WHAT’S NEW . . . as of 1/25/12
BBC delivery 1/27/12—order by
midnight 1/26/12 to get delivery Friday
Bung
it in the Boot
of your Car
delivery to Puget Sound area, free delivery
Welcome
back Under 10 Buck Red (Port Paradiso Sold Out)!
It’s back and better than ever, futures available at <$8
Red Wine
& Chocolate Weekend
Three
chocolate bites with wine February 18, 19, 20 (Saturday–Monday)
Rattlesnake
Hills Wine Trail and Wine Yakima Valley
Now you get benefits from both marketing
groups in our valley
Words
from the Vineyard
Snow and pruning
and pruning in the snow
If the sun seems to be lacking where you
live, come to where we live.
BBC delivery 1/27/12—order by midnight 1/26/12 to get
delivery Friday
Bung it in the Boot of your Car delivery to Puget Sound area, free delivery
This is our usual
mountain to Mohammed — over the mountains and through the snow and the woods — Bung it in the Boot of your Car
(BBC) delivery program. We will be delivering to Bothell,
West Seattle, Federal Way, and
Pioneer Square on Friday, January
27, and your house! All of the details are at the very end above the
order form. Order by midnight,
Thursday, January 26 to get delivery on Friday.
Yes, that is
tomorrow. We apologize for the late notice. To make it up to you, we will
either deliver your wine to your house for free or send it to you via FedEx for
free in a few days.
Order
at your leisure to get a later delivery option.
What should you
know before you fill out the order form (if you don’t want
to read the rest of the newsletter)?
Under 10 Buck Red
is back and available one time only as futures for $7.99 a bottle at case
quantities ($95.88 for the case). Cabernet
Sauvignon joins Rosé Paradiso as our wine club, passport, and premier pass
specials. They are 30% off by the bottle (CS $21, RP $9.80) and 50% off by the
case (CS $15, RP $7).
Welcome back Under 10 Buck Red (Port Paradiso
Sold Out)!
It’s
back and better than ever, futures available at <$8
Let’s start with
the back label information (same as the previous vintage actually):
Keep it simple, keep it good, keep it inexpensive. Monday through
Thursday wine. The wine to open for hollow-legged
neighbors. Wine for meat loaf, frozen pizza,
spaghetti, beans and rice, everyday stuff.
Start with a big tank of simple wine from
lower-cost grapes. Blend in some of the other bits around the winery that add
“nice” till we all say, “Yummm!”
At less than a couple of bucks a glass, this
bottle keeps your daily glass reasonable and good.
And now let’s see
what the winemaker/grower thinks:
Under 10 Buck Red, <$10Red, is back (for a few months).
It's not a big batch, but a tasty one. 2010 <$10Red is Sangiovese. Since we doubled our planting, we are finally
getting close (two more years!?) to meeting demand.
This 230 case batch is maybe a six-month supply. The 2011 batch is a
little smaller :(
So here is your first crack at it. Order a case before it is
officially released at Red Wine & Chocolate and it will be the Under $8 Red. $7.99 instead of $9.99 or
regular $8.49 case price. It won't be offered again at <$8. If you
are King, Pierce, Yakima, or Kittitas counties, we will deliver a case by April
1st, no charge, no April Fools. Other areas call and we will see what we can
do. We will be going to Spokane late February for a benefit dinner. Tri Cities
is easy too.
Remember, we guarantee our wine.
If you decide it's not your wine, we will happily take it back.
So, what's it like? (Let me go find a bottle, it's
lunchtime.) In a word, yummy.
Red cherry fruit, bright acidity, light bodied. Lovely with pork roast and cambozola. Like most young reds, it benefits from
aeration. I'll have it tonight with Daddy's Mac-N-Cheese.
Just tried it as Lazy Sangria, 50/50 with 7Up. Works OK on a snowy day,
will be great on an 85 degree day.
I really like how it is turning out. Past <$10 have been a little
too light bodied for my taste.
If I changed anything it would be to make it Paradisos Red, but can't
afford to sell Paradisos Red at this price! :) And, oh yeah, we are making some
of that too!
OK, now I've had it with Chili, Mac-N-Cheese, Chips, and several
cheeses. It passes muster. Hmm, how about hot spiced wine? Well with some
pumpkin pie spice and brown sugar it's a good reward for the two hours of snow
shoveling and plowing this morning!
Now
that we have you all excited about our Under
10 Buck Red coming back, we have another surprise, Under 10 Buck White! Riesling and Semillon play well together. We
blend them to back our Angelica SR, a sweet dessert wine. But now we have a
little more production from our young vineyard. This means we can start our
production of an affordable dry white table wine based on two of Washington's
best cultivars. The goal—a flavorful medium-bodied white wine
to go with a chicken in every pot. To debut Summer
2012.
We
are sold out of our Port Paradiso (taking the last case or two to a benefit for
Cancer Patient Care up in Spokane). Only a case or two of 2008 Angelica MRS left, then on to the 2009 vintage.
Red Wine & Chocolate
Weekend
Three
chocolate bites with three wines February 18, 19, 20 (Saturday–Monday)
We
will offer an eight-course meal for Red Wine & Chocolate. Nothing
elaborate, just eight tiny bites of food—three include chocolate, two savory, one sweet—to go with our eight different wines. Sip,
Sip, Bite, Sip!
We
start off with a dab of Mushroom Paté and our Rosé Paradiso,
followed by a sliver of Brie cheese for the Oyster White, and a bit of Sushi Rice as an accompaniment to our Riesling.
