No going back now!

Ok, so we did it!  I admit to being a little nervous Sunday when we did the actual blending.  I kept saying to Matt, are we sure?  Once we do this, there's no going back.  It took a long time and a lot of transferring the wines back and forth, but they are now blended.  We don't have a tank big enough to hold all of the wine in one, so we started by putting half of the pure grenache into a bigger tank that was empty, then we put in half of the mourvèdre in the new tank too.  Next we put the rest of the mourvedre into the 1st tank of grenache, all of this we did by simple gravity.  After that we pumped half of the syrah-grenache into the big tank with the mourvèdre and grenache and combined what was left with the other tank of grenache-mourvèdre.  Sound confusing?  It sure was for us.  At the end we added 1 hectoliter of the press wine to each of the blended vats and then pumped some of each into a fiberglass tank with a floating lid. That way we ended up feeling that we had a pretty homogenous blend.  I'm sure we'll transfer it at least one more time before bottling to try to ensure that it is as homogenous as possible.  That was just the beginning though, after all that, there's still the clean-up, which anyone who's ever worked in a winery will tell you, is the most work of all.  Here's a picture of the lees at the bottom of the cuve and the tartrates that are left on the walls of the vat after fermentation!

We just had a fresh asparagus omelette for lunch, I wanted to taste the wine again a couple of days after we blended it.  It was delicious! The 2nd grenache tank that was higher in alchohol and a bit riper, added just the right amount of richness to it and the mourvèdre a bit of spice.  I can't wait for you all to taste it!

Comments

[Mike Duffy]

After all that description, I can't wait to taste it either! How are we poor Americans supposed to get a bottle?

Nice pictures. Given the reverence with which we treat bottled wine, it's interesting to see it being pumped around like some industrial fluid.