Memorial Day Weekend: A Great American Picnic

Every year we at LaVelle Vineyards join the rest of the nation in Memorial Day Weekend celebration. We think that the best way to recognize this holiday and bring in the Summer of 2007 is by having a big BBQ, live Dixieland Jazz music with Calamity Jazz (Sun & Mon Only), games, and invite everyone in the Eugene area to join us in what's become known around here as A Great American Picnic!

This event marks the beginning of the summer season for the whole crew here at LaVelle Vineyards. We'll be releasing our new summer menu down at the bistro in the coming weeks so be watching for that.

Also, the construction project out here at the winery is making lots of progress and I should have some new photos up here shortly with another post.

West Coast Wine Competition results

There are a number of wine competitions that we enter into for a variety of reasons. Winning medals, especially the shiny gold one's allow us to promote our brand. Brand identity is a mixture of things and in this case by winning awards we increase our sales in certain markets that our wine is sold in and, more importantly, increase awareness of our label and the LaVelle Vineyards name.

The West Coast Wine Competition, brought to us by the Vineyard & Winery Management Magazine, is one of the larger events that we enter three of our wines into every year. It's a well known competition in it's 25th year and...well, here's what the website says about it:

The 25th West Coast Wine Competition concluded on April 20, 2007 in Santa Rosa, CA, with a field of over 1,700 entries spanning from wineries located in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Baja California, British Columbia, Australia, and New Zealand.

So, anyway, we did very well this year as all three wines that we entered received medals:

• Gold medal - LaVelle 2006 Estate Bottled Riesling
• Silver Medal - LaVelle 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Gris
• Bronze Medal - LaVelle 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Noir
  

Spotlight: Marathon Runners

Sunday, April 29th marked the inaugural running of the Eugene Marathon. This was the first marathon held in track town since 1982, when Nike last held it's annual OTC marathon. There were 1,500 runners in the event and two of them work at the LaVelle Wine Bar & Bistro. Dawn Merrill, finishing 1,199 overall with a time of 5:03:10 was running in her first marathon ever! Rosemarie Downey-McCarthy, who fills in for us at the bistro from time to time, finished 693 overall with a time of 4:03:20. Also in the race was our chef's wife Catherine Ely who finished 1,065 overall with a time of 4:42:04. Congratulations to you all!

Spotlight: Liz Swagerty

This weblog is all about LaVelle Vineyards. More importantly though, it's about my experiences with the company and the people that are invovolved with it. LaVelle Vineyards wouldn't be where it is today without the people that work here. So, talking about the people that work here and letting everyone know how important they are to not only LaVelle Vineyards, but me as a manager, is something I don't take lightly. This may be a little longer than normal post, but it's an important one about my friend and coworker, Liz Swagerty.

Let me start with a recent experience and how it relates to a simply wonderful person. In the last week of March every year there's a tradition that happens in every college town across the United States...everyone leaves. Also known as Spring Break, most college students leave their college towns and go blow off their previous-term-steam from school. Liz, being a college student, had the chance to go to Maui with a family that she'd been nannying with for a number of years previously. Of course, she took the opportunity and we adjusted the schedule so she could go.

She had an excellent time, as most would in a tropical paradise. When she came back, her skin was several shades darker and she brought stories of snorkeling, dancing and basking in the sun upon her return. Oh, and that's not all she came back with. She took most of the money she left with and bought a ton of caramel and milk chocolate covered macadamia nut clusters and Kona coffee for everyone. I got a package of each and just today I'm getting around to having a couple of couple of Hualalai Estate Kona Coffee. This has to be some of the best coffee I've ever had. Thanks Liz! This is just an example of the kindness of one of my coworkers, and of course friends. Not to take away from the gift of a great cup of Kona Coffee and a box full of Chocolate Caramel covered Macadamia Nuts, but this just scratches the surface in describing everything that Liz has done for me and my family business.

When I first started working full time in August of last year I was excited but overwhelmed. I came into a situation where I needed to learn a lot of about running a business as I went and I looked for help from my new coworkers. Within the first few months I had lost my Special Events manager, my chef, and my Bistro Manager. My Dad was (and still is) a huge help during this transition but what I was knee deep in was trying to run the day-to-day operations of a small company and learning how to hire the right people for the right positions and I had little history and experiences to help me make decisions.

I promoted Liz to my Assistant Manager of the Bistro and she kept everything on track during these transitions, some of which are still going on today. Liz was then and is now like a rock to the Bistro and therefore is a major part of what we're trying to do at LaVelle Vineyards. She does the scheduling, supplies inventory, planning and execution of private parties, and works the toughest server shifts we have down at the bistro. Last night a club member, making a baseball analogy, said that Liz and Dawn (another excellent server of ours) were like Mantle and Maris to LaVelle Vineyards.

I wanted to take this time to spotlight Liz Swagerty for everything that she is to LaVelle Vineyards and more importantly to me and my transition from a geek building websites in Roseburg to a manager working for my family business. I would not be able to do this without people like Liz Swagerty. Thank you my friend.

