WOW - Old world Chianti

We all fall for great labels sometimes and this 2005 Fattoria Monsanto Chianti Classico really pulled me in. Looks like a postcard someone sent from Italy 40 years ago. Nice wine too - big dose of sangiovese like a good Chianti should have with 7% Canaiolo and 3% Colorino for those of you keeping score at home. Here in Austin pick it up for $24 at Tony Mandola's (along with some great Italian groceries or takeout).

wine with gravitas

Here we go draining free run wine by gravity from a bin of Anderson Valley pinot noir. By separating free run from press wine we can later bring together the mix that makes the best wine after seeing how the flavors, acidity and tannin levels settle out.

it was a dark and chilly morning...

Starting at 6am (and 40 degrees - brrr) we are picking Russian River pinot noir today. Well, the pros are picking it and I am taking pictures and driving the truck. Dijon clones 115 and 667 today, more next week. More pictures later of the truck assuming I survive the Friday rush hour ride to the custom crush through downtown San Francisco in a 13+ ton 24' diesel rig. Gulp!

Hey, syrah syrah

White Hawk Vineyard down in Santa Barbara County picked yesterday and we destemmed the fruit today. Well most of it - as we did last year we will do some whole clusters of grapes still on the stems. A little nod to France's Rhone valley approach to syrah. And see those brown patches in the bin? Another French touch is to include a couple percent viognier grapes in the mix, so we will do likewise. Did it last year and the results (still in barrel) are promising.

vineyard news and views

For you serious wine geeks here is some great information direct from the vineyard manager about La Encantada pinot noir vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills near Santa Barbara. We should be getting grapes next week for our second rockroom vineyard-designated wine from this organically farmed vineyard.

It takes a lot of beer to make good wine

That is the saying anyway. For rockroom there is a time when both the beer and the wine come from California's Anderson Valley. This week we will harvest pinot noir just outside Philo CA and as we work with the grapes there just may be a few Boont amber ales floating around. It is good stuff. Or in the local Anderson Valley dialect known as Boontling, it is Bahl Hornin'!

wow - Sonoma Coast pinot

Wine country's answer to Austin's Oasis restaurant has got to be River's End. Perched on a cliff in Jenner CA, you can watch the sun sink while sea lions frolic down below. This is where the Russian River spills into the Pacific ocean so the quaff of choice is a Sonoma Coast or Russian River pinot. Man I can almost taste our own 2007 Bohemian Vineyard pinot now! Oh well, while we wait for that there are some other good examples from this area. Siduri and Zepaltas are my faves but makers like Kosta Brown and Gary Farrell do some dandy wines as well. So pick up one of these Sonoma charmers soon and enjoy with a grilled slab of wild-caught salmon. You'll be glad ya did.

start the presses

Today we pressed Napa cabernet sauvignon to barrel. Flavors were nice and full with an added bonus of good acidity given the somewhat early harvest. Tannins were relatively soft for this Howell Mountain vineyard as cab from 1000 ft. altitude can be a bit aggressive. We are using Sylvain and Taransaud barrels with tight grained French oak so will watch for subtle oak infusion over the next 18 months or so. This is our first pressing of the year so we are off to a great start!

08 Napa cab is born!

Harvest is well underway with heat spikes in several spots pushing grapes to ripeness a week or two earlier than last year. This means our Napa cabernet is already happily fermenting away. These grapes came in very clean and the fermentation is going well so we will probably extend maceration (fancy word meaning sit there with the skins and juice all together) to get the full wow out of this super-premium Howell Mountain fruit. Then it's pressin' time into French oak barrels for that important 2 year nap!

WOW - 2006 Hein pinot released

Official release of the first of the 2006 vintage - Anderson Valley, Hein Vineyard. Get some - yum.

www.rockroom.com

WOW - 2006 is a wrap

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.

W.o.w. - shiner anyone?

So in Texas when we talk "shiners" we usually mean beer and usually bock style Shiner Bock beer at that, but in the case of this week's wine of the week it is an unlabeled bottle of wine - a shiner - that happens to hold our own inaugural sparkling wine. The base wine for this was our 2006 Santa Lucia Highlands chardonnay and the wine is currently in champagne bottles becoming, we hope, our own tasty blanc-de-blancs. If you have wandered through the storage (or "elevage" as the French would say) caves/warehouses of a decent sparkling wine maker you have seen these shiners by the thousands laying humbly with their bottlecaps on waiting for a year or two or three to allow layers of flavor to develop in that bottle. This is methode champenoise and is the only way to laboriously make decent bubbly. How do you get a sparkler of your very own? Hang with us - we're willing to try making anything! And in this case it is going quite well I would say. Maybe we should pop one of these at the next co-op get together so you can see how good it is getting...

rockroom's white debut - 07 chardonnay

Here it is folks, going into bottle after 9 months in barrel - our Alder Springs Vineyard chardonnay. This wine saw oak by way of previously used French oak to avoid an overdose of barrel influence to this wine as we get to know the vineyard and it's ability to handle oak. Remember these grapes had an extreme hang time going well into November before they were picked from their hillside vineyard way up in Mendocino County and we really want this premium fruit to lead the way on this wine. So far it has a very food-friendly crispness to it with nice citrus and pear aromas and flavors. A couple months to get itself together in the bottle and we should have a great seafood wine come spring 2009. Sorry to make you wait, but we will sell no wine before its time. Hey, that could be a good tagline. Let me check to see if anyone has used it before...

