Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is? Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a cellar rat. This entry highlights the beginning of a new adventure of a completely different scale than with Donelan Wines.
I don’t even know where to start.
I have made my way to Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand and settled into the charming, 
idiosyncratic, slightly broken and mildewed bungalow next door to the winery that I share with three other cellar hands. After arriving in Auckland, a few stops to satisfy the awestruck sensation that I could see to Antarctica (I couldn’t), and a traipse over sheep-filled cliffsides I made it to my new home, at least until the grapes are all crushed and stirred.
As of yet, things are still slow at the winery. After a cool summer, harvest is behind schedule and winemakers are getting nervous. The conversation is like déjà vu from 6 months ago in California, as pick dates loomed despite low sugars and rain in the forecast. We’re holding our breath. Today we passed around a Chardonnay sample at the winery; a cloudy, split-pea green juice that, at 17 Brix, is nowhere near where anyone would like it. Raising the winemaker’s blood pressure: there’s already botrytis pressure in the vineyards and there’s more rain ahead.
The winery is committed to making the best possible product it can and is hard at work in Continue reading
Sound Influences Taste: How we can be better and humble winemakers
One of things I always thought remarkable about wine was its employment of four out of five senses all at once. Sight, smell, touch, and taste. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that I need to go ahead and add hearing to the list. I suppose you could listen to bubbles emerging from great Champagne, but I’m more interested in how sound impacts taste, than the sound of wine.
It is no surprise that context influences the way a wine tastes, or that sound impacts the taste of wine. Several studies have demonstrated this, and one need look no further than the field of sensory science in food with their “neutral” environments designed to create as much objective focus on a 
product as possible (of course is creates its own context, who after all tastes in a white room with red lights and black glasses?). This alone is an admission by scientist in the field that they need to normalize context so that the variable, psychological wacky human being can be used as an objective instrument.
Even with that, it is both amusing and instructive to witness additional nuance added to sensory research. In a Public Radio Continue reading
Donelan Video: How do you discover a great vineyard?
How is it that we know that a vineyard will produce exceptional grapes and terrific wine? Our winemaker Tyler Thomas provides some principles that we utilize when scouring Sonoma County for the best new terroirs.
Crushed Chronicles – notes from the intern: the Donelan experience ends, yet lives forever.
Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is? Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a first time cellar rat. This entry highlights the close of her time with Donelan Wines.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true: my time in Sonoma and at Donelan has officially come to a 
close. The first months all blurred together, overwhelmed as I was by the brave new world of my job and new people, places, things. The harvest months were their own blur – a whirlwind of work and fruit and cuts and bruises and exhilaration and adrenaline and work and fruit and and and – I can almost trick myself back into that mode just by talking about it.
I’ve been learning from the pros – both those I work with and those I play with. Although I’ve come a long way in their hands there is still a long way to go. It takes me roughly half the time it once did to do many tasks at the winery, but I’d like to cut it all down by half again, and so on (there’s the Donelan cellar mentality for you).
I’ve had a lucky and happy run here, but my learning goes onward now, and southward. Continue reading
Social Media and Wine: Help People Make Decisions!
The last three weeks of my (Tyler) participation in the social media dialogue within the
Help People Make Decisions: Use Social Media!
wine industry has turned amusing. I greatly appreciate all the reweets, mentions, and links and am pleased to think that we might be contributing interesting content to the discussion. What amuses me and what should be instructive to other wineries is that the most attention we have received over the last several months is a result of our discussion about social media, not about our wines.
Hopefully this is not a testament to the quality of our wines! I don’t think it is. In fact I believe it corroborates a point made in the first post: “our best supporters who drive the majority of our sales are not the ones engaging with us through social media.” (Come on bloggers, show me the money!). As said then and believe now, that is no reason to refrain from participating in social media for there is a “social customer” out there and their presence is growing. But it is an instructive fact that the most attention we have received for a blog post has come from people whose primary goals are to promote the efficacy of social media.
