Winery Update

2/24/2011: Cabernet Tasting Trials. We tried 100% samples, 60/40, 50/50 and 40/60. Some people liked the 60/40 and some liked the 40/60. We all agreed that the wine was to cold to get a good feel for it.  We tried adding 5% malbec into a blend and most people liked that better.
 
We're going to move the ID Cabs into Stainless Steel Kegs and glass carboys to get it off of the oak and wait to bottle until the Malbec has gone through MLF (sometime in May) and then do another trial blending.  The 2010 cabs were topped up some, but not all the way. The extra 1G of 2010 wine in a carboy had a funky smell and taste.  We'll need to address moving the wine around soon.
 
We are preparing to bottle our Viognier. We may blend it with the left-over McAurthur Riesling. Meta levels are low, so we should add a little meta (15ppm), which will mostly blow off as we bottle. We decided to not filter this year because of prior issues. But we'll need to keep an eye on the wines to see if they pop corks from MLF.
 
2/17/2011: Topped and Tasted. All wines coming along well. ID Syrah and Malbec are over their HSO2 smell.  We tried a bottle of our 2006 cabernet. We had a glass poured undisturbed and then shook the bottle (similar to the repetitive inverting that happened during the recent comparative tasting) and poured a second glass. The biggest different was the clarity. The second glass was very cloudy.  There was some difference in the nose from disturbing the sediment, but it wasn't as evident as what we remembered from the comparative tasting. Ray suggested that the difference may be attributed to bottle variation or storage variation.  In either case we agreed that it would be worth opening bottles to check them before submitting them to a contest in the future.