfandel grapes during fermentation):



Here's a chemistry lesson: the fermenting grapes literally go pop, pop, fizz, fizz, as those crazy yeasts eat away at the sugar and give off carbon dioxide, making the mixture bubble and giving off a tremendous amount of heat (upwards of 80 degrees F).

More fun facts soon!

Crushpad Sept. 2007 Visit

We're back from our visit to Crushpad. In a word, it was wild. We sorted the grapes, tasted the fermenting zinfandel and sauvignon blanc, met some great people, and learned a lot. There's no substitute to seeing the process in person. If you didn't happen to tune in to the Crushpad Web cam on Friday, Sept. 7 while we were sorting the grapes, you can get a little taste of what it was like by watching us in a video Crushpad produced:

Crushpad Video of Marc and Lori

They are just about ready to press the zinfandel grapes today or tomorrow. Hopefully we can watch remotely via Webcam.

We'll follow up with details on the whole experience soon.

California Here We Come

Okay, it's early. Forgive us for the cheesy title. Lame as it may be, it's also accurate.

With a heat wave that's taken hold of Northern California (high 90s and 100 in most wine country regions), the grapes just can't wait any longer. Just about everything is ripe and ready to pick, including our Teldeschi zinfandel grapes.

After first being told on Wednesday morning that harvest would be in "a few weeks," that abruptly changed at 5 pm that same day when we were told they'd be picking on Friday--this Friday.

In less than a day Marc and Lori had managed to clear work schedules, find airfare, hotels, and put together a trip out to Crushpad in San Francisco to participate in the zinfandel crush. We are extending the trip out to do some wine tasting in Boonville and Sonoma and to visit our friends and gracious hosts for our San Francisco leg of the trip, Tim, Mechelle, and birthday boy Lucas (thanks again guys!). The only part of the plan that didn't come together is Katie and Ryan being able to join us. We'll be sure to take lots of photos to post when we return.

We aren't quite sure what we'll be doing out there, but you can get a taste for it if you tune into the Crushpad Web cam on Friday, 5pm EST. You may just see us at the sorting table or stomping away "I Love Lucy" style.

Last One in the Crusher's a Rotten Grape!

Today, August 27, 2007, marks the official start to our wine-making venture as our Galleron Road sauvignon blanc grapes were picked very early this morning and are currently being processed at Crushpad's San Francisco facility.

Check out the progress via Web cam at Crushpad Cam.

On Friday, we were sent some statistics and a description of the taste of the grapes:

Galleron Road Sauvignon Blanc
Brix (sugar content): 24.2
pH: 3.24
Total acidity (TA): 7.8

On the home stretch, the leafy green component in the juice is just about gone, the fruit is showing lots of sweet melon flavors, and the pH and acidity are at the levels that suggest optimal maturity for SB.

More details of the sauvignon blanc to come soon!

Harvest Update

An e-mail update from Crushpad tells us that our grapes are 30-60 days away from harvest.

As harvest is an insanely busy time of year for anyone in the wine-making biz, Crushpad wanted us to make our wine plans well in advance, which we did for both the sauvignon blanc and zinfandel in July.

The wine plan involves approximately 30 steps that will take our wine from grapes to finished juice. Via a conference call with our wine maker at Crushpad, we worked our way through each of these 30 decisions, discussing the effects each choice has on the end result. These decisions are everything from the target alcohol content to the desired pH to the strain of yeast to use for fermentation to the type of wood (both country of origin and new versus used) in the oak barrels used for aging.

We (well, perhaps not Ryan!) had all done some research prior to our phone calls and were surprised both by how much it seems we have learned and how much more there is to know.

After harvest once the grapes arrive at Crushpad's facility in San Francisco, they will be tested for sugar content (Brix in wine lingo), pH, and other things that will put our wine plan into action, a plan which may need to change depending on what nature offers up. Regardless, as things move fast in the days after harvest, the wine plans provide a good guideline to reference as we make our way to our desired finished wine, something we can better assess after tasting samples this past weekend of the 2006 bottlings (made by Crushpad itself) from the same vineyards as our two 2007 wines. While definitely encouraged and excited by the 2006 barrel samples of both the Galleron Road sauvignon blanc and the Teldeschi zinfandel, our tasting also brought up additional questions that we'll ask of our wine maker to help ensure we are getting the type of wine we all want.

