Customers support our on-line launch…

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  Not much left in that bottle (Sonoma)

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  It's opening up (SF)

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  The whole family is in on it (Florida)

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  Ready to open (San Diego)

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  Smiling faces (Arkansas)

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  Coffee and wine, yum (Sonoma)

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  Grip it and rip it (Sonoma)

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  Goes well with cheese (Sonoma)

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  Appetizers and rosé (Seattle)

Quick shop link: Dysfunctional wine Discount code at check out: “Hydeout”

Sonoma International Film Festival captures a Methuselah

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  Kevin McNeely, Executive Director of the Sonoma Valley International Film Festival, hoists a giant Methuselah of 2018 DYS Red Blend, equal to 6 liters or 8 bottles. The film festival and Dysfunctional have teamed up several times for outdoor movie nights on the lawn, and we'll return to that program someday soon.

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  Sonoma International Film Festival and Dysfunctional Family Winery look forward to the return of "Movie Night on the Lawn." Featured films have included "Stop Making Sense" by the Talking Heads and "The Last Waltz" with The Band directed by Martin Scorsese.

Memories of a motorcycle adventure to Patagonia, Argentina

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  Here is a full case of Dysfunctional Family wine arriving in Wisconsin and being unpacked and headed for the cellar...or possibly the dinner table. The customer is none other than Steve W, our new friend we met while riding motorcycles through Patagonia last year. Steve is a great rider and an impressive athlete.

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  And this is me at an overlook somewhere just north of El Calafate headed south to Ushuaia just hours before the big drop in temps and increase in winds (famous in Patagonia) when my hands were about to enter the frostbite zone. El Calafate is a town near the edge of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz. It’s mainly known as the gateway to Los Glaciares National Park, home to the massive Perito Moreno Glacier, whose ever-shifting icy landscape is popular for hiking and sightseeing. A modern interpretive center called the Glaciarium serves as a primer on the region’s numerous glaciers. Here is a link to that trip: https://www.rideadv.com/motorcycle-tours/dual-sport-motorcycle-adventure-tours/patagonia-experience-motorcycle-tour

Tasting panel at the winery

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  The table is set for a blind wine tasting. In this case, the target wine is a new client's 2020 rosé (made from some very impressive hillside Grenache). Plus, I am working on a new project with a group out of LA who plans to launch a zero-alcohol low-calorie sparkling rosé, so I snuck samples of the early bench top trials into this tasting.

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  This is one of many types of standard tasting panel note sheets. All the wines are tasted in complete silence. No information is provided to the tasters - other than what was plainly visible, in this case 5 rose-colored wines (2 Sonoma-based rosé wines and 3 de-alcoholized beverages).

Reader’s ask: “What part of the wine business is actually fun?” The wine business can be a complicated industry to navigate. Many wineries employ a team of professionals to help plan their way through branding, pricing, packaging, target demographics, the logistics of inventory planning and distribution, etc. Building distribution channels and tracking sales metrics requires expertise and data. And the wine industry, like many, is now an environment where “big data” rules the day. Careful dissection of customer acquisition costs, customer purchasing habits, and distribution channel metrics now takes place in dark rooms pouring over carefully accumulated data. And frequently the wines need to be similar from one vintage to the next – in order to meet and keep meeting a customer’s expectations.

I am not fascinated with that part of the business. For me as a smaller operator, I much prefer focussing all of my attention on growing grapes and making wines. And rely somewhat on creativity and luck to obtain customers. We produce wines which are rarely similar from one vintage to the next, as the quirky labels testify, often reflecting the individual vineyard sites as they change from one season to the next, experimenting with various techniques and blends and barrels in the winery, and offering wines to our customers who enjoy getting away somewhat from the ‘expert scores’ and ‘safe’ cookie-cutter profiles. It takes a certain degree of confidence to sell wines like this. And it definitely takes a certain degree of risk for customers to try our wines. For those who have tried us out, we sure appreciate your courage!

There’s still time to order wine with a “blog subscriber discount” using the code word “Hydeout” – just enter the word “Hydeout” when you check out from the on-line shopping portal found here: https://www.sonocaia.com/shop/

Pruning our ‘Estate Reserve’ Sagrantino vineyard in the winter of 2021. 

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  Before - looking down the vines row, last year's growth of cordons and fruiting shoots is plainly visible. And the cover crop on the vineyard floor is pushing up.

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  After - looking down the vine rows after pruning last year's wood away, leaving only new clean wood for this next vintage. The old wood is placed on the ground in the center of the rows, and after the cover crop grows a few feet up through it, the cover crop and old wood will be mulched with a mower back into the ground creating a sustainable environment for the soil to flourish.

View of one of Hydeout Sonoma’s client vineyards, this spectacular property is just above the small town of Sonoma. Looking north, old head-pruned zin in the foreground, on the above-left is a lavender field and above that is a new Petite Sirah vineyard on a very steep side-slope, and in the background-right is a new Cabernet block planted just last year. These were already open fields, the drainage corridor has been carefully preserved (see center of image), and no trees were taken down.

L-R, Cynthia, daughter Sophia, and me – on a chilly morning out in the vineyards on the reliable Polaris UTV reviewing recent pruning. We thank you all for the continued support of our new Dysfunctional brand launch.