trip to the Gorge

Ross and I traveled to the Columbia Gorge to visit the Celilo vineyard. Celilo sits above the Columbia river and is dry farmed. We are picking Pinot Gris and Gewurtraminer for our white wines from this beautiful spot. We had an amazing view of Mt Hood when we arrived
The Pinot Gris and Gewurt were tasting really nice. very fresh flavors with an great acid spine that will provide lift and certainly make the wines refreshing.
Here is some Pinot Gris, I was amazed that the skins take on such a reddish hue, since the wines that it produces is so light and clear.We stopped and chatted with our friends James and Poppie Mantone at their beautiful winery near Bingen WA. The wines that they are producing under the Syncline label are some of my favorite in the state. We chatted with Poppie as she harvested the last of their Mouvedre and Viognier off of the little 1 acre vineyard that sits near right next to the winery. It was a great day and I can't wait to taste what our Pinot Gris tastes like out of the fermenter.

What a week! Last Tuesday started with a little 2:45 wake up, Ross and I drove out to the winery and did a quick punch down, grabbed the truck known now as "beastly" and headed south down Interstate 5 to Oregon. We were going to pick up some Pinot Noir for our good friend Mark. Mark sources fruit from the Lachini vineyard and what a pretty vineyard it is.

Crush on Friday

Big day yesterday. We crushed fruit from Cabernet Sauvignon from Klipsun. Grenache, Mouvedere and Syrah, Viognier from Ciel. We are going to co-ferment the Syrah with some Viognier and it just looks so pretty
it's only the top layer that is Viognier, oh yea there is a bit of Roussane in their too. It had such a nice mineral character that we had to try a bit of it. You can see the difference in the grapes easily. The Viognier has that deeper roasted marshmallow color where the Roussane is more green.Here are the grapes after they have been run through the Crusher/Destemmer, That is just cool.






Everything was put into fermentation bins, The graped came in very cold so we will need to wait a bit before we add the yeast. The yeast has a hard time starting fermentation if the must is cold.
Here the grapes are in the fermenter waiting to go into the winery.





This is the week of being busy. The vineyards have all been getting down to the mid 30's at night so we are pretty sure we will have almost everything picked this week. Should be a wild ride. We are making another run out to Ciel tomorrow to taste the fruit and check to see if the foliage has stopped photosynthesis if that is the case then we will certainly pick soon.

Crushing

So it has been a quiet week, Ciel Merlot finished fermentation and now it's happily sitting in barrel,
We took a quick trip out to Yakima Valley and hit all the vineyards we are getting grapes from. Tasted everything and it is tasting really good. It looks like we are going to get hit big time this week coming up.

We did some crushing and de-stemming last Sunday, this is Merlot from Alder Ridge, it came in really clean and delicious. Here is a little video of Mark driving the forklift, and the crusher destemmer at work.