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