Aging wine can be intimidating, so we thought we’d provide our experience and perspective. Here is a “Wine Aging 101” to focus on our Alexander Valley Cabernet...so grab your pencil and a glass of Cabernet. We hope you enjoy this Q&A and we encourage you to send us any questions you might have. Cheers!
Early each year, we sit down at Mom and Dad’s dining room table overlooking the vineyard for our annual vertical tastings. Held over a couple of days, these tastings give us an opportunity to compare vintages, to evaluate how the wines are developing, to notice trends and assess the continuity of our winemaking style. We all have our bias: which vintage is our favorite, which is our least. And it is in these tastings when those biases can change.
Bottling is a critical stage of winemaking – wines that are ready to bottle are very fragile and can be easily ruined by microbial contamination or high oxygen pickup (making them age prematurely.) We bottled the 2014 Rosé recently and I wore a GoPro to share with you what 90 seconds of bottling is like.
Once Autumn arrives, Mother Nature dictates our schedules in the cellar and vineyard. At the beginning of August this year, we anticipated our earliest Harvest yet because the growing season started early. Temperatures were warmer and the conditions drier than in previous years. This led us to believe that Harvest would start about two weeks ahead of normal.
Or so we thought. Mother Nature always keeps us on our toes.
