We will be introducing two new wines to our lineup this year. They are Pinot Grigio and Gewurztraminer (easy for you to say!). We bottled them yesterday (5/15)but are waiting on label approvals. They will be available for sale later in the year. All of our other wines, with the exception of Cabernet Sauvignon, are now available for sales and tasting at the tasting room. Cabernet Sauvignon will be released later in the year.

I would like to welcome Kevin Durland (our winemaker)back from vacation. He is starting to slowly wake the wines back up from their winter nap. We can not wait to get these wines in the bottle to share with the rest of our great customers. Be patient.

Best Regards

Gary

Today is racking day. We will rack the wines and do the first filtering today. Most of the wines have been going through cold stabilization the past month. That is a period where we chill the wines to 30 degrees for several weeks. During that time they will drop a lot crystals known as "tartrates". If we did not do this, they would drop out when you chilled the wines in your refrigerator and would look like dandruff or glass crystal in the bottom of the bottle. These are harmless, but don't look nice. The tatrates are actually the same thing as cream of tarter. Since it has been cold outside this year, we have been able to leave some wines outside in tanks and use mother nature, in addition to our jacketed tanks inside the winery, to chill the wines. These tanks have a cooling fluid(glycol) running through their jackets to chill the wines. It will stay cold today, but with the new winery building, we can clean all of our tanks inside and not have to deal with the weather.

We have released the 2007 Merlot and Cabernet Suavignon, they are avaiable for both tasting and purchasing at the tasting room. We now have 13 wines available at the tasting room.

We have finished bottling all of our wines for this year. They are all in the bottle and we are tasting and se11ing 11 of our 13 wines at the tasting room. The only two that have not been released are the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Merlot. These wines need a little more bottle age. Plans are to release those on August 1st.

Some of our visitors have been asking when we will have our dryer wines available. Well the good news is that we are releasing this years Nimble Hill Red this weekend. The wine this year is made from 100% Nimble Hill grown grapes. It is dryer than last years version as we were blessed with a great growing season and the grapes for this wine were very ripe with wonderfull flavors. Our Bordeaux style reds (Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot) will not be released until the fall as they are still barrrel aging and will need some time to bottle age before release. As for our whites, Chardonnay, which is bone dry, will be available by mid-June. Vidal Blanc Riesling, which is just off-dry, is available now.

We have bottled 200 cases of Niagara and plan on bottling 200 cases of Vidal Blanc/Riesling and 200 cases of Harvest Moon later this week. These wines will be released for tasting and sales by the first weekend in May.

Last year during harvest, we decided we wanted to add a blush wine to our lineup. We had our first harvest of the grape Edelweiss from our own vineyard at Nimble Hill this year and we felt it would make a good blush wine. We have been working on getting it to just the right balance of acidity and sweetness. This wine will be light and fruity, a clean and innocent wine.

The official release date for our 2006 Cabernet Franc is August 1st, however, the shelves will be stocked and sales will commence on Saturday July 28th. The Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon will be soon to follow, stay tuned. This Cabernet Franc is a blend of grapes from Ackerly Pond Vineyards in Long Island and Milnes Vineyards in Tunkhannock. The fermentation was done in open top bins and the cap was puched aggressively 4 or 5 times daily during fermentaion to extract color and flavor. Near the end of fermentation the wine was racked into new American oak barrels and aged for 8 months in oak prior to bottling. It has aged an additional 2 months in the bottle prior to release. This wine drinks well now but will continue to develop with more time in the bottle.