With a bottling session Saturday we got the last of the 2006 co-op wines (our experimental not-for-sale stuff made right here in Austin) safely in bottles. 120 bottles give or take a few. Thanks to those who stopped by to help. Hopefully the takeaway bottles made it worthwhile. Some very promising stuff here. The really big news from Saturday is the barrel-aged bordeaux blend (BDX for short) that is a 60/25/15% blend of merlot/cab/cab franc. These grapes, from different Napa vineyards, were co-fermented so have lived together now for about 20 months. It is a happy partnership that is so far showing up as a really big wine. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, is our simple blend, tagged simply Red #2. This is mostly a second wine made from pink "bleed juice", taken from our zinfandel and BDX grapes to concentrate them, fermented on merlot, cab, cab franc and zin press skin. The resulting wine was a light fruity red that was then blended with a little barrel-aged zinfandel to give it a little heft. Still an easy-drinking red that will be fun this fall. Finally, we bottled a small test batch of a new zinfandel vineyard blended with a bit of our standby zin (both Russian River AVA but very different grapes nonetheless). Early indications are that this best suited to being a blending zin as it displays some striking peppery and herbal aromas that might be too much all alone. We will watch to see how it develops but it is an interesting contrast to our fruit-driven standby vineyard.
No comments:
Post a Comment