More Winery Construction Photos

Rod and Drew are two of the main guys working on the framing project which is the second phase of the construction project ongoing here at the winery. Click on the photo to check out a slideshow of photos that I took this morning. The first phase of the project was to dig a ditch around the outside of the winery. Pat and Richard worked on this project for the most part. After we dug the hole, Rod came in with some steel rebar and poured a concrete footing all the way around. The footing will serve as the foundation for the new cedar siding as it goes up.

At the same time today on another area of the property we received our Western Red Cedar for the project. Rather than buying wood product from a lumber company we decided to buy this cedar locally from a provider in the nearby Crow Valley. We're going to then have the logs milled here at LaVelle Vineyards by a local millwright named Pony Gilbert. He owns the Long Tom Custom Saw Mill and has worked on several projects in the Fern Ridge area. So, if you click on the photo to the left you'll get a slideshow of photos with this big crane thing lifting the logs off the log truck and setting them on the ground near our house.

April 2007 Bottling

We had a bottling last Thursday and Friday here at the winery. We don't own a bottling line so we use a mobile bottler. Signature Mobile Bottlers owns a semi trailer that's been hollowed out and turned into a bottling line. They then drive around, literally, and bottle wine for smaller wineries in the region. We will bottle approximately 7,500 cases of wine this year in three separate bottlings. This time around we're bottling our 06 VS Pinot Gris, 06 VS Riesling, and our new 06 Columbia Valley Chardonnay. A bottling, for any winery, is one of the most expensive times of year. We have to buy labels, glass bottles, corks, foils, and other supplies and then have it all ready for one day. Then, just when you think you're done paying for stuff, along comes the bill for the mobile bottler!

Click on the photo to view a slideshow of the whole set.

More Than Fair! Fairfield Pinot Noir Sale!

Our next big wine sale is off to a good start. The More Than Fair! Fairfield Pinot Noir Sale! is going on right now. Every time we have a LaVelle Wine Club Party we do several things:

• Free Food
• Free Entertainment
• Extra Discounts on select wines

This year, as oppossed to past years I've tried to come up with a special wine sale to go along with the event. So, instead of just offering an extra 10% off a few wines that we have in stock I've decided to put one wine on a big sale in the time periods near the club party. Last month we had the Great Gris Case Sale that coincided with our Spring Wine Club Open House.

This time around I've decided that putting a really nice Oregon Pinot Noir on sale would be a great idea. Given the current market and going rates for most Oregon Pinot Noir this year I thought it'd also be a nice way to thank our club members while at the same time helping ourselves turn a bit of a profit in an otherwise rainy month.

So, Fairfield wines are what we refer to as a Custom Crush job. Steve Fairfield doesn't have a winery of his own, but he does have a lot of grapes. So, Fairfield Wines are actually made by Andy Gribscov (our winemaker) here at LaVelle Vineyards. Mr. Fairfield is responsible for buying the grapes and the labels, and we then process the grapes at our facility, make the wine, and bottle it for him. That is the connection between LaVelle and Fairfield. Fairfield's 2004 Reserve Pinot Noir is similar to our 2004 Vintage Select Pinot Noir. the wines share two of the three grapes sources used to make the wine, so you know you'll be getting a good Oregon Pinot Noir when you buy a bottle (or a case) of the Fairfield 04 Reserve Pinot Noir.

The retail price of this wine is $18 per bottle. We're selling it for $12 per bottle (over 30% off) and $129 per case (over 40% off) for the entire month of April, and then possibly into May in the wine lasts!

Xtreme Peep Stuffing Competition 2007

The first annual and first ever LaVelle Adventure Club (LAC) event has taken place. The Xtreme Peep Stuffing Competition took place two days ago at the LaVelle Wine Bar & Bistro after a staff meeting. Here's the photos of Dawn, Zyanya, Sara, and Amir stuffing away. Gotta love the LAC!

Spring Wine Club Open House

The Spring Wine Club Open House, our first LaVelle Wine Club Party was a lot of fun for our club members and their friends.

The band for the afternoon of the second weekend event was included a jazz trio of Gus Russell, Skip Jones, and Theo the fantastic drummer (of whose last name I cannot remember). The weather was threatening on both weekends so we had the band play inside with both indoor and outdoor seating available. Here's the entire photoset in a slideshow for those wanting to see more!

Great Gris Case Sale great success

The Great Gris Case Sale ended up being a good great thing! I wasn't too sure about it but I figured we didn't have too much to lose (other than 112 cases of wine).

The sale started around March 17th and started slow. A few case orders were coming in, but in the first couple of days I had an overwhelming number of requests to buy the cases over the phone and then pick them up at our Fifth Street Market Wine Bar & Bistro location. After the first Spring Club Party Open House we were getting through the wine but still had quite a bit more to sell. So, I reluctantly made the decision to send out another email and open up Bistro pick-ups as an option. That ended up being the key as the Bistro has always been for us in the past.

We originally opened up the Fifth Street location to give people in our wine club an easy way to pick up their club shipments in town. And in this case the Bistro was again the key to selling out of both the 03 and 04 within the next week.

