I Had A Lot Of Wine Today

I love Napa this time of year.  Midday can be unbearably hot but the mornings are always cool.  This was taken at 6am, I like how thick and low the band of fog is hanging.  

During bottling the early crew arrives at 4:30am to sanitize and prepare the bottling line.  I get to sleep in a little extra and arrive at 5:30am.  At 6:30am we are tasting 20 glasses of Cabernet to confirm the consistency of all 20 nozzles in the filling head.  This happens every morning for 5 weeks.

 Every morning I start the day tasting 20 glasses but I don't usually go out to lunch.  This day we went to lunch and had 3 glasses of wine.  No spitting this time.

Bottling keeps us very busy and we tend to focus on it exclusively for several weeks of the year.  This day however we had a tasting scheduled for after lunch.  So right after finishing lunch we headed back to the winery to taste another 8 wines.

These were the wines in the blind tasting that afternoon.  All from 1999.  It's unlikely you'll come across a 1999 of any of these wines, but if you do, Mondavi and Showket showed well.

So anyway,

I had a lot of wine today.

-L