Next up is changing those wine plans as necessary and awaiting more concrete news on harvest time. We hope to be out in San Francisco for harvest of at least the zinfandel, but as it'll have to be a last-minute trip (they often don't know until a few days before that they are picking the grapes), we are crossing our fingers that it works out with work schedules, flights, and, for Katie and Ryan, the status of their little babe, due early December!

Winemaking Is Addictive

This is Crushpad's motto, and boy do we believe it now.

Having already committed to making a barrel of 2007 zinfandel with Katie and Ryan, Lori and Marc attended the Crushpad NYC tasting event in April in which the company had samples of wines made the previous year for clients and potential clients to taste to get a sense of the different vineyards and the quality of wine being made through Crushpad. It was a great event, and Lori and Marc could just not shake the memory of how wonderful a particular 2006 sauvignon blanc poured at the event tasted. It was crisp and bursting with citrus flavors yet amazingly full bodied. It was literally the best sauvignon blanc we've tasted in years.

Based on this tasting, we began dreaming of making our own version of this sauvignon blanc from the 2007 harvest. In fact, Lori was ready to commit to making a barrel immediately at the NYC event. It took Marc just a few short weeks to mull it over and come to the same conclusion. The 2006 Crushpad sauvignon blanc was bottled just a month before the NYC tasting event -- in March 2007 -- and we could expect the same time frame from the 2007 harvest, meaning it'd be ready by March 2008. We found the prospect of being able to actually drink the wine we are making (and have it taste so good) a mere six months after harvest too tempting to pass up, especially since the barrel of zinfandel we are making won't be ready to inbibe until sometime in 2009! (Red wines age for much longer than whites before being bottled and usually also require additional time in the bottle before they are ready for drinking.) We just couldn't wait that long to taste the results of our winemaking project.

Really though, this is purely a scientific venture. Since our zinfandel will not be ready before the 2008 harvest, how would we know if we wanted to do this again next year if we didn't have some type of finished wine before then? Truly we had no choice but to dive into a second barrel. Thankfully, our zin partners Katie and Ryan and Marc's parents and neighbors agreed (or so we've theorized) to help us out and take a few cases off our hands.

We have no doubt when you taste the results, we won't have enough to go around. So, add to our expanding winemaking brand the 2007 Galleron Road Sauvignon Blanc.

As a wise man once said: "A bottle of red, a bottle of white...."

And the Winner Is.....

Thanks to everyone who posted comments and e-mailed us directly in response to our request for you to help us name our wine. Two names seemed to continually be pointed to as favorites:

Pro Se and Fainwood.

Fortunately (and unfortunately), I think those are our favorites as well. Now we just need to make the decision. If anyone has strong opinions one way or another, or if you really want to make a case for another name, please let us know. We'll let you know the final decision soon.

A Grape by Any Other Name....

Knowing that our grapes have emerged from their buds and are now basking in the California sun has made the prospect of actually having a wine of our own real. In just four short months, give or take, those little babies will be plucked from their vines and on their way to our (and your) glasses. With six months already behind us since the inception of this wine project, it seems well past time to give those fruits a name.

And we'd like your help.

As this may be the first time some of you are finding out about our wine project, we invite you to read the history of how it came to be (read from the bottom up). And then put your creative skills to the test by helping us come up with a name for our wine brand.

The four of us amateur winemakers (Ryan, Katie, Marc, and Lori) have been tossing around a few prospects via e-mail (to Marc's chagrin, everyone, including George Lucas, has vetoed Jedi Juice). You may have noticed the current name of this blog: prosewine.blogspot.com. While many of you may read that as "prose wine," the name tends toward the legal rather than the literary, and I suspect there are a fair number from the legal field who may instead see "pro se wine." Pro se, in the legal profession, refers to the practice of representing yourself in a legal battle: a pro se plaintiff, for example, prosecutes his or her case without a lawyer (heaven forbid!). In Latin, pro se means "for oneself" or "on one's own behalf." As half of our winemakers (Katie and Marc) are attorneys, and this friendship owes its origins to Katie and Marc meeting at the now defunct Palmer & Dodge in Boston, Pro Se as a name gives a nod to this history while also representing our passion to make this wine for ourselves, for our own enjoyment and love of wine.

