If you haven’t submitted your Bruliam Brigade picture yet, what are you waiting for?  And if you’ve already sent one in but lost the monthly contest, you need to scrape your ego back up off the floor and send us some new pictures.  We’ll be doing this every month for the foreseeable future, so there are lots of chances to win!

And for those of you who have signed up to receive our e-mails (or are reading this for the first time) and are wondering why you don’t have a Brigade shirt yet, you need to click here and fill out the form to register for the Brigade and receive a free t-shirt.

To vote all you need to do is: (1) click on the bullet next to the person’s name and (2) click the big VOTE button at the bottom of the poll. The poll will instantly updat
e the tally and show you the most current results.  If the system works properly, you will only be able to vote once.  But, you can forward the link or this e-mail to as many people as you want to get them to vote for you.

The poll will only be open for voting until 8am on Tuesday July 7th so get voting!

If you can’t see the poll or vote properly through the e-mail, please CLICK HERE and you can vote on the website.

And what a year it has been! 

To celebrate we’re going to take a couple weeks off from our regular publishing schedule.  While we’re gone, make sure to vote in our month-end Brigade picture contest and look for new posts starting the week of July 13^th.

Before we go, we wanted to reminisce about some of the highlights of this past year.  If you’re a newer member of the family, this will catch you up on our shenanigans.  And if you’ve been following us since the beginning, hopefully this will be a fun walk down memory lane.

First up, some of our favorite posts from the past year:

Behind the Bruliam Curtain – we reveal for the first time how we plan to pull this off.

How Proper is Your Pinot – one of our most popular posts, generating a ton of Google traffic for the site.  I guess we’re not the only ones confused on whether to capitalize wine varietals.

Salmon with Pinot Sauce and Pocket Pinot Chicken.  Kerith put up a number of great cooking videos this year, but the Salmon with Pinot Sauce and the Pocket Pinot Chicken  recipes were the most widely read and used by readers.

It’s A Small World (After All) – we recount how we were charmed by a dunce-wearing Italian gnome twice in one weekend.

Slow Down and Wait For Me! – Kerith magically ties together toddler tantrums and fermentation.

If You Smell Smoke, It Must Be a Campfire – few posts elicited as much response as Kerith’s post about her hatred of camping (specifically the “sh*t in a box” part) and how it reminded her of our smoke-tainted grapes.

Take The Cannoli – your unimpeachable hosts make lemonade out of lemons by “recycling” a cast-out case of wine.

Get A Job – Kerith confronts a career crisis brought about by our 5-year old.

Bruliam Wine Tasting Video – we get our very first sample of our Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir.  Also check out the later Blending video from the same wine.

Under My Uccelliera, -era, -era – we recount our adventures in Italy that led to a 97-point Wine Spectator score and an unusual baby name.

Drinking Holy Water – religious symbology reveals unfair bias against Jewish winemakers.

Next, a shout out to the Brigade:

If you haven’t checked out the line-up of Brigade pictures lately, click here for a refresher.

In the past year we’ve had submissions from all over North America as well as pictures from Asia (Thailand and Vietnam), South America (Brazil), Europe (Germany, Italy, and even underwater in Spain), Africa (Zambia), and Australia.

But, we’re greedy and we still need more!  If you have a Bruliam shirt, snap a picture and send it in.  If you haven’t gotten your shirt yet, complete the form here and we’ll get you one ASAP.

A word on the charitable aspects of Bruliam Wines:

We decided early on to donate 100% of the profits from this venture to charity.  You can see some of the charities we already support through our foundation here. 

As we’ve waited for wine to sell to generate those profits, we’ve been giving away $250 monthly charity prizes to winners of our Brigade picture contests.  By the end of June we’ll have given away a total of $2,500 to a number of great charities picked by our Brigade members.  You can see them those charities by scrolling through the Brigade page.  We’re thrilled to have partnered with you to support such great causes over the past year and we encourage you to continue sending in pictures for more chances to win money for your favorite charity.

