Welcome to the Covered Bridge Cellars blog! This is our first post and we're glad that you're reading it. We are a husband and wife team that has partnered with Crushpad to create and build a portfolio of kick ass luxury wine brands. As industry rookies, this is a new endeavor for us and one we're really excited about. We plan to chronicle our story as it unfolds, sharing with you the good, the bad, and the ugly.
For our inaugural vintage wines we’re making a barrel of Pinot Noir from the Hein Family Vineyard in Anderson Valley and a barrel of Chardonnay from the Alder Springs Vineyard in northern Mendocino--all in, a whopping 50 cases. We've already hit a significant milestone with these wines, as they are now undergoing primary fermentation. The Alder Springs has been at it a few weeks, while the Hein hit the bin a few days ago. We're "going native" with the Hein, so the next week or so should be very interesting. There is always a risk that something goes awry, but what's a new start-up without a little danger and excitement? We provide real-time access to our fermentation graphs here on the blog, click here to check it out.
On the business end of things, we just gave our legal folks the OK to start the trademark registration process for the first brand of the Covered Bridge Cellars portfolio. The label is currently being refined and perfected by our talented Crushpad graphic artist, KC Skinner. We're not quite ready to reveal the name of it to you yet, but stay tuned, as it could be any day now!
At this point we are roughly a year away from having any bottled wine to sell and our mailing list has a subscriber count of zero. Actually, that is not true, our friend Phil did a "beta test" of the form recently and became Charter Member numero uno. He might not realize that, but that's OK. If you're reading this and are simply dying to know if the form works, click here and enter your information to "test" it for us.... : )
We have set a goal of adding 10 new Charter Members to our list over the next two weeks so we'll see how the shameless plug above actually works out!
A quick tour of the blog: Expect the header graphic to change frequently as we try and keep things fresh. Our CB insignia could use a little professional refining, but it works for now. If you have some good catch phrases or slogans we're all ears too. Everything on the sidebar is pretty self explanatory, the FAQ and Our Story links will give you more info about who we are and what the heck we're doing, so we invite you to check those out. The Links section to the left is a quick first cut, so if you want a blog or site to be added drop us an email. The Blog Extras section is also a work in progress, at this point you can find the Fermentation Graphs, the Vineyard updates, a link to some cool PDF documents, and some other stuff. Subscribing to the blog is simple, you can get our feed via email, through RSS, or by manually entering our feed address into your reader:
feeds.coveredbridgecellars.com/thecbcblog
Finally, everything here should "work", but if you find something that is awry let us know. And if anyone can come up with an easy solution to get the thin divider line to the left to go to the bottom of the page there will be a free bottle of wine for you when it's released--Hein or Alder Springs, your choice.
While the blog is about our business, we'll also devote space to other relevant topics such as our wine-related travels, favorite recipes, our experiences as wine consumers, the East Coast wine industry, and our home winemaking exploits. We'll be posting regularly, so please keep checking back in with us. We expect this journey to be quite a ride and wouldn't want you to miss any of it!
Casey & Jeremy
