22 Mar Being a Winemaker

Being a winemaker has been billed as a sexy job: Imagine spending your days tasting wine talking to adoring customers and eating food and wine pairings day after day. Where do I sign up! While I don’t want this to sound like complaint, because I really do enjoy my job; sometimes being a winemaker is just a lot of hard work. So much is more like running any small business, hiring, and managing personnel, talking to insurance agents, accountants, and bureaucrats. Then there is putting together the spread sheets for grapes, glass and barrel purchases and putting in those orders. Oh boy, ordering glass has been so much more difficult and time consuming this year than I can ever remember. Pile on top of that the opening of our new tasting room: hours of talking to contractors, architects, landlords, equipment salesmen; this has been a full-time job for the last few months. Without boring you with any more detail, work has been all consuming of late.

I do however get to think about winemaking now and then. Just in the last month Robert and I have gotten the last of the 2021 wines racked, post Malo-lactic fermentation. Right now, we are consumed by getting the wines ready for bottling the first week in April. This includes tasting trials for alcohol, acidity, and astringency. White wines, which are our biggest focus for this bottling, have more stability issues and many trials must be run to make sure that protein and cold stability have been achieved. We are making progress; additions have been made and we are waiting for the wines to settle before filtration. Still a couple of busy weeks ahead. The best news is that the 2021 Oriana and Abracadabra Rosé are both tasting delicious. We are looking forward to releasing the new Rosé on May 1.

Next up will be one of my most favorite winemaking tasks: blending the red wines from 2021. It is usually April that I begin pulling samples and beginning with Solesce, working through each blend until I have them all just where I want them. Step two will be to put the blends together by pulling down the barrels, selecting the exact barrels that I want and racking them into a tank and back to barrel again where they will rest happily for another year before bottling. This blending usually takes place in July and August before harvest begins again. That means trips to the vineyard need to start soon as well. Yes, here it comes, my 43rd vintage in Washington. Still having fun, still working hard, still making great Washington Wine.

Cheers! Here’s to all of you, couldn’t do it without you.

Brian