The Schramsberg Caves Party Crash

I was cleaning out my camera and realized I never posted about when T and I crashed the Schramsberg party.  Late after work one day we heard that Schrams was having a party so we headed up valley hoping to get in.

We successfully snuck in and tagged along on a tour of their caves.  My camera did not do well in low light, but you get the idea.

Schrams does a staggering amount of hand riddling, which is what all the racks are for.  A person has to physically turn the bottles in the rack to eventually get the yeast sediment (from a secondary fermentation) to collect in the neck.  Once it is all in the neck, the top of the bottle is frozen and the frozen yeast plug is popped out.  Most places now do this process mechanically, but Schrams is classy like that.

However, the best part of the Schrams caves is how furry they are.  For red wine caves, sanitation is of the upmost importance, any mold is a huge concern because the wine is less protected in barrels.  In this cave, all the wine is in bottle so the grotesquely mold covered walls add character instead of panic.

They say the moldy walls are covered walls are lichen.  When you're in there it looks less like a fungus and more like years and years of grey powdery dust that hang down.

I think you get the picture.  It's gnarly, but oh so cool.

Those are sparkling bottles stacked from floor to celling going several rows deep.  These have already undergone the secondary fermentation in bottle, been riddled and are chilling here, aging, waiting a few years until they are ready to be pulled out, labeled and released to the public.

The bottles are packed tightly together and go back several feet.  Its a very cool tour.

So uh, when I said party, I meant holiday party.  This was a while ago.  

But quick tip for everyone who tries to sneak into a party: add your name to the raffle and win the best prize of the night!  That really helps you blend in.

About 15 minutes after our arrival, I won this magnum of sparkling wine, and then carried it like a baby through the cave tour.  Which also explains how few pictures I was able to take, T kept getting tired of holding my wine baby while I battled with the low light in the cave.  The saddest part is that this was in December and it is almost May and that bottle remains unopened in my fridge.

-L

Found Wine Art in San Francisco

On a recent trip to San Francisco I saw the most fantastic way to artistically display wine corks.  

I used to collect all the corks from all the bottles I opened, but soon I had no place to keep them.

Eventually I only kept the corks from special bottles, birthdays, celebrations, etc.

Now I am mad I did not keep them all and build a giant cork tree in my apartment.  Sigh.

Other wine themed loveliness included this dish soap packaged in wine bottles.  

Lavender in a burgundy bottle.  

And grapefruit scent in a bordeaux bottle.

They also had these old carboys on display.  These are a much cooler version of what T and I used for Rita.  Unfortunately we neglected her and so like the stout carboy advertises, she's probably all vinegar now. Double Sigh.

Then I saw this beauty and wished I had saved all my Rice A Roni boxes to make the Golden Gate Bridge.  Triple sigh.

So many regrets . . . 

-L 

Blind Sauvignon Blanc Comparative Tasting and Other Stuff

The day of the Sauvignon blanc Comparative Tasting.  We tasted 8 wines to get an idea of what California is making in terms of Sauvignon blanc at $35 and under.  And how our $20 SB compares to the competition.

The Big Reveal.  The biggest surprise was the John Anthony, at $19/bottle, it was definitely a favorite.  The Lail Blueprint is also very nice, but incredibly oaky so stay away if you dont like that.  Carica did very well.  The Sancerre tasted like a South African SB, full of smoky jalapeno.  The Crocker & Starr which did really well in previous tastings was a disappointment this tasting

And then to a totally unrelated tasting:

A Burgundy tasting at a friend's house.  He was out of spittoons, so we used these tiny fish bowls.  Very classy.

These are some highlights of the tasting.  I'm not sure how available they are, since a lot of the wines were picked up when my friends worked in Burgundy . . . but if you can find them, they are delicious.

After 8 Burgundies, our host decided to show off his skills and saber off the top of a sparkling bottle.  It was impressive but also bloody, and I caught it on video.  Hopefully he will let me post it at some point.

