Order when it’s Hot, Ship it when it’s Cool
Take advantage of the lowest prices of the year on these small production Napa Valley wines.

Sometimes shipping weather and a winery’s release season don’t coincide with when you may want to buy wine, so we are offering this special deal for those of you who are sitting on piles of cash, are staring at an empty wine celler, or those who just can’t wait until the mailers start arriving this fall

750ml	Magnum	Wine
$65 (reg $72)	$135 (reg $150)	2004 Butterdragon Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Read Cellartracker.com Tasting Notes
$65 (reg $72)	$135 (reg $150)	2005 Butterdragon Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Read Cellartracker.com Tasting Notes
$65 (reg $75)	$140 (reg $155)	2005 Baconbrook Cabernet Sauvignon Read Cellartracker.com Tasting Notes
Or Mix and Match 6 to 11 x 750ml bottles and get them for $60 each
Or Mix and Match 12 or more 750ml bottles and pay just $55 each
From this total, repeat customers can still deduct their discount. If you’d like to find out your current discount level, email us. For new customers, taking advantage of this special summer offer will establish your discount status for our upcoming fall 2006 Baconbrook release.
As is our custom, we will pay for ground shipping in the fall of all magnums and orders of 6 x 750ml bottles or more. Ground shipping to everywhere in the continetal USA on orders of less than 6 bottles is $5 per bottle. We will hold your wine until cooler weather allows safe ground shipping but if you are in a hurry to receive your wines right away, we will credit you what we would pay for ground shipping and charge you our actual cost for air shipping.
The above offer expires 7/31/09. Download Order Form

Share the news about our wines!

In addition to our regular Repeat Customer Discount program and the Summer Special described above, we want to thank those of you who help spread the word about our wines. If you are part of our Repeat Customer program and you recommend our wines to a new customer (or a mailing list member who has never purchased), you will receive a very special gift. All the new customer needs to do is put your name in the comments section of our order form when they order. Hint: a new customer can get in on this too. Just send in an order, thus becoming a repeat customer, and then have a friend order as well with you as the referrer. Sorry, two new customers can not refer each other. You’ll just have to share the free bottle of 2006 Baconbrook. (Whoops! I told you what the gift was.)

Time and again this Court has held that, in all but the narrowest circumstances, state laws violate the Commerce Clause if they mandate ‘differential treatment of in-state and out-of-state economic interests.’ This rule is essential to the foundations of the Union. States may not enact laws that burden out-of-state producers or shippers simply to give a competitive advantage to in-state businesses. We have viewed with particular suspicion state statutes requiring business operations to be performed in the home state that could more efficiently be performed elsewhere. – Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

Sigh. Despite the statement above from a 2005 ruling by the US Supreme Court that states can not discriminate against out-of-state wineries and must treat them as they do their own in-state wineries, the powerful liquor/wine distributor lobby keeps trying to preserve their power to, in my opinion, the detriment of the consumer and the wine industry. A federal appeals court in NY has upheld a ruling that NY can bar out-of-state retailers from shipping wine into NY while NY retailers can ship wine.
This ruling seems, to me, to be counter to the 2005 Supreme Court decision. There are several similar cases coming up in the future in Texas and other states. Unless the Supreme Court steps in and broadens their decision and resolves the apparent conflict between the 21st ammendment (which grants states the power to regulate the sale of alcohol) and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, we’re going to keep seeing this sort of thing happening. The only way around it is to make sure that your state passes laws that are in the best interests of the wine consumer.
Based on a story from Wine Spectator online.