It appears we struck a chord by saying “with all the devices, apps, and tools out there to help us with customers, it seems we tend to forget that in the end we are still dealing with human beings.” Opening a social media account doesn’t help you to better understand how to communicate with your customers; it just provides additional tools to participate with your customers. You still must listen and learn, you are still dealing with people! The folks encouraging producers to float down this stream of media understand this very well, even if they don’t always make it clear that they understand it very well.
One helpful piece written by Brian Solis summarizes social status at the end of 2011 and Continue reading
Video: Grapevine pruning on the Obsidian Vineyard Syrah
Here is a quick instruction from Donelan Winemaker Tyler Thomas on how we prune grapevines. Notice how beautiful the weather is! What a winter we have been having here in northern California! Learn more about Donelan Wines by joining our community
Crushed Chronicles: The life of wine is a game of Tetris
Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is? Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a first time cellar rat. This entry highlights how winemaking can be much like a game of Tetris.
There is a list of things I would never have expected about wineries. At the top of that list: 
everything. Within the top 5: at every facet, wine production feels like a life-sized game of Tetris.
Consider a cellar. Any old space will do. Large, cavernous. Big tanks in a few areas. Machinery and pumps and sumps and hoses and nuts and bolts and clamps and valves and endless bits and bobs ranging in size from – to be specific – the tiny to the enormous. A few sources for water. A handful of electrical outlets. Drains all over the place.
Now let’s go into harvest mode. There’s a crush pad – sorting table, hopper, crusher-destemmer. There are bins of fruit being forklifted around, getting dropped onto the crush pad, getting moved into tanks. Empty bins need cleaning and moving. Fruit needs sorting, monitoring, moving, sulphuring, dry-icing.
There are punch downs and pumpovers with their tools, pumps, and hoses. There is pressing with its, well, press and its digging and its barrels and its own pumps and hoses. And all the cleaning and the moving.
Nearly everything in the entire winery is currently in use and in your way. Your hands are wet. The cellar is loud.
And now take a relatively simple task: moving your pump or barrel or bin or forklift or, really, Continue reading
Engaging consumers of the wine world: social media only part of the answer.
In a recent post I summarized some dialogue about the wine industry’s slow adoption of
social media. Many speak of the need for engagement, and I wondered if the problem lays less in social media per se, and more in a general lack of appreciation for customer engagement.
We need to serve, not just produce.
Allow me to articulate that point a bit further. As our economy shifts from manufacturing to service and consumption, it has equally shifted the way in which we ought to interact with our customers. (I say shifts because the US, as of 2009, was still the largest manufacturer of goods globally, but the rate of increase has virtually been stagnant since 2006 as other countries rapidly pick up the slack and the US share of manufacturing has decreased since 1970. Look no further than IBM as a proxy to the shift). Add the changes in the method of purchase and brand exposure, and the onus is ever more placed on the company to educate and engage their end consumers.
Has the wine industry really ever done this very well? I submit that we have not, particularly Continue reading
Donelan Recipes: Risotto and Shrimp paired with Cuvee Moriah
Risotto is like winemaking. I love preparing dishes that provide flexibility and freedom within a standard framework. Cooking is not unlike winemaking, where principles are applied similarly to each variety and vintage. But within each vintage or variety, there is plenty of room for creativity and nuances based on the producer’s choices. Risotto is such a dish.
During winter, we love making dishes that are hearty, go well with red wine, and stick to 
your ribs. Risotto is such a dish and yet paradoxically seems lighter and less exhausting to the palate than something like Beef Bourgone (another favorite). With a big salad and good crunchy bread, risotto makes a wonderful mid-week dinner on its own (even if usually served as a primo). My favorite Donelan wine to enjoy with this dish is the 2009 Cuvee Moriah. Its bright red fruit, herbs-de-provence characters along with its supple, firm structure pair so comfortably with the lighter flavors but rich textures of the risotto.
