Our Tasting Room Manager, Jane Beery, is the brilliance behind our current window display in our Tasting Room. I really like this photo and had to share. She has plans for many more holiday- and season-related displays in the future, so stay-tuned.
A colleague and friend sent me the link to an excellent article by Clark Smith on Appellation America about Santa Cruz Pinot Noir. This is one of the best articles I’ve seen so far to delineate and describe what can be a somewhat vague term—Santa Cruz Pinot Noir —to most people (one of whom was myself, certainly for a long time), and if you are at all interested in Pinot Noir in general, I highly suggest you read it. There are so many microclimates and different soil types in those mountains that a profound diversity of Pinot abounds, and he explained that diversity very well. There is a section of the article where he describes clonal characteristics. I have worked with all of the clones he describes and he’s pretty much got it nailed. He also writes a commentary regarding the judgement of Pinot by those self-proclaimed critics out there. We all tend to walk around with a certain idea of what Pinot should be —but thankfully, because of Pinot’s unique inclination to mirror the characteristics of the site on which it is grown and how it is handled in the winery, I believe there is a Pinot to fit anyone’s ideal, and he does, too. Hopefully in the future, as Mr. Smith suggests in his article, wine criticism will change from final judgement in the black and white halls of criticism to a more responsible mindset of offering descriptions of wines and essentially flinging the doors of the court open and leaving the ultimate judgement to the consumer, for that afterall is the most important judgement that I know of in this business!
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We had a great time on Sunday at our “Port”, aka non-vintage “Dessert Wine” release party at our tasting room in Carmel. Yes, this is a port-like wine that we cannot call Port out of all due respect to the Portugese and their centuries-old port industry. Anyway, we had many wines and food to go with it and it was a great time! This wine is available only at our tasting and comes in 750mL bottles for $35.00/bottle. The other thing I couldn’t mention on the label (the government says that to state on the label that the wine is blended with spirits is to imply that consuming the product might make a person intoxicated...go figure) is that I blended the base with with a very nice brandy I procured from Germain Robin Distillery, and ended up making a nice fortified wine that one wine club member said was “not too sweet, not too alcoholic, and unusually complex and spicy”. There you have it….might make a great holiday gift!
Spelunking anyone? I feel like a spelunker when I where that headlamp. I’m filling the last barrels for the 2008 vintage in this photo. It certainly was a long one for us, and I’m glad it is over. Wine quality overall seems very good. The whites are delicate and fragrant, and the reds show good varietal character so far.
I know most folks think of harvest as grapes being harvested and received, but the real work for us goes far beyond receiving grapes. It can be a very physically wearing time, and the end of it all is, frankly, welcome. We can resume our normal lives and actually get the weekends off. We aren’t off the hook entirely, though, as the wines and barrels need to be monitored. We check for the progress of malo-lactic fermentation, check on any wines that may have gone to barrel slightly sweet, and monitor any increase in volatile fermentation. Barrels also need to be topped, additions made, white wines stirred, and all the equipment needs to be cleaned, repaired if needed, and put away.
Here’s a photo from a few weeks ago that I like.This is a picture of a red fermentor after we have drained most of the wine and before we have started shoveling the skins out of the tank and into the presses. The open space underneath is a stainless steel filter which, among other things, helps us to drain the tank.
Cima Collina will be at the Pinot Days event in Chicago on November 14th-15th. If you want to attend this wonderful event, please go to their website and enter the code “Collina” to get a 10% discount on tickets! Please be advised that the number of discounts available is limited.
Winemaker’s Dinner
I will be present and pouring Cima Collina at Christopher’s on Lincoln, in Carmel-by-the-Sea this Friday at 7:00. Christopher’s is one of my favorite local restaurants (chef owned and operated), and Christopher himself is a James Beard award-winning chef. Great food, great atmosphere, great service. Tickets are available at: montereywines.org.
Hello All—I’ve taken a little break here, at least somewhat. We hosted our annual harvest party at Hilltop Ranch this past Saturday. The weather was wonderful, the band—“The Furry Chaps”—a fun, local bluegrass band kept us all entertained; all in all, quite good fun. We brought in the last load of grapes on October 10—a mix of Bordeaux varietals (Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdot, Malbec, Merlot) from Lockwood Oaks. I kept the Malbec separate for a possible small bottling next year, but all the others are a “field blend” in one of our bigger tanks and all of it is just now coming into the homestretch—in other words finishing primary fermentation. We have drained and pressed a few tanks of Pinot so far—as soon as I’m done with this entry, I will drain a tank—but will dedicate ourselves more to that task next week…...
Winemaker’s Dinner: Friday, November 7 at 7pm.