A winery doesn’t have to be around for very long before opportunities to pour their wines at public and private events start arriving. Participation in one will probably spur several more invitations. When we first started, I said “yes” as often as possible figuring that we had to get the word out about our wines. Now, 4 years after our first release, I’m still not sure I’ve got it figured out where it makes sense to invest our time and wine.
I recently posted a poll about this on the wine forum Wine Berserkers. (I like this forum because of the number of ITB — In The Business — participants and the welcoming atmosphere by members to folks who sometimes need to talk shop.) Anyway, the general consensus that came out of the poll is that the biggest bang for the buck, particularly for a small winery, is spending money on your existing customers or highly pre-qualified customers. Basically, one is going to sell more wine out of a wine dinner or open house for fans you already have rather than getting additional exposure. In fact, disappointingly, many of the public and private events we pour at result in little or no sales. Don’t get me wrong. They’re fun. Interacting with wine lovers is my favorite part of the biz, but even when the clientele is well-heeled and really “in to” wine, it is tough to make an impression on many buyers when folks are stopping at 25 different tables and perhaps trying 50 different wines that day.
But that doesn’t stop us from trying.

Recently we were invited to pour at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The tasting was being organized by Wine 2.0. To quote their website: Wine 2.0™ is the innovator in social networking and events in the wine industry. With a focus on the next generation wine consumer, Wine 2.0 breaks down the barriers to learning about, experiencing, and enjoying wine.
Sounds cool, right? I’ve been trying to get a handle on the whole social networking thing for the business and what better way than working with Wine 2.0 at what many would consider “technology central” — Google. We were briefed on where and when we should arrive. We were also warned not to take photos or ask probing questions about Google’s operations. (No warning necessary here… I didn’t want to talk about Google, I wanted to talk about Match Vineyards!) Since I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, I did draw myself pouring at Google. I hope I don’t get into trouble by publishing the picture to the left.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. The Google employees were an inquisitive lot, asking many questions about wine, winemaking, and the business. A few showed their engineer side wondering what metrics we used to determine wine quality and success in winemaking. Everyone was gracious and had a good time.
A funny little thing happened while I was there. Several hundred Google employees arranged themselves in the shape of an arrow and held red construction paper over their heads while a plane flew over very high and took pictures. It seems that afternoon they were updating the entry for Google Maps of their own headquarters and wanted a huge man-made icon in the photo. I was next to the arrow (to the right) so when Google maps is ultimately updated — don’t bother to check right now, it’s still the old photo — one might be able to see me. This is especially true since I was holding up the BIG ASS bottle on the right. For giggles, I decided to open a six liter bottle of 2004 Butterdragon Hill for the tasting. I’d never actually opened one of our large formats and it proved to be a quite a conversation starter at the tasting.

By the way, what does one call a six liter bottle? I didn’t know. But one Googler asked this question into his phone, some sort of speech to text conversion took place, and a search online was carried out. The answer was a Methuselah — the equivalent of 8 regular bottles.

Ask any winery to identify their biggest headache and you’re likely to get the answer “shipping.” Shipping and fulfillment of direct sales cost more than customers think it should. It is tough to get accurate service from 3rd parties. Wineries must depend on mother nature to not freeze or boil the wine in transit. And finally, compliance with all the state and federal laws provides a minefield that is difficult to negotiate without a specialist.

It just got even tougher for over 200 Napa Valley wineries.

On June 1, Wine Business and others reported that New Vine Logistics (NVL) in Napa suddenly suspended operations because it had “abruptly gone into a state of financial crisis.” Those 200 wineries who depended on them for order fulfillment suddenly were left in a lurch. Not only was NVL not taking any shipping orders, but even orders in process where stopped. Most of those wineries probably even had some level of inventory with NVL too. What would happen to that inventory?

Ironically, it seemed that New Vine Logistics had been setting the standard on what services to offer a winery, especially to a small one. A winery would have inventory in place with them, NVL would receive orders straight from a winery’s online ordering system, accurately process the orders including checking the shipment for legal compliance, and get them out the door via UPS or FedEx. Special and international shipments were supposedly no problem. In fact, NVL even had a service which helped a winery operate “directly” in many 3-tier states. (A 3-tier state is where a winery can only sell through a distributor, i.e.no direct sales.) Note, I don’t know the exact details of how NVL accomplished this, but I believe they or their partner served as a winery’s distributor in said state and legally (and briefly) took ownership of a shipment before forwarding it on to the customer. NVL would also provide the necessary information back to a winery for compliance reporting or could even completely take care of the legal compliance reporting for a winery. Sounds great, right? I’ve taken a tour of NVL and heard several presentations from them. New Vine Logistics did seem too good to be true. They have a huge temperature controlled warehouse and much of their process is automated, supposedly reducing mistakes. It’s a small winery’s dream to be able to concentrate on production and sales and have someone else accurately and affordably take care of fulfillment and shipping tasks. NVL certainly looked very impressive with their computers, scanners, conveyor belts, etc. No wonder Amazon.com selected them to provide fulfillment for their upcoming wine sales venture. NVL must have looked very familiar to the big online retailer.

