Join us for the Rhone Rangers Grenache seminar next Saturday in San Francisco. Even if you’re not in San Francisco!

This is a must-do for Grenache geeks. Rich (Stage Left’s Chief Grenache Geek) and a panel of hotshot winemakers will lead a special tasting and winemaking discussion of all things Grenache (red, white and pink–8 wines and 8 winemakers). And you can join the fun live and in person or live online! Grenache lovers at home will be able to taste along with the panel using a tidy, tiny tasting pack from Brixr. There’ll also be a live feed, so questions and comments from home will be flying in from all over the country. This is a pretty cool opportunity for those of you who won’t happen to be in the Bay Area next weekend. I know Brixr starts shipping wines tomorrow, so order fast!

If you’re in the Bay Area and you haven’t picked up your Rhone Rangers tickets yet, pick ‘em up here. This is always one of the top tasting events of the year and it’s a great place to discover new wineries and wines.

I’m a few days behind here, but this Saturday past marks the next round of madness in the cellar. It was actually a pretty easy start, with a few tons of Viognier from Harry Fralich and a few tons of Petite Sirah from the Russell home ranch. Both harvests were down about 25% from our initial expectations, but WOW!!!! The fruit is just killer.

Harry’s Viognier is as good as it gets out of Paso Robles. Viognier off this vineyard has an amazing combination of yellow and green citrus combined with sweet mandarin orange overtones. Fantastic. The fruit came in at a nice 25.1 Brix and 3.57pH. We popped it directly in the press for a quick squeeze and cold settle and it’s in barrel fermenting as we speak (only six different yeasts this time).

The Petite Sirah looks absolutely ridiculous… tiny, tiny berries and loose little clusters. Exactly what we like. The stuff came off the destemmer almost black, and already stains everything it touches. This is going to be a good year.

Stay tuned for the next round…

Today is turning out to be one of those “you know you’ve gone overboard when…” kind of days. This year has turned out to be an incredibly slow MLF (malolactic fermentation) year. It’s now late May, and I still have a number of barrels chugging along. For reference, if I had to make a broad generalization, I’d say we’re normally through ML before April hits. But not this year.

Anyway, I’ve been playing road warrior lately and needed a bit of help in the cellar from one of our winemakin’ friends. I asked him to take samples from a few barrels for MLF testing… just 45 or so. Being a good friend, he called me to basically ask me if I really wanted to take samples out of each barrel, when a perfectly acceptable approach would be to separate the barrels into lots, take representative samples from each barrel, blend them together, and test the blended lots. Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s what most people do. A completely valid approach. It’s way easier, and a LOT cheaper. But he doesn’t do it with his wine, either.

In the end, I appreciate that he was trying to save me a pretty significant chunk of money. But we don’t blend anything until the very end. We rack every barrel separately. Every lot has it’s own topping wine. If you ask me, every barrel in the cellar has it’s own personality as a result. Sure, it’s way more work. And although Melinda might tell you otherwise, it’s not like I get a kick out of spending extra money for the sake of spending extra money. But that’s what’s funny about “extra work” - when it’s for something you love, it never quite strikes you that way.