The Blend

Saturday night we organized a dinner with some good friends in order to decide the best blend for our wine.  There aren't that many options but,  a decision had to be made none-the-less.  It's a very fun exercise. Originally we thought that we would make two blends and two bottlings, a Côtes-du-Rhône and a Côtes-du-Rhône Villages (the villages vineyards being a better terroir and therefore a slightly better wine, in theory.) Lately though, after browsing through some local wine shops, looking at all of the wines on the shelves, I wondered if it wouldn't be better to make just one wine the first year.  Many wineries have 3 different wines on the shelf, a Côtes-du-Rhône, a Côtes-du-Rhône Villages and then maybe some sort of reserve blend.  The problem is, as a consumer, you have no idea really what the difference is between these wines, except for price. The back label may have a nice paragraph about where the grapes were grown, what varietals are in the blend and how it was made, but in the end I think it may just lead to confusion, especially since we are a brand new winery.  Secondly, I don't think qualitatively there was a huge differnce in between our two wines that would justify a price difference for the two bottlings.  They are both great, but would they be even better blended together?  That's what we set out to discover.Here's a picture of Matt's brother Brian and the aftermath of our dinner-tasting! I for got to take one during the tasting! Oops!

We have 40 hectolitres of Villages which is a blend of 50% Grenache and 50% Syrah harvested at virtually the same time.  This wine is 13.7 degrees alcohol, is very aromatic in the nose with lots of ripe fruit on the palate, the only draw back is that it's a  little short on the finish.  Next we have 40 hectolitres of 100% Grenache harvested a week later, after some pretty significant rainfall. Contrary to the usual effects of rain, then concentration didn't drop at all, acidity and sugars remained high so that the wine turned out to be quite rich and a whopping 14.6 degrees. Additionally we have the 6 hectoliters from our little mourvèdre vineyard which we harvested on the 2nd of October and it still just barely tipped the scales at 11 degrees. Finally there's the press wine, a blend of all of the wines press juices which is more tannic and coarse than the rest, but that could add some heft to the final blend.

We are currently in Northern Planting Time according to Maria Thun's Biodynamic Calendar so this is typically the best time to do any cellar work, we wanted to make a decision so that we could blend the wine during this time.  I started out by creating several different blends in the morning, each with different percentages of the wines in tank.  One with the entire production blended together, one with only the two tanks of Syrah-Grenache and Grenache, one with the previous two plus the mourvèdre, etc...  We did the tasting blind, mainly for me, since I knew what the wines were and I knew what I wanted the result to be.  At the end of the evening our friend Lucy went around the table and tallied up everyone's  votes.  The two favorite wines turned out the be the two that had all of the wines blended in, the only difference being the amount of press wine we added.  So, the decision has been made, we'll make one red blend for our first wine.  Now we can present samples of the final blend! Great news!