Melissa Sanborn
I love making red wine. It’s relatively cooperative, doesn’t ask for much, and requires much less attention than white wine. Once fermentations are complete and the wine is nestled into its barrel for the year, red wine can just hang out for the duration of its aging. Sure, you need to taste it frequently, check sulfur levels, and rack the wine on occasion, but for the most part, the winemaker gets to let time do a lot of the work. The wine changes throughout the aging process due to various chemical reactions, and seeing and tasting those changes is one of the perks of making wine.
We age most of our red wines in oak barrels.
Mr. Pearson and the barrels.
Though we use predominately French and American oak barrels, we throw in some Hungarian oak just to mix it up a bit. We hope to do a little investigating into barrel alternatives such as oak staves and spirals, down the road.
We spent last weekend racking about 2500 gallons of 2009 wine. This is part of the red wine aging process: let the wine out of the barrel every now and then to allow it to breath. It also gives us a chance to rid the barrel of sediment collected throughout the aging process.
A peek inside.
Tartrates fall from the wine throughout aging, and racking is a good time to remove such precipitates from the aging vessel.
Tartrates
Our 2009 reds will continue to age until winter/spring 2011, at which time we’ll begin to bottle them up. Most of our 2009 red vintages are from our own Central Idaho vines, so we’re excited to get them out on the market next year. Stay tuned!
