Crushpad Update

Categorized | California, General

Posted on 07 June 2011.

The More The Merrier

This weekend we have our annual Aspect (Crushpad Commerce) member meeting at the winery. In addition to discussions about the new visitor center and wine club, we’ll be spending some time discussing the huge movement of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. While we love our few person winemaking teams, we’re starting to see some larger groups of dozens of people… and today I spoke with a client who is assembling a team of 175! people [that’s 175 with excitement, not 175 factorial]. We have two major initiatives – both for non-commercial and for commercial clients that we’re launching very soon and it’s pretty darn exciting. Besides that, here’s what’s up…

The Sparkling Wine Has Landed!
In 2009, we did a little experiment and made two sparkling wines – a very steely Blanc de Blancs style from Split Rock Chardonnay and a slightly fruitier Blanc de Noirs style from Two Pisces Pinot Noir – both Sonoma Coast vineyards. They were both disgorged and finished up last month and we’re labeling away. I’m not even a big sparkling fan and I’ve been knocking down a bottle of each a week. We ended up getting a greater yield than we thought (what do we know about sparkling?) and have a couple hundred extra cases that we are selling in quarter-barrel (6 case) increments. We’ll definitely sell through this for end-of-year holidays but if you want something awesome to drink during the summer (or add to your Commerce product line), contact Rodney Gagnon (rodney@crushpadwine.com). With my newfound love of bubbles, I hope there’s some left.

Crushpad on The Today Show
What I love about national television is that they can fly in a big crew for a couple days, put our team to work creating a big event, shoot the event, and then edit it down to 15 seconds – and still make money. We were featured on a recent segment on wine blending on the Today Show (here) – thanks Hayden and Stu for pulling this together!

Harvest 2011 Pre-Payment Discount
We normally have a pre-payment discount of 5% that ends on June 1st. We’re going to extend that to the 13th this year because I’m a little late with the newsletter. But please contact Rodney Gagnon (rodney@crushpadwine.com, 1.877.946.3404 x7027) to get your order in. We still have many vineyards with availability, although we’re being very conservative as we’ll likely see low yields this year. That’s great for winemakers, less great for grape growers.

Bordeaux 2011 – A Trifecta?
This is our third year in Bordeaux and it looks like we’re a week or two ahead of a normal year (unlike California where we’re a couple weeks behind). That can bode very well for wine quality as vineyards ripen ahead of Bordeaux’s fall rains. 2009 and 2010 were both awesome years and we’ve got our fingers crossed for 2011 as well. Stephen Bolger (stephen@crushpadwine.com) has added some new fruit sources and we now have broad coverage including Pauillac, St. Emilion, Margaux and other AOCs. While we’ve been blending from geographically-diverse vineyards in California for sometime, it’s really quite a new thing we’re doing in Bordeaux and is causing a bit of a stir. But that’s never stopped us before….

Another Look at the Visitor Center
OK, we’re getting closer to the final look and feel of the visitor center. Pending a few approvals, this is more or less what the Crushpad visitor center is going to look like when we open this summer.

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