Vintage 2024: March 1 - Tasting our 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé

It is already March! Time flies when you're trying to get a business up and going during the hiatus in the vineyard. We are having some plumbing put into our industrial space which will make it possible for us to rack our wines and clean our kegs and tanks.
The weather is getting warmer and the crocuses are up! Last night, we had a Japanese style dinner of pork tonkatsu, rice and broccoli and my husband casually said, shall we drink one of our wines? He was referring to our 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon rosé. I said sure! He did warn me that we only had one more bottle of 750 and one more bottle of 375 left of this vintage.
When my husband opened the bottle, we could immediately smell the aroma wafting out of the bottle, reminding us of the singular experience we had when we opened a bottle of Martinelli Jackass Hill Vineyard Zinfandel. The aroma was one of strawberries and raspberries. The flavor did not disappoint. The wine went well with dinner.
In 2018, we had 5 friends come to harvest our first vintage of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Our 5 friends took only one hour and forty-five minutes to harvest 4 rows of grapes.
We borrowed our friend's destemmer/crusher to process approximately 85 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes which yielded 7 gallons of juice. The Brix at harvest was 17, so we decided that it really should be turned into a rosé. We extracted the juice from the skins by putting the destemmed grapes into mash bags, our usual MOO and stomped on it. We put the extracted juice into a keg in our temperature controlled cooler and then used a yeast called VIN13 to vinify the Cabernet Sauvignon.
We tasted the wine in June 2019 and it was delicious but we waited until October to bottle the wine and regretted our lack of urgency since it appeared to us that we lost that vibrant, fresh red berry fruit flavors.
Over the years, we've shared it with our friends who came to harvest our red grapes but we never tasted that vibrancy and red berry flavors until....last night!
The wine was clear and garnet in color with flavors of strawberries and raspberries. It showed us that there is chemistry happening in the bottle! In 2019, we bottled eighteen 750 mL and twelve 375 mL bottles of this rosé.