Yesterday morning we crushed 1.8 tons of Broken Leg Syrah and .56 tons of Girard Mourvedre. The Broken Leg nearly broke my heart. You may have read about the bear. Well that was one hungry bear because Steve estimates he ate nearly a barrel's worth (.5 ton) of wine!! (Last year the vineyard produced 3.6 tons.) Anyone need some extra barrels? We certainly have some to spare. On the upside - the flavors are so amazing and I was blown away to see us pick on October 21st at 24 brix. Given this is extreme cool climate Syrah we were preparing ourselves for 22 on the upside. I love being wrong.

So the total tonnage for us this year is just over 11. We were prepared to go up 13 so not too bad but we will hope to see our Syrah lots grow a bit next year (our goal is to have them all be around 3 tons which is still only a minisucle 175 (or so) case production but with our labor intensive yellow bins and open top wood fermenters we have to stay small in order to make it manageable.

With crush behind us we can take a small pause before turning our attention to pressing. Oh - and we now have nearly 7 tons to punch down 2x a day! Maybe we can strong arm Henry into extending his stay yet another week????