So, what’s next?

We’ll be bottling our 2008 Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir in August and our 2008 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir in October. 

You may have noticed that we made some changes to our website by adding the Our Wines tab to highlight our two 2008 pinots.  We plan to overhaul that page over the summer so that we can actually start accepting pre-orders for the wines (we’ll firm up the dates after bottling, but the deliveries will roughly be scheduled for late 2009 / early 2010).

Our 2009 growing season is already in full swing.  When we hit September, it’s going to be even busier than last year with grapes from three vineyards to sort, ferment, and press.  Should be a lot of fun – and, just like last year, we’ll be extending an open invitation to all Brigade members to come join us at the winery for some messy manual labor (and wine tasting).

A parting favor:

With wine sales looming on the horizon, we need your help spreading the word about Bruliam Wines.  If you’ve enjoyed following our story so far, why not share us with friends?  Forward this e-mail to anyone you know who you think may want to join in the fun or simply send them the link below so that they can sign up to start receiving our e-mail updates:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=BruliamWines&loc=en_US

Kerith and I want to thank you all for your support an encouragement over the past year.  We’re looking forward to sharing the next stage of our adventure with you.

-Brian

Many thanks to Brigade members Anna and Derrick for these great shots from Tug Hill, NY.  According to a little web research about Tug Hill:

Tug Hill is a 2,100 square mile, rural and remote region of New York State located between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks. The region is heavily forested and receives the heaviest snowfall in the eastern United States. The headwaters of several major rivers spring from the region’s core forests. The region consists of 41 towns (containing 21 villages) in portions of Jefferson, Lewis, Oneida, and Oswego counties. With just over 100,000 people, about 50 people per square mile, one of Tug Hill’s most notable characteristics is its relative lack of people

While there may be a lack of people, there do seem to be a whole lot of windmills.  And Bruliam Brigade members!!

Even Mr. Kramer admits, “Not once did any of us exclaim over the sheer pleasure of what we were tasting.  Not once did we deal with wine as something approaching ‘normality.’”  That sounds like a very sad party to me.  At Bruliam, we preach that wine should be special but never so precious that you fear drinking it.  Wine should be a fully integrated component of life and food and family, celebrating the daily, simple pleasures derived from that concoction.  Yes, Mr. Kramer, it is imperative that we “make wine a little less exceptional…and a bit more about life itself.”  Perhaps as wine royalty, Mr. Kramer was privy to the classified copy we wrote for the back of our wine labels, as our own verbiage supports those very same virtues.  We want to shout, “Do open our wine tonight and drink it heartily!”  Toast your day and allow our juice to raise the bar on last night’s leftovers.  And it was with this tingly feeling of rhapsodic wine gospel, consecrating the triumph of my personal wine philosophy that I embarked on my kids’ end-of-the-year school carnival.

And there, nestled between the Frisbee spin art station and the rubber duckie fishing booth, dear Brigade, I jumped the shark.  Dear Bacchus, spite my name and spoil my wine for I have committed hypocrisy of ferocious scale.  Even the powerful St. Urban – my favorite Catholic patron saint- cannot undo my horrors.  When an unassuming mommy friend inquired after the state of the Bruliam vino, I launched into a passionate, rapturous treatise on numerical clones, cranberry nuances, flavor profiles and mouth feel.  I used words like “restrained” and “brawny” and “austere” and “elegant.”  I gave discourse to the distinction between a jammy blackberry tinge a bright red fruit undertone.  And oh God help me for I was utterly clueless and misread every social cue.  I was not silenced until she blurted out (and I am not making this up), “That is beyond me; just give me a good margarita with lime.”  Gulp.  I was quiet.  In my maniacal fervor, I marched right into the Member’s Only Wine Geek Club, oblivious that my companion was uninitiated.  So dear Brigade, please forgive my frenzied musings on yeast strains, and just drink the wine!

