Fainwood Vintage 2007

Let the Blending Begin

2010-03-04T15:24:00.003-05:00

The 2009 Sauvignon Blanc barrel samples have arrived for blending. Let the games begin.

Fainwood Sparkling?

2009-06-26T10:42:00.003-04:00

Crushpad reports that it is considering making sparkling wine for the first time. The Fainwood crew is very interested. If you might be interested in some sparkling Fainwood, leave us a comment below.

SB Still Strong

2009-06-26T10:40:00.003-04:00

Ryan reports that he gave a bottle of Fainwood Sauvignon Blanc to friends who reported back to him that "A fistfight broke out over who got the fifth glass!"

Delicious.

2009-04-05T15:50:00.002-04:00

With much consternation, we opened, decanted, and waited for a few hours before tasting the latest addition to the Fainwood family. Early reports...young, but delicious, with a great deep color, vanilla tones, and berries peeking out. The wine needs a rest after its travels, but the early reports are that we'll be living high on some excellent zinfandel.

The Zin Has Landed

2009-04-02T07:35:00.004-04:00

Twenty-five cases of Fainwood 2007 zinfandel rolled off the truck into the Goldstein Long Island compound Wednesday. With only two bottles lost in transit -- one rolled out of the pallet, down the driveway, and christened the driveway with red wine -- the new wine has safely arrived. Two cases are bound for Massachusetts this weekend.

Unlike the sauvignon blanc, half this production belongs to the Davenports, who are anxiously awaiting its arrival as well.

Here Comes the Zin!

2009-03-31T21:39:00.002-04:00

Waiting for a Fainwood red? If all goes well, the 2007 Fainwood Zinfandel arrives on Long Island tomorrow. First tasting scheduled for this weekend. Although it will need many weeks to recover from its cross-country voyage, it will be the first time to see just how the blend came together. More on that to come.

Zin gets bottled tonight!

2009-02-13T14:42:00.002-05:00

The zinfandel is being bottled this evening at Crushpad's facility between 8-9 pm EST. Anyone interested in taking a peek at this exciting process can check out the Web cam on the bottling line during that time at http://www.crushpadwine.com/ (click on link toward upper right of the home page).

Crushpad in NYTimes Blog

2008-09-12T15:59:00.002-04:00

The New York Times wine guy and blogger has written a blog today discussing the increasing number of urban wineries, and includes a discussion of Crushpad.

In case you drink too much Fainwood...

2008-08-03T16:15:00.003-04:00

For anyone who has overindulged, the mysteries of the hangover and its possible antidotes and cures are legendary. The New Yorker ran a thoughtful article by Joan Acocella dedicated to this subject in May. It's worth a read for anyone who has a home remedy for the hangover. If you do, post it here in the comments section below.

The Sauvignon Blanc Numbers

2008-07-28T15:19:00.002-04:00

Unfortunately a wine label is only so big, so we couldn't include all the technical data about the Sauvignon Blanc on the bottle. For those interested, here are a few key details:

pH 3.31
TA 0.68 g/L
Alcohol 14.6%

Weird Science -- Blending the SB

2008-06-15T19:45:00.014-04:00

We'll be doing some posts to fill in the blanks from between our trip to Crushpad in September 2007 and the arrival of the Fainwood Sauvignon Blanc last month. So, just how did Fainwood get to taste like it does? Part of it is in the blending or, more accurately, the lack thereof...

When we embarked on the sauvignon blanc project last summer, we searched our local wine stores for SBs for which the kindly winery and winemakers had provided lots of technical information either on the bottle itself or on their Web sites: information like pH and TA (total acidity) as well as if they did any barrel aging or if they let the wine undergo malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that is always allowed in red wines and occassionally in whites, mostly in the case of chardonnays; "malo" as it is called contributes a roundness and fullness in the wine's mouth feel, often described as a buttery component). Some wineries had lots of info, which was quite useful in the many SB tastings we conducted ourselves last summer. While far from being truly scientific, we were able to begin narrowing down how certain technical components contributed to certain resulting taste features in the various wines we tried. This all served to help us convert the taste that we wanted in our finished Fainwood SB into the technical criteria we needed to discuss with the winemakers at Crushpad.

