July is a great month to visit the winery. The vines are green, as are the trees and landscaping. The wildflower seeds that we planted in late spring are beginning to blossom. The days are warm and the nights cool, ideal for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
1. The winery as you enter.
2. Overlooking the front lawn and the vineyards beyond.
3. The vegetable and wildflower garden at the entrance.
4. Looking south from our vineyard across the river. The river meanders through the trees and the winery is barely discernible at the bottom of the hills.
Click images to enlarge.
Now that we are in the midst of summertime grilling, it is important to be able to use your wine knowledge to select appropriate pairings for those charcoal scented meats tossed onto the flames. What type of wine should you drink with bitter food? The example I will use is Charbroiled lamb on a bed of wild arugula. I have been getting bunches of wild arugula from the Farmer’s Market because it is such a great pair with anything you toss on the grill.
The flavors in a dish like the one above are strong and need a wine match that will complement, and not enhance, the bitterness. This type of charbroiled food will tend to accentuate the wine’s bitterness. To avoid this type of pairing, pair this type of dish with a full bodied and fruit forward California wine (2006 Santa Barbara Winery Reserve Chardonnay, 2005 Santa Barbara Winery Cabernet Sauvignon, or any Napa Merlot).
All of these wines are full of flavor and will stand up to their food pairing. If the wine that you choose is too light to pair with a hearty and full flavored roast, it will not ruin your meal, but the wine’s flavors will barely even register on your palate.
On a side note, while the Reserve Chardonnay would work with a Charbroiled lamb dish, I think it would be even better if you substituted a Charbroiled pork for the meat choice.
This past week was an important and busy one in production. In the beginning of the week the team went through out Chardonnay barrels and stirred and topped each of them. The second half of the week saw the beginnings of bottling 22,000 cases of our 2007 Santa Barbara County Chardonnay. ”Every two weeks we will top,” says assistant winemaker Ryan Ralston.
This is due to the fact that when you age wines in an oak vessel about 1 pint of wine evaporates out of each barrel every two weeks. The air space in each vessel, aka the ulage, gives us the perfect opportunity to stir before we top. We stir to age our wines on the lees, which reintroduces sediment back into the wine giving a rounder mouthfeel. The lees are the solids left after fermentation that fall to the bottom of the barrel as it ages.
The other option winemakers have for dealing with the lees is to “rack” the wine into another barrel. Stirring and topping also allows the winemakers to check and monitor every barrel on a regular basis. We keep the lots pure by always topping each wine with itself.
In the Santa Barbara Winery Tasting Room during the week you can hear the clanking of the hundreds of bottles going down the bottling line throughout the entire day.
Joanie Hudson, Assistant Tasting Room Manager, Santa Barbara Winery
We are completing a new patio which, for lack of a better name, we are calling our VIP Patio. But stay tuned, we will certainly need to come up with a better name.
We built on the side of the winery as you approach from Santa Rosa Road. In Santa Rita Hills you are almost guaranteed to have wind. It you usually comes up before noon and lasts until late afternoon or until the fog rolls in. We think of it as invigorating but for many it creates havoc with tablecloths and light plastic or paper tableware. The wind brings in the ocean breeze and cools the vineyard and makes possible the fantastic Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that we grow here.
The Patio is connected to the production winery through what we always referred as the VIP room, thus the name of the patio — for now. The Patio is surrounded by a wall and since it is on the leeward side of the winery it affords a great deal of wind protection.
We hope to use it for small groups, that can be catered, of up to 50 people, preferably less.
Call Mirella Valdez, our Tasting Room Manager, for additional information 805.688.7921.
Click the images to enlarge:
A view of the Lafond Vineyards taken today June 7, 2008. In the foreground our older vineyard on the north side of the Santa Ynez river And in the background on the south side of the river the newer vineyard and the winery. By clicking the image and enlarging it you can barely distinguish it up against the hills. In between our neighbor Hilltop Vineyards which supplies us with Chardonnay and some Syrah. The Santa Rita Hills have turned brown, as they always do in June, and the river, although there is a flow, is easy to cross with our tractors and ATVs.
Click image to enlarge:
We are witnessing winter being brought back to the cellar in the beginning of summer here at the winery. Fourteen of our stainless steel tanks are filled to capacity with 51,000 gallons of our 2007 Santa Barbara County Chardonnay. The wine is currently going through the cold stabilization process. During this step of the white wine making process, the wine is chilled down to 32 degrees F in order to remove all tartrates (also known as “wine diamonds“). These tartrates form when the wine gets too cold. While they are natural sediment and completely harmless, they can sometimes be cause for consumer dissatisfaction. So in order to prevent this, winemakers force the tartrate crystals to form at the winery bringing them out of solution so that they can be filtered out before bottling. The thermal mass of 51,000 gallons at 32 degrees chills the entire building.
Our Assistant Winemaker Ryan tells me that the next step is to “seed the wine with cream of tartar,” which gives the tartrates something to grab onto as they fall to the bottom of the tank. Once they do this, keeping tanks at 32 degrees, the next step is to filter the wine at .2 microns, removing the tartrates from solution. Once filtering is completed, the wines will be warmed up to over 55 degrees and the bottling process will begin, leaving us with a “crisp, clean, wonderful Santa Barbara County Chardonnay for a very reasonable price,” says Ryan. Until then, and while the icicles continue to form on the outside of the steel tanks, I will be wearing my mittens in the winery.
Joanie Hudson, Assistant Tasting Room Manager, Santa Barbara Winery
This week we started planting our new Chardonnay block – a little over 10 acres. We are using 5 different clones — some of these clones are already in some of our older blocks, and a few that are new to us, but have been tested in other vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills.
First the ground is softened by drip irrigation, although this may not really be necessary — the soil is very sandy – which we think ideal for Chardonnay. The Chardonnay has been grafted to a root stock that is well adapted to our soil — disease resistant, not too vigorous and good in sand.
Organic mulch is added at each vine location, hopefully to jump-start the plant’s growth. The vine is then planted and enclosed in a growth tube to protect it from the fierce winds and the blowing sand which are common in the Santa Rita Hills.
The first year is dedicated to establishing the vine — growing a solid root system. The following winter the vine is cut back to two buds — almost to where it started. The growth tube remains during the second year until the vine grows out of the tube and can be trained on the wire. The third year we get a small crop. Maybe.
The thumbnails show the planting sequence. Click to enlarge:
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