When we first got in the business, we asked around for suggestions on shippers. I basically discovered it would be a choice not of whom my peers liked, but of whom they hated the least. I was tempted by New Vine Logistics but found their costs prohibitive. I ended up selecting WW Shipping Solutions and have had a love-hate relationship with them ever since. They’ve made more mistakes than I thought were acceptable, and yet they’re always so darn nice and bend over backwards to fix their mistakes, that I’ve never quite gotten to that tipping point and fired them to make a change. Ironically, the change I would have made was to go to New Vine Logistics.
I can only imagine the sleepless nights of early June for the small winery owners who were depending on New Vine Logistics. Word is they were getting very little information from NVL. What would it be like, especially under already-difficult economic conditions, if your most profitable sales channel suddenly froze?

So how will it all end? Perhaps happily. On June 12 it was reported that New Vine had started shipping wine again because of a deal where Inertia Beverage Group infused cash and assumed NVL debt. Those 200 wineries must be breathing a bit easier but I think we all got a warning on how vulnerable one’s business can be if even the most in-demand, cult wine can’t get to the customers’ hands. I’ll keep an eye on NVL and post if there are other interesting developments. Hopefully new management can be brought in to still provide the needed services in a profitable way.

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PS. One can’t talk about shipping difficulties in the wine industry without at least mentioning the #1 reason it is so complicated and expensive. Many of the laws governing the distribution of our favorite beverage are left over from the days of Al Capone and prohibition. And these days, even though anyone over the age of 21 should be legally able to purchase wine from their source of choice (i.e. our winery) it rarely painlessly works out that way. The federal and various state governments provide many a roadblock to control or limit the sale and distribution of alcohol. In this regard, fine wine is treated no differently than moonshine. Fortunately, the legal situation is getting better. Supreme Court decisions and bold action by some state legislatures and governors over the last few years have made it easier for wineries (and you) to ship wine legally… at least in some states. For more information about wine shipment issues, see the websites Free the Grapes and Specialty Wine Retailers: Wine Without Borders.

Today we bottled our first vintage from Baconbrook, our Spring Mountain District vineyard.
122 cases (12 bottle) of 750’s
16 cases (6 bottle) of mags
4 x 3L
1 x 6L

Well, we’ve now done it 3 times…
Yesterday we bottled 650 cases of the 2004 Butterdragon Hill. That’s 630 12 pack cases + the rest in equivalent of mags and 375’s. The bottling went well. The wine was trucked over to Frank Family from Rombauer on Monday, underwent a light filtration, and the line was set up and ran quickly on Wednesday.
As those of you who had the chance to taste it out of the barrel know, the 04 is great. We are very excited about this vintage. Although we like both 02 and 03, the additional maturity of the vines makes us suspect that the 04 will be our “out-of-the-ballpark” wine.
The 2004 Butterdragon will be released next Spring. We’ve decided to keep the 2004 Baconbrook in the barrel longer so it won’t be bottled until next January. That wine will be released in the Fall of 2007.

As many of you know, we make and store our wine at Rombauer, located on the Silverado Trail between St. Helena and Calistoga. Following crush, fermentation, and extended maceration, the wine goes into around 90% new French oak barrels, undergoes malolactic fermentation and then spends the next two years aging in Rombauer’s approximate one mile of caves. Over the course of those two years, the wine will be racked a few times, barrels topped off, and tasted regularly by myself, my winemaker, and our mailing list members who come by.

