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.