One of my resolutions for 2012 is to wear more ties.  Here I am wearing more ties.

January was a busy month full of Blending.  This is the time where we start to combine all of the individual vineyards we fermented together to make a larger blend.  We start with about 150 different components and over several blending sessions we narrow it down to a hand full.

This is a lot of work because it involves taking fresh barrel samples every day that we taste, as well as making small scale blends and setting up and cleaning up a whole lot of dishes.

In the lab I make small scale blends, a few (millilitres will represent 2,000 gallons of a certain lot).  These small scale blends lead to large scale messes.

And a lot of dishes.

My table was so abused after a month of spilling wine on it that I had to go beyond a deep cleaning and actually resurface it.

Wearing a bow tie will make 5 hours of buffing seem like a special occasion.

One of my favorite January activities is participating in our semi annual Olfaction Sessions.  A few times a year Alexendre Schmitt, a french perfumer and educator comes to the winery to work with the wine making team to help us refine our sensory skills.

He comes with his tiny bottles of essential oils and we will spend 3 to 4 hours going over "citrus" and the differences between lemon, lime, verbena, orange, orange blossom, mandarin, tangerine, and bergamont.  He dips the white strips into the bottle, then passes them around the table and asks us to describe the aroma.

When describing an aroma, most people would stop at "citrusy".  Alex wants to know which citrus.  Is it acidic and green, waxy, oily and sweaty like Verbena? Or is it cooling, resinous, metallic, and powdery like Orange?  He forces us to be very specific.  We can't describe something as "floral", we have to first specify "white flowers" and then "jasmine with a hint of celery".  This helps everyone on the team develop a similar language when we talk and make decisions about our wine.

During one session we were discussing Juniper and we brought in examples of different gins that exemplified different characteristics.  It's not enough that we start drinking wine at 7am, but now we've moved on to hard alcohol early in the morning.  It's time likes these that I feel like a rock star, or a dead beat alcoholic.

Let me know if anyone wants to know the three different types of strawberry aromas.  Or the difference between papaya and guava.

-L