The crush pad is finally coming together. The press has been delivered and the hoist is in place.

We have now received most of our tanks and we should have them all in within one week. Things are now coming together rather quickly. Still on time for a second half of August completion.

Another picture of the building. We are looking good, the walls are closing and the tanks are almost all in. Completiong date should be around August 23rd.

This week we had a company gathering at our offices in Portland. I had a speech ready for the occasion but did not find the right time (the courage) to give it. Below is a copy of the speech I never gave:

Dear friends,

Thank you for coming today.

We have many key partners in this room today, growers, attorneys, suppliers, designers, landlords. Please go around and introduce yourself to the broader pacific rim family.

A year ago, we had the idea of creating a new wine brand anchored on the successful Pacific Rim Dry Riesling from Bonny Doon in California. We wanted to use this opportunity to create the first Riesling based winery in the US and claim this varietal as our own. At that time, we only had a product made mainly from Washington, California and German grapes, we had no real identity, no company, no staff, no winery, just 6 individuals that believed in this vision and an owner, Randall Grahm, that believed in us and in our concept.

During the first few months of our project we had to live a double life, fulfilling our obligations at Bonny Doon while laying the foundation for Pacific Rim. The foundation work involved identifying a place in the Northwest to move our offices, finding partners to build a winery somewhere in Eastern WA, creating a corporate entity, revamping our package to bring a focused identity to the new brand and making a lot of wine in the forgotten city of King City, California. By the end of December 06, we had successfully replaced ourselves at Bonny Doon, found our office space in Portland, we had entered an agreement with the Den Hoed brothers to build and manage our winery in West Richland, we had created a new package and a brand identity, we had incorporated our new company in the state of WA and we had moved the corporate team from Santa Cruz to Portland.

Now that was the easy part. In January and February 06, our concept and our team were really tested hard. No one in the market place understood what we were doing and as a result we were not achieving our sales plans. Also the team lacked cohesion as we were all working from home (we used my basement as our meeting room) and we were still learning how to work with an owner 1,000 miles away. It was a very stressful time where all of us wondered if this would really fly. But we did not give up, we’ve just put our boxing gloves and started to punch away. And we’ve got results, We’ve moved into our offices in May, we got the word out and got national press coverage recognizing our efforts, we went on the road and met our distributors and sales partners, one at a time, feeding them the vision, we got the winery off the ground and secured grape contracts, and we were finally spun off Bonny Doon in June and worked since then on establishing licenses to sell our wines in every state.

Today, we are on our way to achieve our plans. The winery is almost completed, we have recruited a top notch staff in Eastern WA, our grape supply is secured and of high quality, we have turned around our sales and we are turning a profit, the media and the public are interested in our story and our wines and most rewarding of all, our competition is looking at us with worried faces.

We are not done though. We have great challenges ahead. We have to align our sales with the production tool that we have put in place, we have to achieve our desired goal of making Pacific Rim the Riesling reference in the country, we have to refine our company culture and we have much work to do to achieve our sustainability goals.

I had no clue that this enterprise would be so tough and so demanding. I also have never experienced such a feeling of pride and humility. I am proud of what we have done and I am so humble and grateful because this adventure could not have been successful without the team here and without your support.

Thank you for believing in Pacific Rim,

Riesling rules.

Well, that is it. We have almost all the walls up, the tanks are moving in, the crush pad is poured, the press should be there shortly. All is coming together. We should be about 6 weeks away from completion and on time for harvest!!

Superb dinner at Boka last Wednesday. Highly, highly recommended. The chef, Giuseppe Tentori (A Charlie Trotter’s alumni), is quite a genius. The fusion food type worked very well with Riesling as one might expect. Check this menu: Stuffed squid on a bed of tapioca in the squid’s ink, golden beet salad on a red beet coulis with yuzu and hickory bacon, veal cheek with homemade grainy mustard, and on and on… Every plate was delicious and beautiful. You have to stop at Boka if you are in Chicago, believe me, you will remember what awesome fusion food is.

Two places to add to this list of great restaurant. The first one is the famous Frontera Grill. I went there yesterday for a Margarita and some topes. The ambiance is great and the topes/margarita combo was awesome. This is one great restaurant for sure.

The other restaurant that is definitely worth mentioning is Vong’s Thai Kitchen. I had a very delicious dinner there. This is not a very hard core Thai, many European influences in the cooking. This type of fusion food works very well with our wines, so it was a memorable event. The dinner was organized in conjunction with Sam’s, the famous Chicago wine retailer.

Walulla vineyard is located right at the mouth of the Walulla gap on an impressive cliff. This vineyard hosts our Biodynamic Riesling, about 140 acres in total. At an elevation of about 1,200 feet the vineyard overlooks the Columbia River which runs 800 feet below one mile South East. The cliff is quite breathtaking and can be treacherous. Bill Den Hoed told me that the day before my visit someone went over the cliff with an ATV after losing control of the speedy machine. The ATV went down 800 feet and became one with the moon like landscape by the river shore. The driver saved her life by jumping before going over the cliff. Bill told me in a funny sort of way: “The chick’s all right but the four wheeler is toast”…Bill and Andy have so many good stories about the cliff and the humans that interact with it; I love every single one of them.

The vineyard is at the image of the landscape, breathtaking and somewhat insane. We’ve done some pretty advanced viticulture designs there. First the density is very high (about 1,600 vines/acre), second it is Biodynamicly farmed, third the trellis is very special (sort of a raised lira with collapsible trellis for machine harvesting) and lastly we are experimenting with buried drip irrigation. We also have 4 clones from Germany in this vineyard.

2007 will be our first commercial harvest out of Walulla. We are planning on making a single vineyard wine with those grapes and it will be probably fermented entirely with native yeast that comes on the grapes’ skins. Be ready for a very, very interesting and distinctive Riesling from Walulla in Spring 2008!