We’ll be celebrating 5 years of WineAndCheeseFriday all month long! We’ve tasted a lot of wines along the way (see the comprehensive list in our slideshow entry) and have compiled our top 5 wines each. As you can imagine this was a task but it’s always fun to go back and reread some of this older entries! Also it’s a great way to identify those wines that we should look for again.
Next task up for Sol Rouge is fixing the vineyard netting. We visited the Sol Rouge Vineyard last year in order to help at the beginning of harvest (http://mferraro73.tumblr.com/post/127822254393/our-day-working-in-the-vineyard-at-solrouge-neil) and that was our introduction to vineyard netting. The purpose of the netting is to cover the vines while they have fruit in order to prevent the birds from eating the grapes. Instead of taking the netting down during the harvest, we bundled it and tied it to the posts up and out of the way of the harvesters.
Our first act for the Sol Rouge Vineyard and Winery was wine bottling! While Maria was working in the wine industry in San Francisco, she helped with this job a few times, but this would be Neil’s first time bottling. It always proves to be a VERY LONG DAY, but we love those new wine experiences.
We arrived to the Sol Rouge Vineyard last night. We are excited about all the wine opportunities that this experience will provide! We are already scheduled to help bottle the wine on Monday morning so stay tuned for an entry regarding that. There will also be tasks to be done in the vineyard which Maria is super excited about.
Neil and I not only like to drink wine, but also we love to be around the grapes before they turn into wine. Whenever we get the chance, we visit vineyards. Since harvest happens late summer to early fall, we called our friend who owns a vineyard to see when harvest might begin. Well we were in luck, because it was about to start in a few days.
Over Labor Day weekend, Neil and I visited Lake County as a work field trip. We were invited out to Sol Rouge (http://solrouge.com/) in order to see the estate vineyard that produces some of the wine I sell. To those of you who live here in the city, this trip was able to happen because the Bay Bridge was closed (http://baybridgeinfo.org/closure), and our winery on Treasure Island was not accessible to the public.