Winemaker Journal: August 2010

Jeff Herinckx

What's happening at the winery
Our second Toast to the Tunes event of the season was even bigger than the first, and we didn't think that was possible! Thanks to everyone who came out to the winery for a fun-filled evening. It was held on the same weekend as the Brew Fest in Portland, so we didn't expect the crowd to be so huge - it was the biggest crowd ever, actually. Fortunately for us, we were accidentally over-staffed that night. We sold twice as much wine as we ever have at a Toast to the Tunes, so it was definitely a success - in terms of fun and in terms of business.

The weather has become more seasonable with temperatures in the 80s and 90s for the most part. This is great for our grapes, since they're a couple of weeks behind schedule due to the cool and wet spring that we had. Warm sunshine will certainly help to move the crop along in terms of its expected growth timetable.

We did a lot of bottling in July, but not as much as we'd hoped. Almost all of our Niagara has been bottled and we're now going to bottle it only on an as-needed basis. We received the labels for our new wine, Deviant, which is the sweet Marechal Foch that I talked about last month. We released it to the wine club first and then released it publicly at our Toast to the Tunes night. It is selling quickly, and I'm not sure that our inventory will last for six months. It seems to be very popular with the younger generation, which is typical of sweeter wines, so far.

Pinot Report
In July, we tasted a few lots of the 2009 Pinot Noir vintage and we think that they're coming along nicely. They need to age more, and they need more oak, which we can add, if necessary, during the aging process. They've currently been in oak for six to eight months, and normally we leave the juice in oak for at least 12 months.

The different vineyards are in different lots for the sake of comparison, and it does seem as though the 2009 vintage will give us one (or maybe two) single vineyard bottlings. We are hopeful to be able to produce a Reserve wine from this vintage, as well. This type of bottling (Reserve or Barrel Select) would probably only be produced in a quantity of 200-250 cases. Since we produce more varieties now, we think that it is time to cut back on the quantity of Pinot Noir that we produce. If we produce smaller lots of a variety of wines, the wine can be better quality, and the wine club can get a new vintage every year. Ideally, we'd like to run out of the vintage by the end of the year.

What's going on in August
We will continue to bottle in August. We have a small batch of Merlot that needs to be bottled, and we also need to bottle our Marionberry wine. Additionally, we need to bottle our Arcachon Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. We planned to do most of the bottling in July, but it just didn't work out that way.

That's it for now...talk to you next month.

Jeff Herinckx
Winemaker

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