We’ve posted the Doctor’s Vineyard tasting / blending video below. If you can’t see the video, please click here.

Unlike the Anderson Valley, there was an abundance of fruit on the nose of the Doctor’s wine.  So much so, in fact, that we felt we had to dial it back and balance it out in order to arrive at the perfect spot for this wine.

We originally barreled the Doctor’s as a blend of 75% 115 clone and 25% calera clone.  During our blending session, we also added in some 667, 2A, and swan clone to make a wine that we truly love. 

We left the winery with a half bottle of each of our newly blended wines and enjoyed them both immensely over dinner that evening.  We can’t wait to see how they further develop in barrel over the next two months.  We now expect to bottle the Doctor’s Vineyard in August and the Anderson Valley in October or November.  This puts us on track for a late 2009 / early 2010 release date for both wines.

Many thanks to Brigade member Paula S. who sent us this great picture with her caddy Neville at the Sandals Golf Course in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.  Paula tells us that she spent her time there trying to convince the locals to give up the Red Stripe for fine wine, but met with too much resistance.

Paula owns the U.K. based internet wine merchant Ultimate Wine Company and writes The Nose Knows wine blog.  If she wins the $250, she’s already designated ClassicFM Music Makers, which promotes music therapy and music eduction for children, the eldery, and the disabled.

The 2008 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir represents a subtle and more refined approach to pinot noir.  It presents a nose of cranberries and other red fruit with a smooth structure and just a hint of oak. The 2008 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir is an ideal pair for anything from Perfect Salmon to Pinot Pocket Chicken.

The grapes for this wine were hand-harvested on October 2, 2008.  We hand-sorted the grapes on October 3, 2008 (see video).  After a 5-day cold soak and a 7-day fermentation period, we pressed on October 14, 2008 using 100% free run and no press fractions.  We barreled the wine as 100% 115 clone in medium toast 33% new French oak from Francois Freres.  On June 8, 2009, we conducted our first blending session, adding in clones 777 and Pommard (see video).

The 2008 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir is scheduled to be bottled in October 2009 and will be available for delivered in late 2009 / early 2010.

The 2008 Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir  is a big, bold pinot and a true reflection of the terroir of the Santa Lucia Highlands.  With a nose of dark fruit and subtle leather and all-spice undertones, the wine is a ideal pair for anything from delicious Pinot Pizza to hearty Lamb Stew.

The grapes for this wine were hand-harvested on September 8, 2008.  We hand-sorted the grapes on September 9, 2008 (see video).  After a 5-day cold soak and a 7-day fermentation period, we pressed on September 21, 2008 using 70% free run and 30% press fractions (see video).  We barreled the wine as a blend of 75% 115 clone and 25% calera clone in medium toast 50% new French oak from Remond.  On June 8, 2009, we conducted our first blending session, adding in clones 667, 2A, and Swan (see video).

The 2008 Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir is scheduled to be bottled in August 2009 and will be available for deliveries in late 2009 / early 2010.

The Anderson Valley tasting/blending video is below. Watch out for the Doctor’s Vineyard tasting/blending video next week.

If you can’t see the video below, please click here to watch it (note that it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to load after you press play – but we promise it is worth the wait).

The good news is that the intervention we had to take with the wine worked.  The smoky overtones are gone and there is now a very nice cranberry nose on the wine.  But, as a stand-alone, it is a very simple wine.

So, we spent about an hour trying out different clones and adding them in at different ratios to come up with a wine that we really love.  Our basic wine is 100% of the 115 clone.  In the end we blended in 10% of the 777 clone and 5% of the pommard clone.  This added both structure and greater fruit to the wine.  What we tasted at the end was exactly what we were shooting for with the Anderson Valley pinot – a lighter, more restrained and almost Burgundian wine.  We’ve very excited!

Next up is a couple more months in the barrel to let the new blend integrate fully.  Then we’ll be back in late August to taste it again and see if any more blending is necessary.