Freaking Out Together

What what??? Only 2 more days left of January 2015? So much has been and is going on for Smith Story Wine Cellars this first month of the New Year!  A little insight to running your own winery for the first time...IT DOES NOT SLOW DOWN AFTER HARVEST ENDS! The first of the year has been crazy wearing so many hats, shoes and gloves...all while Eric broke his ankle (saving a baby seal), Ali lost her car-keys (all of them) for over a week (she found them in a pocket of course!) and Lord Sandwich came down with a case of the fleas (thank you Russian River Banks!).  Freaking out - ohh yeah, but every day our to-do list grows, we are able to check major items off.  We'll see our families soon  - we hope...oh and start calling all our friends to let them know we are ready to mingle again!

We hardly know where to begin with this post - other than to

say - GET READY FOR OUR FIRST RELEASE NEXT MONTH EVERYONE!!

Yes yes, ALL-CAPS is extreme, but's it's been extremely non-stop since New Years Day.  First time to make decisions on packaging for each wine - glass, label design, label paper, colors of the capsule, type of corks to use, screw-cap colors, boxes, where to warehouse, who to sell our wines to...it's ALL HAPPENING. The ecommerce area of the website is in beta-testing right now - we're going live soon!  All this while our Harvest 2015 vineyard partners are lining up, man we are so excited to tell you all about this soon.

How can you HELP us?  Please take a moment to sign-up for our mailing list  - we are sending out our first official winery email offering within days. Yikes - days away from showing off our new Harvest 2014 Babies to the world.  Oh and we've been meeting folks for barrel tastings at the winery...don't hesitate to contact us for a special "garagiste winery" tasting in the Russian River Valley with us!

A nerve racking, hard as hell, insanely awesome time of our lives going on...thank you for following and being a part of Our Story too.

Most of all, we are so glad to have each other through this beginning chapter of our new winery!

This is Our Story,

Eric & Ali

A little piece of peace.

Today we awake to sounds down the hill of kids playing soccer and church bell chimes from The Mission in San Rafael.  It's crazy to think that our first Smith Story Wine Cellars harvest is coming to a close already.  Tonight we pick our last 2 tons of Pinot Noir and we're still waiting on 4 tons of Sémillon to ripen way up on top of the Sonoma Mountain AVA.

The past 2 weeks have been INCREDIBLE.  Thank you and to each and everyone of our Backers who supported us on Kickstarter.com, we reached our goal of $25,000 on Labor Day.  This is going to pay a nice chunk towards our grape-grower contracts!  We were able to update the last few weeks with numerous photos here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/837539083/smith-story-wine-cellars/posts 

We gained so much more than the Kickstarter amount, tons of new mailing list sign-ups and record breaking web traffic hits will help us to continue telling Our Story to the world. THANK YOU.  Next...we are looking forward to finalizing smart financial partnerships to help with the enormous costs of our first year.

To be very honest, as fascinating and thrilling as the past few weeks have been for us, it's also been an uber stressful time for us.  Why?  We want the success of Smith Story Wine Cellers to happen more than ever before.  It's all consuming. Thoughts of how the wines are going to taste, how we are going to sell them, who's going to write about them, how much do we want to produce next year...our thoughts are near manic. Thankfully, we have our day jobs to keep it all in check and mindfully put the brakes on the anxiety of building a business.

We have so much more to say, to update you about, to involve you with, but we are taking a few hours off this morning to enjoy a little piece of peace. Thanks for following...

This is Our Story,

Eric & Ali

*Our wine releases will be allocated, please be sure you are on our mailing list http://smithstorywinecellars.com/allocations