In this post I’d like to provide updates on several of my wine projects.

First, both vineyards that I tend, Sorella Ridge and Hidden Acres, were pruned last month. Sorella Ridge was easy enough for me to tackle on my own since it’s just 56 vines. However, we were at risk of missing our pruning window at Hidden Acres this year (again, the aforementioned “work” thing got in the way). So we decided to hire someone to prune Hidden Acres. A one man job and 2 days of work later and the vineyard was looking sharper than ever. That is, at least as sharp as this old 1/2 acre of neglected vines can look in its current state.

More recently, as the photograph below illustrates, bud break has burst onto the scene in my backyard micro-vineyard, Sorella Ridge.

In the “winery” (aka garage), there’s been a lot of activity. First, in January I started construction on a small insulated and air conditioned room inside my garage. At about 60 square feet, this space will serve as my winemaking and wine storage facility. A 5000 BTU air conditioner will keep the room cool during the sweltering summer heat we get here at the base of the Sierra foothills. I expect to have the raised floor complete today and begin erecting the walls. Clearly I’m in a race with Mother Nature to get the room finished before the temperatures outside rise.

The 2007 wines have been coming along nicely too. The first wine to spend time in my new 15 gallon French Oak barrel was the first of two lots of Zinfandel. Since this batch of Zin was a little short of filling the barrel completely, I topped the barrel with some of the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon. This was back in early January.

Earlier this month I racked the Zin/Cab from the barrel into carboys and replaced it with the Rhone blend. The final blend came to 8 gallons of Syrah, 4 gallons of Mourvedre, and 3.5 gallons of Grenache. Unfortunately the blend percentages were dictated by how much of each variety I had on hand and not based on tasting different blends. I had to get to 15 gallons and it took all that I had to fill the barrel.

Other wines racked include the Barbera, Cabernet Sauvignon, and the 2nd lot of Zinfandel (which will get barrel time after the Rhone blend has finished its tour).

Photos from the winery room coming soon.

I have long had a thing for Italy’s red wines but honestly have done very little exploration of its whites. So when I learned that WBW 41 was focused on Italy’s most prolific white wine region, I was hopeful that I would find yet another reason to love Italian wine. However, on a trip to one of my go-to Italian wine merchants, Fosco’s Italian Market, I was somewhat concerned when the recommendation was a Pinot Grigio over the expected local variety Tocai Friulano.

“Pinot Grigio?”, I asked dejectedly as I took a closer look at the bottle. I wanted something complex, something layered, something profound. When was the last time you had a profound Pinot Grigio?

“You won’t be disappointed”, I was reassured.

I bought the wine.

Lis Neris is a 4th generation family run winery located in the village of San Lorenzo, between the Slovenian border and the Isonzo River. The estate’s nearly 100 acres of vines are planted on a plateau of calcareous gravel that was washed down over centuries by melting ice and snow from the nearby Eastern Alps.

The current patriarch of Lis Neris, Alvaro Pecorari, took over control of the winery in the 1990’s and introduced modern viticulture and winemaking practices, significantly improving quality and consistency.

The 2004 Lis Neris “Gris” ($28 USD) is 100% Pinot Grigio. Harvested by hand and fermented in large French oak barrels, the wine was aged in barrels, on lees, for 10 months.

Tasting Note

Once I poured a glass of the “Gris” I knew right away that this was not going to be an ordinary Pinot Grigio. Instead of the typical colorless and watery-thin New World PG’s, this wine was golden straw in color and just had the look of something with a lot to offer. It was all that time in French oak, I surmised.

The nose exuded layers of flowers, green apples, lemon zest, and a touch of marjoram yet still had a cloak of steely minerality. The mouthfeel was full and velvet-soft but still managed a tinge of acidity. An absolutely delicious wine that brings a lot to the table.

