Category Archives: In The Cellar

Bottling the 2009 Velo Malbec Rosé

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Posted by Gus on June 16, 2010 – 8:46 am
Filed under In The Cellar

The 2009 Velo Malbec Rosé was bottled on May 4th with a mobile bottling truck at RoxyAnn Winery in Medford. Working at better than a bottle per second, the line and crew made short work of my tiny (156 case) production.

Two days later Vernon Rollins at New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro in Talent, a few stones’ throws from where the grapes are grown, paid me a high compliment by taking a case of the new wine as his house rosé pour.

Now, more than a month after bottling, the wine is really showing its stuff, with fabulous aromas of grapefruit and strawberry-rhubarb, and a now signature racy acidity against a bone-dry finish with vibrant flavors of wild strawberries and cream.

Velocity Moves to Pallet Wine Company

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Posted by Gus on June 14, 2010 – 2:09 pm
Filed under In The Cellar

May 27th, 2010 was moving day for Velocity Cellars. After eight fine vintages under the roof of RoxyAnn Winery in Medford, including six for which I worked as RoxyAnn’s winemaker, the day finally came for me to move on.

How does a winery just pick up and move? In my case, the advantage of being a winemaker with neither buildings nor equipment comes through in just this sort of situation. I hired a big truck and we moved eighty barrels across town in one morning with the help of Les (the driver), Peter (loading at Roxyann) and Linda and Josh (unloading at the other end).

Pallet Wine Company, my new home, is located just across town from my old digs at Roxyann, in an historic industrial building which has found a new life as a winery under the direction of Dan and Olivia Sullivan and their talented winemaker/partner Linda Donovan. Besides the lovely new paint job, they have transformed the interior into a full-scale production facility, complete with underground barrel storage, state-of-the-art crush equipment, and even a ROPP head on their bottling line (that’s industry-talk for a screwcap applicator, of which I am a big fan).

Why move? It is never an easy decision to make a big change, and in this case I was certainly in the enviable position of having a choice between two excellent facilities. In the end, the driving force had to be wine style. Pallet will permit me to undertake three significant shifts in my production: native yeast fermentation, micro-lot fermentation, and on-demand bottling under a screwcap, all of which will, I hope, allow me to better pursue my goal of truly regionally distinctive wines.

Thanks, Roxyann, for eight great years. Thanks, Pallet, for the opportunity to share your great facility in the coming years. And thanks, Linda, for a flawless job unloading barrels!

Blending 2009 Velocity and Velo

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Posted by Gus on February 24, 2010 – 9:39 am
Filed under In The Cellar

It’s time to head back into the cellar. In these winter months it is easy to be distracted by the unfortunate necessities of business planning, marketing, and other dreary desk-work, but the wines are calling.
Barrel tasting at this stage actually becomes (yes, it’s true) hard work. Over the next few days I’ll be individually sampling each barrel from the 2009 vintage in preparation for one of the most crucial steps in the élevage (upbringing, or raising, of wines, as children more or less) of the new wines: blending.
I like to blend early, to encourage integrated flavors and stable wine, so the blending decision is a bit like deciding what you’re going to be when you grow up, except that you don’t get to change your mind later. So, I go through the barrel stacks and look for wines that show structure, intensity, purity of fruit and age-worthiness; those barrels are put into consideration for the Velocity bottling.
If the wine tastes friendlier, yummier, perhaps a bit softer and more vigorously youthful, it is a clear candidate for bottling under the Velo label. Then comes the fun part – assembling the components. Just because, say, seventeen barrels show Velocity-level promise, that doesn’t mean that those should simply be tossed together and called a wine. Now I get to play with the proportions in an attempt to blend a wine which will display the kind of balance, elegance, and focus I strive for. Perhaps a bit more block B, or less block A; maybe a dash of Cabernet franc will spice up the Malbec, but which barrel is best suited for the job?
So, off I go armed with my palate, my instincts and a sturdy glass, to start clambering around the barrel stacks.

