I'm glad to see that this bottle gave pleasure. The 2005 vintage for ESJ was a nightmare. Not in the vineyards, but the place we made wine that year was operated by people who did nothing but bring misery to my job.
First the guy who first invited me to make my wines there didn't want to formalize any details about what it would cost me. Then his partner bought him out. The guy who was "in charge" of winemaking didn't know how to do anything but run labs. He wanted to run labs, it seemed, every day. One day when he was moving barrels, after I'd racked a bunch of them, he managed to drop a rack with two of them off the fork lift, destroying both barrels. This genius naturally curried favor with the owner, and complained that I was making life difficult for him. And on and on it went. Miraculously, I got all my wines from that year bottled, and got the hell out of there. I think the vintage was one that produced the kind of raw material that made for wines that didn't need quite as much long-aging in bottle as some have.
