Stomping Girl Holiday Wine Tastings

Stomping Girl Winery Holiday Pop Up

Saturdays in December  – Dec 1, 8, 15

2:30 – 4:30 pm

complimentary wine tasting

holiday gift bottles

at Zut on Fourth

 1820 Fourth St, Berkeley

details on our website

 

Thanksgiving and Pinot

We are in the right business this time of year because no other wine goes better with turkey and savory side dishes than Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.  While our Chard is not ready for release (darn!,) our award-winning Pinot can grace your Thanksgiving table this year:

• Our elegant Silver Medal winner 2010 Russian River, which is almost sold out, will complement the heck out of the turkey.

• Our 2009 Corona Creek will stand up to the hearty mouth watering sausage-stuffed mushrooms we recommend below.

• Our versatile, well-balanced Silver Medal winner (and excellent price/quality ratio per Prince of Pinot) 2010 Unhinged is perfectly suitable for dinner but also an excellent casual partner for next day turkey and stuffing sandwiches.

A couple of our favorite Thanksgiving recipes:

• Ina Garten’s mouthwatering Sausage-stuffed Mushrooms
• Sweet Potato Buttermilk Rolls from Pinch my Salt

 

Harvest 2012 Update

I write this awaiting arrival of 5 tons of Pinot Noir from Beresini Vineyard in Carneros.  Uzi woke at 3:50 this morning to oversee the pick while I slept to a more normal hour and drove to meet him and the fruit at the winery.  I beat them both here so am taking advantage of the moment to write this in our traveling office/dining room/sometimes bedroom (aka my car.)

The reason he and the fruit are a bit late, and why growers and winemakers across Sonoma and Napa are celebrating, is that the perfect fruit set we had this spring and a steady stream of pleasant weather has led to an incredibly bountiful harvest.  The vineyard produced more fruit than it has in years and they needed more time and more bins to pick it.  The yield (tons/acre) is still low compared to most vinearyds, but for Beresini Vineyard this year is a jack pot!  I think we’ll finally get as much as we asked for.  And best of all, this year’s decisions on when to pick are being decided on ripeness not impending rain storms or heat spikes that played a role in the last 2 vintages.

We are so happy to bring in Pinot Noir from Beresini and Lauterbach Vineyards for the 4th year in a row and Chardonnay from Hyde Vineyard for the 2nd.   We just bottled our 2011s from each of these 3 vineyards and consider ourselves very lucky to have ongoing relationships with these dedicated growers.

And now it’s time for us to roll up our sleeves, get sticky and dirty, keep our traveling office stocked and go make some wine.  Hope your fall is just as happy and exciting!

 

Green Harvest (Dropping Fruit)

In regions where there is plenty of sunlight, fertile soil and irrigation, grapevines can end up producing too much fruit.  This is the case in many winegrowing regions in California.  In response, we typically remove a percentage of the clusters around this time of year–after they are fully formed but long before they are ripe.  Removing a portion of these immature clusters allows the vine to put all of its energy into the remaining clusters and leads to a more even ripening process and improved flavor compounds.

Removing fruit may seem detrimental since it decreases our yield and, ultimately, the amount of wine produced.  However, our intention is better quality wine, not more wine.  Green harvest allows us to achieve better quality wine by creating balanced vines with the right cluster-to-canopy-size ratio and more evenly ripened clusters at harvest.

Below are some recent pictures of a walk through dropping fruit, when veraison (the turning of the grapes from green to red) is 20-30% complete.  All but 2 clusters are removed from shoots that have extended beyond the top wire, all but 1 cluster are removed from shoots that extend below the top wire and all the clusters are removed from shoots that are too short to reach the middle wire.   When veraison is done, we do a second round and drop all the clusters that did not ripen properly so that we end up with an evenly ripened crop.

Pinot veraison

dropping fruit

 

Harvest 2011

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Harvest came late and fast this year.  Late ripening fruit and forecasted rains early this week led to a mad race to harvest the thinner-skinned varietals (such as Pinot and Chard) early Monday October 3rd before rain could cause any damage.

 

Thanksgiving and Our 2009 Pinot

We released our 2009 Pinots before the holidays this year for you to enjoy at the holiday dinner table and to be able to give as a gift.  They are young but very drinkable now, if you don’t want to wait.  If you happen to drink them side by side, here’s the order in which we recommend you enjoy them:

1) Lauterbach Hill, RRV–a delicate, lighter-bodied, food-friendly Pinot that pleases the palate with bright cherry and strawberry notes

2) Beresini Vineyard, Carneros–an elegant, medium-bodied, deep garnet-colored Pinot perfumed with cherry and a bit of spice

3) Corona Creek, Sonoma Coast–a fuller-bodied Pinot displaying darker fruit and a hint of roasting coffee and chocolate

Drink now or put in the cellar to enjoy a few years down the road.

