We have changed the name of our award winning Vidal Blanc/Riesling to just Vidal Blanc. The wine is the same wine as before, a blend of Vidal and Riesling, but we changed the name to reduce the confusion between it and our regular Riesling. This wine is now available at the tasting room as well as most of our other wines that were sold out. We now have Innocence, Niagara, Harvest Moon , and Mountain Red available. Nimble Hill Red will be available by this weekend (5/16).

We have been working on final filtering of Innocence as well as doing checks to insure the wine is both cold stable and heat stable. Today we will be working on doing a test on our new/used bottling line. This line will fill the bottles and put the corks in them. In the past, corking was very labor intensive and was the bottleneck in terms of how fast we could bottle our wines. Plans are to bottle Innocence next saturday, the 28th of March. If all goes well we may have Innocence for sale by Easter weekend.

I meant to use the term "elevage" not delestage to describe the time period that we are now entering into. Delestage is a process that Champagne goes through, sorry about the confusion.

We have finally finished the 2008 harvest. We figure we processed about 40 tons of grapes at Nimble Hill this year. We have close to 7500 gallons of juice/must/wine in containers. Some wines are finished fermenting and blending has begun. Some of our reds along with Chardonnay have completed malolactic fermentation. We will now enter the time period known by the French as "delestage", which means to "elevate" the wine to it's finished quality. During this time period the winemaker will make decisions regarding fining, filtering, stirring lees, leaving wine on the lees or racking off, all in an effort to make the best wine possible.

As I mentioned in a blog earlier this year, we were blushing over the anticipated release of our new Blush wine. It is a clean and innocent wine, hence the name; Innocence. We released it at the James Taylor concert last week and then began tasting and selling it in the tasting room. It has a new and unique label design. The wine is a blend of grapes with the primary grape being Edelweiss, which was grown in our Nimble Hill vineyard. We now have 9 of our 13 wines released and available for tasting and sales at the tasting room.

It's been a long winter, but the wines in the cellar are finally nearing the bottling stage. There are finishing touches that need to be done to the wines. We will be doing an initial filtering and add sugar to our sweeter wines, after which we will do a final cold stabilization. The wines went through cold stabilization individually, right after fermentation, however blending the wines together, or adding sugar, will cause a change in pH which may create a need to cold stabilize again. We will also be doing checks to insure the wines are both cold stable and protein stable. Any last minute adjustments will be made based on those tests and then we will be able to do final sterile filtering and bottling.

The bad news, as many of you know, is that we have sold out of several of our wines. Nimble Hill Red, Chardonnay, Vidal/Riesling, Niagara, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon are all sold out. The good news is that we have increased production in our 2007 vintage and will have a larger quatity of each of these wines when we bottle in the spring. Last year we produced slightly over 3,100 gallons of wine. As I write this, we have 6,100 gallons in tanks and barrels at the winery. About 600 gallons of this wine is being made for Maiolatesi winery which experienced a fire this past year and is currently without a winemaking facility. All in all, after racking, filtering and sampling losses, we will end up with over 5,000 gallons of wine which will help to avoid shortages next year. Thank you all for your support as it is you, our customers, who have made our sales such a success. Here's wishing each of you happiness in the New Year.