Viognier Barrel Tasting

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Posted by Gus on February 2, 2010 – 2:17 pm
Filed under A Matter Of Style, In The Cellar

Yes, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. I am making a white wine. The reasons are many, but the strongest one may be simply that my middle name is, in fact, White.

Since coming to the Rogue Valley I’ve made Chardonnay, Pinot gris, Pinot blanc, Viognier, Roussanne, Marsanne and even a little Grenache blanc, but always for wineries and labels other than my own. Settling on a style for my own white, I started with Viognier, which I feel has demonstrated a real affinity for the dry, sunny growing conditions here, and supplemented it with a bit over 20% Marsanne, which is a relative newcomer to the region.

Winter sample of Viognier/Marsanne

The Viognier is from Gold Vineyard in Talent, where Randy Gold has been reliably growing the Malbec and Cabernet franc for Velocity since 2002. Having nibbled some grapes the previous fall, and having tasted some of Trium Winery’s Viognier bottlings from the site, I felt confident that the moderate elevation and easterly aspect, combined with Randy’s skillful farming, could yield the kind of fruit I was looking for. The 2009 vintage did not disappoint me; we were able to bring the fruit in at a civilized 23.0 Brix, with plenty of tropical and stone fruit flavors, sufficient natural acidity, and the kind of balance I am looking for when trying to produce a moderate-alcohol wine.

We harvested the Marsanne on the same day from Crater View Vineyard over by Jacksonville, and went ahead and pressed the fruit from both vineyards together into one tank. I just closed my eyes and trusted that the blend would work. As I had hoped, the Marsanne brings some additional roundness to the wine, and a pleasant melon character. I had expected the Marsanne would also provide some additional acidity, since my experience with the grape from the previous vintage was that it held onto a nice low pH well into maturity, but for this year it wasn’t to be, and I had to be satisfied with the natural acidity of the Viognier.

Barrels for my White Wine
My goal with the wine is to bottle it unfiltered, and to give it plenty of lees contact for mouthfeel, complexity, and stability. So right now it is moving slowly through malolactic fermentation in barrel, has yet to be given any SO2 (even at crush I avoided SO2) and is, as the picture suggests, in 100% two and three-year old French oak barrels. I bought the barrels from Far Niente winery in Napa, where they were used to make a three-year barrel aged late harvest Sauvignon blanc called Dolce, which explains the filigreed decoration on the barrel heads. I am just happy to have some clean, fairly neutral barrels to age my new project in.

Now come the two toughest questions. What should I call it, and how much should I make next year?

2009 Vintage Malbec, Cabernet Franc and Rosé

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Posted by Gus on January 7, 2010 – 11:59 am
Filed under In The Cellar

With the 2009 reds appearing to be finished with malolactic, it was time this morning for a visit to the cellar to taste the new wines. First, I had to freshen up my palate with a quick taste of the 2009 rosé, which has been moved to a small stainless tank for aging on the fine lees. The rosé is currently resisting malolactic fermentation, so will be warmed up a bit and reinoculated with a few liters of its red counterpart in barrel.Rose Tank Sample 1.7.10

The 2009 reds are currently in three lots. MB1 is all Malbec, the first to be harvested, tank fermented, and now tasting like it will serve as the foundation for a 2009 Velocity. Then there are seven barrels of Cabernet franc, whose herbal character can be surprising at this stage. I admit to having had a love/hate relationship with Cabernet franc until I had the opportunity to enjoy a few Loire Valley bottlings of the grape, at which point I determined to embrace its herbal nature as varietally typical and very food-friendly.

Thief 1.7.10

There are also about fifteen barrels of MB2, the second lot of Malbec which boasts plenty of currant, cherry and dried herb aromas on a somewhat softer, leaner body than MB1, leading me to believe that it is likely to find a home bottled as Velo.

For such a copious vintage there is very good concentration and substantial structure, especially in MB1. These will all be fun wines to work with.

