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
  

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.