It’s blending day at Alta Colina!
This morning Bob, Jeff Cohn (our consulting winemaker), Soren (our assistant winemaker), and I assembled around in the barn up on the Vineyard with a couple dozen barrel samples to do the first pass of blending trials for the 2011 wines.
Blending is one of my favorite days! It’s an incredibly interesting and unique opportunity to taste the individual lots before blends are put together. Once wines are combined there’s no going back so it’s extremely important to get it right.
On a blending day, we start the morning by pulling samples from each lot that we want to potentially include in a final blend. Keep in mind, even when a wine is 100% of something there’s still blending going on between tanks, barrels, specific coopers, pick dates, and a million other factors!
Blending is like cooking, all the ingredients are laid out in front of us and it’s our job to put the right elements together to end up with a final product that elevates all the ingredients to a whole new level. Today marks our first pass and we expect one or two similar days before deciding on final blends.
