Les Blog

Earlier tonight, a hardy crew assembled to lay the rosé to rest and give the port a quick racking. The port tasted very lovely but very young, and was surprisingly different across carboys, but the star of the evening was the luscious rosé.

You may recall that this wine was a seignée of the syrah we picked this year — that is, you “bleed” (seignée) the fermenter of juice just after crush, and then ferment that pink juice as a rosé. Unfortunately, I waited a bit too long before drawing blood, so this rosé is actually quite bloody — good for drinking, but it probably took a little something from the syrah left fermenting.

In any case, the rosé started out with a relatively high pH — which is to say, it was very low on acid. That not only meant it had less ability to fight off deadly contagion (like the bacteria that turn wine to vinegar), it tasted “flabby” and even a bit soapy (though ladies, I’m told, like it too). Luckily, it was otherwise clean, so a few days ago, I added a bit of acid to perk the young scalliwag up.

Sure enough, that brought down the pH to around 3.66, which is still pretty high for a white/rose wine, but much healthier. Those assembled for bottling tonight all soberly tasted it, and admired its ample fruit and generous taste. Nevertheless, I was still nervous about that pH, and we all agreed it could take a little more acid without freaking out and seeing spiders.

After a second addition, the pH had dropped to 3.55, much safer microbially speaking (and isn’t that the only way to speak, these days?). Better, we all noticed the difference instantly in the glass: much more forwardly floral, and much more alive in the mouth.

As the wine equalizes and absorbs that late acid addition, the pH will probably creep back up a hair. Nevertheless, after maybe a month’s worth of solitude to recover from bottling, this should be a lovely summer quaffer to lie down in the tall grass and enjoy.

On Wednesday, Melissa, Whit and I racked the Cabernet Sauvignon, which had been split between a barrel and a variable height tank.

Readers with ESP will remember that in mid-winter, before we were able to get another variable tank, about 3/4-barrel’s worth of Cab had been exposed to a lot of oxygen as it went through malolactic. I’d crossed my fingers that the CO₂ produced during malo would offer it some protection, but when Whit, Mike and James racked it late January, they detected some off odors — “compost,” Mike even said. I don’t know about you, but that’s a je ne sais quoi I know I’m always looking for in a fine wine. In any case, they cordoned off the offending wine into the variable tank, keeping the barrel pure.

Happily, I didn’t detect anything like that in the tank as I popped the lid — or as we racked it — so hopefully, what they were smelling/tasting was simply the end of malo. In any case, both barrel and tank tasted fresh and full, though the wine in the tank was much more closed and youthful, as you might expect. Because of that, the vegetal tiny of the Cab (due both to the varietal, but also less ripe fruit than we’d hoped for) was much higher in the tank; in barrel, the oak seems to be intertwining itself with the veg to make it less apparent and the wine correspondingly more pleasant.

All in all, the wine is sound and as I said, it looks lovely. My guess is that unless we can pull back the green pepper in the wine, however, the Cab will have less of a voice in the blend than we might like.

600 bottles and corks. 1200 labels. Just short of 3 hours. As James pointed out, that’s about a case every 3 minutes. That much throughput in that little time is unprecedented, and nothing short of amazing. When the last bottle went into the last case, I don’t think anyone truly believed it.

Now, we did get a running start. James, and a little later, Whit came over early to begin setting things up, so between the three of us, we had the bottler set up (an art in and of itself) and the settling tank filled by the time most of the crew arrived.

But that’s not to take away from how much this crew got done and how quickly. Indeed, that prep stage of bottling is in fact hindered by a lot of people, who really have little to do until the bottling armada cranks up. So when a great crowd showed up at 3, it was the appropriate force at the right time, and off we flew. Incredible.

More pics and a play-by-play after the link. Continued …

When they said they wanted to borrow our BMW for something, we had no idea it would end up in the Côte d’Ivoire in so catchy a song.

The other night I opened one of the few bottles I have left of our 2001 Klipsun Vineyard Merlot. In point of fact, it’s actually 92% merlot, augmented with a bustier of 8% Klipsun cabernet from the previous year. I remember it being… ample in its youth, but boys, I’m here to tell you she can still make your heart race.

Klipsun Vineyard inclines down a sun-baked hill in the Red Mountain AVA near Richland, Washington, supplying grapes to heavy hitters like Quilceda Creek, DeLille, Andrew Rich and — until they got wise — us.

Seven years later, the merlot from those shapely slopes still had curvaceous curves. Cedar and tobacco leaf wrapped around deep, floral fruit, forming a veritable Robusto of a nose. In the mouth, not quite as spectacular, but increasingly complex over the hour we drank it. Lovely, high thread-count, emery board tannins, more or less balanced with gobs of lush fruit — man, I’d forego my bailout-funded $18 million outhouse remodel if I could achieve that texture every year.

After all that, there wasn’t much in the way of a finish, sadly, but the ride was so thrilling it’s hard to complain too much. It really reminded me of the merlot we got from Horse Heaven this year, so even though the 2001’s nearly gone, perhaps this year’s model will take us around the track once again.

Last night, my wife and I were lucky to be two of more than 700 people packed the McMinnville Community Center to honor David Lett, the Oregon wine pioneer who died in early October on the verge of what would have been his 38th Oregon wine harvest. (As with all things in the winemaking world, everything gets put on hold until the wines are safely in barrel. Thus the two month delay in scheduling the event — even David would have skipped his memorial if it had happened during harvest.)

A number of speakers remembered the man, including former Governor Barbara Roberts, winemaker David Adelsheim, and restauranteur Nick Peirano, the latter nearly choking up a number of times as he recalled his old friend. But most touching was his son Jason (pictured above), who led the crowd in a toast asking us to shout “‘Cheers’ loud enough for [his] father to hear in whatever vineyard he’s now tending.” Oh yes, I think he heard. So many lives have been touched by Lett, his irascibility, his generosity, his tenaciousness and his charm, it was — well, inspirational, I can’t think of a better word — to feel so many people bound to one another through him. In fact, probably half the people in the room would be grinding it out in different careers right now were it not for his 1965 “theory” that Pinot Noir would flourish in the soggy hills of northern Oregon.

In 2001, I was lucky enough to spend some time with him when I was completing Life in Vine, and I have about 45 minutes of an interview I did as we walked through his historic vineyard. I’m starting to cut together something out of it, but last night, as images from his life floated by on an overhead screen, I remembered one exchange in particular (embedded at right) that summed up so much about him for me.

As I begin to ask what possessed him to plant Pinot Noir, watch that grin spread across his face: He’s heard that question a thousand times before, and you can tell he’s got a witty, well-practiced response in his pocket, ready to go whenever I stop talking and let him unload it. But something happens in the course of delivering the line: its essential truth overtakes him. For Lett, Pinot Noir truly was a princess, and with all his soul, every fall for nearly four decades, he vied for her hand, more than once even winning it.

If that doesn’t make him a prince, to say nothing of a king, then I don’t know what would. Cheers, David.