2003 Carlo and Julian Pinot Noir

A few days ago, my husband was rooting around in our wine cellar and discovered this 2003 Carlo and Julian Pinot Noir from Carlton, Oregon. We both remember going to the vineyard and learning about their tall Pinot noir vines being tended by sheep! My husband said that when he pulled out the cork, it came out in one piece without a problem which is a good sign for a wine that is 21 years old. The sniff test revealed some muted aromas but the tasted test was surprisingly good. The wine still tasted youthful with a fair amount of fruit on the palate. The label on the back of this bottle provided a little more information. The wine was made with Pommard, Dijon 667 and 777 from the oldest vines on their estate vineyard. Only 200 cases were produced. The wine was unfined and unfiltered. On their website, I learned that they still use their sheep in the vineyard which was planted in 1991. We paired the wine with a pork chop smothered in pan gravy with a side of wild rice and green bean almondine!

2024 Harvest Party

The year is coming to a close and before the New Year comes around, we wanted to thank our harvesters for their help by throwing our annual harvest party. This year, the food theme was "Mexican" and included Mexican chorizo fried in egg roll wrapper, lamb flautas, baked empanadas with chicken filling, Mexican pork ribs, vegetarian southwestern-style spring rolls, plantain chips, and sweet potato salad with cilantro-lime dressing.

We had a fair number of our harvesters attend the event!

One of the traditions at our harvest party is to give away baskets of goodies. This year, Donna took home the grand prize, with David taking the second prize and Karen the third prize. It's a fun thing to do!

We want to thank all of our friends who helped us during our 2024 season! See you next year!

2024 Visit to the Massouds at Paumanok on Long Island

Around this time of the year, we make our annual trek to Long Island to visit our mentor and friends, Ursula and Charles Massoud and their son and winemaker Kareem and his wife, Karen. Last year we were invited to a fabulous Dinner and Winetasting at the Halyard where we tasted more than 25 vintage wines made on Long Island. It was such a wonderful dinner that when we left, we promised that we will come back and make dinner for the Massouds. On Tuesday, we took the Long Island Sound Ferry from New London to Orient Point. We did not make the previous mistake of taking a small ferry and opted for the largest ferry that we could take and that was at 11 a.m. We meandered a bit when we reached Orient Point and went to Greenport where we stopped at the Blue Duck pastry shop where they make their own bread and sandwiches and had a gruyere and ham panini. It was delicious! Our next stop was to see Steve Mudd, and though my husband emailed him earlier he had not responded but we thought we would try anyway. We wanted him to taste our 2019 Chenin Blanc and to thank him for his help in 2013 when his crew laser planted our vineyard. However, no luck, no Steve, so we pressed on.
We reached Paumanok at Aquebogue around 1:45 and let ourselves in to the guest house adjacent to the winery. It was early enough that we were able to rest and then prepared the food that we brought over on the ferry.
The Massouds arrived at their guest house at 6:30 and we began dinner with an appetizer of spanakopita (spinach pie) and tiropita (cheese pie) which we paired with the 2022 Forge Cellars Dry Riesling Classique. We brought the Riesling because Ursula is from the Mosel where her family grew Riesling. She gave the wine a thumbs up! It paired very well with the Greek appetizers.
There was an intermezzo of Greek salad with bread and then moussaka. My husband anted up a 2001 Rocche Barolo and a 2005 Dunn Napa Valley. The wines paired very well with the the moussaka but the Dunn was especially appreciated by all of us. Dessert was one that my husband ordered from Wild Briar, a nussecken, a German nut bar which we still amazingly had room for!
The evening flew by with laughter and great conversation. It was such a memorable evening. Ursula and I think that is the ultimate role of wine!
(Postscript: My husband knew that there was bad weather coming in on Wednesday so he made reservations on the 9 a.m. ferry from Orient Point back to New London, again on the largest ferry that we could get on. The ride was smooth and we reached New London in pouring down rain! When we got home, we learned that the last ferry from either New London or Orient Point left at 10 a.m.!)

One Thousand Vines

A few weeks ago, this book showed up on our doorstep. My husband has been keeping his eye on One Thousand Vines by Pascaline Lepeltier as a book that we can delve into during our "quiet time" in the winter. It came out in French around two years ago and has recently been translated to English. I did glance through the book and it looks very interesting with beautiful illustrations.
I will be reading the book during the cold months ahead. I'll report back. Stay tuned!

Bottling Our 2023 Late Harvest Chenin Blanc

On December 1, 2023, our friends, Mary and Barry came to help us with the last harvest of 2023, the botrytized Chenin Blanc. Barry brought over his apple press and we used that to juice the botrytized grapes. We had a modest amount of juice that we were able to squeeze out from our last harvest, it didn't quite fill a 5 gallon carboy. We let the juice cold settle and on December 3, the cold settled juice was deemed clean enough, so without any racking, we inoculated it with our yeast of choice, QA23.

On December 6, we noticed that fermentation had begun and by December 19, fermentation had possibly reached an end.

The finished wine was stored in the carboy and kept in the darkness. On October 11, we racked the wine into two carboys to get the finished wine off of the lees. The wine went into one 3 gallon carboy and half of a one gallon jug.

On December 3, we combined the racked wine back into a clean 5 gallon carboy and prepared to bottle the wine using gravity.

We used 375 mL Bordeaux style bottles and hand bottled the finished wine. We ended up with 37 bottles of 2023 botrytized Chenin Blanc.
We are looking forward to harvesting our 2024 late harvest Chenin Blanc!

Drinking Pinot Noir for Laura's House

My husband is part of an online group called Berserkers and every Thanksgiving, apparently for the past 12 years, they support Laura's House, a shelter for victims of domestic violence. We have been participating as well. This year, we took this 2023 Kemmeter Sonero Rose of Pinot Noir, shown on the left in the picture below to our daughter and son-in-law's home for Thanksgiving. This was one of the wines that we purchased recently, when we took a trip up to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes.
The rose was bright and tasted of ripe strawberries and red cherries.

The following evening, we had the 2022 Rose Rock Pinot Noir from Oregon and the 2005 Louis Jadot Beaune Clos des Couchereaux, a New World and an Old World Pinot Noir. It was not a fair comparison because of the age difference. I thought the Louis Jadot still tasted youthful. The Rose Rock was easy drinking and went very well with the Stanley Tucci pasta e fagioli that our son made. Truth be told, I wasn't really concentrating on the flavors of the wines but enjoying the evening with our son and daughter-in-law visiting from Massachusetts.
Anytime that we can open up some Pinot Noir, especially for such a good cause as Laura's House is a good time!