It's shipment time - what a week!

I just got back from a week on Red Mountain getting ready for our fall wine club shipment. Since I started working with Fidelitas in May, after the Champoux shipment went out, this served as my very first time working to get a wine club shipment out the door. I swear I could have prepared all summer long, and still wouldn’t have been ready for what I witnessed last week. It was a flurry of database reports, phone calls and really a lot of fun. I emerged from our office there at the tasting room each evening feeling like a little shrew that hadn’t seen sunlight all day long. However, I’m now back at home feeling pretty successful, and am already starting to miss Jessica G, Marilyn and Nedra, who were my sidekicks throughout the process.

Most of you should be seeing your wines this week arriving via FedEx Ground if you have opted to have your wines shipped. For those of you who would like to pick-up, your shipments are ready to go at the tasting room whenever is convenient for you to stop by and visit. If you live in a warm state, or on the east coast, we are holding your shipments until October 1st. This is to prevent any potential heat damage from traveling across the country. Please be sure to contact me if you have any questions at all.

We also have some special library wines that were just released. Jessica G has some 2002 Optu red and 2003 Walla Walla cabernet sauvignon at the tasting room available for purchase. I was able to taste both of them while I was over there and enjoyed them both. I love our wines now, but it is always neat to see what a few years worth of aging can do for a wine. Also remember that we are within 30 days of the shipment, which means that most wines are available for an additional 5% discount. I’ve seen some really great deals go by. It’s also a great time to try your shipment wines and then stock your cellar with them.

Enjoy the Optus! They really are great. This weekend in the tasting room we had two groups debating whether the Optu white would be best with a lightly grilled halibut or crab cakes with mango salsa. If anyone wants to weigh in on the topic - or better yet, share the recipe you like the best – please do so! You can send it to me and I’ll try to get it posted for others to see.

Toasty Indeed!

We just hosted one of our annual events for members in Seattle. This party was designed as a way to say thank you to our club members, as well as a way for them to get to know one another a bit better. It also happened to coincide with the much anticipated release of our 2005 Optu red wine and 2007 Optu white wine (also our fall wine club shipment), which are both fabulous wines. While I spent most of the night running around in circles, trying to meet as many people as possible, filling orders and passing out shipments, I think everyone had a great time.

Our event “Getting Toasty in the City” was held at the Northwest Wine Academy - my old stomping grounds (along with a few other wine club members!) from when I took some classes there a few years ago. If you live in the Seattle-area, are interested in wine and want to enhance your knowledge, I would strongly suggest you check out their program. Not only were they kind enough to let us host our party there, but the school gathered together a team of absolutely wonderful volunteers who came to set-up, pour wine all night long, and then stayed to tear it all down again. A big thank you to Reggie, Stacey and all of the volunteers – I literally could not have done it without you!

We were lucky enough to host a few master coopers from Seguin-Moreau, the infamous cooperage from Napa Valley. These hard working guys did barrel toasting demonstrations throughout the evening. Guests were able to watch a barrel being made all the way from being a pile of wood, through assembly and toasting to the finished product. I heard a rumor about a wine club wine being made from the barrels we all got to see produced…

One of my favorite parts of the night was definitely the food. After seeing an Airstream trailer driving around the city, making lunch in different neighborhoods each day, and then reading about them in Food & Wine Magazine, I knew that we had to have Skillet Street Food join us at this event. Josh and his crew pulled their trailer into the parking lot and started cooking up a storm. They even featured two dishes to pair with our new releases that evening: THE BURGER was incredible alongside the Optu red and their PRAWN PO’BOY was awesome with the Optu white wine. There was also a caprese salad and herbed fries that I managed to taste between tasks (thank you to Ben and Dara for making that happen!).

As I mentioned earlier, I got to meet so many wonderful people. Thank you to everyone who came that night and made it such a special event. A really BIG thank you to club member Laurie Hodges who took all of these wonderful photos that you’re seeing in this post (along with the pic of me at the top). Also, thanks to Duane at Winefoot and Doug and Josh with Wino Magazine for all of their kind words. It was great to have you there. Next time I see everyone, please take the time to come up and say hi!