1. Bye Bye La Nina! From a weather point of view (which all grape growers are dependent), we should have a fairly normal and quiet growing season. La Nina (cooler weather) is behind us and El Nino (hotter weather) is coming up in a couple of years. We can see these trends by watching the ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean (see image to the right). The temperatures bottomed out about a year ago and have been on their way up. It seems to generally be a 7-8 year cycle with some swings being more pronounced than others. This last La Nina swing was pretty acute so we had two years of crummy growing conditions. I’m hoping that 2009 is as good as 2006 which was great for us.
2. White wine. 2009 will mark the first release of large amount of commercial white wine. We are making a Rousanne from Elerding Vineyards in the Horse Heaven Hills AVA. We have about 100 cases of it. It already tastes great from the tank and we are looking forward to bottling it in a couple of month. We love white wine around here and we probably drink more white wine than red these days. Retailers tells us they want more local white wines and we are happy to oblige!
3. Regent Release. 2009 will also mark the first commercial release of our Regent. I’m not sure if I’m the first one in the USA to release a commercial Regent wine, I might be the first that releases a 100% Regent wine. Regent is taking off in popularity around the country. I get many inquires about Regent in my past post about the grape. We got a full 2000lbs from Ron Nelson again this year. The grapes look great and it should make some more great wine. I think we’ll be releasing the Regent in March some time.
4. New Tasting room. We just signed a lease to move our tasting room to the Apple Farm Village about 1 mile from our vineyard/winery right next to Village Wines a well known wine shop in Woodinville. We have already out grown our little tasting room at the winery. We expect to keep the winery open by appointment only. This should be an exciting year from the sales end of things. Stay tuned for the grand opening some time in February.
I’m sure there is a lot more that will happen that we can’t even anticipate for our little family owned winery… Happy New Year!
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