Risotta confines you to the stove once you begin preparing it, which can make serving it for dinner parties more difficult. Since we always find our friends in our kitchen regardless of the dish, what difference does it make! Much of the chopping and prep can be done in advance, though once you start cooking you’ll be locked in.
The following recipe is adapted from Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef and my Father’s methods Continue reading
Social Media in the Wine World: poor customer engagement?
I (Tyler) wonder whether the growing concern with the wine industry’s slow adoption of social media is a social media problem per se, or a historic problem of poor customer engagement. Kid Napa does a good job summarizing a recent discussion on the issue, though it also has been tackled directly by others such as Alder Yarrow, Steve Heimoff, and Joe Roberts.
Before adding my wrinkle as a winemaker for a small, boutique brand I’ll summarize 
well-outlined positions that are perfectly valid, and often perfectly correct. Joe Roberts notes that wineries need “engagement innovation…[or] the single most innovative outreach platform ever developed in the history of the human race – the Internet – to directly engage the people who buy their shiz” (emphasis mine). I agree with the principle, we need to engage our customers, and yes the internet is a key tool.
However I will add that many of our customers “who buy [our] shiz” don’t use social media. That’s right; our big buyers who drive the majority of our sales are not the ones engaging with us through social media. Perhaps industry ambivalence to social media is because we are not alone in this fact. We still engage the buyer in other ways and we utilize social media to engage our future customers, who are likely to use social media as another way to engage with us. It’s a matter of current versus potential customers: both are needed, both are valuable, and both desire to be engaged.
Providing ballast to Mr. Roberts, Steve Heimoff points out in “Hey Joe, lighten up on the social media thing” that winemakers are busy enough with countless other responsibilities and that adding another serious time drain is unfair. And while Gary V may be shouting “just wake up sooner, work more,” not all of us have the power to get 26 hours out of a day. Steve is correct; we do have many other tasks that drain our ability to drive the social media megaphone of the winery. That said, winemakers may need to locate the same passion and persistence in this arena that they do during harvest: overworked and overburdened as we may be, we have to roll up our sleeves and knock it out of the park anyway. No one is better positioned than we are to funnel information from site to cellar to customer. We ought to be the teachers: of the story, of the philosophy, of the vineyard, of the wine, etc. And while it can be tiring to take on these multiple roles all in one day, no more hiding behind your barrels and work orders! It is the appealing part about being a winemaker: multidisciplinary work!
Alder Yarrow, as is his tendency, brings an amount of sensibility and rationality to the discussion – as well as a good deal higher word count! He accurately points out that using social media is a necessity but that there are tools that can help wineries mitigate the size of the conundrum. Mr. Yarrow acknowledges that it’s work, but insists that it’s the right work to be doing. He’s right, and emphasizes Mr. Robert’s point in a more constructive way.
And for my wrinkle? Working with Joe Donelan – who until recently never used a computer – has taught me the lifetime value of the customer. It may have taken a bit to convince Joe of the importance of Twitter, but he has always understood the value of engagement (“engage, educate, and entertain!” he says). All the writers outlined above used the word “engagement.” But perhaps we should peel the onion back further; maybe the problem is not only a hesitation to work with social media but also a systemic problem with engaging customers.
Could it be that a historical lack of engagement (and maybe I’m being unfair) is partly to blame for the dearth of social media adoption? Haven’t consumers, until very recently, primarily been engaged with wineries through retailers? It seems the residue of an old manufacturing based economy is that we are slow to become energized in directly engaging customers. We are not the only industry that has been slow to realize that the U.S. is no longer a manufacturing-based economy but service-based economy. We are no longer just “suppliers” providing goods for some anonymous end consumer. We are service providers. At Donelan we are fully engaged in this process, even with the majority of our buyers, albeit not solely through social media. We write notes, we email, we call, we tweet, we post, we “like”, we serve our customers and anyone else who desires to learn about wine and our passion. In short, we “engage, educate, and entertain” at every opportunity.
If you’d like to engage with us, please click here!
