Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Instant Gratification 8 of 8: Ring Out (Final Offer of 2017), 12/23/2017

  (Full Pull & Friends Chardonnay (FPF-22)) Holiday Pickup Schedule REMINDER: Please take note of our schedule below for the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018: Dec 23 (TODAY): Open 11am-7pm Dec 28-30: CLOSED Jan 4-6: CLOSED Jan 11-13: Open 11am-7pm ---- Hello friends. This is our final offer of 2017. We’ll plan to stay out of your inboxes until about January 7, when you can expect our first offer of 2018. In the meantime, after our open hours today (Saturday; 11am-7pm) we are CLOSED for pickups for the next few weeks, and our first TPU pickup day in 2017 will be Thursday January 11. Today’s offer will mostly focus on reflections from a busy 2017. At the end of the offer we’ll include reorder links for a handful of our in-house favorites; and at the beginning we’ll do what we’ve done every year since 2009: excerpt Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light; The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more, Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. I love quoting these particular stanzas, because they speak to the cleansing grace of the end of a year, the power of first remembering and then letting go. One memory that stands out to me from 2017 was our team’s September trip with Morgan Lee to visit all the vineyards we work with for our in-house winery, Block Wines. This was the first year that we were able to bring nearly our entire team on that eastern Washington swing, and it led to all sorts of interesting conversations, several of them sober even. And I remember Pat making the point – after seeing all these pristine, carefully-tended vineyards and tasting all these perfect grape berries ripening on the vine – that the raw materials we start with in the Pacific Northwest are truly beautiful, and that the role of the winemakers is to convey that beauty in the finished wines. Our job at Full Pull is to suss out the winemakers who are achieving the honest expression of this rigorous farming, and to shield our list members from all the rest. I see our role as that of the curator/matchmaker: the curator side tasting broadly so that you don’t have to; the matchmaker side connecting the best winemakers in the northwest (and a few in the rest of the world) to a group of people who care about the beverages they consume. And that’s what always strikes me about our list members. In a world where cool detachment seems to be in the ascendancy, our list members are a countercultural group who choose to *care* about something. In this case, it’s wine, but it’s the caring itself that’s telling of the kind of folks who populate our list. Our Full Pull team feels very fortunate to have such a thoughtful, engaged, kind group of people as our list members. Thank you all for such robust support in 2017. Now then, let’s do this quixotic thing we do – attempting to use language to convey sensory experience – one more time, and then let’s close the door on 2017.Despite going really long on this decade-old Chardonnay, it still may not last out the year; we’re down to just 18% of our original stock remaining, thanks in part to this recent review. Wine Enthusiast: Copyrighted material withheld.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull and Friends (+Pickup Schedule UPDATE), 11/9/2017

  (Full Pull & Friends Chardonnay (FPF-22)) Pickup Schedule UPDATE: Next week, we will be closed for the entirety of Thanksgiving weekend to give our team time to celebrate with friends and family. ----- Hello friends. It has been a relatively quiet year on the Full Pull & Friends front. Just three releases, and no more in the hopper for the remainder of 2017. One of those three (the Blanc de Blancs Brut Nature) has been sold out since August. The other two have received positive press of late, giving us a good opportunity to reoffer them. If you need a reminder on the FP&F program, and how it differs from Block Wines, this page has the details (the short version: Block Wines is a winery within Full Pull, going from grape to bottle; FP&F is more of a classic negociant model, purchasing barrels or blank bottles of finished wine and putting our own label on them). That page also shows the entire history of the FP&F program. At this point, we’re sold out of 19 of the 22 wines we’ve developed. The trio with remaining inventory are the pair we’re reoffering today, along with the 2014 Klipsun Merlot, which is getting down to its last handful of cases. To say that our list members have enthusiastically embraced Full Pull & Friends would be a bit of an understatement.Despite going really long on this decade-old Chardonnay, it still may not last out the year; we’re down to just 18% of our original stock remaining, thanks in part to this recent review. Wine Enthusiast: Copyrighted material withheld.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Aged Chardonnay, 5/29/2017

  (Full Pull & Friends Chardonnay (FPF-22)) Hello friends. We have a very special opportunity today. It’s rare enough to access cellar-aged Chardonnay from anyplace in the world, but this comes from our backyard, from one of the finest white wine vineyards in Washington. Better yet: we’re able to put it under our private label, which means we can offer it for an accessible price that invites experimentation: Despite going really long on this decade-old Chardonnay, it still may not last out the year; we’re down to just 18% of our original stock remaining, thanks in part to this recent review. Wine Enthusiast: Copyrighted material withheld.