The sale was so successful that I've started looking into getting some more wine for another sale. We've done custom crush jobs (external source provides the grapes, we process, bottle and put their label on the wine) in the past for the Fairfield Wines label and I think we may be able to get either some more 2004 Pinot Gris or better yet, some 2004 Reserve Pinot Noir to put on sale for our up coming Chocolates & Cherry Blossoms Spring Wine Club Extravaganza.

The problem with Pinot

The Oregon wine industry is having another booming business year and our flagship red wine, Pinot Noir, is doing better than ever! What began, as I originally thought, as an off shoot success due to the popular flick Sideways is fastly becoming a Pinot problem of staggering proportions.

The Pinot problem stems from the way we make wine traditionally: Once a year... One harvest, one season, one crush per year is our only chance to make Pinot Noir or any other wine for that matter. What also makes it tough? The fact that with Pinot it sits in a barrel for 9 months , and then in the bottle for another 6 months (if you're lucky). If we were in the beer business, we would just buy more hops or barley and make more beer. Many times a year if neccessary. Wine doesn't work that way, sadly. So, every year around October we not only harvest the grapes on our small 17 acre plot but we try to make an educated guess at what will happen with sales of our wines for the next year and then buy grapes accordingly.

This is...in a word, difficult. Let's go with two words here: very difficult. Let's just imagine that the only wine we make is Pinot Noir. This only makes the quandry a tad easier and of course a total fallacy. So, now that we've taken the problem into the realm of fantasy let's look at the factors of the decision making process.

First, I have to think about the market in the current year and the past several years whilst remembering that wine making, like farming, is a very cyclical business which means we go up for a few years and then inevitably down for a few years. Other than the farming aspect, you could have various outside factors (i.e. Sideways 2, The Willamette Valley) that swing the demand one way or another almost instantaneously.

Just because your demand is up does not mean you're in a good overall position. Case in point, in 2004 we knew that Sideways was affecting the demand for Pinot but we couldn't make more wine fast enough and so we struggled through 2005-2006 with 1,100 cases of our 04 Pinot Noir. We ran out in the summer time and had to go three months with no Pinot. This was bad. So, what did we do? We bought more grapes, and we made 50% more Pinot Noir in 2005. Sooo, fast forward another year and we've been out of Pinot for three months. We (and most other small Oregon wineries) release our Pinot a smidge earlier than we'd like to and hope for the best in mid-November, 2006. The wine is, in a word...great. No, wait, two words again: Really Excellent.

Now, riding a strong economy and growing Oregon Pinot Noir market we're through the first three months of sales and we're way ahead of where we should be. This is great! Right? Well, kinda. Yes, I'm very happy that our 05 Pinot is selling like hot cakes. This past weekend we took it to the first of many competitions and it won a gold medal and best in show. All very good things, right? Yes, except now I sit down with my partner and we start crunching the numbers...he says, "We're going to run out of Pinot...again". This is, of course, the problem with Pinot.

So, what do we do? Well, there's a few things you can do. One of them is to look at the most basic rules of supply and demand and raise the price. We've done this, but other Oregon wineries have done this more than us and we're still burning through the stuff.

Our distributors never like to see a mid-vintage price increase but there's not much else we can do. You see, when it comes to distriution of our wine the one thing that you don't want to ever want to do is run out. Especially in markets where you have a glass pour account. Running out means that the restaurant has to change their menu and then we'll lose the account in all likelyhood. Locally, if you have a wine club (which most wineries now have) you risk people deciding that your wine is getting too expensive.

First festival of 2007 brings first big award!

This weekend marks the first big festival we've participated in for 2007. The Oregon Seafood & Wine Festival (OSWF) is in it's second year and held at the Oregon Convention Center (OCC) here in Portland, Oregon. We participated in the festival last year for their first year and did well. Having been with LaVelle full time since August 2006 I'm still in my first year with LaVelle Vineyards so I wasn't present at the OSWF last year.

This year is the first year the OSWF has held a wine competition. There are approximately 65 wineries at the show this year and although not all of them put wines in the competition there were lots of entries for this first annual OSWF wine competition. We entered three of our wines in the competition:

• 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Noir
• 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Gris
• 2005 Crow Valley Riesling

As manager of the festival I'm the one who brings all of the wine and festival supplies up from the winery just outside of Eugene, which ends up being a two and a hald hour drive. About two hours into my drive on Thursday afternoon I called the winery to speak with my Dad. In the middle of our conversation he stopped and told me to hold a minute. When he came back he said that Diana (our office manager) just got a call from the OSWF wine competition and that two of our wines had won awards! Our 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Noir won best of show! At first I asked if that meant it was the best Pinot Noir in the competition and Dad quickly replied, No! Best in show means that our Pinot Noir was the best wine overall entered in the competition! Our 2005 Crow Valley Rieslilng also won a Silver Medal in the competition.

So, the tiny piece of bad news in all of this was that I had to drive back to Eugene that night to pick up more wine for the weekend. A small price to pay for winning best of show!!