While Pro Se is currently winning out over other potentials for the overarching name of our wine project -- think the name of a French Chateaux or California winery -- we are looking for suggestions both for this name as well as the name for our individual 2007 zinfandel bottling. Both names will be prominently displayed on the label of our own making.

So, here is where you all come in. Give us your input on this and other names we've been tossing around, and offer up some of your own. Keep in mind, the "chateaux" name should be one that'll stick as that'll be the main name on our label for this and any future barrels. For the bottling name, as this may not be the only barrel of wine we ever make, unused names may find their way onto a future vintage.

Suggestions so far:

• Pro Se (as discussed above)


• D&G (representing the last names of our winemakers: Davenport and Goldstein)


• Goldport (obvious mashup)


• 79 Sofa (79 is the atomic number for gold, and a “davenport” is a sofa)


• Ausofa (as above, Au is the atomic symbol for gold)


• Fainwood (the street upon which sits Marc and Lori's house, from whose front porch the decision to start this adventure was hatched)


• Zélé (pronounced Zay-lay) loosely translated from its native French, means "zeal, enthusiasm, or fanatical devotion to a cause or goal"


• Paradigm Shift

Click the "comments" link below to leave your suggestions, offer up your opinion on our potential names, or give feedback on those ideas other friends and family suggest. We'll compile a list of the best for both the wine "house" and the zinfandel bottling in a future post.

Crushpad Hits NYC

To make us East Coast wine enthusiasts feel a bit better about living far from the center of the action, the folks at San Francisco-based Crushpad packed up their homemade wine and traveled cross-country to lure amateur winemakers to a tasting in New York City on April 28. Having already committed to making a barrel of Zin, Marc and Lori represented our group and traveled down from Boston to check out just what kind of wine was pouring out of Crushpad--an ardous job but somebody's gotta do it. Crushpad rented out a slick, two-story loft space in Chelsea with a deck overlooking the Hudson River.

After a rickety ten-story climb in the elevator, Marc and Lori emerged into the sunny, whitewashed space to be greeted by rows of bottles of Crushpad wine from the 2006 vintage. These wines with temporary labels calling out the varietal, year, and maker were barrel samples of the wine currently being made from the 2006 harvest by people in the NYC area. This would be the first time many of these winemakers would be tasting their in-progress juice. Excited by that prospect and of seeing our bottle on that table next year, Marc and Lori grabbed a map and proceeded to the section marked "whites." Over the two floors, tables were set up by varietal, each manned by a Crushpad employee who would describe the wines being poured and answer any questions.

Under the "early bird gets the most wine tasting under their belts" philosophy, Marc and Lori were among the first attendees to arrive at the event. This proved to be beneficial as the Crushpad employee pouring the whites was Dave, with whom much correspondence had passed over the past few weeks. Dave immediately recognized our names, and we chatted for a short time, with Dave confirming receipt of our check and informing us that we got the last barrel of Teldeschi Zin.

Then it was time for the tasting to begin. With the first pour of the afternoon, Marc and Lori were immediately blown away by the quality of the wines from Crushpad. The sauvignon blanc from the Galleron Road Vineyard in Napa Valley (Rutherford) was crisp, clean, and citrusy, and immediately Lori demanded that we make a barrel. It rivaled the best sauvignon blancs we have had recently from New Zealand and South Africa. The chardonnay was truly a barrel sample, as evidenced by its still cloudy appearance and slight effervesence. Again, however, it was clear that this would make a terrific wine, with all the structure and fruit that one would look for down the road.

At the cheese table, Marc and Lori ran into the only non-Crushpad vendor at the event, who runs a wine storage facility, Vintage Wine Warehouse, in Queens, NY. For those without enough space, his services run the gambit of showing up at your house and packing up your wine, storing it in a temperature controlled facility, culling out what you want and redelivering it, or shipping it anywhere in the world. Since a personal Crushpad pickup of our wine would be logistically difficult to say the least (despite intense interest from Ryan in a cross-country wine tasting trip), this is the likely destination of finished wine for our eventual pickup. Perhaps the giveaways at his table, though, were the best part of the interaction. Apparently many of his well-heeled clients don't care to keep the wood boxes of their fine wine, and he had scores of the printed ends of these wood crates for the taking. Marc and Lori can now pretend to have worked their way through cases of Mouton Rothchild, Château Cos d'Estournel, Château Margaux, and others.

