...several hours later

...Hawkeye still on patrol, the winery is safe.

There's a new dog in the house!

We have a new member of our family! We were adopted by Hawkeye, a thirteen month red bone hound. He was bred for hunting but made a personal choice that he is a pacifist and decided that guarding the winery is the life for him! Chase our vineyard boy, guards Hawkeye at night and herds him around the yard and Callie, our Calico Cat makes sure both the boys are well behaved!

Hawkeye woke up for about 10 minutes this morning to go oversee Steffan and Kevin working on some filtration out in the production area. He decided all was going well and went back to his guard position. He may wonder out to the tasting room if you come in to taste wines so please say hello. If Amber comes out he may not follow and you will hear her comment about it (with a disgusted tone - at which point you may hear me chuckle in the back office) however if I come out, most likely a little red guy with short hair and a furrowed brow will follow. He couldn't be much sweeter and we're lucky he found us!...I keep humming, "and they called it puppy love!"



Hawkeye has total confidence in our tasting room area as he spent this last weekend with both Amber and me as we entertained new and old friends. The wines are all tasting great. We're excited as some 2006 wine will soon be making its way to the tasting bar as well as some new 2005 vintages. The Rose' and Viognier are almost sold out as well as the Intuition and Princess Syrah.

P.S. We just bottled our 2006 Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Barrel Select Syrah and the Intuition. Just when we think we have our ducks in a row for bottling the bottling gods throw something else at us. We'll we learned yet a few more bottling lessons but the wine got to bottle, the sun came up the next day and all was well in our Bergevin Lane universe. We'll share the lessons learned in another bottling post!

Cool Pics!

So our friends sent us a picture of their latest vacation and guess who got to go with?...give up? Nope, not Amber....take another guess...nope, not Annette...that's right we stayed home and our wine got to go. Why does it get to have all the fun?! The 2007 Calico White and our 2007 Rose' went to Northern Wisconsin. Looks like fun was had by all! Thanks Schurtz family!

XOXO, Annette & Amber

Look out Calico... Duke is in the House!

Well a couple of fun pics from friends this past week. First and foremost we may have a new contender for our Calico label. Duke shows off his profile and believes his svelte figure will make him our new "label boy" for future bottlings! Then he turns around an well you can see for yourself...



On another note, some very good friends went camping and they took along one of our good friends, the 2002 Calico Red. They made the Calico it's own little hammock and everything. Check out the view! Well, the Calico lives better than we do. P.S. I made them swear it was not up there for target practice. They said they would NEVER waste a good bottle of wine on that!

Library Wines

We have always "saved" wine for our library and not having owned a winery before were never sure how much to save or what we should save. So, we saved everything. Well, now six years later we are learning what we should keep and how much we should keep.

Last week we did our first official library tasting. I guess in my little dream world I was anticipating a very formal setting, who knows maybe candlelight, table cloths, pewter spit buckets, beautiful crystal, an aura of elegance and then "the taste". In my imaginary world I envisioned the first taste from our library wine...the slow motion of the glass filled with liquid magic swirling as it slowly moved towards the nose, the exaggerated inhale and then the much anticipated moment..."the taste, the swirl, the swishing sound of liquid and the spit". I envisioned silence and then the lips parting in a smug smile. This would be followed by loud cheering in the background and harp music playing from the heavens, confetti dropping from the ceiling and the unstoppable flashing of cameras as the paparazzi was capturing the moment. Wow, wish I was there...

Meanwhile back in reality world, Steffan and I set up the wines, with our Riedel glassware, our plastic spit buckets and I think I had on crop pants, a t-shirt and my tennis shoes. We sat at my 6 foot plastic table with our spiral bound notebook paper and started to taste. The room was comfortably lit, (to see the color of the wine) a comfortable temperature, and a comfortableness with the tasters. We looked at the wine and set off to work. We tasted, said wow a few times and honestly had one whoa! After the tasting we let the wine sit overnight to taste again the next day.

Here's what we discovered...If it's not nailed down and the wine tastes good don't tell Amber and Julie because they will sell it! If it's an older wine don't hold back so many cases (in our case - until we learn the age-ability of our various wines)... Our 2004 Viognier is a little past its prime - drink immediately, our 2005 Viognier is tasting fantastic right now! These Viogniers are from different vineyards, different years, and have different flavor profiles. The 2002 Vintage is at a drink now stage. Our 2003 has a drink now for our Calico Red and our Cabernet Sauvignon, the Syrah is tasting really good and in the next year or so we'd recommend drinking that. We believe the 2003 Intuition can hang in there 1 - 3 years.

