2005 Blends And Bottling Plans
I am seeing an emergent pattern here from vintage to vintage. Our even-numbered years have been giving us wines that are beautiful, scrumptious and forward. Our odd-numbered vintages are slow-to-develop, closed, brooding and a bit massive. I'm learning to deal with it.The wines from our 2005 vintage have been slow to come together. Tasting through barrels over the last month it seems that they are all finally hitting a peak and I want to get them out to bottle.
This vintage marked big changes for Westwood. Foremost, 2005 is the first vintage where we are releasing wines we made from grapes we grew ourselves at our Annadel Estate Vineyard. It is also the first vintage that we vinted and aged the wines entirely at our new digs here in Sonoma.
There have been a couple of other developments: Instead of three Pinot Noir bottlings we will only release two Pinots from the 2005 vintage. I am happy that the Haynes Vineyard, while stingy as usual in grape production, still gave us about 1.8 tons/acre which will yield about 175 finished cases of wine. Over here in Sonoma the crop set was a disaster at all three of the vineyards we planned to produce from. Carneros, Nicholson Ranch and the Annadel Estate Pinot all yielded about one third of what we had planned for.
I have been faced with the choice of A) doing three excruciatingly tiny single-vineyard Sonoma Valley appellation bottlings, of 120 cases, 48 cases and 96 cases, respectively, or B) blending the three wines into a single small lot. Helping me make the decision, the respective owners of the Carneros and Nicholson Ranch vineyards each decided to stop selling their fruit after 2005. If I had continued to produce Los Carneros and Nicholson Pinots in 2006 and going forward, it might have been worth the pain of having to spread these tiny 2005 bottlings around.
But I did not have these vineyards in 2006. Sealing the deal, it turns out that the wine resulting from a blend of the three 2005 Pinot Noir lots is something special – more than the sum of its parts.
The Nicholson lot was comprised entirely of Dijon clone 777, whose Syrah-like weight and texture render it unsuitable (in my opinion) as a stand-alone wine but make it the perfect contibutor of deep color, bass-note sensory elements, and structure to a blend. The Los Carneros lot was comprised of Dijon clones 667, 777, 115 and 114 in a ratio of about 3/3/2/1 and contributes earthy and spicy aromas, red fruits and mid-palate weight.
The unknown quantity going into the vintage was the Annadel Estate Pinot lot. We planted our vineyard to equal numbers of Dijon clones 115 and 667, and in 2005 we pruned to yield – we hoped – between 1.25 and 1.5 tons per acre. Then Nature gave us bad weather during set, and our yields ended up at under 0.5 tons/acre.
But what a wine! As a stand-alone, frankly I would fault it for being lightly colored and short on the finish – not unexpected from the first crop year of a young Pinot vineyard. But in the 2005 Sonoma Valley Pinot blend what the Annadel lot brings to the party is a minerality on the palate, and a very complex – dare I say Burgundian? – aromatic intensity.
So from the 2005 vintage I plan to bottle the Haynes Pinot, and a one-time-only Sonoma Valley Pinot. We won't have much of either to sell – Westwood Pinots will be even more exclusive than usual.
Next, after a hiatus of several vintages I will be bottling a Syrah. One hundred percent of the grapes for this wine were grown at our Annadel Estate. In all honesty, the wines I made from the Syrah available to me for a number of years did not meet the standards we set for Westwood. This changed in 2005. Although I was on pins and needles about it, the Estate gave us – in my estimation – a truly worthy Syrah.
In the past I have found that new wood completely masked the varietal character of the wines made from the Syrah sources I had to work with. This turned out not to be true of the Estate Syrah. The 2005 Westwood Annadel Estate Syrah – raised in 53% new French oak – is a big mouthful of a wine and shows great aromas of berry fruit, smoked meat and white pepper.
Finally, blog followers may recall that we planted the Estate to some other varietals we sourced from the nursery associated with Tablas Creek Vineyards. Tablas Creek has a long and interesting story. In brief, co-ownership by the famous Chateau Beaucastel resulted in the Tablas vineyard being planted to registered selections of Mourvedre, Grenache, Counoise and Syrah – the "Beaucastel blend" – that were entirely new to California. I was very fortunate to be one of the first winegrowers to plant these selections outside of Ch. Beaucastel and Tablas Creek.
I also planted a small amount of an obscure varietal called Tannat at our Estate. In France Tannat is grown in the Basque appellation of Irouleguy as well as the Mediterranean appellation of Madiran. The grape seems to have originated in Argentina or Paraguay, much as Zinfandel sprung (full-formed as from Athena's) brow here in California. I am following up on a suggestion that Tannat may have been a blender planted in Bordeaux in ages past, since supplanted by Petite Verdot. Whatever. Tannat can produce a very acidic, dark and rustic wine on its own, so I planted just a bit – about 1/3 acre – as a blending element.
Consequently in 2005 we will be bottling a red blend, the fourth wine I have made for Westwood after Pinot, Syrah and Rose. Maintaining the a Zen-like sensibility of my vision for our brand, we are naming this blend Westwood redFOUR.
In 2005 Westwood's redFOUR blend will be 50% Syrah, 31% Mourvedre, 16% Grenache and 3% Tannat. This unique blend showcases the minerality of the Annadel Estate grapes, overlaid with aromas of bright cherry fruit, herbs, liquorice, and hints of wood from the 25% new French oak the wine was raised in.
Now, we just need to order some glass, corks, and foils, finish our label design and get Federal label approvals, get the labels printed and delivered, move the wines from barrel to tank, and schedule a mobile bottling line to come in and do the work – all in the next six weeks. Piece of cake.
Then I get to do it all again in late August for the 2006 wines.
posted 3/27/2008 01:18:00 PM
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