After provisioning up and learning where the wine would head to for pickup, Marc and Lori settled into tasting the reds, beginning with the three syrahs on the same floor as the whites. Of the three 2006 syrahs, the White Hawk Vineyard Syrah from Santa Barbara was terrific -- lush, fruity, deep, and rich, but well balanced and drinkable even at this early stage. Simply a great wine, and Marc and Lori would have bought some right then and there had it been available.

Moving upstairs, Marc and Lori were thrilled to see that the zinfandel available for tasting was their very own Teldeschi vineyard from Dry Creek Valley from the 2006 vintage. So, with a little trepedation (what if it is terrible, and we have a whole barrel coming to us?), Marc and Lori sidled up to the table and had their first taste. It was what everyone had hoped when we chose the Teldeschi in the first place: a real zin, with strong fruit, good balance, and without any hotness from high alcohol content. Hooray! We won't end up with 25 cases of cooking wine! After some more cheese and visits to the cabernet sauvignon table, Lori persuaded the zin pourer to donate a bottle to our cause, so Katie and Ryan could also see just what they had invested in.

After two and half hours of tasting the wines made by Crushpad, as well as a customer's barrel sample (a fellow attendee offered us a taste of his Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah from Mendocino--which, while clearly tannic and needing more time in the bottle, had nice potential), we were happy to say that the winemakers at Crushpad clearly know what they are doing. They will be able to help our group of amateurs make some great wine. And, the group of people who work there, holding our dream jobs, mind you, are fun, knowledgable, and enthusiastic about what they do. We look forward to working with them.

As we were getting ready to leave, Marc discovered the benefit of being male as he ran into a fellow Crushpad client and winemaker Dain Smith in the restroom. In our research into Crushpad, we learned of Dain Wines. While Dain certainly is a unique name that would stick in your mind, he was instantly recognizable to Marc due to another favorable trait: having gotten the seal of approval from none other than Robert Parker. Dain, fortunate to have a friend who is a distributor and was able to get his wine to Parker, received 92 points for his 2005 Brosseau Pinot Noir. Other Pinots and Syrahs from his 2005 vintage earned equally as respectable 90s from Parker. We were happy to have had the chance to speak to someone like Dain who has turned an interest and a dream into a reality, with the help of Crushpad.

With Crushpad shirts, corkscrews, and wood winebox ends, Marc and Lori shuffled off to Penn Station to take NJ Transit back to good, old friends living in Maplewood, who, after a long day of planting rosebushes, put up with tales of NYC winetastings over a terrific dinner.

Crushpad on NPR

Crushpad founder Michael Brill was recently interviewed on NPR's Weekend Edition.

Found Teldeschi

What a nice surprise! Lori and Marc found a bottle of 1993 Teldeschi zinfandel on the menu at the Blue Room in Cambridge last week. Considering that it is 14 years old, it was a pretty sturdy zinfandel that went well with the mushroom pasta and shrimp and chorizo we ate. Having lost the fruit it presumably had early on, the wine has matured to a nice mellow spot, earthy and rich. We'd be pretty pleased if our zin tasted like this after 14 years (2021!). For an interesting overview of the Teldeschi vineyards, check out its history here. Although a bit unclear, it seems Teldeschi itself is no longer bottling under its own name, but Ravenswood continues to make a single-vineyard Teldeschi zin. Keep an eye out for older Teldeschi or newer Ravenswood Teldeschi vineyard wines in restaurants or wine stores and let us know how they are holding up.

Got Grapes?

• Our burgeoning wine project owes a debt of gratitude to Marc and his love for podcasts. In his quest for the best wine-related podcast, he happened to come across the Cellar Rat, produced by Alan Baker, a self-professed wine geek based in San Francisco. One of the Cellar Rat's most interesting podcasts focused on his personal wine-making venture, courtesy of a custom-crush facility catering to such small-time winemaker wannabes.

