Tag Archive for: 3 Texan Vineyard

Halfway through Harvest 2016!

watch out! it is going over!

watch out! it is going over!

Hey there, I wanted to give you a quick report of how things are going around here.  I don’t have long–if you look closely at that picture, you’ll see that malbec there is about to “boil over” and ferment right on out of that barrel!

This week I’ve got 1.5 tons of malbec fermenting from Temple, TX and .75 tons of merlot from our Salado vineyard fermenting.  We have already fermented the chardonnay, sangiovese and tempranillo.

So what’s left?  CABERNET SAUVINGNON!  Next weekend, Saturday, August 20, our friends at 3 Texans Vineyard will harvest their cab.  Follow the link and give them a holler if you would like to harvest grapes with them.  They are near Temple, Texas.

I haven’t even scheduled the harvest of our cab yet.  The weather is calling for a bit cooler temperatures, so hopefully that will help the plants ripen those grapes some more.  I will let you know soon, but probably harvest August 27 or September 3, 2016.

Well, that’s all for now, I’ve got some punching to do!

FOOD + WINE pairing along with ART, July 2nd

oak testing

which wine is best? come find out July 2nd, 6-9 pm

The other day I got together with Chef Brandon to get some feedback on some wines I have been working on.  I wanted his opinion on how I should oak the wines we are currently ageing.  (See here for more details on where we are with making 2014 wines).  I poured him a couple versions of our dry sangiovese rose, a couple versions of 3 Texan cabernet sauvignon, and a couple versions of 2014 Diamond Back.  He helped me to think about which oak flavors married well with which wines.  And he gave me feedback on the rose.

Brandon works for Classic Events Catering and from this wine tasting he put together a terrific wine pairing menu.  This food and wine pairing will be available for $24.95 during the Art Opening Reception for John Davis, on Thursday, July 2nd, 6-9 pm.  Tickets for the food and wine are available on eventbrite.

The menu includes a NEW debut, 2014 Salado Vineyard Sangiovese Rose which will be released at this event. This light summer rose wine has an orange citrus note and will be paired with Corn Cake sous vide pork belly, slow-poached quail egg, green tomato marmalade, and topped with American caviar

From the BARREL, 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon from 3 Texans Vineyard will be previewed. Taste this wine before it is bottled and tell us what you think. If you enjoy it, we might even offer it to you at a special pre-bottling price. It will be served with Masa Tostado ‘churrasco style’ double cooked brisket, pickled red onion, avocado kewpie mayo, & kimchi Brussel sprout. The 3 Texans Vineyard is located west of the Temple Airport.

Sweet Tweet muscato will be chilled and presented with Tart grilled peach, goat cheese-mascarpone ‘cheese whiz’, clover honey, and oregano.

For an additional $5, folks can partake in the food and wine pairing described above, and participate in a special tasting of 2014 Tempranillo and 2014 Malbec grown in the 3 Texans Vineyard at 6 pm. This tasting will lead by winemaker, June Ritterbusch and will demonstrate the differences in aging a wine in various oaks.

Finally, the gnomadic fashion truck will be on hand. What is gnomadic Fashion? An online store + Fashion Truck! Their treasures include handmade, fair trade, and socially responsible goods.

Winemaking–June 2015

My Production Control Board

My Production Control Board

It is at this point every year that I say, “ohmigoodness!  time to bottle the wine before harvest gets here!  Harvest is about 8 weeks away and we need to empty the tanks so that we will have space for the 2015 harvest–which might be big due to all that rain we received in May 2015.

So the last couple of days I have been ordering corks, labels, bottles, capsules and oak in order to have the supplies ready for bottling.  Ouch!  This is when it is tough to be an entrepreneur.  These things cost REAL money folks.  And we will be selling this wine late 2015-2016 and maybe even 2017, so it takes a long time to recover that investment in inventory in the wine industry.

