With most of the Pinot Noir fruit in, both our 667 and 777 clones of Pinot Noir from Sierra Madre Vineyard have fermented and are now going into barrel! Lane is always the first to pick - which means our wines are also usually the first into barrel. This results in wines that are lower in alcohol and also more age-worthy.
The Pinot Noir spent about 10 days in open-top fermenters. We performed punch-downs three times a day, to mix in all that yummy fruit character. The wines all went through a very slow ferment and went into barrel smelling beautiful.
We did bring in an extra ton of Pinot Noir this week from an undisclosed high-end Pinot Noir vineyard from the Santa Rita Hills, which will go into our final blend and add some extra depth and character. Score! That will represent about 10% of the final wine. It is currently fermenting in an open-top bin.
The rest of the Chardonnay also came in this week - 4 tons from Sierra Madre Vineyard, Clone 15. The Clone 15 took a little longer to ripen, but the juice is gorgeous - and will add a nice spicy note to the Chardonnay. The Robert Young Clone of Chardonnay is now in barrel, having almost completed fermentation, with malolactic bubbling away.
Stay tuned for news on the Grenache - word is that it might be picked next week.
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 […]
