Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 21:02:58 -0700
Subject: May newsletter

Perennial Vintners In this issue:
 ▪ Schedule: Open this Weekend
 ▪ New wines now available
 ▪ Copper River salmon season
Newsletter -- May-2013  ▪ Farmers Markets update
(Click here to view in HTML on website)
 ▪ Vineyard: New shoots
http://www.PerennialVintners.com/  ▪ Wine Shipping update

(Click on any image below to go to website with more information/larger image/etc.)

Schedule: Open this Weekend
Our next official open day is this weekend, 25-27 Memorial Day (including Monday).  This is a Winery Alliance of Bainbridge Island event with all wineries open both days - everyone's doing barrel tasting, so it'll be a very special event.  We'll be open 11am 'til 5pm, the other wineries open at noon.  We'll have a special mixed case (one of each of our wines plus some dups) available at 20% off.  The weather is supposed to be decent, so come on out and visit the closest commercial vineyard to downtown Seattle to get your fix of where wine really comes from...

New wines now available
Some of you may have made it out to taste our dry Orange Muscat and our Syrah over the past month or so.  Well they're finally labelled and ready to sell!  The Syrah has been quite popular so far, it's nice having another red to sell as we've always had many more whites than reds.  Our Orange Muscat is done in an unconventional style, completely dry - it's usually done as a sweet dessert wine - ours will go with foods unlike the dessert style.

Copper River salmon season
Copper River salmon season is now in full swing.  Every year I personally look forward to this, as it's consistently the best salmon I've had.  Once a year I make the splurge (it's typically $24+ per pound) and share a fabulous dinner with my sweety complemented by Perennial Vintners wines.  The current release Mueller Thurgau 2010 is an outstanding pairing, and is what I'll be pouring for my annual Copper River event!

Farmers Markets update
We've changed our schedules around to make it easier to know when we'll be at a particular market.  We're at West Seattle and Poulsbo markets on the 2nd and 4th weekends of the month, and at Bainbridge market on the 1st and 3rd weekends.

The next couple markets our Poulsbo person will be on vacation, so we may be missing some markets.  Also our Bainbridge person has a broken foot and may not be able to make the next market, sigh...  If you might be interested in selling wine for Perennial Vintners at either of these markets (starting this weekend), please reply to this email and we'll see if we can make it work...

The really big news though, is that SB 5674 has been signed into law!  As of 28-Jul it will be legal for a winery to pour wine at a farmers market, yay!  Thank you to all of you who helped support this!  It remains to be seen which markets will be ready to do this (both the winery and the market have special licensing requirements), but Perennial Vintners is looking forward to doing so as soon as it's possible.

Vineyard: New shoots
It's a really uplifting time of year in the vineyard.  Each year in winter we have to prune the grapevines back to almost nothing but the trunk, then as the season progresses the plants put up new shoots, which will leaf out and put out grape clusters.  We've got shoots almost a foot long now, so you can see the bright green new growth filling in for the growing year.  Come by and take some cell phone photos to carry with you, to help you to remember that wine comes from vineyards.

Current vineyard activities are mostly weeding (line trimmer and shovel), and spraying - this is the less exciting part of farming.  However, next week we'll start shoot thinning, so if you're interested in learning about grape growing, this is an activity you should join us for - please consider joining our helpers email list.

Wine Shipping update
We've shipped our first order via AmazonWine!  Paperwork is in progress with California ABC, we should be able to ship there by the end of the month.  We're still considering other states to ship to - as mentioned in previous newsletters it can be costly to set up shipping so we must make our decisions carefully - if you feel we should consider a particular state, please reply to this email and let me know which.