Taste The Wines Amongst The Vines

I will be co-hosting a wine tasting at the Furlong Estates Vineyard on Saturday June 13th. See flyer below (you can click on it to see it larger) or click here for more information.

Winemaker Interview

I was recently interviewed by Sagi at OpenBottles. Click on the link below to read it.

OpenBottles Interview

Wine Update

This time of year things start to pick up in the winery. Once the coolness of the winter months come to an end, and the weather starts to warm up, the wines also start to "wake up". When I barreled my 2008's last fall, a lot of them had not finished there fermentations. Now they have and over the past month or so I have been busy racking the wine. Racking is the term used when wine is taken out of the barrel, the barrels are cleaned and then wine is put back into the barrel. After fermentation is over, all the dead yeast cells and other "muck" settles to the bottom of the barrel. So when the wine is removed, all of this "muck" (also known as lees) is taken out of the barrels. It's a really beautiful color (as you can see in the photos), but leaving the wine sitting on the lees for too long can sometimes lead to spoilage. I usueally just do this only once unless the wine starts to smell a little funky, then I would rack again. So now that racking is over, it's time to start choosing and ordering this years barrels and get ready for bottling of the 2007's. As for the 2008 wines, they are tasting pretty good. More about that in a future post.