The 2013 harvest began in Sierra Madre vineyard with the picking of Pinot Noir Clone 667 on September 4. Woohoo! As usual, Lane Tanner (winemaker and co-owner) was the first to pick in the area - it's her style, and what you get is a wine that is naturally lower in alcohol but beautiful, graceful, and downright delicious! Nonetheless, harvest came very early this year.
Clone 777 quickly followed the 667, and both are now fermenting along smoothly at the winery. Chardonnay just came in this week - on September 9 - with the Robert Young clone. It is already showing such beautiful fruit flavor - this will make extraordinary wine.
The Chardonnay is now fermenting in oak barrels, and the Pinot Noir in open-top fermenters. Will Henry (co-owner, pictured below) is managing the punch downs in the shortest shorts he can find - ostensibly to scare away VA bugs.
When Pinot Noir ferments, the CO2 rising from the liquid pushes the skins to the surface and forms a cap of grapes and skins. Punch downs are where you break the cap on the open top fermenters, and mix the skins in with the fermenting juice.
More news later as harvest progresses!
The 2021 harvest was near. I called my winemaking partner, Lane Tanner, and asked her to find as many neutral oak barrels as we could gather - we had to accommodate extra fruit coming in. The quality in this new, mysterious vineyard was just too good to pass up. I dubbed the vineyard ‘The Wild King,’ […]
I was always a believer that being wild was a good thing - to a point. Be it a confrontation with a bear on a remote surf trip in British Columbia in January, or a night spent adrift on the open ocean in a boat that had lost its engine, wild is exciting, invigorating, and […]
Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind were made by accident. Perhaps the best known (and beneficial) was made by scientist Dr. Alexander Fleming, who went on vacation for a few weeks and returned to see that his petri dishes had overgrown with mold. His discovery: penicillin. Other examples of benign errors include potato chips, […]
There’s a lot of geeky stuff on the back of a Lumen bottle - wine-geeky stuff. So why is it there? Not only are the basic facts listed - vineyard source, AVA, variety, clone - but also we share the pH, TA (titratable acidity), and Brix at harvest. What, you may ask, is the significance […]
