2010 Vintage Tasting

We just had the mother of all tastings.

In this business I've had to work on my endurance in consuming alcohol.  Which I know sounds like one of those luxury problems like 'the floor to ceiling windows in my giant mansion don't leave me any room to hang my Picassos (not my problem, but a true story).  But it's actually really exhausting and when you're doing it for hours, it really stops being fun.  It's also less fun when it happens to be 6:30am.  And even less fun when you're tasting young wines that are still sweet and very aggressive.

Now that it's January and most everything has finished primary and secondary fermentation and is out of tanks and barrels in our cave, my winemaker wanted to have a tasting to evaluate the vintage so far.  That meant a whole 8 hours of sample collecting for our 3 cellar guys and 4 hours of tasting for the production team (winemaker, cellar master, viticulturalist and enologist).  We tasted through 56 wines.  It was nuts.  It's by far the biggest and longest tasting I've ever participated in.  Spitting ensured that we were not completely hammered by the end of it, but still, some of the alcohol is absorbed in your mouth and some of the team got a little tipsy.  This was one day we might have needed the breathalyzer before leaving work.

The purpose of the tasting was to figure out which lots were showing well and which were not.  If a lot was particularly delicious or disappointing we want to answer a few questions.  Where was the fruit from?  How was it farmed?  Did we sort out the raisins or include them? How long did we macerate before beginning fermentation? What was the fermentation vessel (oak, stainless steel or concrete)? Was the fermentation native or inoculated? If it was inoculated what was the yeast? How long was the fermentation? How hot did it get? What nutrients were added?  Was the malolactic fermentation native or inoculated? How much new oak is in the lot?  What coopers made the barrels? Etc.

Answering those questions help us to figure out what works.  For example, we know that the Sauvignon blanc fruit we receive from Morgan Ranch does really well fermented with Vin13 yeast in stainless steel but not very well in oak.  The lots that we let mascerate taste better than the ones that were pressed right away.  And so on.

Eventually these 56 wines will be blended into our 8 core wines.

-L

Back to Work Folks!

Here we are, back from the break!


Even workaholics like me need a break every now and then, although I assure you I was very reluctant to take one (there is so much to do!).  Usually this time of year is slow, however because the year was late and because my job requires taking care of the malic fermentations, the lab is still incredibly busy.  Not to mention the piles and piles of paperwork for year end accounting and government reporting.  


But! I did take a break.  I spent a few days in sunny San Diego.  My brother and I took amtrak down there so that we could spend some quality time together and also because he is a scary driver and since I was not going to share the driving duties with him neither was I going to take them all on myself.  So we took amtrak, all 26 hours of the trip.  I only bring this up because this gave me some time to edit old videos.  


The following video is a project that T and I undertook.  We had a tiny sliver of an acre of Malbec on the property that we weren't sure what to do with.  Since it was such a small amount, T and I decided we could use it for our yeast start ups.  We harvested it (i.e. cut the clusters off the vine and collected them), processed it (hand destemmed using the red apparatus featured in the video) and fermented the resulting juice.  The juice we collected we put into kegs and inoculated with a favorite yeast of ours, Willams Selyem.  We like this yeast because it's hearty, has good alcohol tolerance and doesn't generally impart too many "yeasty" characters to the fermentation.  When the kegs were vigorously fermenting, we added them to much larger tanks of juice to start that fermentation.


If we hadn't collected juice from the property, we would have had to go to Safeway and buy 20 gallons of Welches grape juice to start the fermentations.  This is undesirable for several reasons.  First, it's embarrassing to need 20 gallons of grape juice, but also, Welches is made from Concord grapes.  Traditional wine grapes (Cabernet, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, etc) are from the species Vitis vinifera but Concord grapes are from the species Vitis labrusca, which is know for it's "foxy" characters.  And I promise you, no one who describes a wine as foxy is using it as a compliment.


The video is a quick diary of what we went through to harvest those few gallons of grapes.  The video was taken by interns (no longer with us) who did not know how to hold the camera so the field of vision is narrow instead of wide.  Anyway, it shows us stumbling through trying to get the maximum amount of juice from our harvest, very sticky business.





More new (old) videos to come.


Happy New Year.


-L