Top of the Morning to You!
What a month March has been—we’ve seen warmth, we’ve seen cold, we’ve seen blizzards,
we’ve seen rain—I think we’ve touched on every season possible in one month! Thank
goodness amidst all of this, we’ve gotten 2/3 rd ’s of our pruning done. Mike has been taking a
virtual pruning class where an expert pruner in the Midwest has been coaching him on how to
properly prune new vines. So if he didn’t call you to help—it’s because he’s fine tuning his skill
this first year of doing things a little differently.
Thank you to those who signed up to help bottle. You got to experience a very quick and
efficient way to bottle 10 varietals, 15, 700 bottles in 1 ½ days. I even learned that you have to
let the wine rest for up to a month before releasing it because it goes into bottle shock—I guess
that’s equivalent to child birth, that’s the only thing I can relate it to. Except the bottle doesn’t
lose sleep and doesn’t have to get up all hours of the night. But we went through the child
birth of taking the wine from the tank to the bottle. We calculated how long it would have
taken us to bottle all of it on our own—9 full days and then it wouldn’t have happened until
after pruning and we still would have had to schedule each one amidst all of our other
happenings—so we can honestly say, when you have a lot to bottle at one time, it’s well worth
it!
We aren’t going to release all of the wine we bottled at one time. Some of it will do good to sit
on the shelf and age a little longer. But when can you start seeing some of our new releases hit
the tasting room? If you are part of one of our 2 wine clubs? April 11 th at our special wine club
release party. For the general public, Saturday, April 12 th we will be introducing some of our
new wines for 2024. Join us in the tasting room where you will get to savor some of the newest
releases for Shamrock Hills.
Now, sit back and enjoy the journey as we enjoy another edition of Wining in the Hills!
Salute’
Mike and Denise Riley