November, 2008
BEHIND THE BARREL NEWS
Spotlight and Wine Quip!
Matt's Unique Perspective on Our WinesGreetings! We here at the winery have just finished up an amazingly productive and busy harvest for 2008 and between you and me, the wine is tasting great at only a month old! After 56 days of picking, crushing, fermenting and pressing grapes there is a little bit of time off, ha ha, and Dave said that we should tell everyone about how the last two months were.
For the 2008 vintage we decided to go back to all estate fruit and not purchase any grapes to make our wine. This decision has been three years coming and has cut our production from 5,000 cases down to just shy of 3,000. Also with a late frost that happened in May, our vineyard was hit with a decrease of around 15%, mainly in the ever popular Barbera. Despite the drop in quantity, we have managed to reproduce very deep, rich and balanced wines similar to our 2007 vintage, while maintaining the great fruit and acid of our 2006 vintage. In all, these wines are tasting great now and will taste spectacular down the road. We will let you decide when to drink them.
In August we had our semi-annual pick up party for our futures customers, which featured all of our 2007 wines and some great food catered by my culinary school classmates. A great party in all, that had our big screen blasting some music, fun people coming together and some great weather outside. After everyone had gone home we opened up a couple of bottles out of Dave's secret stash, deep in the cellar. One of the standouts was our 1995 Estate Zin that just oozed deliciousness. Tons of fruity berry flavors were still apparent and it had evolved into an amazingly deep and earthy wine. And they say that Zin doesn't age well....
On the wine making side we are readying ourselves to taste all of the individual wines made out of some unusual grapes such as Lagrein from Northern Italy, Aglianico from Central Italy, Touriga Nacional and Souzão from Portugal, all of which are grown on our property. Then once we have tasted and figured out the individual profiles, we are going to begin thinking about how to blend them in January. Come by and order your 2008 Futures prior to January to get a barrel taste of these crazy grapes before they are blended.
December 6th brings about our second pick up party to get your 2007 futures purchases. We will again have the stereo cranked up, our wines open and some awesome barbecuing by our very own Steve. We hope to see you soon to barrel taste and pick up!
Enjoy and Cheers!
Matt Wilson
Assistant WinemakerDavid Coffaro Vineyard & Winery
7485 Dry Creek Road
Geyserville CA 95441
Phn: 707-433-9715
Fax: 707-433-6008
www.coffaro.com
