Co-op bottling day

After fining with a little bentonite we bottled our experimental Napa sauv blanc today. A nice bright wine but just not sure this source is worth taking in a commercial direction. For now this one will be co-op only wine, great for light seafood pairing on a hundred degree day. Plenty of those this year!.

w.o.w. - chilly sauv blanc

As summer draws to a close here in Texas there is still enough sun and heat to merit popping a well chilled white. I was pleased to open one of our own rockroom wines - a 2005 Napa sauvignon blanc - and find it full of good citrus and floral aromas and grapefruit and green apple flavors. Crisp, bright and great with light food and a hot day. Some of you still have a bottle or two of this wine - enjoy it now while the weather is warm! Better yet, sip it next to the 2006 version we made and lets talk about which is better...

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!

w.o.w. - cheap, easy and lots of passion

I could make some comparison between my preference for women and sauvignon blanc but that may offend someone so I won't go there. Instead I will just tell you about this $9 bottle of wine that is the wine-of-the-week. If you have been wondering when the w.o.w. will be something really easy to find and inexpensive, here it is - Monkey Bay sauvignon blanc (2006) from Marlborough, New Zealand. Great with seafood and lighter fare (even sushi as pictured here, although my preference would have been a Kirin Ichiban). What is fun about this wine, like many Marlborough sauv blancs is that it is LOADED with the standard sauv blanc aromas and flavors: fresh cut grass, grapefruit, gooseberry, lime and passionfruit, passionfruit, passionfruit. I promise you, if you have any of these items laying around the house, in the lawnmower bag or growing in the ship's hold, take a deep whiff and then try this wine - you will see the comparison. Now some would say there is just too much of all of the above, like drinking Jolly Ranchers or something. Maybe so, but nothing will educate the palate on these classic sauvignon blanc flavors like the stuff from Kiwi-land. Then you can move on to a nice, subtle, complex French Sancerre... or maybe even that rockroom Napa sauv blanc lurking in the background.

w.o.w. - shine on

Spent Saturday hangin out in San Francisco with the gang at the winery and got some great info on status of the 06 wines and what is coming up for 07. After all the learnin' we were ready for some practical exposure so we popped some shiners (ya know - unlabeled bottles) of 05 syrah and 06 sauv blanc. So wait, you say, why are those wines of the week? I mean, where are we supposed to get shiners of new wine????? Well the rockroom of course! Stay tuned as we have some barrel samples of 06 wine ready for tastin...

The Scent of a rockroom

The sweet smell of a winery is in the air in the new rockroom winemaking co-op digs as our recently arrived fruit ferments its way toward wine-dom. Briefly...
Whites:
Our little barrel of chardonnay is perking away nicely and you can already smell the toasty vanilla-caramel influences of the French oak barrel. Remember this will be blended with some wine from the same vineyard that is fermenting in neutral vessels, so we will be able to moderate the barrel character. Other whites are doing well ranging from the pinot gris which has almost fermented out completely to the Napa sauvignon blanc that is taking its own sweet time. Keeping our whites in tubs of ice-cooled water keeps fermentation temperatures low. Maybe Santa will bring us a glycol chiller!
Reds:
The picture above shows our merlot-cab-cab franc blend several days ago as it starts fermentation. Unlike the whites, we want fermentation temperatures to climb on this stuff so the bins are wrapped with insulation to make sure we get to 85 degrees plus. Fermentation is exothermic (ah look it up) so no external source of heat is required to easily hit this. The zinfandel got a couple extra days of cold soak to really get the fruit soaked out and be sure any raisined grapes got softened up enough to release their flavors and sugar. Look for pressing alerts on reds in a week or so.

2006 Grapes Arrived

Yesterday the fridgee truck arrived with our shipment of 1300 lbs of premium California wine grapes. The whites are in the form of pressed and settled juice ready for a cool fermentation into white wine. The reds will go through various cold-soak regimens after which yeast will be added to start their fermentations. If all goes well we will be pressing wine in mid to late December.

In case you have forgotten what we are making or only wrote down the wines you are participating in, here is the full list:

Zinfandel - Russian River - a different vineyard source than we used in '05 (that was Mendocino) this is an old vines vineyard that rockroom sourced from in '03 and '04.

Right Bank Blend - Napa Valley - like its distant cousins being made from grapes grown on the "right bank" of Bordeaux's Dourdogne River, this wine will lead with merlot but we will give it an American-style boost from a solid dose of cabernet sauvignon and a splash of cabernet franc. Certainly an elegant sibling to that Inkgrade badboy we are making!

Chardonnay - being made in 2 styles from 2 sources: a big California-style barrel-fermented (Radoux French oak barrel, medium+ toast) Carneros chard, and a low-oak Santa Lucia Highlands chard going for a more acidic, food-friendly wine. Assuming the SLH juice tests out with solid acid levels (looks likely) we will make a small batch of sparkling "baby-blanc-de-blancs" wine as well.

Sauvignon Blanc - Napa Valley - same source as 2005 but more of it - it disappeared way too fast!

Pinot Gris - Suisun Valley - first time for this one. Call it pinot gris or call it pinot grigio - lets just hope it's good!

If you are in Austin over the Thanksgiving weekend you might want to drop by on Saturday or Sunday as things get going!

Harvest 2006 Status

The picking has begun! The growers are reporting in and here are a few harvest stats:
pinot gris (or pinot grigio if you prefer Italian) was harvested Monday 9/11 at 20.1 Brix (percent sugar by weight) and acidity of 8.2 g/l at pH=3.51. Finished with a little residual sugar this should be a nice low-alcohol quaffer to beat the heat next summer. Our Napa sauvignon blanc was picked the same day at 22.2 Brix and 7 g/l acid at pH of 3.3. We will do it bone dry and it will be a great refresher to pair with grilled shrimp next summer.

Meanwhile our InkGrade cabernet sauvignon (that is the photo) is already at 24.5 Brix at 7 g/l acid and pH 3.34. Should harvest by the end of September. The Hein pinot noir will be ready a week or two after that (two weeks later than last year). Bottom line is that California harvesting is bunching up a bit and could have shades of 2004 when fruit came in all at once.