philosophy

As with our vineyard practices, we believe that experimentation with new and old winemaking methods will lead to continual improvement in the cellar and complex and intriguing wines.

Our philosophy in making our viognier and rose of syrah is to really allow the fruit to show through, therefore we keep them in stainless steel tanks – no oak - and we allow them to ferment very slowly to not burn off any of the fruit. In addition, we do not let them go through secondary fermentation which converts malic acid to lactic acid. In other words, none of the “butteriness”, but instead clean, crisp and fresh fruit flavors.

As for our red wine philosophy, we believe in keeping all of the lots separate until it is time to blend. This allows us to see what the potential of each lot is and determine the best combinations for our blends. We also believe in letting the fruit mature on its own so we do minimal racking (moving the wine out of the barrel to remove the sediment and putting the wine back into the barrel). We also believe oak is another spice and just like you should not over salt your food, we should not over oak our wine, as this will hide some of the fruit.

While tasting through barrels prior to bottling our 2004 vintage, we found a few Pinot Noir barrels of exceptionally high quality. We gave all of the barrels a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 and found that while most barrels were 8’s and above, there were a few 10’s. We then selected those barrels (4 in total) to be our barrel select “?” rho Pinot Noir. Of the four barrels, 2 were new French and 2 were neutral. We felt that the structure of 50% new oak would allow this special Pinot Noir to lay down and age for a little longer than our “?” lambda Pinot Noir. To take the rho a step further, we decided to bottle it at the same time as the lambda but to keep it in bottle for an entire year to allow for more integration. We continued this program with our 2005 vintage and will do so going forward.

Although we tried to escape our prior IT career by getting into grape farming and wine making we did not quite succeed. Technology is still a key component of our daily operation and a very important factor in memorizing tasting results and making key decisions. When we taste through all barrels a couple of times a year (lots of hard work…believe me) we use extensive spreadsheets and data bases to track what our taste buds are telling us. Not only does this helps us in making decisions about final blending but it also is key in making decisions about our future barrel selection strategy, yeast selections etc.

We are respectful of, but not hampered by traditional winemaking methods and will continue to experiment in our quest to craft interesting, enjoyable and exciting wines.