Thursday we had a group of people over for a tasting who have been making wine or are interested in making wine and asked them to bring a sample of their wine to share. The tasting was a great success and the new wines were very impressive.
Michele and Tom brought their cabernet, which was fermented along with ours but has been in different barrels (hungarian and french). Their barrels had already given the wine a different taste than ours. It is interesting how quickly that happened and reinforces the impact that barrel selection makes in the final outcome of a wine.
James and Ariana brought their Syrah, which also fermented along with ours but has been in a glass carboy after fermentation instead of a barrel. The wine from the Carboy tasted good, but it hadn't matured as much as what was in the barrel.
Terry and Penny Garrison brought their Cabernet. Terry got his grapes through BrewCon. He knows they were from Star and I'm guessing they came from Larry Kornze's vineyard as the harvest time was very late. Terry did a great job of crushing/destemming and fermenting and the result is a very smooth wine. He has a smaller barrel (5G unknown cooperage) which is adding oak at a pretty quick rate.
All of the Riverwoods wines were very good. No hints of any problems in what we tasted. We did see 1 carboy of Petite Sirah that has some surface scum that we need to investigate. I am guessing racking it out and adding 20ppm meta should clean it up. We also need to finish topping-up the wines. The merlot topping fluid was empty and we need to break down a carboy (and should verify all other barrels got topped-up).
A few notes on the Riverwoods wines:
- Chardonnay is drinking well and is ready to bottle. Flavor is more balanced this year without the tartness and there is more body and color. We expect to filter and bottle the Chardonnay this month (Feb).
- Petite Sirah has some good up-front fruit and is very pleasant.
- The syrah this year is lighter body and easy to drink. More barrel time will help shape it.
- The malbec has a strong green pepper flavor this year. Not the green stem flavor, but more peppery.
- The merlot is highly tannic this year. We got it from a different source that had very small berries, so the skins really dominate the flavor. We will have to experiment with the Boisique blend this year to get the typical fruit. We may need to add some of the cab franc and/or Petite Sirah.
- The WA Clone-6 cab had good flavor and nose and was smooth.
- The ID cab had lots of fruit and was full bodied.
- The 08 WA Clone-6 (reserve) cab was very elegant and had a nice balance of oak, although Ray commented that he thought the oak was approaching a level we needed to watch it (the barrel is 4 year old, so it isn't likely to change too fast).
- The 08 ID (reserve) cab was intense in color, aroma, flavor, body and tannins. The wine has been held in Ray's new 30G French barrel and you could really taste and smell the French Oak. Michele described the nose as a fruitcake because of the gushing fruit, vanilla and alcohol.
- For dessert we (stirred up) and had the Petite Sirah port, which is drinking fabulous. The sweetness is there but not overpowering and there is considerable depth in the Petite Sirah flavors with a very nice long finish.
- We didn't taste the Cab Franc, which is only in a carboy.
