Winemaker’s Musing Jan 2019

It has been a few months since my, the Winemaker’s, last post. Been exceptionally busy with my “other job”! But, the verdict is in on this seasons semi-sweet wines. It was a VERY good year for them. Most of the wines are a bit on the drier side again as our acid levels were low. I could have even made the Edelweiss as a dry wine if I wanted to. Instead it was left slightly sweet. It has a tremendous nose of floral notes and a lovely palate. We even put some in the Golden Eagle, Jeremey’s blend of dry non-barrel aged white. It has a very nice mineral quality to it. The taste is even across the palette. This year’s Moonstruck is another nice one. It will be a few months before these wines are released as we need to finish off last year’s wine first.

The jury is still out on the dry wines from this vintage. We had a terrible harvest of our Syrah. Due to the precipitous fall of temperatures in November of the previous year (2017) most of the primary buds were damaged and we had very poor fruit set. This also affected our Chambourcin, although we still got a small crop off of them.

I am trying to make these wines bigger than I did years ago. More tannin and a bit lower in pH so that they will last many years in the bottle. The issue with that is they will taste a little “harsh” in their youth. As an example, the 2016 Chambourcin is just coming in to its’ own right now. Unfortunately, we have just about sold out of it and will be selling the 2017 soon. My goal is to have enough stock so that we can age these wines for two to three years before releasing. So last years light harvest will set me back on that a bit.

 

Cheers!

Jim