Untitled Document
April 8, 2008
Well, we all know it's been a while since the last blog post here on the MoreWine! site. Between everything that's been going on around here it's been tough to find a chance to sit down and keep our customers in the loop. We'll be working hard to get more regular posts up in the coming year. For now, here are a few highlights of what we've had going on around here and what's on the horizon for the coming year.
- Olin Wines Winery is Legal! As many of you know from conversations with us over the past year, we've been in the process of establishing a small commercial winery here on our Concord, CA "compound." Well, after about a year of paperwork and waiting and more paperwork we are finally legal and under production. The 2007 harvest from our contract vineyard was frozen by the folks at Brehm Vineyards and we finally got around to fermenting and pressing it this March. Check out the gallery below for some pics of our press day.
- New Website Structure Many of you have probably already noticed that just after the holiday season this year we re-arranged the website in an effort to make the site easier to navigate and the products you need easier to find. As always, we'd love your feedback. So if you guys have any comments or suggestions, please send them along to info@morewinemaking.com.
- New Red Winemaking Manual on the Way! That's right, our trusty old Guide to Red Winemaking has gotten a makeover. As part of the process, we've expanded the scope of the paper to include more detailed descriptions of the processes that you go through, and hopefully some clearer explanations of some of the science that goes into winemaking. Also, we've separated the "how to" portions of the paper from the "why" portions. The paper is in its final editing stages and should be up on the site by the end of April.
- Home Winery Packages Coming Soon! Ever wanted to just make the jump to barreling your wine, or to step up your production level, but stopped because being sure that you were each and every little thing for the job was just too daunting? Well your days of worry are over, as MoreWine! is on the verge of releasing Home Winery Packages designed for a wide range of production scales and budgets. Keep an eye on the website and your e-mail inbox as we'll be letting you all know as soon as they're available.
Pressing 2007 Cab in April 2008
As we mentioned above, 2007 was a strange year for us for winemaking. Between a busy season, the end of the bonding process and Tristan having a broken collar bone, we just had to wait to make our 2007 wine. So come early March 2008 we were finally ready to get the bins down and the fruit from the freezer and get our fermentation underway. Our official stance is that we wanted to show support for our Southern Hemisphere bretheren who are all in the midst of harvest and crush right now. After a beautiful, 10 day ferment, our 6.5 tons of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon was ready to press out, so the whole crew met up this past Saturday to turn the normal MoreFlavor compound into a real-deal, working winery. In what was easily our best-run pressing to date, we processed 11 half-ton macro bins in about 12 hours. Below are some snapshots from the afternoon.
Our Presses out and staged while we continue to prep
Winemaker Shea Comfort cleaning the big tank
Must pumping into the press
Collecting free-run and waiting for the press to begin the squeeze
Shea tastes the press-run
Who says you need a pretty winery to make great wine?!
Olin's daughters finally learn what Daddy is doing all the time
Spent Pomace
11 June 2007:
Greetings fellow winemakers! This is Tristan Johnson, Brand Manager for the MoreWine! Division here at MoreFlavor, and I'm excited to me making my first post to this blog here on our site. While it may have taken several months to have a chance to bring you all an update, I'm pleased to have three great announcements to bring to you.
As you will likely have noticed, we've launched a brand new website design, which in addition to being better looking and easier to navigate will also give us a large amount of much-desired control over the design and content of the front page. Please take the time to browse around a bit. The entire back end of the site is new, so there may still be a few bugs. Please let me know by email if you encounter one and we'll get the designer working on it right away.
We're also happy to announce the start of our First Annual Barrel PreSale. The sale is covering new small barrels by Saint-Martin and Allary Cooperages and MoreWine! Brand Recoopered Barrels. The same general framework that surrounds our Equipment PreSale is in place - order and pay in advance for a discount on barrels that will be delivered in October - just in time for your 2007 wines to start needing them. Please check out the Barrels section of our website for more information about these barrels and their pricing.
