It's a New Day!

No - this blog post isn't about the song by Will I Am. It's about a new day in the life of well, me!

Today was my first day of working at Halter Ranch Vineyards in the Adelaida Hills of Paso Robles. I'm so excited as there are lots of really neat things going on at Halter (including a brand new, state of the art 70,000 square foot winery opening July 1st!) so we're all going to be quite busy. But one of my favorite things about the Halter is that it's a huge estate vineyard property so you get to have your hands in a lot of parts of the business. Though I'm in the tasting room, I got to hang out in the vineyard today and tomorrow I'll get to work in the employee vegetable garden too!

Halter is currently expanding their tasting room as an interim space until about 18 months from now when they open the "mothership" tasting room - that will be insanely gorgeous. Since there's so much construction going on, we were pouring off the back porch of the 1885 Historic House on the property. Here's fellow employee Sarah looking adorable at the bar:

Then here's a photo of my buddy Seth & I - Seth is the tasting room manager at Halter. We're doing cheers and drinking the bubbles I brought to celebrate my first day :)

What I loved most about today is that there we were, pouring outside on such a gorgeous day, with chickens roaming around us begging for food, being surrounded by fragrant lavender with honeybees flitting about - but the best part were the baby blue jays!

In the tree next to us, a mommy bird was feeding here babies. Look at the incredible shot that I got:

Can you see them? When Mommy & Daddy come with the food, the babies would start SCREAMING - so loudly that we'd all stop in the middle of the tasting and watch the parents do their thing. There was a bit of a "hole" in the tree so we could see a lot of the action. Here's the mommy on the roof - she was working so hard!

But I freaked out when one of the cats on the property figured out there were babies in the tree and tried to go after them. Oh boy, did we all kick into action! Before we left for the night, Seth set this up around the tree to try to be a type of deterrent so the cat wouldn't go after the babies tonight. We wanted to do more, but it was all we had. Fingers crossed that they'll be OK.

So wow - it's a big change for me but I am thrilled to be at Halter. I'm so sad though to leave all of my buddies at Cypher Winery - I'm just so thankful to everyone there as I loved working there & they really helped give me a start in the wine industry - and good Lord was it fun!! But hopefully I'm not losing my buddies there but rather just gaining new buddies - and in the end we'll all still meet and hangout at the 15C Wine Bar! :)

I'm sure there will be many more posts about Halter and the exciting things going on there. Stayed tuned........