Final Bottling


Winemaker Bruce McGuire, shown here, is in the last stages of bottling before being overwhelmed by the harvest. Bruce is filtering Chardonnay. The wine has been cooled to 30F to crystallize the tartrates that are naturally part of the wine. The filtering is to remove the tartrates as well as any suspended solids that are still there.

The cooling requires about two weeks and once the wine is stable, that is the tartrates have crystallized, it is passed through a diatomaceous filter. Diatomaceous earth consists of ‘fossilized remains of diatoms, a type of hard-shelled algae’ (Wikipedia) and is universally used in the wine industry. After filtering, the wine will be allowed to warm up, and at bottling will pass through a finer membrane filter calibrated at absolute .45 microns.

This is a procedure we use for all white wines and very rarely for reds. Reds are chilled, as well, but are given more time to settle and the resulting clean wine can be bottled without filtration. Red wine is more complex and passing through a filter may damage the wine and its more nuanced flavors.

29th Annual Santa Barbara Taste of the Town

29th Annual Santa Barbara Taste of the Town

ABOUT THE EVENT
Join us for an epicurean adventure! The Taste of the Town is Santa Barbara’s original tasting event, featuring savory samples from many of Santa Barbara’s finest restaurants and premiere wineries. All proceeds benefit the Arthritis Foundation.

Taste of the Town

Sunday, September 12, 2010
Riviera Park Gardens
2030 Alameda Padre Serra
12:00-3:00 PM
For more information, contact Jeanne David at 805-563-4685

Develop a Wine Palate by Knowing Exactly What You Like

Develop a Wine Palate by Knowing Exactly What You Like

How do you figure out what types of wines you like to drink?  Think about flavors you find desirable, foods you like to eat, what flavors complement the foods on your plate?

But mostly, what works for YOU?

Surf the Urban Wine Trail for Heal the Ocean

Surf the Urban Wine Trail for Heal the Ocean

When: Fri Aug 20, 2010 6pm to 9pm
Where: Downtown Santa Barbara (check in at Santa Barbara Winery)

On Friday August 20, 2010, check in at the Santa Barbara Winery, 202 Anacapa Street at 6 p.m., and start an evening you’ll never forget! Join the Moms In Motion’s Summer Triathlon Team in supporting HTO with an evening of great wine, food and live music at the second annual “Surf The Urban Wine Trail for Heal the Ocean.” From 6 to 9 p.m. you get to stroll among six downtown wineries and restaurants, tasting local wines, sampling gourmet fare, and enjoying the sounds of talented musicians. Participating venues include Santa Barbara Winery, Oreana, Kunin, Kalyra, the Bay Roadhouse, and Union Ale Brewing. Tickets are $50 in advance or $60 at the door. For just $25 more, upgrade to a Reserve Tasting and sample additional reserve wines at each venue, and receive a limited edition Heal the Ocean wine glass.

   http://www.healtheocean.org/

Celebration of Harvest Festival 2010

Celebration Of Harvest 2010
October 8, 9, 10, 11

The annual Celebration of Harvest is held in October each year, when we’re in the thick of the winegrape harvest and winery staff take a needed break to showcase their latest wines, many newly bottled! This year’s Celebration of Harvest will be held on October 9th from 1 to 4pm, and once again on the beautiful grounds of Rancho Sisquoc Winery in the Santa Maria Valley.

Local restaurants, caterers and specialty food purveyors will showcase their talents and the bounty of Santa Barbara County, while live and lively bands will fill the air with music. Add to that the silent auction, filled with specialty wines and large format bottles from members of the Vintners’ Association to benefit local food banks, and we definitely have a reason to Celebrate Harvest!

Be sure to take in the sights, sounds, smells and excitement of harvest by extending your stay for a few days. The Vintners’ Visa is a four-day pass to 12 participating wineries, each of whom are pulling out all the stops just for Vintners’ Visa holders. The Vintners’ Visa can be used at participating wineries from can be used Friday through Monday so make it a long weekend! And for the full celebratory mode, (and for a great deal!), order a “combo ticket” which gives you access to the Festival at Rancho Sisquoc and a Vintners’ Visa!

More to come… Click Here for more info and tickets.

Blogging Makes Things Different

…but not that different

August 18th, 2010

Bill Smart is the head PR guy at Dry Creek Vineyard, a talented communicator and a nice guy, to boot. He was at the Bloggers Conference back in June, and has now written a thoughtful piece about his impressions over at Palate Press.

