Top 100 wines.

Review in the San Francisco Chronicle

Wine note…Pacific Rim Sweet Riesling.

Review in Cooking Light

Holiday Pours Priced to Please Even Scrooges.

Review in the Washington Post

This year we are playing with some Willamette Valley grapes in our effort to broaden our sourcing from the larger Northwest. The idea is to complement the grapes from Eastern Washington. This has worked very well with our Gewurztraminer 2007 which will be about 40% Willamette Valley and 60% Yakima Valley. The resulting wine is much lower in alcohol than a 100% Yakima Valley Gewurzt. The wine is also less phenolic allowing us to reduce the final residual sugar; all in all a better balanced wine.
We also have played with a single vineyard Riesling from the Willamette Valley. The wine is now finished and we have decided to make it as a Kabinett style. The wine is truly refreshing and distinctive from an Eastern Washington Riesling.

This week we started our Vin De Glaciere winemaking. It is a very fun wine to make even though it is quite excruciating. The basic idea behind the making of this nectar is to press frozen grapes, leaving the water iced (in the form of a suburban size ice cube) in the press and releasing only the sugar. The juice coming out of the press is very sweet (about 36 Brix). We will ferment it to about 9% alcohol leaving about 16% of Residual Sugar. We freeze the grapes from a single vineyard in the Yakima Valley in a big freezer and we usually press about 10 tons a day which will be made into 350 cases. It is a long process that will take an entire month. After the pressing we have to ferment the ultra sweet juice which also requires some efforts because yeasts do not thrive in such a high sugar environment. It will probably take another month to ferment and will cause a few dozen cardiac arrest to the winemaking team worrying about the yeast finishing their job. At the end we make a very crisp and focused single vineyard Riesling dessert wine that is just plain delicious.

2006 It is about time to release our 2006 Dry Riesling to general consumption. This wine is our largest bottling and it is also our signature wine. The blend comes mainly from the Columbia Valley of Washington State with a splash of Rheinhessen wine that we bring from our dear Friend Johannes Selbach in the Mosel. We thrive to achieve a dry profile (below the 0.9% Residual Sugar line that the German call “trocken”) with low alcohol (below 12.5%) and plenty of minerality. The final wine is very impacted by the winemaking decisions of low sulfites and sur lies aging for six months. The nose is impacted by the dual fruit sourcing; The riper style from Washington (apricot, tangerine) is blended with the more floral German style (jasmine, lilac). On the palate, the wine is crisp and straight forward with some yeastiness from the sur lies aging. It is a very versatile wine and I have yet to find a dish that does not work with it. 2006 was a great vintage in Washington and in Germany and I think it shows in the quality of this wine.

As some of you might know, one of our main Riesling source comes from Wallula Vineyard in the Horse Heaven Hills appellation. Our vineyard sits at about 1,200 feet of elevation and presents several unique characteristics. The first one is to be planted with high density (about 1,613 plants per acre) allowing high competition between vines. The second characteristic is the ingenious trellis system which creates a micro environment under the vines very conducive to high quality Riesling. The third characteristic is our extensive clonal selection. The last characteristic and may be the most important is that this vineyard is farmed entirely Biodynamically.
The wines from this vineyard are turning so good this year that we are considering a single vineyard bottling from this special Terroir. We have tried to go Biodynamic all the way (ie in our winemaking as well) but we only succeeded with one tank. I understand this is not too bad of an achievement for a Biodynamic rookie that I am. The wine is very exciting. Check this out: No pesticides, no fertilizer what so ever in the vineyard, handpicked, no yeast added (only the one that came with the grapes), no yeast nutrients, no acid, no nothing during the winemaking process. Now, that is as pure as it gets.