Velocity Cellars » Open Bottle

Velocity Cellars Supports Rogue Valley Farm To School Fundraising Dinner

Gus — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:03:28 +0000

Julia and I were fortunate enough to find ourselves invited last Sunday night to the second annual Rogue Valley Farm To School fundraising dinner at New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro in Talent. It may have helped that I donated one of the wines for the dinner, but it seemed like we got the best end of the bargain by being seated at the bar and getting to enjoy an astounding meal. The food alone would require pages to describe, starting with an extraordinary array of tapas, moving to an elaborate paella, a cheese course and chocolate-cinnamon olive-oil cake with homemade almond ice cream for dessert. Perhaps best of all was the fact that every dime of the proceeds went to an extremely worthy cause, the above mentioned RVFarm2School, which provides locally-grown food to school cafeterias. Even the very gracious servers donated their tips.
Thank you, Tracy Harding, for including my wine, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers at New Sammy’s that night for your hard work. We had a ball!

Stylistic Evolution

Gus — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:37:27 +0000

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.