We are blending!! On Monday we sat down and tasted 5 wines for acid balance. I was impressed with all the wines. We tasted the 2007 My Zin, Terre Melange, Aca Modot, Escuro and Cabernet. Those are the wines we thought may be low in acid. Those are also the wines produced with the most grapes purchased from other growers this year. I will be real happy this year when we go back to all Estate fruit. I don't understand why, but our fruit has great acid and is always in balance. The only varietal with low acid from our vineyard is our Syrah. I am thinking of picking it earlier this year to preserve the acid.

What we did Monday was prepare two bottles of each of the 5 wines. One bottle contained enough tartaric acid to lower the PH in the wine by 0.15. The wines were about 4.00 PH so we lowered the Ph to about 3.85 which raises the acid in the wine. Water has a PH of around 7.00 and is neutral. Lemon has a PH of less that 3.00. I like to bottle my wines with a PH of around 3.7 and that is what we obtain naturally from our vineyard.

We tasted all the wines blind and wrote down what we thought about balance. Even the wines that were not treated tasted great, but we thought they tasted too good for 3 to 4 month old wines. After six of us tasted we decided to add the tartaric to all of the 5 wines when we blend. We thought the wines would age better.

Yesterday we blended the 2007 Block 4 which has a PH of 3.75 so we did not have to add any tartaric acid. Today we are blending out Estate Zin, Barbera and Carignan. All these wines have good acid also. In all we have 11 of our wines to blend so we will be at it for several days. Soon we will be fining our two white wines and later this month we will be bottling them along with our 2006 Ultimate Cuvee. We also have to blend and bottle several lots for two other wineries. We will be very busy in the next several weeks.

Wednesday January 16, 2008

Our blending has been going well in the last week. We will be through today. All the wines have great color, more than any year I have been making wine. As I said last week some of the wines were a little low in acid so after tasting blind we added acid to some of the wines. All the red wines now are between 3.6 and 3.8 PH and about 0.65 TA. The Late Harvest Sauv Blanc is at 3.55 PH and the SLO dry Sauv Blanc is at 3.45 PH. We fined these two sauv blancs last Friday and will rack them next Friday in preparation to bottle in about two weeks. Come by to taste. I will have alcohols tomorrow.