Urban WineWorks

It seems hard to believe that we’re already beginning to prepare for harvest, but it’s true. Part of that preparation is to get last years wine into bottle so that we can open up some space in the winery for the fruit that will be arriving this fall. In essence harvest begins with bottling last year’s wine. Before we bottle, we will sit down and taste through the barrels and decide what each one’s strengths and weaknesses are, so that we can come up with a well balanced blend. Each barrel has its own nuances, depending on how old it is, where the oak came from and how heavily it was toasted. Wine responds to these variables in different ways depending on how concentrated the flavors and what the alcohol levels are among other things. A light wine low in alcohol for example, can easily be overpowered by new, heavily toasted oak barrels, whereas a full bodied intense red wine can take on some of these new oak flavors and actually be enhanced. So when we sit down to blend we may end up blending together wine from new French oak barrels blended together with wine from a mixture of one year old, two year old and neutral barrels to achieve the perfect balance. Wine blending is not a perfect science, because every person’s taste is so individual, but it is a necessary and important process in the art of making wine, and along with other things such as fruit quality and variables in fermentation, it determines a winemaker’s style.

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