We paired this wine with a Frico Friulano (potato & cheese tart with grilled balsamic onions and peperoncini on a bed of arugula) and a Florentine Pork Roast (herb-crusted roasted pork studded with garlic and rosemary). The acidity in the wine matched beautifully with the cheese in the tart and the tanginess of the balsamic onions and peppers. Although the pork roast was pleasant, both the wine and frico muscled the delicate flavors of the roast off of center stage.

Contemplating the Lis Neris Gris was truly a revelation for me. How could a variety such as Pinot Grigio that is seemingly locked into a reputation as a light-fare quaffer exhibit such fullness and complexity? Certainly the New World is not doing this noble grape justice. For me this wine represents the realization that with any variety, in the right location, grown under the right conditions, and in the right hands… greatness is possible.

Although I’ve been making these cookies for the Christmas holiday for as long as I can remember, perhaps the greatest joy I receive now from Peanut Butter Blossoms is seeing my own children pick up the tradition. What follows is a pictorial view of last night’s baking session.

It all begins with the dough, rolled into a small ball.

The dough gets rolled in sugar before being placed on a cookie sheet. A daughter for every step in the assembly line. Perhaps having 3 kids was all part of the plan.

Perhaps a little lumpy in places but isn’t everything made by children perfect?

The girls couldn’t wait to dig into the bag of chocolate kisses and start unwrapping them. 

Finally, the cookies are out of the oven and are ready to receive their crown. They’re best when warm. The chocolate melts ever so slightly.

There you have it. We now have our cookies for Santa.

So what are your family baking traditions?

Petite Sirah has always been one of my favorite varieties. In fact, I am eagerly awaiting the first harvest from the six Petite Sirah plants in my own micro-vineyard. Historically Petite Sirah has been used mostly as a blending grape in other wines. The stout tannins, deep color, and bold blackberry and spice flavors of this grape contribute structure and ageability to their blending partners.

Fortunately bottlings of Petite Sirah have become much more common lately. I was attracted to the wine I chose this month by the name given to a previous vintage by a local wine merchant. In one of his regular email newsletters, Eric Stumpf at The Wine Consultant, described the 2004 Mount Aukum Petite Sirah as follows.

If it’s all about bigger is better! If size matters? This is the Black Hummer of red wines! Think of plump juicy wild blackberries! Add a dose of minerality from decomposed granite. A hint of “Good & Plenty” licorice candy. Smooth riding but with full throttle, muscular tannins. I don’t care if you only drink Cabs (you’ll swoon over this one)!  Bring on the brontosaurus rack of ribs! Drink now for full guts, glory and because there’s a lot of wine in this bottle that needs to get out!  

A wine described as a “Black Hummer”!? Awesome! Who wouldn’t want to go for a ride with a wine like that? I actually tasted the 2005 model of the Black Hummer for this post but rest assured it still muscles its way to the line.

The color of this wine was an alluring deep, dark, inky, purple; the windows are definitely tinted! On the nose this monster is in your grill with waves of blackberries, blueberries, and a very distinctive black pepper aroma. The super-duty tannins in the interior of this wine keep you moving down the fastlane in style, riding high above the wimpy hybrid wines in your mirror. Show up to the next party with this beast and you’ll be sure to impress your friends.

2005 Mount Aukum Winery Petite Sirah
Appellation: Fair Play
Price: $29
ABV: 15%

How would my rack stack up against the heavy weights of the wine blogosphere, I wondered. Sure I’ve had big plans for my rack over the years and wanted to make it a showpiece in my home but it still remains hidden and locked away to this day. Really, though, what would I have to lose? Certainly my unimpressive rack would quickly be forgotten when compared to the flashier models. Why not!?

So, I guess it’s time to bare all and show you some pictures of my wine rack.

Most of my wine is stored in our hall closet, under the stairs, in the center of the house. Although the temperature and humidity are far from ideal in this location, it’s the most consistently cool and dark place in our house.

I keep my most prized wines on the lowest shelves. Here’s a shot of some Brunello di Montalcino wines I brought back from a trip to Italy a few years ago.