How fortuitous for the four of us, as we all fit that description. And so our association with Crushpad began during a somewhat inebriated discussion about this podcast on the Goldstein porch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 2006 following Ryan's Florida IronMan. Though we admit none of us has met a wine we don't like, that evening Ryan and Marc narrowed the varietal down to zinfandel for this first project (while Lori and Katie made their way through a bottle of port in the living room, after which they contributed their two cents that we should investigate making a few bottles of zinfandel port out of some of the barrel).

Research into Crushpad and the types of zinfandel grapes offered began. Available zinfandel vineyards for 2007 harvest are:

• Beatty Ranch Vineyard, Napa Valley (Howell Mountain): This dry-farmed, old vine zinfandel is located at 1800 feet elevation in Howell Mountain. It's a trek to get to them, but since they've been there since before World War I, it's worth the trip. The vines are head-trained and are spaced approximately 2m x 2m. They enjoy long days of warm sunshine thanks to the high elevation that puts them above the Napa fog, but still enjoy cool nights which work to ensure a good level of acidity even at higher levels of ripeness. Wines made from this vineyard have telltale signs of pomegranate and juniper berry and muscular tannins found throughout the Howell Mountain AVA.
  


• Grist Vineyard, Dry Creek Valley: Located at 1,000 feet above the Dry Creek valley floor, this certified organic vineyard adds a bit of mountain structure and spice to traditional Dry Creek brambly, red fruits. The vines are head pruned and sit in iron-rich red volcanic soils that stress the vines into low yields and concentrated wines. Needless to say, this vineyard has an incredible track record and we're very excited to be working with it for the first time in 2007.
  


• Teldeschi Vineyard, Dry Creek Valley (Sonoma): This vineyard produces Zinfandel, Syrah and Petite Sirah from vines that are up to 115 years old. Like most great zinfandel, the zin vines are head pruned, yields are low and the grapes are packed with flavors of cherry, blackberry and boysenberry. If you're a zin fan, you've undoubtedly had some of this stuff (perhaps from a winery that starts with an R). The cool kids these days are blending a small amount of petite sirah with zin for structure – so Crushpad is supporting zinmakers with some additional petite for blending purposes. If you like your wines big, this is the vineyard for you.

The next step was to scour the Internet for wines made from these vineyards for a tasting at the Davenport South compound in Westerly, Rhode Island. This was no easy feat since, as far as we could tell, only one or two (in the case of Beatty Ranch) wineries make single-vineyard zins from these grapes. Luckily, and with much Internet sleuthing, on short notice we were able to locate a wine from each of the vineyards for the tasting. We had the best success with Wades Wines, a wine store in California that was able to deliver quickly, and, when a NJ store failed us, Lori located a Providence wine store near Brown (and on the way to Westerly) that carried the Teldeschi. The bottles were:

• 2001 Highlands Zinfandel Beatty Ranch



• 2003 Turley Zinfandel Grist Vineyards



• 2004 Ravenswood Zinfandel Teldeschi

While admittedly highly unscientific, with wines from different years, winemakers, and vineyards, we were able to settle with reasonable comfort on the Teldeschi grapes for the project. The Beatty Ranch was extremely light in color and flavors, and we felt we wanted a stronger, more extracted zinfandel. The Turley was, well, a Turley, and we wouldn't flatter ourselves to think that we could produce a Turley the first time out. Plus it was a departure from the traditional fruity and spicy zinfandel as it was more earthy and mineral tasting. The Ravenswood was in the tried and true style of Ravenswood single-vineyard wines before it sold out to Constellation. And that seemed to be what we were looking to make: strong, bold, spicy. In short, a zin.



Some interesting notes on timing from the back of the Ravenswood bottle. Those grapes were picked on September 24, 2004, which is some indication of when we might need to plan to be out in the wine country if we want to participate in harvest. We can do some checking on what kind of weather there was in Sonoma in 2004 so we can try to draw some comparison to weather as it occurs this year. Also, this vintage was bottled April 18, 2006, a year and a half after harvest. If we were on that schedule, we wouldn't see our wine until Spring, 2009! We'll have to investigate whether that is a typical time for zin to sit in barrels.


Next up: picking a name. Get your thinking caps on.