Finally, MoreFlavor is proud to announce the addition of a new retail facility to our family. Phil Montalbano and Fermentation Frenzy of Los Altos, CA have joined up with MoreFlavor to add another CA retail location to the lineup. Phil has been brewing beer since 1991 and making wine at home since 1997. He started at Fermentation Frenzy in 1994 and purchased the shop from its previous owner in 1997. At the time of his joining the MoreFlavor Team, about 60% of his shop’s business was focused on home winemakers – a tradition that we hope to continue. Despite being a dedicated businessman and husband, Phil has never lost sight of the home fermentation which brought him into this business, having won numerous wine competition awards over the years. This has culminated in his winning 2007’s Best of Show Award in the WineMaker Magazine National Competition, Red Wine division for his and friend Ryan Teeter's Bordeaux blend submission. Over the years Phil has applied his love of and expertise in winemaking to help more than 10 existing customers make the leap from home winemaking to commercial production, and in 2000 he co-founded the 60+ member Bay Area Winemakers Association (BAWA). The club meets bi-monthly at the Los Altos store. MoreFlavor will be celebrating the addition of Fermentation Frenzy to our family with a Grand Re-Opening event all day on Saturday July 21, 2007 featuring great deals on everything in the store as well as demos, talks and all the great service and products that you’ve all come to expect from us. Stop by on July 21 to say hi and meet the newest addition to the MoreFlavor Team. For questions, directions, advice, sales or more information on the Bay Area Winemaker’s Association; please contact Phil at the store at (650)-949-2739 or at PhilM@MoreFlavor.com.
Thanks for reading, and keep checking back for more updates on what's going on in the MoreWine! world!
Cheers!
Tristan
8 February, 2007:
Well it seems hard to believe that it has been six months since my last post. I am not sure where to begin. For starters I would like to introduce Tristan Johnson as the new brand manager of MoreWine!. He has been with the company in the wine division since 2003. He has a strong wine science background as well as good amount of hands-on winemaking knowledge. Too many of you this might already be old news, but for those of you who are new you will be excited to have some one assisting you who is extremely knowledgeable AND customer service orientated.
In the last six months we have done a lot of infrastructure change including the doubling of our main distribution warehouse in Concord, California. We added rolling conveyors, new packaging machines, and doubled our packing stations. This along with more manpower has enabled our shipping times to continue to improve. We can now ship up to 400 orders a day from this facility which should come in extremely handy during our peak shipping season -- wine season!
Tristan will be taking over MoreWine! and www.Morewinemaking.com and this little blog. We launched MoreWine! Pro, which focuses on commercial wineries, and its corresponding website, www.morewinepro.com, in December and I will be focusing on this brand and site. We also finished our 'corporate' website www.MoreFlavor.com where you can read about everything that is going on company wide.
One new product worth mentioning is our Calcium based bentonites, Albumex and Canaton, for white wines. I am not sure every homewinemaker knows that fining white wines with bentonite is a standard commercial practice to eliminate protein haze in the bottle. These new bentonites from Keller of Germany are pre-soaked, meaning they can be added directly to the wine which eliminates all the hassle of using traditional bentonites. They also have the advantage of forming half the sediment bed of traditional bentonites which means you take more wine into the bottle. Check them out!
Cheers, Olin Schultz
20 June, 2006:
The first version of www.moregrapes.com went live today. A free service that will link the buyers and sellers of grapes. With over 100 hours into programming the database and overall page design, the project was a little more than we expected... but then isn't that always the case! Everyone asks me why we don't charge a brokering fee. I want people across the country to make more wine by having greater access to high quality grapes. If this happens then everybody wins. Our pump project is coming along nicely and we are hoping to have a prototype at the ASEV show in Sacramento, CA next week. Come visit us at booth 441. Today we added a line of new American oak barrels up to 30 gallons. Stay tuned for a flurry of new product releases in the next few weeks.
Cheers, Olin.
