Speaking of which (and then I'll get to the harvest, I promise), you can now buy our wine at The Wine Merchant in Folsom and Roseville, and you can have it with dinner at Moxie in Sacramento. More news on where to pick it up coming very soon. This was a big harvest for me. I moved my operations closer to home in Clarksburg. The facility is an old sugar mill right on the Sacramento River, and the first time I visited, felt like I was driving up to Batman's house. I also doubled my output this year, and dealt with the yearly trial of finding new grape sources for the Sonoma Zin. One again, I returned to Oakley for the Rhone blend and can say with confidence that almost all of the grapes looked better than I had ever seen. It should be a really good year. Let's go through them quickly, if you're interested. If not, you can move down to the '04 tasting notes. Russian River Zin: I have always loved RR Zins. If you ever get a chance to try some Hartford, you should. RR Zin grapes have always provided the solid fruit and dark color for my wines, and this year is exceptional. Right off River Road in what I think is the Fulton area of Sonoma County, these dry-farmed grapes almost immediately turned black in my sample bag. We picked two and a half tons over a weekend and fermentation was even and smooth.

Dry Creek Zin: Dan Patocchi is a crazy man. Good crazy though, not live in a shack and mail bombs to people crazy. Dan has 10 acres of a little known clone of Zin in Healdsburg, and as we were bouncing through his vineyards on a john deere golf-carty like thing, he pointed out one section of the vines and said something to the effect of "That's crappy dirt down there, so the vines are a bit off." Guess where I wanted to pick. Here's why. This season was unusual in that it was really hot, and then, just when the grapes are supposed to hit their peak, we get a cold snap. Not a bad thing typically, but this one lasts a bit longer than usual and everyone starts freaking out about rain. So I take a sample bag of Dan's standard grapes. 23 degrees brix and a light pinkish color. I add one cluster of the crappy dirt grapes, and the bag turns dark purple and the sugars jump up to 27 degress brix. I love crappy dirt grapes.

Oakley Rhone: This year ('05), the Oakley blend will be much more Petite Sirah heavy. In '04, there was more Mouvedre, some Carignane, and a little Alicante Bouchet. The '04 had suffered a Hydrogen Sulfide problem during fermentation. H2S occurs when the yeasts are stressed out (lack of nutrients, weak yeast colony), and all of a sudden, your beautiful fermentation smells like someone stuck a couple of 2 year old rotten easter eggs in your fermentation bin. Not good.

The solution? I ran the '04 through a giant copper funnel made especially for removing H2S. The two things that take away the smell are copper, which somehow binds with the Sulfides, and Oxygen, which allows the wine to release a majority of the gas. I had a much smaller H2S issue this harvest with one bin of the Dry Creek Zin, but my new oxygen-heavy punchdown style, a handful of copper flashing, and some nutrients saved the day.

The other pretty remarkable thing about this harvest was the yields, which came in really heavy. So there should be a glut of wine on the market starting in late '06 through '07. The trick is to find wines that were allowed to hang until the very last minute and avoid those that were picked early. How can you tell? You can't really, without trying the wines. The early picked will taste like lime juice. I have tried a couple of early picked wines from this harvest, and they were all pretty tart.