Day Trips: Opus and Quintessa

Despite a continually busy schedule I managed to visit two of my favorite wineries in the valley this week. 

First stop: Opus One 

I was at Opus One for the 2008 Harvest and have nothing but fond memories.  During the off season I go back to visit the lab, or lunch there but it has been several months since my last visit.  

On Tuesday I took T over to get to know the winery and try Opus's latest release.  We tried the 2005 and the 2007, which were both fantastic wines, however I felt the 2007 is currently too young and I am interested in trying it again in a year or two.  The 2005 is a very well balanced and complex wine, but I'm not terribly fond of that vintage anywhere in Napa.  2005 was a cool year, similar to this year and the flavor profile is very different than the fruit forward 2007 or 2008.  It's not a question of good vs bad, just a personal preference.  

Below is the blue Napa sky taken from the entrance to the winery,  it was unseasonably warm in the beginning of the week, high 70s.

I didn't take too many pictures since I used to work there and it felt weird to do so, but I did want to show off their barrel room because it is so different from ours.  Similarly to us, Opus keep their barrels one high (a most covetous luxury) but they have a large semi circular display room instead of a cave.

 

Working with barrels that are only one high is a luxury because they are a pleasure to work with, all the barrels are easily accessible for taking samples, or topping or adding sulfur.  

Over the 20 or so months that the wine ages in barrel the water and/or alcohol slowly evaporate through the pores in the wood.  As some wine evaporates out of the barrel it creates a head space where the remaining volume is exposed to oxygen.  Having a partially full barrel is undesirable because it leaves the wine vulnerable to spoilage through oxidation and microbial attack. 

Oxygen loving bacteria like acetobacter can infect unprotected wine and are responsible for turning a wine into vinegar.  To prevent this from occurring whenever the wine level starts to get low, we breakdown a barrel (empty it) and use the wine to fill all the other partial barrels.  Every 3 to 4 weeks the crew has to top every single barrel (for a winery our size, a single vintage can have on average 1000 barrels).  Which is very labor intensive.  Another protective measure is adding small amounts of liquid sulfur dioxide as an antimicrobial agent.  This is also done every 3 to 4 weeks for 18 to 20 months.

So when I said that we also keep our barrels on a single level, it was a mostly true statement.  It has been true every year since 2005, however this year since most of the fruit came in at the same time we have had some space issues.  About 85% of our barrels are in the cool cave (55F) stacked one high.  The rest are not quite done with primary fermentation so to encourage the end of fermentation we have to keep them warm.  We have a warm room (75F) but it is small and we have had to stack 4 barrels high.  

Which is still pretty good.  

Another winery I worked at used to stack them 6 high and that was terrifying.

Having barrels one high is a luxury because otherwise we are climbing around like monkeys to get our samples (as T is seen in the above pictures).  One would think there is a more sophisticated way of doing this, but climbing like monkeys is still the most effective technique.

T and I get our climb on every 2 or 3 days to monitor the dropping sugar levels.  Once these barrels are below 1g/L of residual sugar they can be moved to the cool cave and resume a single level life.

Next stop: Quintessa

Quintessa is high end winery not unlike Opus.  I am not a former employee, but it's one of my favorite places to bring out of town guests, so I often find myself there.  

This is really what it looks like.   They have a lake.  Yeah.

But no one has visited lately and on Friday I found myself there for work.  

Quintessa has a similar Sauvignon blanc program to ours so we took 5 of our 2010 wines for an educational comparison.  By "similar program" I mean that they make their SB in a similar way.  They have a single Sauvignon blanc that is made from several different vineyard sources and fermented in several vessels: concrete eggs, new oak barrels, neutral oak barrels and stainless steel barrels.  We ferment in all of those vessels too, but we also ferment in stainless steel tanks, which they do not.

Currently not too many wineries have concrete eggs in the valley but that is going to change.  Our main focus of the tasting was the eggs.

We got through 19 wines in about an hour an a half.  

I appreciated tasting their egg fermentation side by side with ours.  After the tasting we got to ask each other questions about the vineyards the fruit came from, about fermentation temperatures and preferred yeasts, anything we wanted to ask each other.  These types of tastings are fairly common and mutually beneficial for the wineries that participate.  

However, I sometimes forget how rare an opportunity it is.  I don't know of other industries who invite their competitors into their offices and offer up their product for questions and review.  

We were tasting only 2010 wines, stuff that barely finished fermentation.  We get an exclusive glimpse into the starting components of a wine that will not be released for several months.  

And  a large point of these meetings is to learn from each other and apply the knowledge.  We collect information about the quality and price points we are competing against directly from our competitors. 

I say competitors in a very loose sense.  I do not mean competitors as in rivals.  But we do compete for a similar market share.  They are a winery in Napa Valley that produce Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon and we are a winery in Napa Valley that produce Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon at similar price points.

Its as if Apple invited Microsoft over to their campus and said hey, bring your latest smart phone** and we'll bring our latest iphone and we will sit around a table and we will ask you how you made your phone and you can ask us anything about how we made ours and we will use that knowledge to improve our initial product, and if you want to take some home we'll sell them to you at a discount. 

It's kinda like that.

Except that wouldn't happen in tech land and it happens all the time in the wine industry.

And why it's so commonplace is a topic for another day.

-L

Up Next: "How I spent my first 2 day weekend in 14 weeks"

** I have no idea what their smart phone is called =/