Next
are our reds—with the new release of our Under
10 Buck Red we are serving Teeny Tiny Tacos with a Chocolate Molé sauce. Paradisos
Red is our pizza wine; we would love to have pizza, but it just doesn't
seem to work as a small-bite option, who can eat just
one bite? So instead, we have Beans in a Chocolate Adobo Sauce. This is
followed by our ever famous Bleu Cheese Dip with the Cabernet Sauvignon.
And
now we are ready for dessert, two of them! With our Zort we have Truffles Paradisos , handmade French-style chocolate truffles
flavored with Grains of Paradise and raspberries (these are concocted by our
friends Aaron and Karl at Intrigue Chocolates). We
suggest you melt this truffle in your mouth rather than bite. Last, but not
least, is our Angelica MRS. We have
a skosh of pumpkin custard to go with that.
We
know it is hard to choose which wineries to visit, we hope you come to visit
us. Passport and Premier Pass holders receive 10% off your purchase of two or
more bottles; 30% off bottles and 50% off case purchase on selected wines.
Anyone
who has been to visit us in the past year or so might find this description
familiar. Yes, it is similar to what we do every day of the year. The special
truffles and the teeny tiny tacos are special for this event.
We
are also selling bracelets to help raise money for an International Autism Research
and Treatment Center to be built. More information is available at beadingtobeatautism.org. The
bracelets are simple, cute, and inexpensive ($3 each).
We
continue to raise money for the 1 Starfish organization
(to help kids in Nicaragua to go to school). Twenty percent of our tasting fees
go to this group. More information about this is available at 1starfish.org. We
charge a $5 tasting fee to people in our tasting room who do not buy a bottle
or two of wine. Fortunately for us, we don’t need to charge tasting fees very
often. But it means that we have raised less money for 1 Starfish than we
usually do. All ideas heard for free!
Rattlesnake Hills Wine
Trail and Wine Yakima Valley
Now you—and we—get
benefits from both marketing groups in our valley
With
the challenge of the economy the last few years, we have seen fewer faces in
our tasting room. Those of you that come visit us usually buy anywhere from a
little to a lot of wine. For that we are very grateful. We do need to figure
out a way to get more people to come see us. With that in mind, we have decided
to join a second trade marketing group. This is only important to you if you
are someone who decides to get the Premier Pass from Wine Yakima Valley for
special event weekends. For the past few years, we haven’t honored these
passes. But now we honor both these passes and the Rattlesnake Hills Wine Trail
Passports.
What
is the difference, you ask? The WYV Premier Passes are only good the few days
of the event (usually a weekend). The RHWT Passports are good forever, but like
a coupon, can only be used once at each winery. It is up to you (looking at
both organizational websites) to decide which one, if either, you decide to
purchase. Both are available online and the RHWT passports are also available
at all of the RHWT wineries. Here are the two websites: Rattlesnake Hills
Wine Trail and Wine Yakima Valley.
Words from the
Vineyard (written 1/19/12)
Snow and pruning
and pruning in the snow
The first winter storm has arrived. Snowing like the dickens!
Usually by mid January we have had a few light snows that sometimes
last long enough to get out the sleds, but this winter we have only seen a few
flakes before today. Nothing to shovel or sweep.
This snow is enough to get out the cross-country skis and test my
knees and practice shoveling and sweeping and clearing roads with the tractor.
Mild weather so far this winter, no cold snaps. Plants have not had
any cold damage. I haven't had to bring the rosemary in out of the cold. After
last winter's severe damage it would be nice to get a mild year and a
"full crop."
A full crop would be more than double 2011's crop of 22,653 pounds of
grapes and exceed our storage capacity. Finally!
Snip Snip Snip Snip the prelude
to Sip Sip
I'm taking a storm break from pruning. The snow makes it wet and cold
and because it snows so seldom, I get snow days off.
I prune five to six hours a day almost every day, Sundays too, from
Thanksgiving in Wine Country to Spring Barrel Tasting. I prune every vine, it is
the first of at least four times I touch each vine.
I am 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) down and 28,000 feet (8,600 meters) to
go. Five and a half more miles, 100,000 more snips.
As soon as the snow falls off the branches it's back to it. Semillon next.
I start with Riesling, the most cold hardy,
and finish with Zinfandel, because it is the end of the alphabet. No, not
really, I end with Zinfandel because it is the most tender.
We still have a long time for the possibility of a sub-zero cold front
and winter kill, can only hope it won't happen.
Lots of people look
to Yelp to help decide where to go wine touring. Here
is how to find us there: yelp.com/biz/paradisos-del-sol-winery-zillah. Google Places
(see QR code to the left) is another place to look around. One of these days we
will put reviews up on our web site along with new photos. It’s still on that
To Do list.
Other ways of
getting in touch with us are facebook.com/ParadisosdelSol and twitter.com/ParadisosdelSol.
Thank you for
continuing to buy wine from us. Give us a call if you don’t want to deal with
the order form, we are happy to do whatever it takes to continue to get our
wine to you. If you didn’t keep drinking our wine, we couldn’t keep doing what
we love (which also includes drinking our wine). So, as usual, we raise our
glasses to you and hope that you do the same to us!
Cheers!
Paul & Barbara
COME TASTE PARADISE!
Paradisos
del Sol Winery
www.paradisosdelsol.com
3230 Highland Drive
Zillah, WA 98953
509.829.9000
Updated
1/25/12