Blending Season - Part Two
Blending Season - Part Two
Wherein we separate Cabernet Franc into 3 different wines, moves barrels all over the place, etc
My dogs are barking…the cure is the second martini.
All day in the cellar today, working through an intricate and amazing treasure map of blending put together by Beth Murray, our Assistant Winemaker and Cellar Master for the eight or nine wines we are bottling on Friday.
There is a shit-ton (ought to be an official weight and measure…) of moving parts when it comes to putting blends together. Remember from my Blending Season - Part 1 post, when I wrote about the goal of putting together a coherent and Beautiful wine from a bunch of disparate pieces? Well, there is a ton of physical work that goes into getting those perfect pieces together. Aidan Mirassou is our forklift jockey, unstacking and restacking barrels as he digs out the specific barrel to finish the blend for Lineage’s piece of Cabernet Franc.
Today Beth and I racked Cab Franc out of puncheon and barrel into tank (some of that resulting blend went right back into the same barrels (but as a blended wine, not just a single evocation of Cab Franc) for Lineage and L’Autre Côte. We also put together - in this crazy process - the 650-case blend that will be the Cabernet Franc that you can enjoy in restaurants and in your own living room from your favorite wine shop. This particular blend is a combination of wine from puncheon and barrel (one of the puncheons was divided into 2 different wines!). So, only part of the 132-gallon puncheon went into the wine destined for restaurants, while the rest of it went into the 2021 blend that will be our flagship wine, Lineage.
The best that we can hope for - when Time and Oxygen (the reaper of the elemental world) reign - is a transitory moment of apotheosis before every wine succumbs.
Visitors to the winery will sometimes ask me what 1% of a particular wine can add to the blend. And I always answer, 1% will make a wine that is significantly different in structure and organoleptics (flavor and aroma) than the version that did not have it, and is - for the time the wine is being blended - the difference between a fine wine, and one that is magical and carries the hopes and dreams of the winemaker along with it.
We are thoughtful winemakers; we look at each barrel (and each partial barrel) as an inherently “perfect” piece of the final blend. As I have noted before, the amount of evolution wine goes through over time, will ultimately make short work of the “perfection” we had hoped to achieve when we were putting the pieces together. The best that we can hope for - when Time and Oxygen (the reaper of the elemental world) reign - is a transitory moment of apotheosis before every wine succumbs.