I also store some of the wines that I make myself in the same closet. Since technically it’s wine and it’s stored in glass, I’m exposing them here too! How are these for some big guns?!

Pictured above are my ‘07 Barbera, Grenache, Cabernet, and Syrah. My ‘07 Zinfandel and Mourvedre wines are still finishing their secondary fermentation in the garage.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also show where I store my white, pink, and sparkling wines. Those go in a small wine refrigerator located in our kitchen. Since I just received my fall shipment from one of our favorite producers, Navarro Vineyards, you can see that my fridge is well stocked with some of Navarro’s outstanding whites.

So there you have it. I feel better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest!

This evening my 5 and 8 year old daughters gave me a hand punching down the ‘07 Zinfandel. One of them asked what kind of wine was in the carboys on the bench next to the Zin. I replied in my best French accent, “why, it’s Mourvedre.”  If you’ve ever seen the movie Tommy Boy you may remember the scene where Chris Farley does his best James Earl Jones impersonation as he booms into an oscillating fan, “Luke, I’m your father”.

Well, hearing my daughters take turns saying, “moo-ved-ray” into the fan keeping our garage cool brought a huge smile to my face. I just love the fact that they’re interested enough in my winemaking obsession to lend me a hand and ask questions.

Absolutely priceless!

I decided to stick to my original plan and combine two of the bins and keep the other on its own. I wanted to inoculate the two lots with different yeasts so I could blend the characteristics of both in the final wine. The larger bin got D254 and the smaller bin got D80. Both bins will get nutrients in the morning.

Hopefully the larger bin (the one that was starting on its own) will not encounter any of the difficulties, such as a stuck fermentation, which are common with wild yeasts. Perhaps the D254 will muscle its way in there and keep the wild child yeast in line? We shall see.

Seeing as how I surely committed some sort of wine blogging faux pas last month by mentioning one winery but actually opening a wine from another, I was determined to make amends this time around. So the question at hand building up to this month’s dad vs. kids throw-down was how to get my hands on some of that “*%#&@!” Twisted Oak wine? Sure, I could have ordered directly from the winery but how much fun is that? Since El Jefe, the Grand Poobah of TOW (or maybe it’s the Sgt. Hulka of TOW?), slyly pointed out that WineQ was now featuring wines from Twisted Oak, I knew right where to go to get my *%#&@! fix.

WineQ is a new web 2.0 company trying to do for wine what Netflix has done for DVD rentals.  Setting up my Q on WineQ was a breeze and, before I knew it, the UPS man was handing me a box with a green WineQ sticker on it. A box of three Twisted wines: the 2005 *%#&@! red Rhône blend I tasted tonight, the 2005 %@#$! white Rhône blend, and the 2005 Viognier.

Now that I had the wine nailed down, I needed a menu to go with it. And not just any menu… a menu that would match the wine and be something my 3 daughters would actually eat. Let me tell you, the Iron Chefs never had it this difficult. My younger 2 daughters, 8 and 5 years old, are easy enough to cajole into trying new things but my 11 year old is convinced that anything other than chicken fingers must be straight out of the kitchens of Fear Factor. I needed a slam dunk.

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Planted at Smokey Ridge is one block of Sangiovese, a couple blocks of Zinfandel, and another block of Syrah. The Zinfandel vines are 8 years old and the others looked to be just as old. The vineyard is planted on a gentle slope with a south/southwest exposure. Even more important, though, the vineyard’s 2,500 foot elevation brings welcome overnight relief from the scorching summer days of the Sierra Foothills. Ideal grape growing conditions.

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The color of the Mourvedre was beautiful and the flavor was outstanding. A few quick photos…

A typical press setup for a “garagiste”.

The poor little suckers were doing their best to escape the clutches of the basket press.

I just liked this shot looking around the side of the basket press.

 Next up: 250lbs. of Primitivo (or Zinfandel) tomorrow.