Winemaking

Harvest 2011 – Week 4 – Grapes, Pigs, and Fun Varieties at Asti Winery

Week 4 has come to a rather quiet close as we only processed a few hundred tons this week atAsti.  It’s a drop in the bucket for what is to come this season.  We were led by Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris from the Lodi area which both had perfect Brix, crisp acids, and really ...

Harvest 2011 – Week 3 – The Pinot Commeth

We’ve begun harvesting Pinot Gris from the Central Coast vineyard, CatCanyon (also the source of the Emma Pearl Chardonnay).  Pinot Noir doesn’t seem to be too far behind in Brix so I’m sure we’ll start to see that soon as well.  Here atAstiwe have our first grapes scheduled for mid-next week however it’s mainly Sauvignon ...

Harvest 2011 – Week 1 – Going through Veraison

Now I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself…Grapes can not be being harvested already.  So what’s this week 1 thing all about you ask???  I count the first week in August every year as week 1 of a 16 week harvest season.  Week 16 falls in the middle of November by which time normally all the ...

Getting Started: An Introduction to Wine Smelling

Yes, that’s wine SMELLING, not tasting.  I was fortunate enough to get interested in wine before I was actually of legal drinking age.  Why do I say fortunately, you ask?  Because this forced me to only smell wines, for the first two and a half years that I worked in the wine industry.  I really ...

Crazy Times: Notes on Blogging, Vintage 2011, Winemaking, and the MW exam…

To my returning readers, my apologies that I have been unable to get a post up for the last two weeks but my life has been insane between full-time winemaking, an on-going house renovation project, a 50 mile bike ride for Diabetes research and my MW studies.  To my new readers…Welcome to the Personalities of ...

Layovers and Trellis Systems!

So today marked a milestone in my career as it’s the start of my first official Sales Trip!  This trip is for my new brand Emma Pearl however the day so far has been less than pearly.  I decided for reasons that still escape me to not leave out of the tried and true San ...

Wine Trails and Weeping Vines

I spent a good bit of my Saturday at the Asti Winery tasting room for the Barrel Tasting Weekends for the Northern Sonoma County Wine Roads.  This included an event for Dry Creek, Russian River, and of course my stomping grounds the Alexander Valley.  I love events like this because I was able to talk ...

Is Wine an Art???

I’ve had this blog post in the drawer for weeks thinking that it would be something that no one but me would be interested in debating.  Apparently I was wrong. I read this post this morning on Vinography and it inspired me to publish it. http://www.vinography.com/archives/2011/02/a_short_conversation_between_w.html From my viewpoint as a winemaker as well as ...

The Top 5 Essential Tools of the Professional Winemaker (that no one would have ever thought were important)

I feel sometimes that I get caught up in working and doing my job that I forget there are rather interesting things that I absolutely can not make wine without that most of the non-winemaking public would scratch their head over. Thus in order to lighten things up on the blog a bit I present my “Top 5 Essential Winemaking Tools” list.

Going Bottle Ready!

Now that harvest is over and all the new wine is happily going through ML or has already been sulfured our winemaking attention is turned towards making blends for bottling. We do this year round however it always seems to reach a peak around this time of year because bottling has been drawing off blends we made way back in June and July while harvest was happening. Now with the holidays upon us distributor stock is at a year round low because people buy up wine at Thanksgiving and Christmas for family meals and get togethers. This makes January a big bottling month to try and replenish the reserves. In thought, putting a blend together is not that hard. You take all the lots of wine that you’ve already previously