A couple of weeks ago we were fortunate enough to get a mention in the Wall Street Journal. It was certainly a very cool thing to have happen. Traffic to the site rose dramatically, for a few days. Some folks joined the mailing list and some others subscribed to our RSS feed. Many were exposed to our project that otherwise wouldn’t have been; I could hardly complain. Yet predictably I suppose, soon after the paper and the online article hit, traffic quickly tapered off to former levels. After all, we don’t have any wine for sale (yet).

As luck would have it however, a woman named Karen Schroder happened to be reading the Journal that particular Monday and was interested enough to send me an email. Karen is an agent at ICM, one of the larger talent agencies in the US, and wrote to tell me that she was interested in helping me turn our winery adventure into a book – replete with wine country silliness and behind the scenes details – if I were interested. Karen relayed that she represented bestselling authors Amanda Hesser and Candace Bushnell among others, and that she thought the blog had “the perfect mix of a personal story combined with fascinating information about the industry and the process of wine making.”

After thinking about her offer for a reasonably dignified period of time, right around 90 seconds, I of course jumped at the opportunity. Now I suppose I qualify as one of those unpublished authors you sometimes hear spouting off at dinner parties. Yeah, the ones you roll your eyes at. That’s me. Good times.

It’s all very exciting and I’ve been busy collecting interesting characters and stories from my friends and acquaintances. So far I’ve got the family winery start up cautionary tale. I’ve got an arm full of stories about the wine country version of the jet-setting toxic bachelor (no link for that one!). And I’ve got a smattering of pretty interesting inside baseball distributor stories. You know, like where the wholesale rep expenses a bag of weed that he bought for a wine buyer? Stuff like that.

I’m just now getting started but I can honestly say that researching and talking with folks, hearing their stories first hand, is and will surely be the most enjoyable aspect of this project. Obviously I don’t know how the story will end, it could be a tragedy after all, but with this type of opportunity I have to think that the future is pretty bright for Capozzi.

Anyway, I’ll be at Wine 2.0 in San Francisco on Wednesday and if you’re in the neighborhood I’d love to hear some more good stories. Grab a glass of wine and tell me your tale. I’ll be the guy in the pinotblogger shirt (which we should be shipping this week, at long last).

Kent is the winemaker of Green Truck Cellars, a small Pinot producer in Napa Valley. And when I say small, I’m talking 400-500 cases small. Earlier this year he traveled to France on a journey to discover more about the barrels he was using; how they were made, how the wood was selected and harvested, how the craft of cooperage is performed, and finally to visit and see for himself some of the great vineyards of Burgundy.

On his Pinot log is a series of posts on French Oak barrels I desperately wish I had written (or, more accurately, that I wish I’d been in a position to write). The storytelling is very fine, and the details and the vagaries of NTBois cooperage in particular, and French cooperage in general are so good that if you are at all interested in Pinot and it’s birthplace, Burgundy, there is hardly any better reading to be found.

You’ll have to scroll down to read the relevant posts since the blog doesn’t allow for permalinking (switch to WordPress Kent). Look for the entry entitled “06.16.06 | Bullet and Barrels“.

Great stuff.

If you are new here, don’t forget to vote on our label design!

Tomorrow I’m off to San Francisco to attend WordCamp 06, a conference for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is the blogging platform that I use to write Pinotblogger, and its completely free, which I think is pretty awesome.

Capozzi Winery will be helping to sponsor the conference. We’ve decided that we’d like give a little back to the creator (Matthew Mullenweg) and the community surrounding the software that has helped us to tell the story of Capozzi in an interesting way, to get the word out about our winery, and to have all these great conversations over the past 9 months.

If you’d like to attend, the conference is free and it starts tomorrow at 9:00 AM. Here are the details:

WordCamp is a 1-day conference for WordPress users and developers.

When?
Saturday August 5th, 2006
9 AM – 6 PM, 8:30 PM after-party
Where?
Swedish American Hall, San Francisco CA
Cost?
Free!
Why?
To figure out the next generation of publishing on the web.

