I also recorded a video of a lovely instrumental that Joy introduced to Win.  Here it is….hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

We’ll be using this next week to bottle lots more wine!

On another note, I am back to keeping our salesroom open from 11am-6pm everyday again. We may occasionally decide to shut down early in the next couple of months, but I will post up an announcement here and on Facebook if that happens.

Finally, check your email inboxes – I just sent out our February newsletter this afternoon.

Have a fantastic weekend and come out for a visit soon!

We are gearing up for our annual Cellar Party tomorrow!  That’s our neighbor Rob lighting up the firepits last year – think we can talk him into doing it again this year???  Hope you can join us – here’s the details:

Cellar Party

Saturday November 5, 2011

Tasting room open 11am-10pm

Live Music from 5-9pm provided by Brent Copeland and the ACP Band.

Dinner available at 8pm – shrimp and chicken jambalaya or mushroom chili, cornbread, and dessert for just $8.

Register to win a great gift basket or other giveaways throughout the day in the tasting room.

Here’s a little taste of Brent Copeland’s music:

Hope you can join us Saturday evening! Cheers!

In all the excitement, I lost track of how fast time has flown by this month. We have one last Saturday afternoon of music, and the weather looks like it will be perfect, yet again!  Come on out tomorrow between 1:30 and 4:30pm to check out The Accidentals.  We’ll have the firepits burning and tables ready for your picnic plans.  It’ll be a little celebration of the Cardinals winning the world series….hopefully!

Here’s a video preview of The Accidentals from their performance here at the winery last year:

Hope to see you here this weekend!

Here’s a little preview:

What a great voice!

Even if you can’t make their show, come on out to enjoy the beautiful autumn weather while it’s here. See you soon!

And tomorrow (Saturday Oct. 1) we’ll be hosting Colin O’Brien in our wine garden from 1:30-4:30pm.  Bring a picnic and plan to be entertained by this talented musician!  Here’s a little taste of what you can expect on Saturday:

And a bit of his banjo:

Looking forward to seeing you this weekend!  Cheers!

Plus we have live music on Saturday and Sunday from 1:30-4:30pm!

Saturday features Mark Gordon playing just about anything you want to hear. Just throw out a request and Mark will play it!

And Sunday features one of our favorite bands all the way from Macon – Keota!  Check out the video we shot last year when they played here:

Hope you can join us for a fun-filled, relaxing weekend here at Peaceful Bend!

Here’s a video of the Mississippi Sawyers:

Don’t worry, the concert is in the cellar, so you can stay nice and cool during all this heat! Hope to see you here tonight!

Anyways, as promised, I have some pictures and a quick youtube of how we filled up the Grapes of Raft pouches.  Clyde the mechanical engineer wizard rigged our bottle filler to use on these pouches, and after some tweaking, it went pretty smoothly.

First though, the bags had to be labeled!  When Clyde brought labels back to the winery last week on Friday, we sat down and put the labels onto the unfilled pouches –  much easier to label when they are empty than when they are filled!

So then the bags all went down into the cellar to be inflated with wine!  Here’s a few pictures of the filling process:

First, the bag in loaded into a fixture that held the nozzle of the bag in place for the duration:

Here Clyde has removed the nozzle and is connecting the bag to the filler.

The filler is controlled by a timer and some fancy computer programming that meters out how much wine goes into each bag.  It will first fill the bag with nitrogen, then vacuum the bag out to make sure that there is no oxygen in the bag when the wine goes in.  The next photo is of the bag while it fills up:

And once the bag is filled with wine, the fancy computer program makes sure the bag gets a little squirt of nitrogen.  Then  Clyde takes it off of the machine and snaps the nozzle back in place while the bag is still in the fixture:

That process ended up hurting my hand after a while, but Clyde’s tougher than me and didn’t have any troubles with it.  Once the nozzle was in place, the pouch is slid out of the fixture and violá!  A properly inflated Grapes of Raft!

We decided to lay out the bags onto pallets, so the next picture is of a pallet ‘o GOR:

Aren’t those bags pretty all lined up?  :)

I need to thank everyone who commented here on the blog and on facebook & twitter yesterday.  We had a blast hearing your encouragement and thoughts on the wine.  I finally stopped obsessively checking facebook every three minutes somewhere around 5:30pm, but Clyde took over where I left off!  I imagine this might be a bit like what a book author might go through upon the release of a book.

Well, one final thing to leave you with this afternoon.  Clyde took a short video of me inflating a pouch.  Please excuse the overly-long Vanna moment.  I thought he was trying to take a picture, not a video!  In any case, here I am in action on Monday afternoon:

Hope you enjoyed this peek at the inflating process. Don’t forget that you can purchase Grapes of Raft from now until Tuesday July 19 for just $12.00 directly from the winery. After the 19th the price will go up to the normal $15.00/bag. Cheers!

I’ve been bad and haven’t shared anything on the blog here for too long, so here is a video of the trio last weekend playing the second movement of Trio in G Major by Carl Stamitz.

2011 Wine Cellar Concert on youtube.

My wine pairing recommendation with the video is a glass of Dry Creek if you’re in the mood for a white wine or Meramec if you are in the mood for red.  ;)

A huge thanks to Arts Rolla and Brewer Science for sponsoring the concert again this year. And a special note of congratulations to Brewer Science on 30 years in business!