October 26 - December 31, 2025 
Friday October 31, 2025
Jose just gave me the list of 229 barrels from this 2025 harvest. I now have to figure out which barrels go into our 24 wines. After I finish the spreadsheet in December Jose and Salvador will blend the wines into about 220 barrels. We will lose abut 10 barrels because there will be about 3 gallons of sediment left in the bottom of the barrel.The sediment will go into 10 barrels to settle and over several months the cloudy sediment will yield about 5 barrels of clear wine.That clear wine will be the start of Zp2c.
Also in December we will rack, thus blend, different barrels of our 2024 16 month aged wine to be bottled in January. Before the 2024 wines are racked I will taste a few wines that we aged since July in different types of oak. I and a few other people have tried the 2024 Sagrantino out of the barrel and we have thought it could be the best wine I have made. Before we rack that wine and combine the 5 barrels, I will be excited to taste 3 of the 5 barrels which are in 3 different French oak from 3 different companies.I will taste them blind and this great experience will help me to decide what barrels I will buy for the 2026 vintage. I love what I do.........
Monday November 10, 2025
Great news! We are harvesting a small amount of Late Harvest Petite Sirah! The sugar appears to be about 40%. That should yield a sweet wine at close to 20% residual and 11% alcohol. I could make it more like a French Sauternes which are closer to 14% sugar and 14% alcohol. We have this additive that is used in the fruit juice industry to kill all the yeast cells. In other words that is why you fruit juice does not ferment in your frig. Anyway we can add some of this, Called Velcorin, and it will stop the fermentation where ever we want. I will talk more about our new project in the next few days...Fun...Fun...Fun
Thursday November 13, 2025
We decided against harvesting Late Harvest Petite Sirah. There wasn't much crop there, maybe next year?
Tuesday November 25, 2025
Sorry for the long time between diary entries! As you will read below I have been actively working on a big supplier problem. And also I have been working on the excel spreadsheet from Jose that shows all our 250 barrels from the 2025 harvest. We will be racking and blending in December. Eventually the spreadsheet will show where the barrels go into the wines we make, whether it be Block 4 or more complicated wines to chose which barrels, like Italiano style, Estate Cuvee and Super Tuscan Style and many others. I will start tasting next week many samples from the barrels that will help me decide the final blends. We have 15 tons of 100% Zinfandel and it is a challenge to figure out which barrels go into our many Zinfandel based wines. Also we have almost 8 tons of Cabernet and 5 different areas of Cabernet to figure out which go into our five wines that have Cab in the blend. I will have more to say in the next week or so.
Sometimes I talk about disagreements with a producer that supplies us with a necessary part of our bottle of wine. After 20 years of using screwcaps from the same producer, Amcor, I have a complaint. First of all my mistake is dealing with a sales rep about the disagreement rather straight to management. Amcor of American Canyon, I say American Canyon which is in Northern California, because I found out they have a plant in Canada. The rep offered me a great price but the capsules were made in Canada, not out of American Canyon California.They sent me 168,000 capsules enough for 2.5 years. The problem is the writing on the bottom of the capsule is not what I am used to getting from Amcor. A picture is below. The writing on the bottom is too light. So I fought with the sales rep of Amcor for two weeks back and forth on phone calls and emails and finally he connected me to the Plant Manager. Before that for a week or so Pat and even Catalina said I should compromise because what was I going to do with 168,000 capsules if they would not come and pick them up. BTW, I had stopped payment on my check so they had no money! I was not in favor of compromising the outside look of our wine bottle. But after talking to the Plant Manager, I decided to take a 10% discount and he also offered free, to connect me to an artwork designer to maybe redesign the logo on the bottom to a larger font.
As you see below, the writing on the capsule on the left is much lighter than the one on the right, the usual capsule we have gotten from Amcor for 20 years
Friday December 5, 2025
Our big Xmas Club party is tomorrow so we have been setting up for it today.
Also I have been tasting many wines this week. All the 2025 Cabs to decide where they go and also I tried the Montepulsiano to check it out compared to Nebbiolo a killer blend of Aglianico and Sagrantino which will go to my 2025 Super Tuscan. I decided to keep all the 25 cases of Nebbiolo separate. I decided to blend the Monte into the Italiano. We actually start bringing all the barrels outside next week to set up for our blends........
Friday December 12, 2025
Jose was off two days so we have just started racking off our 2025 60 gallon barrels. There will be about 56 gallons of clear wine and leaving 4 gallons of what we call mud. The mud wine will be settled for several months and will be racked in March. We will recover about half clear wine and the rest, a solid mass will be dumped out in our vineyard to help keep down some weeds. The clear wine will be the start of our Zp2c, the bottom of the barrel. When we rack off our wines we lose the 4 gallons so if we have 11 barrels like our Italiano Style, we will lose about 44 gallons, thus more than half the 60 gallon barrel. We have kegs that hold 15.5 gallons so there should be about that much of clear wine to save for topping off the 10 barrels left of Italiano. Obviously it gets more complicated when we have 12 or 5 barrels of a wine. That is where I come in. I have to decide what I can use from one wine or the other to have whole barrels and kegs left. This year we have 6 barrels of Petit Verdot. Since I want to keep Petit Verdot 100% I have decided to lose one barrel and save some wine to add to our Bordeaux wine, Aca Modot and save a keg of Petit Verdot for topping latter, the 5 barrels left. I could go on but it is very complicated and has required me to work on the spreadsheet for a week or more. Even when racking Jose has several questions for me to ask, if I want to change one of the wines we rack. I love the challenge.
Saturday December 20, 2025
The rain finally came in yesterday butonly 0.77 inches. The storm was originally predicted to arrive on Monday so we did get 4days to rack and blend some of our 2025 wines. Jose says we only have 3 more days to finish but the predictions is for rain or showers everyday into the first week of the new year. That will be Ok with us even though we were hoping tobottle our 2024 16 month wines in mid January. That could still happen but we will be OK to bottle later in the month or even in February. We need about 4 days of clear weather.
What was fun is I had a chance to taste several of my highly anticipated blended 2025 wines. I don't do flashy tasting notes for myself. Sure I have done many for back label notes but those are usually done with help from Ai. The wines I tried were Aglianico, Sagrantino, Escuro, Super Tuscan and Lagrein. I thought the Aglianico was the most intense upfront with strong tannins and acid. My favorite was the Sagrantino because it was the most balanced with incredible structure through out to the finish. The Super Tuscan which has Cab, Sangiovese, Sagrantino and Aglianico in the blend was the most complex. The Escuro and Lagrein had nice balance also. It looks like this will be another great year. I will have to wait for several weeks for the rain to stop so I can taste my Zinfandel blends including Block 4.
Enjoy the Holidays, all of you........Dave
Dave
For any comments or questions I encourage any of you to e-mail.....david@coffaro.com
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