Rosé evolution

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Posted by Gus on December 23, 2009 – 9:54 am
Filed under A Matter Of Style, In The Cellar

The 2009  Malbec rosé, in tank at this moment, is presenting an interesting opportunity to further refine a winemaking style. Having tried a style with virtually no skin contact and moderate lees aging (2006) , then a no-SO2 juice style with little lees contact (2007), followed by an SO2 at crush plus two to three days skin contact before saigneé and again a limited lees contact style (2008), I may finally be settling down. Still, I won’t promise to stop experimenting, especially when each year brings new variables.

For 2009 I went so far as to craft a plan, which was quickly modified as the grapes began coming in. The relatively low sugar content of some of the grapes combined with big berry sizes prompted me to increase the percentage of juice drained from the fermenter, up to about 30% in one case. The saigneé was done after as little as one hour up to one day of skin contact. By selecting only the lowest-sugar lots (around 21-22 Brix) I am hoping to finish with a wine near 12% alcohol, which is civilized for a rosé.

Fermentation was deliberately warm, in the 60s Fahrenheit, to try to capture more red-fruit character. The next step was to retain the fine lees (the expired yeast cells left over from primary fermentation) by racking the cloudy wine along with the fluffy top layer off the settlings in the tank. Now the plan was simply to age the wine for two or three months in contact with the fine lees, to build some creamy character into the mid-palate.

Tasting the wine at this point with John Quinones (the new winemaker at Roxyann Winery, which is where I make my wines) he suggested we try to promote malolactic fermentation. Since the 2009 has plenty of natural acidity, and since the flavors were presenting an herbal edge, I readily agreed. Inoculation was simple; we took a couple of buckets of newly drained, dry, free run Malbec from a tank slated for Velo production and pitched them into the top of the rosé tank, bringing a little extra color as well as a healthy malolactic culture along with it.

I’ll keep tinkering with this wine, but I think we are on a very positive track for this 2009 version.

Malbec Rosé

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Posted by Gus on December 16, 2009 – 2:59 pm
Filed under In The Cellar

Vintage 2009 provided a fine opportunity to make a fair volume of my micro-project, the Velo Malbec Rosé. With 1500 liters in the tank right now, I have about twice as much as last year’s meager 80 case production. The idea for the wine came about after several vintages of wrestling with the soft-skinned Malbec, which had a tendency to fall apart on the grape-sorting table, resulting in buckets of juice being collected from the drain pan which would then be tossed into the fermenter at the end of the day’s crush. In October of 2006, we were poised once again to return the pink juice to the fermenter, literally standing there with the buckets, when we thought, “what are we doing, why not make a little rosé with this?”
We saved the run-off juice, then drained a bit more from the fermenter so we would have enough to fill one 210 liter stainless drum. A couple of days later we racked the clean juice to a new drum, gave it a little bit yeast, stuck it a cool corner of the winery and left it to its own devices. When the dust had settled by mid-November at the end of harvest, we rolled it out and drew off a sample of pale, vibrantly acidic, dry rosé scented with watermelon, strawberry and a touch of rhubarb.
As we were getting ready to bottle the inaugural vintage of Velo Malbec Rosé my wife, Julia, and I discovered we were going to be having a daughter. In lieu of cigars at her birth it seemed appropriate to be able to offer my friends a bottle of pink wine.

Stylistic Evolution

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Posted by Gus on December 3, 2009 – 10:37 am
Filed under In The Cellar, Open Bottle

As I gather up the wine for tonight’s 29th annual JPR wine tasting fundraiser I am struck right away by a clear sign of my own wine’s process of evolution. The 2005 Velocity and the 2007 Velo are virtually the same wine by the numbers (a little over half Malbec, the rest Cabernet, Cabernet franc, and Syrah) yet they are such distinctly different wines. Within two vintages I had honed the decision of which grape varietals from which vineyard blocks to use, so that I was working with essentially the same grapes which warranted bottling under the Velocity label in 2005.

Looking at the first five or six vintages of Velocity and Velo is like looking at the steepest part of a graph of evolutionary change. In the beginning I hoped that Malbec would play an important role in the blend, but did not imagine that it could dominate as successfully as it does now. I feel now more than ever that it was a wise decision to let the wine follow its own natural path, and not to try to force the style into some predetermined recipe imported from another winegrowing region.