It was a fun two days worth of work. The anxiety has subsided, the fanfare has died down and we're plugging right along!

Brrrrrrrr...is it really June?

Here's the 4-1-1 at the winery

Steffan - purple teeth

Amber - purple fingers

Julie - purple princess

Annette - purple rain, purple rain...

Steffan - purple teeth: What does this all mean? Steffan has been analyzing, tasting, tasting, tasting, spitting, analyzing, tasting, and blending his little heart out working on our 2006 Reserve Bottlings. We have had a blast tasting through some amazing Washington State Syrah while we work on our 2006 Barrel Select Syrah. It's a tough task as you probably know but someone has to do it. While I get to sit in and reap all the benefits of his selection efforts he has literally agonized over each selection, each particular barrel and how much of each specific lot to put into the final blend. I smile, walk into his tasting area and sit down and sample. Then I knowingly add my feedback and he smiles, shakes his head agrees or tells me I'm off my rocker! ;-) The good news is that although he's the expert, what has happened is that all of the sampling, barrel sampling and knowledge of the vineyards has given me the capability of understanding what components we're looking for with our wine. So many thanks to Steffan for sharing the wealth of his knowledge and sharing with Amber and I so that we continue to evolve as wine lovers too!

Amber's purple fingers...she's working on our "Killer B" wine club package...it's a lot of effort but wow, how exciting to have the most amazing wine club members ever! We love our Swirlies!!! It has been fun to listen to Amber work with our friends, old and new, who wander into the tasting room. She has been up front working on the computer so has had a chance to get out of her office and work with folks behind the bar. Kind of brings an old western tune to mind..."she's back in the saddle again..."

Julie - purple princess...Julie is managing all of our back office stuff...keeping us organized, working on the Killer B wine club package and holding down the fort. In addition, she lovingly helps many of our tasting room customers!!! Julie is the best person to work with because she has the capacity to understand our insanity and bring us in off of the ledge when we get crazy. She's fun to share recipes with and has an amazing sense of humor. Oh yeah, she's even good at what she does at work! What a bonus.

Annette - Purple Rain... Due to the awful weather (I promise not to complain when it is 100 degrees, I promise not to complain when it's 100 degrees) I have been reduced to having my brainstorms in the rainstorms! I am having a blast doing a little bit of everything such as tasting events, blending, helping out everyone at the winery...maybe I'm not a purple rain maybe I'm just the purple helper because my responsibilities seem to cross with everyone. Yep, scratch purple rain because although I've had many brainstorms...I think I'm the purple helper. I feel like I'm doing a little bit of everything...not sure if I'm doing anything well but I love variety.

Speaking of helping, we've had such great people helping and supporting us along the way, including our vineyard managers, our fellow winery owners, our great distributors and fantastic customers that we're very excited to be doing what we're doing. Life is about doing what you enjoy and even though this business is super competitive, super costly (when you're doing things on a smaller scale) and very regulated...Amber and I can truly say we love what we do!

Here's wishing each of you the ability to follow your dreams and the ambition to fulfill your heart's desires!

Spring showers bring more spring showers....

We can not believe how chilly this spring has been. The weather will tease us with a little sun and then it says, "NOT" and we're back to drizzle! However, despite the fact that we all feel we've been in hibernation forever all is looking good in the vineyards...our little buds are starting to flower on the vine so we're on our way into the 2008 harvest season. We've been keeping ourselves busy at the winery with racking, blending and just finished with our Spring Release. Talk about a fun weekend! We had the most amazing folks visit us over Spring Release. The weather was pretty well behaved and it appeared many folks had a wonderful time. We're pretty sure we had the coolest folks visit our winery. We tried to even adopt ourselves out to a few families! ;-)

We had two very special releases that came and went with Spring Release weekend, our 2005 Barrel Select Syrah - Columbia Valley and our 2006 Pinot Noir - Walla Walla Valley. Both were limited releases.

We're off to Seattle this weekend for a fun wine dinner at Wicked Cellars in Everett, WA (Friday evening) and then the Seattle Cheese festival on Saturday at Pike Place Market. Should be a fun weekend. Oh, here's a link I thought you might enjoy. Thank Amy for the kind words! Until next post... Amy's Blog.