On the day of the Big Pour I couldn’t resist having a little fun. Tom Sr. wouldn’t mind if I leave my mark? I mean a giant lightning bolt isn’t too noticeable, right? Besides I’d blame it on Mike. After all he was the one taking the photos.

I even [...]

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On April 23rd cement trucks filed into our driveway one after another. A light drizzle started off the day. But by 11am the rains were gone and the sun gave way to the perfect cement pouring day. Check out the flames on the remote-controlled boom truck. And that industrial sized cement [...]

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With a sigh of relief, I’m glad to report that our construction zone doesn’t have that man from Mars, Twilight Zone eeriness anymore. They filled all those open trenches with concrete.
After several months of what seemed like daily dirt pushing, the early stages of a building began to appear. On the morning of [...]

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The other day Wendy Day, our hospitality maven, made a comment about our new building and it has really stuck with me. So much so that I had to blog about it.
“It looks like crop circles out there,” Wendy said. And it’s true our ‘barrel warehouse’ resembles a scene from a Sci-fi [...]

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Having an office at a working construction site sure has its hindrances. I am just about used to the periodic earthquakes. But our Office Manager is tired of the constant shaking and thinks it loosened a couple of fillings. There’s also the afternoon jack hammering, the buzzing and rumbling of equipment stirring [...]

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On an unusual sunny and gorgeous day in February, a towering crane was reaching into our busted open courtyard and plucking out some of our stainless steel fermenting tanks. The tanks ranged from 1800 gallons to 5600 gallons and they were being removed only temporarily to allow the jackhammers to go to work on [...]

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Now that the Merlot vines are gone and the rains have started the ‘little kid’ in us all has been awaken, especially in Tom Jr. The giant dirt hills and shallow mud puddles are ever so enticing. Dirt bikes and ATV’s are considered work, right? Just trying to compact the dirt for [...]

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One of the best things about construction, besides all the big kid toys, is demolition! In order to connect our current home with our future building, we (and by we, I mean a heavy-duty excavator) had to bring down the outside courtyard wall. And bring it down it did.
It’s times like this that [...]

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In November of 2007 we began the process of pruning and removing 488 Merlot vines from our estate vineyard in order to make space for the new crush pad and barrel warehouse. By mid-January the big guns were brought in to ready the site for the new building.
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We have outgrown our existing shoes, thus Whitehall Lane is expanding! We broke ground on our winery addition just south of the existing building and are in the midst of constructing this new 9,000 square foot building. The new digs will provide extra space for barrel storage, a new office for Dean our [...]

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