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Apple seemed to really like my Hawk Hill Vineyard label!

I licensed this image from Getty Images two years before Apple bought it as an icon for the "Mail" feature on the Apple toolbar -- could they have fallen in love with the Comfort Pinot Noir label?!?

Winemaker's Notes for 2004 Hawk Hill Vineyard bottling

45 cases produced

This famous fruit was accessed with the help of my friend Ken Freeman and Charlie Chenoweth, who manages Hawk Hill Vineyard.   Dr. Paul Michaelczec, who owns Hawk Hill, is devoted to his vines and fine wine -- I'm grateful to have been able to buy a ton of fruit from him.

1,000 lbs of the fruit is Pommard clone #4; the other 1,000 lbs is Dijon clone 115.

The whole ton came in at the same time, on September 14, 2004, and I had a big rental truck in the vineyard that brought both containers back to San Francisco at once -- what a luxury!  Chet Zimmer and Michael Birch were at the winery to meet the truck and we worked through all 2,000 lbs of fruit in two hours, destemming 66% of both and layering the other 1/3rd throughout the tanks "whole-cluster".  After a six-day cold soak, they were innocuated with Ausmerhausen yeast.   This fermentation went a bit faster (probably because it was the second in the winery that year),only six days from start to finish, and then Marissa and I pressed (getting our biggest yield ever) and started malo.

The Dijon 115 was ciphoned to the Francois Freres barrel that had been used for the prior two vintages (the last was the 2003 MasRas Dijon 667).   The Pommard 4 was ciphoned to a new Rousseau Troncais, Med+.

ETS Chemistry panel on 8/7/05:

Dijon 115:

ph: 3.71, TA: .60, Free SO2: 23, Malic: complete, Alcohol: 14.2

Pommard 4:

ph: 3.75, TA: .63, Free SO2: 27, Malic: complete, Alcohol: 14.7

The same bottling team that worked the Carneros bottling did this Russian River bottling -- we got all 90 cases done in about 7 hours!