Pinot bottling 2007 - graduation day!

Our 2007 pinot noirs developed beautifully in barrel over the last 9 months or so and were ready for their big day today to go into bottle. Sort of high school graduation for our babies - brings a tear to your eye, right? There's Pete in the photo making sure labels stay lined up as bottles get filled, topped with a blast of nitrogen to eliminate oxygen, corked (with our own custom rockroom corks of course) and topped with shortie capsules. Now for some bottle aging so that all those flavors can integrate and the wine can grow up a little more. Expect a spring debut for our 2007 pinot noirs if all proceeds quickly, fall of 2009 if maturity comes slowly. Hey, you can't rush greatness, it just has to come!

WOW Austrian White

Dipping south from Germany we visit the land of edelweiss fame and find some stellar white wine. Greuner Veltliner, the name of the grape and the wine, is a terrific food wine with crisp acidity, some pleasant grassy meadow aromas and a soft mouthfeel with a finish that lingers nicely. Works great with Weiner schnitzel (around here pork is the only, not the other, white meat) and is just as nice with cheese or as pictured with mousse pate. You may have to search a bit to find one of these in the U.S. as Austria does not get its own section in many American wine shops. I would say it is worth the search for these moderately priced beauties if you have a hankering for an interesting white.

Not so Bad-en

Baden is the southwest corner of Germany and is home to the Black Forest and much of the country's production of red wine. It is a stretch to call these "rotwein"s red as most are more like rose'. Many are sweet and are consumed blended with water. The kind of things you do when the flavors are not that great. It is mostly just too dang chilly for red grapes to ripen enough such that wines like these Spatburgunders (pinot noir outside Germany) taste much like what you would expect from France or California. Still, they do seem to work just fine slightly chilled and served with mildly flavored weisswurst or bockwurst. Prost!

Wines of Wurttemburg

Several days in western Germany just east of the Black Forest provided enough time to try a few regional specialties. The reds were light and fruity, the whites very crisp. Lemburger red was fine and the surprise was a barrel aged chardonnay that was in all ways a white Burgundy proxy. Really outstanding with that whole cool weather chard profile of acidity and minerality but softened by the barrel treatment. Unfortunately, many reds in this region are not really made from fully ripened grapes so are more of a rose and are bottled with residual sugar, probably to cover what would otherwise be some unripe weirdness. The final travesty is that these semi-sweet wines are often mixed with water by the locals to make a thin beverage that is really no more than a thirst quenching alternative to beer. The key to finding the better wines is to look for the word "Trocken" on the label (that "dry" auf Deutch) and "barrique" indicating that it was actually in a small wooden barrel at some time in its life. Be ready to pay a whole 2 to 5 euros extra for this - well worth it. Prost!

WOW - cool pinot

As expected we are fitting in a few stops for wine as we trek across France and into Germany. In Alsace near the eastern border of France we ran across the full pinot family: blanc, gris and noir. Here in Strasbourg we had a typical pinot noir for the region: light, crisp and served chilled. Almost like a full flavored rose. Great with veal and mushrooms.

WOW - Just Merlot?

Now this is not a wine of the week you will find at HEB or anywhere else in Austin or Texas or the Ooh-S-Ahh for that matter. It's just that with lunch at the floating Cafe Seine just steps from the Eiffel Tower, Just Merlot was just fine. But then drinking any French wine in Paris is probably just fine. Watch for more totally useless wine picks as we wind our way across France and into Germany. Doing important research to keep rockroom at the forefront of winemaking!

San Francisco Pinot Call-it-a-Day

Rockroom managed to pull off our first ever industry tasting today at San Francisco Pinot Days big finale tasting at Fort Mason and I must say it went well. Pouring the pre-release (as in so far only available to you co-op faithful) 2006 and the current release (as in almost sold out) 2005 Hein Vineyard pinots we got many cudos on the wine. Reactions ranged from "hey that's nice" to "wow, that's really good". So I would say our joint winemaking collaboration is working out well, which of course comes as no surprise to those of us that have been sipping and sampling along the way. So for now we will keep on pushing the boundaries of small production winemaking, OK?