July 1, 2008 Friendship is the wine of life… Edward Young, b. 1683 It’s a beautiful day here in Napa, 79 degrees and sunny, with a breeze keeping everything pleasant. Our steady work of the last several weeks has been focused on getting ready for the large bottling project that starts next week. We’ll be putting almost two-thirds of our wine into bottle, and that takes a lot of preparation. Red wines have to be taken from the correct barrel and blended in the correct tank, white wines have to be cold-stabilized, labels have to be triple checked and printed, glass has to be ordered and stacked. Sharon has a check list as long as her arm. Rafael and Rene have been putting in late nights in the cellar, and Anthony has been trying to keep all their barrel movements up to date on the computer. Our national holiday is on Friday, but the holiday for us will be the day the bottling truck leaves the property! Out in the market, Anthony and I have seen a variety of forces changing the course of business as usual. In some places, the restaurants and other tourist venues are doing a bang-up business with all the visitors from overseas, but not many local residents. In other areas, new laws are making traditional package stores compete with large grocery chains. Many markets are feeling the pinch of escalating prices for gas, food and utilities, and are compensating by eating in and buying their wine to bring home rather than enduring wine list pricing. We have responded by being out in the market to help stay in the line of vision of both sales people and buyers. And even though our costs for cork, glass, labels and barrels have risen, we’ve kept our prices steady for most of our wines. We hope that earns us a special place on shelves and lists as we battle the market mayhem. In the meantime, we have seen the summer upswing of visitors and have enjoyed some of the crazy-busy weekends vacation season brings. The end of this month will see us all breaking out the new vintage of Syrah, and new Block Six, from Canterbury Vineyard to inaugurate the new building with winery friends. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ll finally be playing bocce here at the winery, after a good ten years of waiting. Thank you Pete, Mark and Cornelius! Cheers, from all of us at Bell Wine Cellars!