While almost all of the SB picked for our Fainwood bottling was fermented and aged in stainless steel vessels, Crushpad held some of the juice separate and transferred it to oak barrels for some barrel fermentation and ultimately a little malo. The question for us, then, was how much, if any, of that barrel fermented SB did we want to blend with the pure stainless.

From the tastings we had done of other SBs, all along we thought we wanted a little barrel and/or malolactic fermented juice to take the sharp edge off the traditional acidic SB taste and give it a little more depth. So after Crushpad shipped us samples of both the stainless and the barrel juice for us to blend in February 2008, we assumed we were in for some combination of barrel/malolactic in our final blended wine.

It was like being back in science class, as we broke out pipettes and graduated cylinders (thanks Joerg!), and started measuring out small amounts of both wines. First, we were struck by how much we loved the pure stainless and how pleased we were with the Crushpad execution of our wine plan. We ran the gamut from an even 50%-50% split to a 75%-25% to an 80%-20%...you get the picture. Marc had to get more and more exacting with his tiny droplets of barrel wine that he mixed in the stainless steel. We got down to about 5% barrel fermented and worked down 1% at a time. At 1% we simply declared that the unadulterated stainless SB was the taste we were after. Try as we might, nothing beat it. And alas, the blend was no blend at all.

Yum

2008-06-15T11:55:00.008-04:00

Well, we couldn't be happier with the Fainwood sauvignon blanc. The folks at Crushpad executed our wine plan just as we had hoped and we have a delicious and imminently drinkable bottle of summer wine. It is a straight down the middle sauvignon blanc made in what we think of as the Napa style: brightly acidic, but not overly so, fruity, but not overly perfumed like many of those from New Zealand. We've found that it drinks best after it's been open for about 15-30 minutes and once it's warmed up a bit from the fridge, which makes it a bit too cold, masking the flavors. (As evidenced by the pictures, we've had many "test" bottles so far to figure this out.) In a future post we'll put all the technical details about the wine.

Fainwood Has Landed

2008-05-12T21:16:00.006-04:00

Though we have been quite lax in our updating of this blog, fortunately our wines haven't followed suit down our lazy path. The first thing you may notice is that we chose "Fainwood" as the official name (thanks to all for participating with your fun suggestions).

While we were all busy with other things (including baby Daniel for Katie and Ryan), our wines have been continuing their individual journeys. Our zinfandel is on its last legs of fermentation -- a full eight months after it began -- but perhaps more importantly, the sauvignon blanc sprinted toward the finish line to become a full-fledged wine. We'll go backward in time and provide far more of the details of how this came to be in the next few posts, but, for now, rest assured that the sauvignon blanc is bottled, labeled, and currently recovering from its cross-country trip from San Francisco at Marc's parents' house in Setauket, NY.

A hearty thanks to Papa Goldstein and Uncle Arnie for picking up (literally) the 24 cases from the dropoff point in Queens and photographing the process (proud grandparents?). How's that for a little teaser? Tune in for a photo replay of the pickup and conga line of cases down to the Goldstein cellar.

And get ready to drink up with us in the Sauvignon Blanc Summer of 2008!

Trip Report Coming Soon

2007-10-03T10:49:00.001-04:00

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

2007-09-18T13:19:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-06T06:26:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-08-27T14:34:00.001-04:00

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

2007-08-09T11:31:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-19T17:33:00.000-04:00

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.....

2007-07-13T18:42:00.001-04:00

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....

2007-06-02T09:57:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-12T06:26:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-01T05:18:00.000-04:00

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

Found Teldeschi

2007-04-17T21:00:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-04-06T21:45:00.000-04:00

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.