Barreling into Harvest at Miner Family

Man, even empty, these barrels are HEAVY! They weigh in at about 100lbs each, and they’re a definite sign of things to come: aside from seeing those yellow bins standing at the ready outside Mumm, or anticipating the first grape samples to land in the lab, nothing tells us that harvest is around the corner quite like a loading dock full of our new barrels.

Miner will receive about 580 new barrels this year. Seem like a lot? Well, when we’re unloading the truck and getting them situated, it seems like a lot to us, too! But each year, our new barrels constitute just under 50% of all the barrels we’ll use.

Barrels are important – really important. Barrels offer an exchange of oxygen, time for the wine to come together, evolve, decide what it’s going to be. There’s a texture component to barrel aging as well as countless flavor components.
How do we choose barrels? There are so many ways, but it basically comes down to experience, trials, and good note-taking. Many wineries conduct barrel trials every year – testing out a couple of barrels from a new cooper or new styles from familiar coopers, and tasting/analyzing them periodically to see if they might want to incorporate these barrels into future harvests.

All barrels are not created equal! One barrel might taste delicious with our Garys’ Vineyard Pinot Noir, but may not cut the mustard for our Stagecoach Cabernet Sauvignon. How do we know? Again, experience and tasting - and of course, personal preference. Winemakers know what they can expect from a brand new Gillet barrel, for example, and from there they can determine if it’ll be a good match for their grapes. A good winemaker never ceases to search for new ways to make better wine. Every year offers another opportunity to tweak your technique using information learned from previous years. The longer you work with a specific lot of grapes, the better you know what those grapes need and – more importantly – what they don’t need. This is how we’ll determine, among many things, how much new oak to use on a wine.

So next time you pick up a glass, think beyond the butter, the “wood”. Think of the mouthfeel or texture of the wine, the possible presence of vanilla, pepper, spice – these can all come from the right oak used on the right wine.

We’ll get back to heaving these puppies onto racks and stowing them safely away in our cave. It IS the end of August, after all – we’re rolling right into harvest!

~Dianne Norton, Enologist, Miner Family

Midway at Miner

Now that we are well into the 2009 harvest, here is a run down on grapes we've brought in thus far at Miner Family and a quick assessment.

Day 1 of harvest came after Labor Day (a rarity for us) with the arrival of just over 5 tons of Sauvignon Blanc from Oakville Crossroad Vineyard. We will produce 350 or so cases of SB, which is down from the 800 cases we made in 2008. Also during week one, we brought in some Tempranillo and Grenache from Mike Naggiar's Vineyard in the Sierra Foothills. Beautiful, ripe, and tasty, these two reds were pressed off skins and are now in barrel (See Miner's first post, our amateur video of Tempranillo going to barrel).

All of our Viognier from Simpson Vineyard has been brought in: 75 tons this year and down from the 100 tons in '08. Fueled by Rutherford Grill ribs and cornbread, our fierce night shift crew (Wes, Ben, and Gabrielle) pressed Viognier until the wee hours (think 3am) for six consecutive nights. We barreled down some of our Viognier but the majority is slowly fermenting in tanks. After being kept at finger-numbing temperatures, our Rosella's Vineyard “777” Pinot Noir has now started to ferment in half-ton bins in our warehouse. A whopping 325 cases worth of Carneros Pinot Noir from Sunset Vineyard came in this year - an indication that vineyard yields would be up,and indeed yields look like they are up across the board for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Case and point, our first block of Chardonnay to come in from Stagecoach Vineyard yielded 33% more than last year and Hudson Vineyard Chardonnay in Carneros also came in with yields above average. We will have plenty of top notch Chardonnay to go around this year and we're planning on doing 3 vineyard designated Chardonnays: Hudson, Hyde and Genny's Vineyard.

We brought in just over 5 tons of Marsanne from Stagecoach Vineyard last week for our La Diligence bottling (a partnership with Domaine Francois Villard/Rhone Valley, France). As for Napa Valley reds, it's looking like they will be ripe soon and we will be prepared for an onslaught in the next week as Cabernet Sauvignon yields are likely to be high.

The winery is starting to smell good as we approach the harvest '09 half-way mark with around 250 tons in so far. Until next time, when we come up for air... or beer

Gary Brookman
Winemaker, Miner Family Winery

Barrel Fermenting Tempranillo

Mia Fassero
Miner Family Winery