• 10-7-2005

The grapes this year are not as good as they were in 2003, this spring wasn't as good pollination and the harvest is low.  Combine that with a rainy fall and I hope we end up with good wine.

8:00am and we were at Bob's in Oregon City to pick Pinot Noir grapes.  Bob is a great old guy with above average fruit.  This fits since he is just a little fruity :)  We had 4-500lbs reserved and picked in the rain for 2- 1/2 hours.  The picking is fun and we enjoy the hell out of it.  It took us until 11 to pick, crush and load the grapes, then another 30min of jabbering with Bob.

• 10-8-2005

6:30am we are in Olympia Wa to pickup our 250 of Syrah and 250 of Pinot Noir. 7:30 and we were supposed to be crushing right now but they had a pallet of grapes fall over in transit and they have to clean up the mess.  I helped unload all the grapes while the first guys in line were crushing their grapes.  These grapes come from Central Washington they look and taste great!  The owner of the supply store sold me 200 extra pounds of grapes so now we are set!   10am and we are loaded and headed to Newburg to pick another 4-500lbs.  Some of our grapes in 03 came from this vineyard and it turned out great even though they seem to be a little young.  Our friend Angie helped us pick.  Now all the grapes are picked and we are ready to make wine.

• 10-9-2005

The Syrah was supposed to be sulfated but this morning after unloading all the wine we found that it had started a wild fermentation.  This is not a huge concern since some wineries only use natural fermentation.  I added our yeast to get a controlled fermentation started and added nutrient and peptic enzyme to all the fermenters also added yeasts to all the must now we are really off and running.  Now we let it sit.

• 10-10-2005

Fermentation is going like hell now we have to do cap management.

• 10-11-2005

6am time for my morning cap punch, I also added Malolactic Cultures to all the containers.

• 10-14-2005

Friday is here and I did lab tests today.  It's amazing how different all the same wines can be.  All 10 fermenters are at 1.000 Specific Gravity or 0 Brix so tomorrow we press!

• 10-15-2005

Today we press!  We are doing enough wine this year that we decided to buy our own press.  Getting everything ready to go was quite a chore and by 10am I was ready to start.  Well at 6:30 and finishing by flashlight we are done, and very tired the mess can wait till morning.  Some of the wine looks great, some not so great.  Lessons learned: Washington grapes need a long cold soak, the fruit was great but we did not get as much color out of it as we did the Oregon fruit.  Invite more people to come help press, Bridgette and I were spread too thin to press 1400lbs of grapes alone.  Start earlier.

• 10-20-2005

The wine is fermenting we are keeping the temp around 70.  Bob's grapes are working slower than the others with the Syrah bubbling the most.  It's going to be a long year waiting to drink this stuff.  On that note, it's tasting better this year at this stage than in years past.

• 1-1-2006

Happy new year!

Our wine has a happy new home.  We moved in December and our wine is now living in the garage on some storage racks.  The secondary fermentation is complete, malolactic fermentation should be done and we need to rack the wine off the sediment that has formed on the bottom of the carboys.  Only 8-12 months left until we have finished wine :)

• 2-4-2006

Better late than never, right?  We spent the day with the wine and finally got it all racked.  What a day, siphoning 120 gallons of wine through a 3/8" hose.  Now that it's done we can let it sit until after spring fishing season.  Then we do it all again and put it on oak.  It's late so I'll post pictures tomorrow.

• 2-23-06

Good wine bad wine.  I get a lot of questions about what is a good wine and does price matter.  #1 price doesn't make a wine good.  A good wine to one person may be a bad wine to another.  #2 good wine is whatever tastes good to you.  Don't worry if you find you don't like what the wine snobs tell you is a good wine.  Go to the store buy some wine drink it and if you like it go buy a 1/2 case.  We have a couple of cases of Jade Mountain Mourvedre that we found several years ago.  The wine has changed so much over the last few years and it has been real fun to taste the changes.  Moral of the story just have fun.

• 8-6-06

Racked the wine, put it on oak, and made the process look cool by using some dry ice.  We can't wait for October this is going to be the year of Chardonnay, I have a beer keg that has to be converted to a carboy so we can have out stainless chard.  The wine has been moved into a room in the basement so we should be able to control the temp better.  Bottling in a few months those who help will get the most wine :)

• 11-25-06

This has to be the finest part of the whole process.  Today a group of strangers came together as friends to help us bottle our wine.  I know we couldn't have done it without them.  The bottling process took about 4 hrs from start to finish and when it was all done we have 650 full bottles.  The Pinot blend we decided on looks to be a nice wine, I think the Syrah is going to be excellent and we even have some table wine to boot.  Thanks so much to those who helped make the 05 DustyBridge a great wine.

• 12-05-06

DustyBridgewines.com has been launched!!  Before this I was mooching space off another site I manage but now we have our own domain.  With the move to a new home will come some changes to the site.  The wine reviews page is up and going, I hope some people will send in reviews for their favorite wines.  The general look and feel of the site is going to be remade and a guest book is in the works.

• 12-08-06

It seems weird not to have some wine in process, so after the 1st of the year we are going to get a Chardonnay wine kit and make some white wine.  Now what should we call it?