Santa Barbara Winemakers.
November 2007 Edition.
Featured video.
Yves Gangloff. From the Foreign Office. The last of Sonny's French lessons. This is a visit to the cellar of Yves Gangloff. For any self-respecting lover of Rhones and Condrieu, you have to taste Gangloff's wines. Posted 1 November 2007.
Next month we will return to normal Santa Barbara scheduling. We hope you have enjoyed this collection of videos filmed on location by Sonny.
Something a little different this month. For all you Hospice fans out there, we have something too exclusive to keep to ourselves. Sonny Courtney is Joey Tensley's cellar rat, who found his way into the Condrieu this year with the plan to hook up with Yves Cuilleron. Being such a huge fan of this website he decided to send some exclusive footage of the weeks leading up to harvest with some peeks into the vineyards, tastings at Guigal, and tours around the area. He has a very unique take on all of his experiences there and the footage included on the homepage this month is one of many that will be posted up as and when they are posted to us here. We chose to keep the footage raw as Sonny is using his cell phone video. Sonny also has a weblog with photos and commentary on these pages . Drop him a line and let him know what you think of his journey.
November 16
Next month Santa Barbara Winemakers will be moving to subscription only. There will be a two tier system, $10 a month or $75 for the year. Subscribers will have complete access to all the archived material. We have tried to keep this service free for anyone interested in Santa Barbara County wines but with costs rising it is difficult to retain the "PBS" system. With this in mind we will be exploring more areas within the wine industry with in-depth reports and of course more videos each month.
For December the video we have lined up will be Keith and Larry Saarloos talking about their beautiful vineyard of syrah on Ballard Canyon.
In-depth we will take a look at why there has been a mass exodus at Zaca Mesa and our own experience of shuffling the deck chairs on this Titanic.
Click to Subscribe before the holidays or send as a gift.
November 1
Something every winery and winemaker who is shipping their wines around the US should be aware of. Click here
November 1
The grapes are still coming in. I was watching more bins coming out of Tierra Alta again this morning.
A quick outline of things to look for in 2007 vintages:
Steve Russell at Prodigal Wines
has an incredible pinot noir, picked in the first week of September, racked off it has an amazing potential to show what this varietal can do. Dark, inky with cherry and licorice notes I haven't found in pinot before. Not overextracted either, bright and fresh.
Joey Tensley has some Colson Canyon syrah that after 3 days of cold soaking was almost black in colour.
Some pinot clusters this year were no more than 3 inches long
with berries the size of ball-bearings.
There are reports across the valley of lower yields, down by as much as 30%. There are also reports that with lower sugar levels during harvest we could see a bumper crop of wines below 14% alcohol.
The most surprising fruit was over at Tres Hermanas winery where Luke Lindquist is facing his first solo harvest. He had some of Beckmen's sauvignon blanc from Purisima Mountain on Ballard Canyon, this fruit had life in it, the berries were almost wriggling with energy, tasty, clean. Almost addictive. This will be the wine to look for next summer.
The most serene vineyard, with the happiest pickers, the healthiest most uniformly good-looking grapes and surroundings that hail back to the old world was at the Woodstock Ridge vineyard where Jeff Frank has been quietly growing some wonderful sangiovese.
2007 is likely to offer winemakers the most challenges and potentially some of the best successes, points will no doubt go to originality, but quality will be the benchmark. This is why we are here.
Cheers
Santa Barbara Wine
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