-L

Day Trip: Bay Area Wineries and UCDavis Winery

It's been a busy time collecting wine for the comparative tasting.  I went down to the bay to pick up a few more bottles.  First stop was Rock Wall Wine Co. on the naval base in Alameda.

They have the grapes trucked in from all over and brought to the naval base where they make the wine in old airplane hangars.  I'm not sure if they use the cranes for winemaking, or just for hanging pretty paper lanterns.  It's a very different scene walking into a cavernous wine warehouse vs a highly stylized tiny Napa tasting room but it's totally awesome.  I picked up a bottle of Carica Sauvignon blanc, Kick Ranch, a place we get fruit from as well.

 Also in the Bay is Urban Legend in Oakland, near Jack London Square.  A mom and pop organization in the middle of the city, tried the wines, bought a bottle of the Tempranillo.  Very cool place.  The labels reflect the location of the winery near the shipping docks in Oakland.  I would like to make wine in the city in the near future.


To UCDavis:

Went to UCDavis for the bran new LEED Platinum certified winery opening.  UCDavis has been working on this winery ever since I left Davis, so I had to go back and check it out.  Before 2011, the winery at the world famous winemaking school was from the 1920s, which when I was going to school there I found charming.  I liked that I was learning on the same equipment that the greats before me learned on but seeing the shiny new equipment got me over that real quick.

These are small tanks for students to do small scale fermentation experiments.  They are temperature controlled and hooked up to a computer so you can see the stats (temperature, brix) remotely.  When I was going to school (and this was only a few short years ago) we were doing our small scale wine experiments in jugs not dissimilar to giant milk jugs with handheld thermometers and hydrometers.  Oh I am so jealous.

These are the boots of all those lucky bastards.

 Wandering through on the grad student labs, a friend pointed out The Sniffer.  This instrument breaks up a wine sample into it's aromatic components so you can smell them one at a time through the funnel.

 Even more construction up ahead at the UCDavis campus!  I really miss that place.

-L

Day Trip: Vineyard 29

Wineries often trade wine with other wineries they see as their competition and hold Blind Competitive Tastings.  We were interested in putting their Sauvignon blanc against our Sauvignon blanc, so T and I drove to V29 to pick up their SB and drop off our Cabernet Sauvignon which they were interested in tasting.  This is the entrance to Vineyard 29.

V29 has several different types of tanks including concrete and stainless steel but these wooden tanks are reserved for their highest quality fruit.  This is a good way to get 200% New Oak into your wine.  First you ferment in a 100% new wooden tank and then after primary fermentation drain the wine into 100% new oak barrels.  This is expensive ($225 a bottle), and a stylistic choice.  Not everyone appreciates 200% new oak.

On the right you can see concrete tanks.  It is rare to see concrete tanks used for red wine in California.  I  found concrete tanks very common in Chile and Argentina when I was visiting, but this is the first winery that I have visited that has concrete tanks for red wine.  I expect to see more and more wineries acquiring concrete tanks because of the desirable characters the concrete contributes to the wine.

The caves at V29 are immensely impressive.  Walking through them you eventually dead-end in their library room.

The history of V29 is told through it's vintages and preserved on the labels of the wines in this library.  They also hold tastings in this room.  Absolutely lovely.

Black glass wine decanters with the V29 logo.

The cave's barrels are stacked two high, and they have concrete eggs for their Sauvignon blanc, which is a lot more common.  The trend in Napa valley for a while has been to ferment white wine in concrete eggs.  The eggs come from France, hold about 150 gallons and are insanely expensive to ship over.  The benefits are good temperature control of the fermentation, the eggs shape allows for a gentle mixing action and desirable minerality imparted to the wine.

Lovely tour from Assistant Winemaker Jessica.

-L

My Absence Explained

I  spent a few weeks in this wonderful place, not thinking about wine at all.

Flying to Nassau

Atlantis from underwater

Boat to go snorkeling

Beach at sun rise

Beach at mid-day

Beach at evening

Beach at sun set

Flying our of Miami

And now back to work :(

-L