It is finally time to bottle the oak trials today! I am also bottling the 2009 Petite Sirah that I did egg white fining on, so I can compare it to the unfined wine side-by-side. The chardonnays all cleared out really nicely, which is great so I can bottle directly from the individual jugs — [...]
Tag archive: petite sirah
We finally set a date and bottled the 2009 Merlot and Petite Sirah from Van Alyea Ranch in Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma. The wines are tasting great, and we could have bottled before now but I realized I didn’t have a spigot to attach a hose to clean out the barrels after they were empty. [...]
We drove up to Fallbrook yesterday to meet up with Paul and a bunch of his neighbors to bottle his 2009 Merlot and Petite Sirah from Lambert Bridge Vineyard in Sonoma (the same grapes we made wine from that need to be bottled soon). It was a very nice day, sunny and warm but not [...]
It’s time to rack the Petite Sirah off of the egg white fining lees and see how it tastes! The wine is very clear, and there was not a lot of lees on the bottom. Tasting the fined wine side-by-side with the unfined wine, I definitely prefer fined wine. It did smooth out taste without [...]
I wanted to try some egg white fining on the 2009 Petite Sirah. We tasted it recently and decided it was good without any fining, but I’ve had a previous vintage with fining and really liked the results. So, I decided to go for it. We have a 30 gallon barrel plus one 6 gallon [...]
Josh and Dave came by to taste the progress of the 2009 merlot and petite sirah. Last time we tasted them, they seemed to really lack any oak flavor, so we thought we might need to add more cubes to the barrels. We tasted the merlot first, and it is surprisingly good — not overly [...]
I have a few wines that are due for bottling, but I was waiting until I opened my shop because I needed corks, and it seemed to make sense that I should buy them from myself. So today I’m finally bottling my Amador county primitivo. I’ll bottle most of it as 100% varietal, but I’m [...]
The barrels needed a new home, so we decided it was a good time to rack out the wine and clean out the barrels. Both the merlot and petite sirah need more oak, so we’re going to leave them in the barrels for another year with some extra oak cubes added in. We pumped the [...]
My in-laws are visiting from Germany, and that seemed like a good reason to check the progress of all of the vintage 2009 wines in the shower. I pulled 100 mL samples from various carboys for a taste. We started with the Fallbrook syrah. This wine already has great aromas with big fruit and good [...]
We are planning to bottle the syrah soon, and I will also probably bottle the primitivo as well. The merlot and petite sirah in the barrels have not picked up enough oak for our tastes, so we’re going to leave them for another year. I realized I haven’t cleaned out the airlocks on my carboys [...]