Some interesting bloggers will be in attendance. John Furrier, the CEO of Pod Tech and new boss of Robert Scoble, will be there. So will Rakesh Agrawal, one of the founders of Snapstream, as well as folks like Jason Cosper, who runs preshrunk, a blog dedicated to ferreting out the best in tee-shirt fashion available on the web. About 500 other bloggers will be there as well.

It’s an interesting group and I’m looking forward to meeting them. Best of all, because they all blog, I know that, for instance, Niall Kennedy’s photography appeared on a bottle of Costello Vineyard’s ’99 Merlot, and that he wants to make his own wine someday (but doesn’t have the patience).

I love blogs.

Veraison (vay-ray-ZON), the start of berry ripening is upon us. All over Rebecca’s Vineyard Pinot grapes are starting their change from hard, green, sour acid pebbles into sweet, ripe, red bird bait.

I find this time of year the most beautiful, as long as the temps are reasonable. The fair is still going on, summer is only about half over (September is typically the best month to be in Northern California weather-wise), and all around the vineyard splashes of color begin to appear and intensify each day. It is wonderful.

Today is a good one also because we’ve had a good response and great feedback on the new labels. Around 50 people have voted, which is a pretty decent number, (though I’d love to have more) and label 21 is currently in the lead.

If you haven’t yet, please take a moment to vote on your favorite. It really is a great help to me and I can’t get enough of the feedback. While we aren’t designing our label for a supermarket shelf, we do want you to feel like you’ve ordered something really special when you buy our wine off of a wine list or receive it after buying direct. Your feedback will help us achieve that goal.

And in other news, Cate over at Wine Sediments has asked me to come help fill-in for departed A-listers Tom Wark and Lenn Thompson. I was happy to oblige, and recommend you check the site out at least a couple times a week since there are some great writers still there like Mark Fisher of Uncorked, Andrew Barrow of Spitoon, Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape and others.

And please remember to vote!

One of the best and most honest posts on building a winery (and running it as a business) I’ve read is over at Vintner’s Journal, the Match Vineyard’s winery blog. This kind of openess really makes me want to try their wines. I just wish Randy and Sasha would post more often.

Have a look..

I was recently asked if there was any advice I was given that I failed to follow that I’m now regretting. Nothing comes to mind, but there were a few bits of advice I took that I now either regret or I’m not sure about the path taken…

St. Zini has all the details and some great commentary over at his blog.

It seems Randall Grahm can truly be called eccentric now, he’s always been a bit loony and now he’s also quite rich. Perhaps, as St. Zini proposes, now he will be able to concentrate on making some interesting lower production wines that will match his distinctive personality. Here’s hoping.

Cheers to Randall.

Craig Camp’s Anne Amie Vineyards is hosting what looks to be an outstanding Pinot Noir dinner up in Oregon on July 27th. From the site:

What is great wine without great food? A fabulous dinner will be assured as our guest chefs for the evening are Caprial and John Pence, owners of the renowned Caprial’s Bistro in Portland and hosts of the popular PBS television cooking show, Cooking for Family and Friends.

Guest winemakers for the evening will include:

* David Bruce, one of the pioneers of California Pinot Noir growing will share with us his renowned David Bruce Winery wines from the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Clara Valley. (www.davidbrucewinery.com)

* Keller Estate Winery winemaker Michael McNeill will present his outstanding Sonoma Coast Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines. (http://www.kellerestate.com).

* Goldeneye Vineyards, part of the prestigious Duckhorn Wine Company, will present a full range of their distinctive wines from California’s Anderson Valley. Winemaker Zach Rasmuson will guide you through their exciting wines. (http://www.goldeneyewinery.com)

Tickets are $95 a person, which strikes me as a very reasonable price. Upcoming birth of child is preventing me from going, but if you go, let me know how it was!

Broke a few glasses over the holiday weekend? Not sure what to do with that sad looking Riedel glass with the stem broken off? Recycle and repurpose it on your nightstand where you can slash yourself with it and bleed yourself awake!

From product designer Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad (Via Lifehacker, via Boing Boing, via OhGizmo, via MobilWhack, via reluct):

…to boost the volume of your phone’s alarm — say, if you’re a heavy sleeper — you can rest it inside a large wine-balloon that’s had its stem snapped off. The glass bowl acts as a resonating chamber for the alarm.

