“California dreaming on such a winter’s day!”
What a nice way to start off the year. Our 2012 Reserve Syrah just won a silver medal at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. This now completes the trifecta for our Coloma syrah vineyard. It's the vineyard you see on your right entering Karma Vista. The vines have such pretty color in the fall that people are always stopping to take their pictures among them. We now have won bronze, silver and gold medals in San Francisco for three separate vintages of our Reserve Syrah. This is the largest competition in the country with over 6,000 wines entered this year. Ours was the only medal winning Syrah in its category not from the West Coast. So that obnoxious honking you hear is us tooting our own horn! The public tasting for the event is in a few weeks on Fisherman's Wharf and you just might see us there soaking up some of the competition. So you see, even though the winery is closed, it's still work, work, work, for me and Sue. Keith is busy crafting the 2014 vintage, the smallest harvest we've ever had at Karma Vista. What we lack in quantity looks like will be more than made up for in quality.
At the same time we are holding our breath as the nighttime low temps hit their winter worst. A freak wind out of the East is robbing us of our lake effect cushion and last night we were colder than the Chicago side of the lake. That doesn't happen very often. The recorders in the area showed about -8 degrees this morning, and it could get much colder tonight. Still nowhere near as bad as last year, but enough to make you nervous. Ok, maybe not you, but it makes me nervous. If that's the worst that we get we should still be in good shape. Any time the vines have as much time to relax as they did last year they are usually super hardy and loaded with buds. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, it's a good time to celebrate with a glass or two of Syrah and a few thousand of our friends in California. Like I said, work, work, work.
