oh winter

It's that dead part of winter - post football, or at least post Browns season, where time just hovers and stands still like the cold swirls of breath in the freezing air. I walked around the vineyard today after the encouragement of a few days of unseasonably warm weather and started thinking about getting back to my vines. Soon, but not today.

This is an incredibly exciting time. It feels like it's all pent up in my throat, where we're about ready to open and I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes of engraved wine glasses and paint samples and wine racks. I'm like a kid before Christmas just waiting for the tasting room floor to be finished, the walls to be up and painted the perfect hue that just embraces you in the warm fuzzy feeling that's so conducive to drinking wine in.

I'm plotting and planning for this next year, building on the beauty of the vineyard and the deliciousness of our finished wine. I'm thinking about growing a couple rows of basil so that we'd have fresh, organic herbs for our home baked bread we'll serve in the tasting room. I'm thinking about getting a couple of pigs so that we could sell our own smoked sausage that we raised ourselves with locally made cheese plates. I'm planning the warm soups and the simple menu, imagining chatting over a beautiful wooden bar with open bottles and smiling people on the other side, just tasting the fruit of Ohio vines in the peak of their glory for the first time.

Ah yes, I'm probably getting ahead of myself. One step at a time, Janeé. It's a couple of months before we're open still.

Anyway, we're going through the filtering process for our 2010 sweet wines and some of our dry reds now. They're getting chilled to perfection to make the sediment drop to the bottom of the tanks. Then they go through our new plate frame filter, many, many times. Then they go back into tanks to sit and think about it for a bit, then they get filtered by a different filter. Then they're bottled.
It looks like another couple of months before we are going to do another round of bottling. We've got plenty to do to get ready in the mean time and our 2009 wines are all in bottles and getting labeled with great care right now.

I'm happily standing in a relatively warm building, staring out the window at the vines, just waiting for a break in the weather to start tying them up again. But man, when the snow starts flying, it sure is nice to hibernate in the production room, surrounded by cases of wine and looking forward to opening day...