The Wine Is In The Mail

We are eagerly awaiting our first barrel samples of our Anderson Valley pinot noir.  According to the UPS tracking number, we should receive them sometime today. As you may recall, our Anderson Valley pinot from the Annahala Vineyard is the wine with the potential smoke taint problem (you can click here to see our recent video post on the smoke taint issue).

In talking to our winemaker Chris earlier this week, he told me that he's started to treat some of the other Annahala pinot with reverse osmosis and activated charcoal to remove the smoke flavors.  We've asked him not to treat our wine until we've had a chance to taste it.  So, Chris is sending us a sample of our untreated wine along with a barrel sample of another Annahala pinot that has already been treated.  We're hoping that this will give us a good before-and-after comparison.  While we're all for removing the smoke flavors, we want to make sure that nothing else is getting stripped out of the wine through this process.

We'll be tasting the wines over the weekend and video taping our first impressions for your enjoyment.  We'll also let you know if we're going to be going forward with any treatment for the smoke taint.  If so, I'll be let Kerith take the lead on explaining the science side of the "cleansing" process.

Wish us luck!

Also, thanks to everyone who contacted us after the post last week asking what we should do for the 2009 vintage.  We've already reserved our allocations for 2009 from Doctors and Annahala and we're leaning toward making a final decision on a third wine.  As Uzi from Stomping Girl Wines wrote, "Make what you like to drink. You can't sell what you are not passionate about! Worst case, you'll drink it yourself."  I couldn't have said it better myself.