Urban WineWorks

On Saturday, April 5th we had the wine club out to taste the 2007 wines and enjoy a day at the winery. The wines showed beautifully. We chose to highlight the influence of oak on Pinot Noir. We picked wine from three different barrels. Each barrel was produced by a different cooper and the wood […]

We are getting ready to bottle our Start Your Own Winery Pinot Gris. One of our Start Your Own Winery club members produced some last year and it turned out to be a very nice wine, so they wanted to produce it again this year. Since Pinot Gris is produced as a white wine and […]

I recently tasted the 2006 Start Your Own Winery Pinot Noir. Typical of the vintage it had nice lush forward fruit. The aromas were rich in Bing cherries and winter spices like cloves and cinnamon. What I really liked it about it though was the mouth-watering finish. The acidity was persistent, balanced and really carried […]

The barrels of Pinot Noir from the Start Your Own Winery completed malo lactic fermentation. I sent samples to the lab to confirm this to be the case. The next step in the winemaking process is to add so2 to protect the wine from oxygen and other contaminants while it ages and matures. So2 bonds with […]

We’ll begin Pruning the vineyard in the first part of January. This marks the official start of the 2008 vintage.
 At Bishop Creek Vineyard we employ a “cane and spur” trellis system. That means that we use two shoots from the previous vintage extending along the fruiting wire in either direction from the center of the head of […]

We tasted through the 2007 Start Your Own Winery Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris this past Sunday. It is amazing how different wines can be from vintage to vintage. It is a little hard to tell right now because it’s so young, but the wine seems to have more structure than the ’06, with more […]

With the 2006 vintage behind us, it seems a recap of the 2007 harvest is about due. After the past few years of unseasonably warm weather and relatively easy vintages we knew by mid September that this one was going to be a little different. Rain started falling toward the end of August and never […]

We’ll be bottling on September 15th. This is the final step for Start Your Own Winery 2006. The numbers on the wine came out well. We have a free SO2 level of 22 parts per million, a good solid number for both drinkability and ageability, our PH is 3.65, also a good level for stability ( […]

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 […]

On Wednesday June 20th we racked the Start Your Own Wine Pinot from the barrels, washed the barrels and racked the wine back in. As I anticipated, the wine benefited greatly from this breath of fresh air. Aromatics were enhanced as was texture and overall balance. We were also able to remove any remaining sediment, […]