I agree with lots that he wrote — but not all. So let me respectfully set out a few of my differences, while emphasizing that, overall, Bill’s article is an accurate representation of where winery P.R. stands in relation to social media.

Bill sets up something of a straw dog when he posits a fundamental difference between bloggers (the implication is that they’re younger, although there were plenty of older bloggers in Walla Walla) and “traditional media.” “For starters,” says Bill, “bloggers do not want to be talked ‘at.’ They want to have a conversation.”

Okay, deconstruction time! First of all, I’m going to start pulling out what few hairs I have left, next time I hear the dreaded “TM” phrase: “traditional media.” This has become a form of invective and an expletive that displays some kind of bias — whether along age or other grounds, I couldn’t say; but when it’s used in a pro-blogging article, it’s usually freighted with negative implications toward print journalists. Why?…

Click Here for Steve Heimoff’s full article

New Netting Application

(Click image to enlarge)

We are experimenting with a new concept for netting. Instead of using large nets which cover several rows at a time, are difficult to install and remove, we are using netting which covers only the fruit area and is applied to both sides of the vine. It installs very quickly using a three man crew and an ATV.

Removing should be just as easy since the net doesn’t cover the vine it won’t get entangled with growing canes. There is one dark cloud, however, since it fits tightly against the vine some of the fruit is pressed against the mesh. The question then is, will the birds realize this and pick off the available fruit or, is the netting sufficient deterence, and fly off elsewhere.

Pinot Gris Goes Down the Riesling Path to Transparency

Pinot Gris Goes Down the Riesling Path to Transparency

The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) has recently come up with a PinotG Style Spectrum, which is supposed to tell consumers what kind of Pinot Gris they’re getting, on a scale that ranges from “crisp” to “luscious.” As an industry response to the multitude of Pinot Gris styles now being made in Australia, it makes sense as shorthand, so that prospective purchasers don’t have to actually read descriptive back labels or know how to interpret technical notes.

Researchers correlated organoleptic data from a trained tasting panel with spectrographic analyses to develop the scale, allowing a wine to be classified according to its spectrographic “fingerprint” rather than according to some winemaker’s or marketer’s subjective impression.

As an attempt to remove subjective taste criteria from style description, the PinotG Style Spectrum parallels in some ways the development of the International Riesling Federation’s (IRF) Riesling Taste Profile, which purports to tell consumers how sweet their Riesling is based on the relationships in the finished wine between residual sugar, total acidity and pH. That’s it: just numbers, crunched into a linear scale from “dry” to “sweet.”

tasteprofile

Click Here for the rest of the article

SFMOMA Exhibit – HOW WINE BECAME MODERN

SFMOMA PROBES THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF WINE AND PRESENTS HOW WINE BECAME MODERN

From November 20, 2010, to April 17, 2011, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. This exhibition explores transformations in the visual and material culture of wine over the past three decades, offering a fresh way of understanding the contemporary culture of wine and the role that design has played in its transformation. Organized by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, How Wine Became Modern marks the first exhibition to consider modern, global wine culture as an integrated yet expansive and richly textured set of cultural phenomena.

The story begins in 1976, the year of the now-famous Judgment of Paris. There, in a blind taste test, nine French wine experts pronounced a number of northern California wines superior to esteemed French vintages. However apt the decision, later criticized and repeatedly restaged, the event released shock waves across the globe as it gave the nascent California wine industry, as well as winemakers in many other parts of the world, new confidence, credibility, and visibility. This, in turn, had multiple effects including the expansion of wine markets, growing popular awareness of wine, the birth of wine criticism, vineyard tourism, and a host of other manifestations. From this moment forward, the culture of wine began to accommodate and valorize new priorities such as innovation, diversification, globalization, marketing, and accessibility.

“In many ways,” Urbach claims, “wine has become ‘modern’ as it re-imagined its own representation and joined itself to other forms of culture,” including architecture, graphic and industrial design, visual arts, performing arts, and film. And it is here, he adds, “at this particular intersection between nature and contemporary culture, that the social meanings of wine reveal key issues of our moment, including the status of place and authenticity in a world increasingly structured by dematerialized, virtual experience.”

The exhibition, designed by the renowned architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), combines original artifacts such as architectural models and photographs with works of art, some newly commissioned, as well as multimedia presentations and interpretive text. Viewers will encounter artworks, objects, and information within immersive environments that engage multiple senses including smell.