Part of the decision making process is crafting a product matrix that makes good sense.  What I mean is that as a business owner, I think about what portfolio of wines I want to offer in order to make wine drinkers happy and maximize profit.  I feel strongly that I need a dry white, a couple different dry reds and some sweet wine.  We have some dessert wines that we produce as well, but I will not be working on those in the next couple of months, so they are not included in this discussion.  So my goal is to produce Night Flight, Diamond Back, Big Bully and Rootin’ Tootin’ for sale at Salado Winery Company at about $20/bottle and then to produce three varietal based reds for 3 Texans Vineyard at 3 different price points.  Based on my experience selling wine over the last 10 years, I decide on how to blend the wines and price them.  Since I often do the selling myself, I have quite strong opinions about what wine drinkers are looking for.

We are a bit behind in trying to get 2014 Night Flight bottled.  It needs to be cold stabilized and that is time consuming.  We are nearly out of it though, so that is the most pressing work to be done.

The 2014 Diamond Back is a blend of 40% cabernet sauvignon and 60% merlot.  The wine has been blended and we have started doing taste tests with various folks.  We will use a combination of American and French oak with this wine, both will be medium toast.  Some folks preferred the American which had strong flavor up front and some preferred the French which was a little more subtle and let the berry fruit notes of the cabernet shine through.  As winemaker, I make the final decision–yeah me!  I’ve got a fair amount of this Diamond Back wine on hand to sell, I still have plenty of the 2013 to sell too therefore I want a dry red blend that will appeal to a wide range of wine drinkers.  So I will use 25% American oak to get just a bit of that flavor up front, during the initial swallow and 75% French oak to give the subtle notes more boost and help carry the fruit flavors through to the end.

The 2014 Rootin’ Tootin‘ needs a little citric acid added to it, probably about .5g/L to give it a little punch.  Since it is warm much of the year here in Central Texas, I like to make wines a wee bit tart, then serve them very cold.  I think a wine like that tastes very refreshing that way and this wine is for folks that like their wine on the sweet side.

The 2014 Big Bully still needs to be made!  I need to play with various combinations of tempranillo and malbec to see which blend is the best, then we need to see how much tempranillo we want to allocate to the blend vs. how much of the single varietal we want to bottle for 3 Texans Vineyard.  I also can backwards plan by predicting how much Big Bully I think I can sell.  It will likely  be oaked with a little more American oak than the Diamond Back because we want to ensure that they have a very different flavor profile.  I am inclined to make a 50-50 blend, but there is much, much more malbec so it is a tough decision to decide how much to blend.  Malbec can be a tricky sell since some wine drinkers really hate it! I am not sure why, but some people will not try even try a Malbec, so I am worried about the large amount that we’ve got on hand.

The 2014 3 Texan Cabernet Sauvignon continues to be my darling.  We have tried this with American medium toast, French medium toast, & Hungarian medium toast, but our favorite so far is the French heavy toast.  We tried this with the chef from Classic Catering yesterday and he was extremely excited about it.  He felt that the heavy toast was a much more unique flavor in this wine, almost like cinnamon.  I complained to him that the heavy toast oak costs an awful lot more, but he proposed a great idea.  He said I should try pre-selling it, so that is what we are going to do.  We will have a sample available on Thursday night, July 2nd during the art opening reception and we will take pre-orders at a discounted price. Hopefully I can sell enough through pre-sales to purchase some heavy toast French oak and make this a terrific bottle of wine with a full retail price of $39.95.

In our preliminary taste tests, we liked medium toast American oak with the 3 Texan 2014 Tempranillo and medium toast French oak with the 3 Texan 2014 Malbec.  This needs to be tested in another round of testing with the folks at 3 Texans Vineyard!

Then all of the bottling needs to be scheduled.  I’ve ordered corks and capsules for all of this wine, but I did not order all of the bottles or all of the labels.  I could not order all of the labels yet because we haven’t decided the allocation for Big Bully.  Plus the labels are actually the most expensive part and just like my MBA professor said, CASH IS KING.  I also didn’t order all of the glassware either.  The pallets of bottles take up too MUCH space and we need lots of messy available work space for harvest.  Luckily Salado Winery employees are taking their vacations early in the summer, so all this bottling will be done when they are back.  So there you have it.  Bottling operations at a winery involve cashflow, space planning, materials, time available and after that, we still have to deal with Murphy’s Law. 🙂

Hope to see you soon!