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Yesterday we received the first little bundle of joy from Parcel 17, a ranch over in Salt Springs Valley on the western side of the county. This new vineyard is planted to three different Spanish varietals.
Graciano, pictured here, is planted along side Mazuelo, also known as Carignane, and Monastrell, which is also known as Mourvedre. Everything from this vineyard will be blended together and bottled as it's own product...and if the Graciano is any indication, it'll be a bomber!!
-Fermento
The funny thing is, almost unnoticed, several tons of Viognier have slipped into the winery from several different vineyards. They have slipped, a couple tons at a time, past all of the surveilance cameras; but I can tell you that small, tight clusters of little tasty berries have been squished mercilessly by the big press into some damn yummy juice!
The fruit on the vines is getting what it needs now. We have settled into perfect days of 90 degree sun, followed by cool, clear nights in the low 60s. Yeah baby.
This weekend gets busy: Syrah from Dalton's out on Dogtown Road comes in on Friday, Tempranillo from Rolleri's on Saturday, and we also expect to be picking our own Tempranillo this weekend. Syrah and Rolle from the Tanner Vineyard should follow quickly.
As always, stop by the winery and check out what's being squished. If you're lucky, we'll let you do a round of punchdowns!!
(photo: Tanner Vineyard Syrah)
This blog post posts posts from other blogs. Stuff you might want to read. Or not.
First, Josh over at Pinotblogger has some excellent comments (and just a tad of trash talk :) on our new Geek Sheet format. If that interests you go check it out:
Pinotblogger comments on Twisted Geek Sheets
(and do please send your own comments on the Geeks - what would you like to see?)
Next, Mary over at Dover Canyon posted about the best explanation on sulfites in wine I have ever seen:
Over at Dover Canyon on Sulfites
Shipcompliant has a blog on new happenings in direct shipping of wine and stuff. I don't normally get into poly-ticky things here, but if you saw the recent NBC piece on minors purchasing wine over the internet, you need to read this:
Over in the right hand column are some of our favorite blogs to read over the Sunday morning Bloody Mary - "Blogs Almost as Twisted as We Are" - scroll down a little. Do check them out some time!
On the Twisted Oak web site you won't find a lot of wine weenie data on the wine web pages. You basically get our back label copy, which we hope will help you make an informed purchase decision because we are so darn entertaining...
OK, back from Fantasyland... on every wine page you will find a link to a "Geek Sheet" which will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the wine.
The problem is, our Geek Sheets, while informative, are boring and flat. They are the most un-Twisted thing about this place! While we have been content for a while to wallow in the irony of it, that is now going to change...
With the release of our 2004 Silvaspoons Vineyard Petite Sirah, we are rolling out a new Geek Sheet, which you can find here. Gone are the bare numbers and bland tasting notes. In are tasting notes that actually say something*, and a graphical representation of the numbers to help get a sense of what they mean. To the left is a snippet...
Graphical? It's time for El Jefe to "out" himself. It's true. I am 100% geek. I even have a ham radio license (I know that's hard to believe.) One of the radio magazines I read does extensive testing of new radios, measuring all sorts of specifications. They print these specs using the same kind of graphical method we're trying here.
In Radioland, the specs are generally "bad" (red) or "good" (green), and the numbers slide between those two ends.
In Wineland, our specs are not necessarily good or bad, but instead they relate to the sensory experience. Is the wine crisp or soft? Light or full bodied?
We've tried to use appropriate colors and text in our graphs to give a sense of what you might experience when you drink the wine. We hope it works and that you agree.
Please do let us know what you think. Let us have it. We can take it!
* OK, so the notes are a little over the top. I blame the wine...
I know it doesn't seem like much, but we have suffered through several vintages with the boring black capsules and the generic grape design. Now we finally have Our Tree!
First chance to get yours will be on the much-anticipated 2004 Pig Stai Pour't, available later this year.
It was kind of like that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he is testing bombs at the bomb factory with a hammer, and writing "DUD" on them with a crayon if they don't explode. Only different.
Our friends from Mobile Wine Line came by today and helped us do some bottling. This part of the line puts the little foil cover, or "capsule", over the top of the bottle. I like to call this machine the "Condomizer" (mostly because I don't know what it is really called...) Anyway, this is of course a delicate piece of equipment and requires precise adjustment using the orange adjuster shown above. I call this "percussive maintenance." (Thus the Bugs Bunny reference...)
Today we bottled our 2005 Calaveras Grenache, 2005 Calaveras Torcido (a Grenache
and Graciano blend), and 1700 cases (woo hoo!) of our 2005 Calaveras
(a Mourvedre, Syrah and Grenache blend.) Last vintage we only had 150 cases, so this was a much longer time - and a very satisfying
We hope to, uh, release our early next year. I just hope we all can wait that long for a good
More Twisted Few! Thanks again to all who came a-looting with us!
And the best part - the people who make it possible - the Twisted Few! Several of the folks rose to the challenge and arrived in full kit - as they say on the high seas. Enjoy!!
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An event like this cannot happen without people making it happen - here are a very few pictures of some of our crack staff at yesterday's Looting. Special thanks to Carla, our amazing Tasting Room Chick for running the whole thing (and somehow I managed to mess up every picture of her that I took this year....)
Left: Nat & Marco; Right: Pimp Daddy & Jamie
Left: H. and Paula; Right: Fermento
Yesterday was another successful Twisted Oak Winery Cave Loot Extravaganza! Every year we thank our Twisted Few members (aka, our attempt at a wine club) by having a bit of good clean debauchery with a thieving romp in the cave (cave, thieves, pirates - you get the idea). TF members got to taste five wines from the barrels and a bit of the Sauvignon Blanc we squished Friday night, and munch some yummy piratical goodies made by Altitude Catering (209-753-6259).
Here are some photos of the cave, click on each for a larger image - more to follow!
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