Winter at The Blending Room
All of the sudden, it’s winter in the Lake Chelan valley. We woke up to nearly 12 inches of fresh snow on the ground yesterday with the cold temperatures to go along with the whiteness. A number of winos fought the elements to come into the winery and warm up with the reds. It was good fun to be a haven from the cold outdoors and just enjoy fine wine inside. We’re still shoveling out and watching for falling icicles from above. Angela has traded her gumboots for snowboots. Come check out her new footware or just lounge in the lawn. We’re now open on weekends...
Read MoreThe Sign
You may have followed our adventures raising the wine barrel into position on our new signpost. If so, you may have noticed the perfect space below the barrel for our true signage for The Blending Room. WineGirl had cunning plans for the Washington Wineburst icon to lure people in from miles away and redesigned the logo to fit neatly into the sign space. Inspired by fond memories of elementary school postermaking, Angie and Delice went to work projecting the design onto freshly whitewashed signboards. They traced the lines, then painted the pink. I was able to monkey up and conquer my...
Read MorePainting the barrels red.
Angela took on a project to decorate the inside and outside of the new winery with wine barrels. Old, grey, weathered barrels wouldn’t do, of course. She decided to stain the centers of the barrels, not with red, red wine but, with wood stain to match the color of wine spillage. Only in cases of serious mistake does wine spillage stain a barrel so uniformly. They turned out really nice; so nice that we used some to hold up our new tasting room bar and hold down our signpost. There were still enough to decorate the outer grounds too. Nice work,...
Read MoreAll About Industrial Floor Coatings
The following quote was from a blog post that Angela started a while back. It is floor time. As a winery, we need a sealed concrete floor for our production space. Sounds easy enough… but when you have a list of needs such as quality, budget, durability, and efficiency it makes for some interesting compromises. Interesting reading? Not sure, but here goes. Well, the floor is supremely important to me. Maybe because I’m short and I rarely look up, or maybe it just makes everything that much cleaner feeling, but my one demand was that we didn’t end up with a car showroom...
Read MoreBarrel Raising
Our new wine space came with an interesting sign post out front. It has two spaces for possible signage. From the ground, 20 feet below, it looked like a wine barrel might fit perfectly in the upper spot. As it happened, Winegirl Angela was working on painting some old barrels. We knew that getting the 100 pound barrel up in the air might be a little tricky as would keeping it up there. The crew gathered together chain, steel pipe, nuts and bolts and brackets. We checked the sketches, then crumpled them up. We checked the wind, then ignored the results and dragged the barrel up and onto the...
Read MoreFirst Things Third
Drain The result of all that mud digging posted in First Things First was a new drain. I never thought I’d be so proud of a hole in the ground. We’ll even have a space for a sanitizing sink in the winery to clean all of our winemaking tools. _________________________________________________________________ Carpet While the boys were having their way with the pipes, I was working diligently on our décor. This meant tearing up the hideous blue indoor-outdoor carpet. You’d think this would be easy… you’d just need a putty knife. (Putty...
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