Bottling Day

I'll be very honest, I was on the verge or a major meltdown all week long because Paul had to be at the day job today and we were scheduled to bottle 3 lots of wine.



I wasn't melting down over him not being there, it was my own anxiety about "what if something, anything, goes wrong". The biggest item of contention was getting there by 7:45 a.m. For one, I'm never on time and I almost always get lost when I'm on my own, ok, that's an exaggeration, I mostly do ok, but still, it's a long windy road from home to Big Basin and I wasn't looking forward to a solo ride.



As the sun was coming up and the sky was a pretty pinkish hue, I was still grumbly and cursing but trying to talk myself out of the anxiety attack that I was on the verge of. I was trying to put a happy spin on being up a such an early hour. For example, the only other time I get up and go mobile that early is if we're going on vacation and we have an early flight. So there, that cheered me up, I talked myself into believing I was headed to a mini-day vacation, afterall, this isn't really hard work and it still beats a traditional day job.



The drive was fine, and I only got stuck behind a couple of slow moving vehicles twice, not long enough to make me late.



I did manage to arrive on time (woohoo!), my crew showed up just after me and we started the line around 8:30. The experience compared to the last two times was about a million percent better. Holy moly, let me tell you. Maybe it takes three times of doing it, or maybe we finally got a guy that knows how to run the line. Yep, guy. One of them.



The last two nightmare bottlings with a billion delays had 3 guys running the line, plus our help inside the truck.



Anyway, my apologies for not taking a single photo, I didn't have Pauls slick iphone and didn't remember to grab my own camera this morning.



In all we processed about 290 cases of wine today. Now in bottle are the 2007 Pinot Noir Santa Cruz Mountains, 2007 Haut Tubee Red Wine, and the 2007 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah wines.



I headed down the mountain around 1p.m., got some yahoo poophead in a red sports car right up my rear bumper on the windy road for just a short while (until I could find a reasonable turnout) and he zoomed off ahead of me. Mind you, I drive fast and aggressive when it's just me in the car, but I wasn't in a little zippy sportster so I minded my own business and kept a steady beat. I caught up to him once, he was stuck behind a pick up truck hauling trash bins, then he over took him too. Zoom. Whoosh. Zip. Gone.



At the crossroads, I got onto highway 17, headed south, and was crawling along at the pathetically slow speed of 55 (cruise control set. boring.) and I get just to the bottom of the hill, make that first bend in Los Gatos and there he was. The Sucker got nailed by a motorcycle cop.



I waved.



It was a great bottling day.