I think Lifehacker commenter Scott Feldstein sums things up nicely:

And since you can’t drink any wine out of the glass once you’ve implemented this ingenious solution, you won’t be quite so hung over and thus won’t be so inclined to oversleep your alarm in the first place. Double bonus!

Bloggers can do so much with their notes. They are less constrained by length and can offer more backstory than print media, and they can link to other sources for additional information on a wine. They can podcast or vlog their notes. Most importantly, blog authors can also direct readers immediately to a source where they can buy the wines reviewed.

Besides doing their readers a service by making wines they reccomend easier to get a hold of, bloggers could potentially make some cash ala Amazon Affiliates for their referrals.

Currently wine-searcher.com is the only online servive I’m aware of that gives wine bloggers the ability to link to wines availbe for purchase via their search engine. Unfortunately the process of creating links is cumbersome and bloggers can only become affiliates (and get compensated for referrals) if they have over 100,000 pageviews a month. Which leaves out everyone but, well, Vinography. And even then, payment is based on click throughs @ 6 cents per refferal, instead of a cut of the total purchase. And finally, to top it all off, the results given in wine-searcher aren’t usually the best prices available. You have to pay wine-searcher for complete results.

Alder at Vinography is pretty good at linking to online mailing list sign ups, but other than him I don’t see other bloggers making it easy for their readers to actually get their hands on the wines they review. Making it easier for wine bloggers to link to places to buy the wines they review would be a great first step. An even bigger step would be to cut them in on the action and give them 4 or 5% of the total purchse when they refer customers directly to a winery’s online store. Producers give wholesalers like Southern 30% of the retail price, so I figure 4-5% is a small price to pay for a “new aquisition.” And yeah, we’re going have an affiliate program of some sort at Capozzi. For sure. So stay tuned.

Anyway this whole post was brought about when I wanted to provide links to some of the wines that we’ll be tasting this weekend in our (mainly) Russian River Valley Pinot palate training exercise. I wasn’t concerned with making any quick cash, but I was interested in getting people excited about Russian River Pinot and I wanted to provide links to places where readers could purchase some of the great wines we’ll be sampling. Due to the tediousness of actually providing links, however, instead I decided to post this rant.

The wines we’ll be tasting blind and “judging” are listed below. We have a nice sampling of vintages and a good cross section of the valley, from Green Valley up through Laguna Ridge and ending at Middle Reach. I’ve also thrown in a Seasmoke from Santa Barbara and a Robledo from Carneros for flavor.

I’ll let you know next week which ones were the favorites (no scores though, sorry).

00 Dehlinger Estate (RRV)
00 Dehlinger Goldridge Vineyard (RRV)
01 Marimar Torres Don Miguel Vineyard
01 Joseph Swan Trenton Estate (RRV)
01 D’Agostini (RRV)
02 Robledo (Carneros)
02 Harrington (RRV)
02 Rochioli Three Corner Vineyard (RRV)
03 Moshin 115 Clone (RRV)
03 Ketelsen Tudor House Reserve (RRV)
03 Merry Edwards Klopp Ranch (RRV)
03 Gary Farrell (RRV)
03 Moshin Lot 4 (RRV)
04 Holdredge (RRV)
04 Rochioli Special Cuvee (RRV)
04 Dutton Goldfield Dutton Ranch (RRV)
04 Seasmoke Botella (Sta. Rita)
04 Rochioli Estate (RRV)
04 Halleck Three Sons Cuvee (RRV)

I got note a couple days ago from RadCru co-founder Jeff Playter letting me know that his new wine-a-day site will be launching on July 10. RadCru is teaming up with Inertia Clients (one of which might be me if all goes well) and offering one wine a day, 5 times a week, for a 24 hour window or until the wine sells out.

It’s a cool idea and an interesting way to get smaller wineries with limited production in front of consumers who might never have heard of them. If you are interested in signing up, you can do so at radcru.com right now.

From a participating winery’s point of view, I don’t have any specifics on RadCru’s distribution fee, or what cut Inertia will get, but if RadCru is able to generate steady ready-to-buy traffic by offering limited production, quality wines, it will probably be worth it.

Jeff also mentioned that the Chronicle will be doing a piece on them in the near future, so keep an eye out for that to learn more about their service.