18 May, 2006:
The Pre-Order sale ended a few weeks ago and we are still catching up. The details of ordering 10-15 containers of equipment is somewhat overwhelming. However, eventhough April is second only to September as far as being a busy month for us we still pushed ahead in many directions. We created a new division MoreWinePro which will feature equipment focused at commercial wineries. A separate catalog and website, MoreWinePro.com are in the works. This will allow us to focus on the home winemaking crowd and the commercial winery separately, enabling us to provide the very best information to both sectors. In June we will be working on prototypes of our new line of MoreWine pumps and we should enter production in July. We will also introduce a new product we call VinoSeal which is a high end wax/plastic hybrid for your very best wines. It is applied much like a wax, but does not chip. We should also let you know that our free grape exchange site, MoreGrapes.com will go live in June. Buy and sell grapes through a searchable database that our in house programmers created. So... were busy!!! P.S. we look forward to seeing anyone who will be attending the ASEV wine show in Sacramento in June.
Cheers - Olin.
23 March, 2006:
Today I tasted my 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon that I am making from Alexander Valley (Sonoma County) grapes for the first time. This is a commerical wine that I make on the side working at a local winery. The 2004 vintage was an extremely structured wine. This year I wanted to soften the tannin structure so I did several things. I used stainless tanks with a 1:1 ratio as opposed to macrobins, I lessened the punch down schedule from 5 times to 3 times per day, I did not crush the grapes - I only destemmed them in my processor http://morewinemaking.com/product.html?product_id=19588 and then ran them through a must pump, used enological tannins, and eliminated D80 from my yeast stable (I use 3-4 yeast per varietal.) The wine was so much softer than 2004 that I was amazed. Also contributing to this softness is the fact that the berry size on the 2005 harvest is said to be 10% larger than on the 2004. This wine sees 75% new oak and half of that is American this year. Now I am second guessing myself as I think the French barrels will provide more structure that this vintage might need. Hard to say this early on. Anyways this is the beauty of making one varietal and focusing on it exclusively. Well that's not entirely true. I am making 100 cases of old vine zinfandel from Dry Creek from a vineyard originally planted in 1880, however the vines are of all ages. Keep tuned, my first commercial wine will be availabe this summer, A Dry Creek Cab/Merlot blend.
20 March, 2006:
Olin, Darren and Karl went to the Wineries Unlimited show in Lancaster, PA to display tanks, fillers, pumps, and more. The show was a great success. We always enjoy the chance to talk face to face with so many customers that we typically only get to talk with on the phone. This year marked the first show in which Karl (KarlW@MoreWineMaking.com) was doing sales visits to wineries on the East Coast so it was even more busy than usual. Of course we visited the Lancaster Brewing Company (we don't discriminate between beer and wine) and enjoyed our annual Milk Stout. On Wednesday after the show we had some extra time before our flight out of Philadelphia. After watching the food network show on Philly Cheesesteaks, Karl was all about visiting the original, famous Pats and and the just as famous Genos (which are across the street from one another in Southern Philly.) Our vote was for Genos for what it is worth! After eating way too much grease we were off to Monks, a famous bar in Philly where we dined on imported Belgian beer.
16 March, 2006:
The new website you see now goes up, marking the next chapter in the life of MoreWine. For years our wine products were comingled with our sister company MoreBeer.com making finding many of our unique products a serious challenge. Now with more detailed product descriptions and more wine-only interaction with customers we could not be more excited. Look for new logos and even more exciting changes this April.
1 March, 2006:
The famous MoreWine pre-order sale starts today and lasts until April 15th. Now in its sixth year, MoreWine offers up to 15% off certain imported items when you order and pay by April 15th. Help us with our cashflow and order selection and save some serious money! These prices represent the absolute best values in the industry and ensure that you get the product you want for the 2006 crush. See our website and/or request our 8 page sales flyer. A customer service representative will be more than happy to mail you one.
28 February, 2006:
MoreWine on the East Coast!
Karl Wichmann our East Coast sales manager decides on a Fort Mill, South Carolina warehouse for distribution in the East. Initially this warehouse will be used for distributing pre-order sale items (items ordered by wineries and home winemakers in the spring and delivered in early August.) Subsequently the plan is to stock certain high demand items at this warehouse. Talk to Karl about picking up items at this warehouse or getting shipping qoutes to the East Coast or MidWest.
