Outside of a large bottling run in the middle of the month, the cellar at The Steven Kent Winery will remain quiet for most of January. You’ll find the winemaking team, Steven Kent Mirassou, Beth Murray, and Aidan Mirassou, in the relative comfort of the Tasting Salon putting the 2021 wines together.
In the video above, the three of us are tasting our way through 10 different barrels of Cabernet Franc to determine where each of them should go: into L’Autre Côte - which is our high-end “Right Bank” blend, Cabernet Franc meant for restaurants and wine shops, or as an integral part of Lineage | Livermore Valley, our “Left Bank,” Cabernet Sauvignon-heavy blend.
Deep in the middle of harvest, this quality picture forms. Whether by sampling berries in the vineyard or tasting the incipient wines in their fermenters, what each wine will become takes shape.
Each of the bottles is tasted blind - we don’t know whether the wines within have been aging in new or used 59-gallon barrels (called Barriques) or in neutral or new Puncheons, which contain 132 gallons and contribute oak characteristics to their wines much more slowly than Barrique. Each of us approaches the wines a little differently, taking notes in a variety of ways, each of us prizing a specific characteristic slightly higher than the others.
After much discussion and retasting, we will eventually come to a consensus; the barrels will be racked into their designated blends and will be left to age for several more months before they are bottled.
The process of Blending is about trying to match in the bottle the picture we have in our heads about the ultimate potential of that wine. Deep in the middle of harvest, this quality picture forms. Whether by sampling berries in the vineyard or tasting the incipient wines in their fermenters, what each wine will become takes shape. At the Blending table, then, those individual pieces of the final blend (the Cab Franc portion of Lineage, for instance) get slotted in to flesh out the beautiful beast we are trying each year to make.
In Part Two (which will be posted on Monday), I’ll take you in-depth through what I am tasting and thinking about each wine that was included in the 2020 Lineage | Napa Valley blend, why the “final” blend changed radically just before bottling, and what the prospects are for its life.
Blending Season - Part One