Barrel tasting is fun. It’s also a bit of a gamble for several reasons. Wine in the barrel is a very dynamic thing and I’ve seen it be really unimpressive one week and knock your socks off the next. Also, not owning our own facility means we are sometimes subject to Rombauer’s schedule. I remember one time setting up a tasting with some mailing list members at 3:30 PM, only to discover that the Rombauer cellar staff had taken off at 3:00 that day. Not a problem normally — we aren’t escorted there — but they had turned off all the lights in the caves and neither I nor anyone in the Rombauer tasting room knew where the lights were. Plan B, implemented quickly, was I invited this couple back to our house, gave them a tour and opened a bottle of the 2002, the only wine we had in the bottle at the time. I thought it went pretty well for an off-the-cuff endeavour, but I guess they didn’t. They never bought any wine. Oh well. This post is about barrel tasting.

Last Friday I checked out our 2004’s and 2005’s in barrel.

2005 Butterdragon – Already tasty, but still showing signs of the recently finished malolactic fermentation. For lack of a better descriptor, it makes the wine seem a bit “fizzy” in the mouth.

2005 Butterdragon (Skins Lot) – All our wines go through extended maceration but with about 1/2 of Butterdragon we provided an additional 5 days on the skins. This wine seems further along than the other lot showing more floral nose and rounder mouthfeel.

2005 Baconbrook – Monster lurking in the barrel. Tight.

2004 Butterdragon – Scheduled to be bottled in June. Lovely round mouthfeel, dark color, fruit forward with chocolate.

2004 Baconbrook – Also very tight but exhibiting exotic spice aromas, dark fruits, and a touch of eucalyptus. Although this wine is also scheduled for June bottling, we may keep in the barrel for a few more months.

Want to come barrel taste with me? Let me know and I’ll do my best to meet up with you at Rombauer. Also, as tastings are scheduled, I’ll post here if there are additional slots.

The next scheduled barrel tasting is Tuesday, March 14th at 10:30 AM at Rombauer. Let me know if you’d like to attend.

I had a really good night on Saturday. Sasha was in The City with an old friend so I took Alec (my son) to Pizzaiola, a great pizza and pasta place at Telegraph and 51st in Oakland. It’s fun to have a “guys'” night out. I also took along a 375 of the 2003 Butterdragon Hill. It was a good chance for me to sip on our upcoming release.

Just a few informal thoughts…

Elegance and restraint. It is not as fruit forward or primary as the 2002 was at this stage. The wine is regaining some heft as we put some time between it and the bottling last September. The fruit is really nice, but there’s complexity showing through that differentiates it from the 02. Oak, spice box, anise, tea, mocha… it’s not as big and lush as the 02, but probably a more complete and definitely more complex wine. Probably will age longer. Definitely more sophisticated. Definitely better than the 2002 with a meal. I like the color — a medium ruby with lovely luster. Doesn’t look “big” in the glass… yet. Charming cassis and raspberry ribbon of fruit. Some will like it a lot better than the 2002, some will not. While it also displays the candy aroma in the finished glass that seems to be the M.O. of Butterdragon, it’s currently not the “fun” party wine that the 2002 was/is… also lower in alcohol than the 02. I like it. How cool is it to get to know this vineyard.

This week we racked our 2005 wines. The process was started Monday and completed today.

For those that don’t know, racking is the process where the wines are pumped from barrel to tanks and then the barrels are cleaned out and sterilized with ozone removing all the dead yeast and other solids that have settled to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is then returned to the barrel.

In our short history at Match, we’ve been racking 3 or so times per vintage over the course of the 22-24 months the wine spends in the barrel. There’s no hard or fast rule… the winemaker decides when its needed based usually on smell. This was the first racking of our 2005’s.

On the farming front… Tomorrow we start pruning Butterdragon.

More and more people are hearing about Match.

On Thursday, I had the pleasure to sit down with Alder of the popular wine blog Vinography.com and share a bottle of our 2002 Butterdragon Hill and a few of our stories. Check out the story and tasting notes on Vinography and while you’re there, bookmark that site. There are so many valuable and entertaining entries, you may find yourself checking it daily.