As you have read from my co-blogger, spring is a busy time in the vineyard. Our jobs in the winery do not require us to be peeled out of bed at 3am by a phone call (Thank god) but spring is also busy in the winery. I thought I would give you a little insight about what happens when we start getting ready to bottle our wines to make room for the next vintage.
The wine that I will be following is our Su’skol Chardonnay blend. As some of you may know, this wine is our single vineyard Chardonnay from Napa County. The vineyard site is close to Carneros and with its often foggy summer mornings is a perfect site for Chardonnay. This is why a few years ago we decided to make a Chardonnay exclusively from the Su’skol ranch.
Before the winemaking team can blend the Su’skol Chardonnay, our lab samples all of these lots out of our barrels. In order to sample we must first identify all of the oak types and vintage percentage in each lot. When we sample these wines they will all be oak correct and from many different representative barrels from each oak vintage. This method of sampling insures that the wine samples are as close as possible to the overall flavor of each lot. As an extra precaution we will top all of these barrels after sampling to make sure the wine in the barrel does not get overly exposed to air.
On a given morning, again not 3am, the winemaking staff sits down with 10 – 50 samples in front of them.
For the Su’skol ranch we tasted about 30 wines, broken down in flights of 7 wines. After tasting a set of 7 lots we go over our notes, talking about our favorite wines, or maybe some that we need to move out of the program. This often leads into brainstorming talks about what worked in the vineyard or cellar the previous year. After all of the wines are tasted individually we create a table top blend of our favorites and taste that. If this wine is an expression of what we know the Su’skol ranch brings to the bottle, we are done. Often though, we make minute changes to the blend, adding and deleting partial lots to create that vintage’s perfect Su’skol Chardonnay.
Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker
