Les Blog

For the first time in a dozen years, a white wine is brightening the basement: Pinot Gris from Oracle Vineyard in the Dundee Hills. After pressing and letting it settle for a day, I took a halogen shop light and lit the side of the fermenter to see where the lees-line was (“lees” being the skunge the precipitates out of a wine after fermentation). Man, bask in that warm, golden color: I plan to bring this photo up every time I need a hit of vitamin D through the long, dark Oregon winter.

Today I drove out to the Dundee Hills and Oracle Vineyard to pick up our Pinot Gris. It was a beautiful but bone-chillingly cold morning, as co-owner Amy confirmed when I got there, wrapped in all the clothes she could find and still freezing. By the time I left, the sun had started to break out of the clouds (perhaps for one last encore before heading south for the winter), Amy was finally warming up, and we had all our fruit in hand for 2009. That makes me one relieved Garagiste.

Now that the Gris has been processed, we have 7 wines downstairs in various stages of completion, from the Syrah which we’ll probably press Tuesday, to the Cabernet which isn’t even thinking about fermenting yet.

We picked up our Syrah at the same time we did our Merlot, but as you might remember, we let the Syrah determine the pick date and let the Merlot fall where it might. That decision ultimately showed up in the flavor (more backbone and structure), but of course, in the numbers, too…
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Ah, Merlot, you corpulent, shar-pei of a wine, you. Despised by many, tolerated by few, I alone sense your inner beauty, your generosity of fruit, your gentle tannins…

… but this? 27.5 brix? 4.02 pH?! Girl, how could you?!

Oh, well. Nothing a tummy tuck and boob job can’t fix. Follow along with me as we do the merlot numbers…
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Field samples from our Cab block show brix at 25.8, but pH at 3.4. That pH is down in Pinot country, and at .73, the TA (titratable acidity, a number loosely but not directly related to pH) is also high. So for Cab to have those numbers, something isn’t quite ready yet. The fruit may have enough sugar (that brix is more or less perfect), but the acid’s too high, so the fruit isn’t in balance.

I asked the vineyard manager to taste the fruit for us, and he reported back today that indeed, the Cab isn’t ready yet: seeds are still green, and the jelly-like sac around the seeds is still expansive. So he guesses as much as 2 weeks, though hopefully closer to one.

That’ll undoubtedly put our brix in the stratosphere, but as long as pH continues to rise, we can always add a little water to bring the sugar back into balance once we pick.

So hold on: this one may be a cliffhanger!

It’s official: we’re road-tripping to Yakima (or thereabouts) on Friday to haul back a combined ton of merlot and syrah. Both are in the 25-26 brix range; with luck, they won’t get much higher than that before we can rescue them, but the vineyard manager says they’re both tasting perfect.

It’s the first crush of the season, so there will probably be a lot of head scratching as we try to remember what it was that worked so well last year. But with luck, it’s like riding a sticky, sugary bicycle, and it’ll come back to us once the fragrance of fruit fills the air.

It was a hot afternoon, but five of us coolly assembled to taste through each of our four main wines — Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Syrah — to determine what part they’ll play in this year’s Peugeot blend.

First, to get the lay of the land, we tasted through the wines individually. Frankly, I was a little surprised at how nicely the Cab had evolved — last fall, this one came into the winery like a health care protester, barely ripe and a little unbalanced. But my notes now began, “Wow, big fruit!” Amalgamated notes from the tasters:

Lovely cherry/raspberry nose, but maybe a bit on the hot side. Tart, but alive. Ripe raspberry and blackberry, with a touch of pepper. Elegant, generally round and full throughout, but fading quickly on the finish. Grippy tannins on the finish — good for some, a bit much for others. Cocoa and minerals. Maybe a little monotone. [Mike adds] The first Cab I could have with salmon.

All in all, better than we could have hoped for. Next up was the Merlot…
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