Guide Hachette selection Cabardes

We got reviewed in the guide Hachette. I'll add this to the media portion of the website eventually but it's pretty low priority since it's in French and in the middle of harvest. The 2009 Guide Hachette talked up our wine a good deal. We weren't quite the Coup de Coeur for the region, but nobody expects a wine called "Les Americains" to wine the favored spot in such a prestigious French review. It's an honor to be in the pages of this renowned wine publication.

Here's a link to the actual article for anybody who reads French:

Guide Hachette

As always, the rest of the media clippings can be found in the Press section of the website:Press

French wine in Sweden

Good news for all our Swedish readers. A Swedish wine club that you can join online will be making several of our award-winning O'Vineyards wines available to households around Stockholm (and maybe beyond). In addition, I'm excited because I get to write and read an unprecedented number of umlauts in my day to day affairs.

torstig.se

rudimentary English translation



Hurrah for International cooperation. Hopefully it'll go far better than the encounter between Swedish Chef and Jacques Roach.

Still running

I've been back in Tampa a couple days now and I'm starting to miss mom's cooking. But it's good to be in the city that raised me, checking out the old stomping grounds and living in the house I was in before we started this crazy vineyard thing. For those who don't know, I'm from Tampa so this is where the wine's marketing and distribution is headquartered for the time being.

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Home, Sweet-Mother-of-@#*!, Home.

[[VIDEO REMOVED]]

The video isn't working entirely right... I'll have to get my mom to reupload it. Regardless, that's a glimpse of the house my parents built before going into wine. They made the houses like they make wines WAY BIGGER THAN MOST PEOPLE WOULD EVER EXPECT.

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Anyway, I'm in Tampa and I'm ready to start selling wine. A lot of new contacts from the Sarasota Wine Festival. I met David and Deb Hunt from Hunt Cellars, several of the family member at Stanley Lambert including (Jim Lambert, self-proclaimed wannabe winemaker), the lovely family behind Silkwood Wines, and the Michael half of Michael-David Winery (who make Earthquake, Incognito, Pride, 7 Deadly Zins and many many more). They were all fantastic people and I will be keeping in touch with each of them.

I also got to snoop a little behind the scenes, sneaking around the service corridors of the Ritz Carlton, salvaging floral arrangements from the hotel's trash, and pouring more than a thousand samples in three days. I even got invited to an after-party thrown by one of the bigger distributors and it was fun drinking behind (what some refer to as) enemy lines. At the end of so much good wine, everybody can be good friends.

Soutirage Update

We spent most of the day doing soutirages on some of the Syrah for the 2007 Reserve. It had a lot of lies (that's pronounced leez and has nothing to do with obfuscating the truth) and it was exceptionally important to make sure that this grape deposit should be separated from the wine at this time.

We also took advantage of this move to put some of the barrels in the center of the room on that new oxoline shelving I was bragging about a couple days ago. It took a long time, but it should be easier on the remaining barrels we have to go through.

More to come!

France in April

I just celebrated my 23rd birthday at the beginning of the month and after an incredibly busy pair of weeks in Florida, I flew back to the vineyard. I am currently typing from my office above the winery and I am excited to announce that I finally got around to making a short vineyard video. Hopefully, I'll keep these coming as a web series on O'Vineyards that can shed some light on some of the cool things we get to do, the way we tend to grapes and wine, our love for this work and this area, all the sweet toys I get to play with, etc.

This installment is on a topic I'm very excited about. I've been gone since crush at the end of 2007. In my absence, my parents installed a brand new oxoline system to shelve our barrels. This actually sounds a lot like an ad for them, but I'm not getting paid. (We should look into the sponsorship opportunities, but) This is just a friendly look into one of the cool new gadgets I get to use.



For people who can't see the video cause they're at work or on dialup or somesuch:
My barrels used to be stacked on top of each other which is the way it's been done for a long time. Once they're full, they're exceptionally heavy and it's a little difficult reaching the bunghole (that's the hole in the barrel, not the naughty part of your body). The shelving system uses space age innovations like wheels and tubes to shelve each barrel independently. This makes the hole accessible, makes it possible to turn the barrel around while full with minimal effort, and turns the difficult process of emptying the last bits of the barrel as easy as turning it upside down. I'm sort of surprised it took centuries of winemaking before an affordable shelf with wheels was invented, but at least we have it now.