Thank you, Wine Club members,
We at Compton Family Wines always appreciate our customers, especially our wine club members. Your continued support has always been helpful to the business and it is no different this year of 2020. The support of our retail customers has kept our business moving along this year without big interruptions. Although the company’s overall sales are down due to our dependence on restaurants for outside sales our retail sales have kept us going. We also are appreciative of our employees for helping with business moving forward this year, even with so many uncertainties.
This year brought many challenges from business interruptions to ending the growing season with terrible wildfires in the valley. The fires were many miles away from our vineyards, but the smoke traveled for a couple of weeks into the valley during the time when the grapes were ripening. At harvest, ash was covering the grapes we were fortunate to receive some rains which helped to wash the ash off as we finished our harvest season. The 2020 vintage is shaping up to be one of the best with small berries and exceptionally clean fruit from a great farming year. Even with all the possibilities of smoke issues in the wines we brought in all of our fruit (you don’t know until you bring it in the barn). Although we had some concerns about smoke taint during fermentation, we finished fermenting to let the wines settle out, and at this point we are finding minimal damage to the wines. The wines from 2020 will be full-bodied with bigger tannin and great fruit components. Our 2020 Rose will be bottled in early February to start showing the 2020 wines.
On a personal note, Tabitha, and Matt along with our family had the chance to purchase Deerhaven Vineyard in Philomath which included a home. We were able to move the family into the new property in November. Matt has been managing this vineyard for 20 years and the fruit has been a main component to our wine production from the beginning of the winery in 2004. The plan for the property is to continue the vineyard along with raising some livestock. At the time of this letter, we have 31 chickens laying eggs, 2 geese protecting the chickens, along with 5 haired sheep with 3 of them pregnant and a new sheep dog puppy. The family looks forward to having our own piece of property along with growing the healthiest products we can from the diversification of life on the farm.
