Up Island
This weekend we were up in Campbell River to support the Campbell River Hospital Foundation charity fundraiser - we did a tasting and served our wines at their event. It was a lot of fun and people seemed to enjoy our wines - always a good sign.
We try to support charities were we feel we can. There are always lots of requests, so we had to develop criteria on what we would support, and what we won’t - based on principles that we both agree on. That way we can try to look at each request objectively and decide if it meets our criteria or not, and how or if we can support it.
It’s always a challenge, but we’ve been to several functions each year, pouring our wines or donating our products - sometimes more, sometimes less - depending on the cause and how strongly we feel about it.
I must say it felt strange to be treated like a V.I.P. The foundation was really excited to have us there in person letting the guests taste our wines and participating in the evening’s events.
Our 2007 Pinot Noir is ready to come out of it’s barrels and into the blend tank ready to bottle. As predicted we are 3 months behind normal (we normally bottle in August) because of the 3 months that our winery was under construction which delayed getting the reds into their barrels. But we will be only a few weeks behind normal getting 2008 in barrels - so we should get all caught back up this year. By the way our 2007 Pinot Noir is going to be great - it’s developed really well and should be another great offering. And we are not bottling all of it - it’s turning out so well we are going to hold 5 barrels back and do a barrel reserve on a portion of it - to give it a little longer in the barrel and release the next year (2010) as a special barrel reserve. It’s that good.