Sunday, June 24, 2007

bottling some coop juice

Bottling went well today and we have some 2006 wines ready and waiting. The pinot gris is a light wine with floral and melon aromas and simple clean flavors. The sauv blanc packs a bit more flavor and tends to citrus like grapefruit and lime with hints of passionfruit and great acidity that should help is play nicely with food. Worked fine for me with some greek dolmas for dinner! Now what can I say about the WhiZ? Beautiful bright pink with hints of cherry and strawberry this is a nice light quaffer. Plenty of flavor and acidity softened with about 1% residual sugar. Finally, the Santa Lucia Highlands chardonnay went to bottle with big, rich flavors - the usual apple and pear are in there but with a dose of pineapple and a really long lingering finish. This wine had a brief time in French oak barrel (Radoux medium toast) and it certainly picked up some nice caramel hints.

The pinot gris, sauvignon blanc and WhiZ are ready to drink and will be great summertime chillers. The chard is yummy now but will benefit from at least a few months resting in the bottle to allow some of the complex flavors to integrate. In fact, I expect that this wine will do well with even more age on it. Having said that all these wines have pretty low levels of sulfites and were only lightly filtered so don't expect to leave them in a hot pantry for a year or two. Also, none were cold stablized (c'mon - click the link and read about it!) so they will do best just chilled an hour or two in the fridge right before opening. If you stick em down in the deep celler of your Scottish castle or subject them to several days of fridge temps you should expect to see some tartrate crystals form at the bottom of the bottle. No worries - harmless stuff (cream of tartar) so just pour carefully to avoid that little bit of sediment. And enjoy! - These are the first of our 2006 handmade wines and they turned out really nice!

1 comment:

scott said...

sorry about the blurry photo Derek!