 

2009 Release

Announcing our New Release now available on our website:

2009 Stomping Girl Pinot Noir, Beresini Vineyard, Carneros

2009 Stomping Girl Pinot Noir, Lauterbach Hill, Russian River Valley

2009 Stomping Girl Pinot Noir, Corona Creek, Sonoma Coast

Thankfully, it is ready just in time for Turkey Day because what goes better with that bird than Pinot Noir?  And we’re not just saying that because we make Pinot–it’s a tried and true, classic combination.  Good old American Pinot with a good old American bird.  So why not give Stomping Girl a try with your turkey this year?

Because we want to offer first dibs to our mailing customers, this wine is not yet available in restaurants or retail stores.  It is only available on our website–which is newly designed, by the way, check it out.

If you want to ensure your wine arrives in time for Thanksgiving, be sure to place your order by November 17.

If you’re local, or will be in town visiting, then order on the website and choose to pick it up at the winery–no shipping charges!

Order a case of one wine or make it fun and mix and match 12 bottles–either way you automatically get 10% off.  No coupon required.

 

Brix Levels Getting Up There

Beresini Pinot Aug 28

As harvest approaches, we are taking twice weekly Brix measurements of Bersini vineyard in Carneros–typically, our first vineyard picked.  On August 28, it was at 20.2 Brix.  On September 5, 21.4.  We picked on September 14 last year but due to the general coolness of this summer, the vineyard is about 1 degree and 1 week behind where it was last year at this time.   While the warm weather we’ve had these last two weeks might speed things up a bit, it is still hard to tell.

Last year, Beresini had a smaller than expected yield from our rows and it looks like we may find ourselves in the same situation again this year.  Smaller yields typically mean better, more intensely flavored wines…but it also means less of it.

 

Vineyards in Late June

We popped in on Beresini Vineyard and Corona Creek Vineyard in late June to check on the fruit.  Here they are:

Beresini vineyard (first photo) is in Carneros.  The berries are a little farther developed than those in Corona Creek (2nd photo) located in Sonoma Coast.  In 2009, we harvested Beresini over 2 weeks before Corona Creek.

We also stopped at the Fremont Diner in Carneros, just down the road from Beresini, for some down home cooking.  The big yellow square in the photo is butter, right behind it is a pig’s leg. Definitely not the place to go if you’re on a diet.

 

Bottles and capsules and corks, oh my

bottles, capsules and cork samples

Winemaking is not always about making wine.  There are always less glamorous tasks to be done, like packaging, which we are working on now. Later this summer we will bottle our 2009 vintage and we are lining up packaging details now. This means decisions have to be made on what size, color and nationality the bottle will be. We must choose what type of cork to use and if our logo will be branded on it. Then there is the capsule–what material, color, size do we want? Logo or no logo?  And last, but not least, we must update our label for the 3 different vineyards 2009.

Under my radar, downstairs, Uzi has been busy mixing and matching different colored capsules with various styles of bottles with our 2008 label slapped on to get a visual of what we want to end up with.

During his mix and match process, Uzi put a filled bottle with our 2008 Stomping Girl label, a red capsule and a Stomping Girl branded cork in it on our kitchen counter for me to see.  In an ironic twist of fate, later that same day a sommelier/wine director from a very well-known restaurant coincidentally paid me a surprise visit on an unrelated matter (we were working together on a project for our kids’ school.) He knows we make wine and spontaneously asked if he could try it.  I obliged, of course, after all there was the bottle of it right there in front of us on the counter. Had I followed rule #1 of pouring your wine to trade, I would have tasted it, and I would have known that it was not the 2008 Stomping Girl Lone Oak Vineyard, Santa Lucia Highlands that was clearly indicated on the label and that I portrayed it to be.

The gentleman gave it a sniff and a whirl.  His feedback was brief as he was in a hurry. He observed cranberries on the nose and the palette and then had to run to an appointment. Cranberries???  I should have known something was up at that point.  Our Lone Oak definitely does not invoke cranberries.  It has a much darker red fruit component.

That night I discovered the wine that had been on the counter, that I had poured for our new friend was not what I thought it was.  Aack!  I had been waiting weeks for the perfect opportunity to pour our wine for this man and I blew it!  How was I to know that a bottle labeled 2008 Stomping Girl Lone Oak Pinot Noir was in fact a bottle of our 2007 basement Pinot? Still a perfectly drinkable Pinot but not our Stomping Girl that retails for $38.

Luckily, we had a nice chuckle over it later and I promised to pour the real Stomping Girl for him next time.  Wonder if he’ll believe me?