Posted By : Chris Corley

           A few of the wines that we pulled for tasting and analysis today are     destined for our Domaine Montreaux sparkling wine program. In 2008, we crushed small amounts of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to be used for bubbly. We’re considering doing a rose this year. Our sister Carolyn is no doubt already getting her popcorn maker dusted off as she hears that good news!

          Making sparkling wines can be a little tricky. Beginning the secondary ‘methode champenoise’ fermentation in the bottle is one of the more helpless feelings I’ve had as a winemaker. With still wine fermentations, you can sniff and taste, and plunge your hands into the juice and, for lack of a better term, really get intimate with your fermentations. With secondary sparkler ferments, it’s different. Once the re-fermenting wine is bottled and the crown cap gets secured, you’re on the outside looking in. The bottles are stacked away neatly in the old wooden bins that Uncle Brian built in the late 1900s, and you dust them off and crack one open every so often to see how they’re coming along. The fermentations usually go along just fine, but it’s a winemaker’s responsibility to avoid issues, not just identify them, so we’re always trying to remain vigilante with our sparkling wines (like a mix of Charles Bronson and Don Ho). Sorry, I take that back, I meant ‘vigilant’.

          Sparkling wines are fun for everyone. In the picture to the right, Brother Kevin reacts to a taste of young brut. Young sparklers can be fun to drink, with their apply, pear bright fruit aromas and flavors and crisp, refreshing acidity. Older sparkling wines can be a real treat as well. We’ve recently opened up some of our Domaine Montreaux from 1983, which was an amazing bottling of wine. Most people don’t think of sparkling wines in terms of aging, but well made bubblies have all the right components for aging well – high acid, low alcohol, low pH, CO2, and pressure in the bottle to keep air from getting in and oxidizing the wine. That being said, they’ve got to have great fruit in the first place if they’re going to go the distance.

         This year, we’ll make just a small amount of Domaine Montreaux, and we’ll likely start preparing the secondary fermentation in the next couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to bursting some bubbles !

Posted By : Chris Corley

Monticello Vineyards is now on Facebook! If you’re a member of Facebook, search through ‘groups’ and join “Fans of Monticello Vineyards”. It’s an open group and you’ll be able to share photos and comments about your visits to Monticello and wines of ours that you’ve enjoyed. You’ll also be able to keep up to date with events and news at Monticello !

Posted By : Chris Corley

“It takes a lot of good beer to make great wine” … a primitive cellar hand likely coined this phrase several thousand years ago shortly after the discovery of fermented bevereages. We certainly enjoy a cold beer at the end of a long hot harvest workday. In the cellar, we have varied tastes for beer. Most of the cellarmen enjoy the lighter styles of lagers, while I prefer a little heavier beer, pale ale. Our lab guy, Mark, tends towards the thick stouts, which I enjoy as well, particularly in the colder winter months.

This year, with some help from the guys, I’m going to home-brew batches through the winter. Yesterday was the first brew, an India Pale Ale. Given time and more familiarity with the process, we’ll get increasingly creative with the recipes. I’m looking forward to home-brewing all different types of beers, but likely will gravitate towards ales, porters and stouts through the winter. I’m hopeful that the first batch will be ready by Thanksgiving so all the guys can take a bottle or two home.

In some ways the process is not all that different from making sparkling wine in the traditional bottle-fermented “Methode Champenoise”, which we’ve used for our ‘Domaine Montreaux’ sparkling wines since 1983. Over the last 25 years of making Napa Valley sparkling wines, we’ve come to appreciate the beauty of the bubble. In both sparkling libations, the secondary fermentation within the bottle generates the effervescence.

We love growing things as well. It’s in our nature to grow our own raw materials, as we’ve grown most all of our own grapes for our wines since day one. So it goes with beer. In the spring of 2009, we’ll plant a small amount of hops so we can learn about these fragrant vines. I’ve ordered 10 organic rhizomes for next season. The rhizome is the root mass from which the plant develops in the spring. For this first season, we’ll plant 5 different varieties of bittering and aromatic hops – Northern Brewer, Cascade, Fuggle, Perle and Willamette. As hops can grow to lengths of 20′ tall, we’ll grow these organically in used wine barrels along the west side of the winery building, with the trellis system supported from the roof of the building. They’ll get plenty of afternoon sun and will provide some shade for that end of the winery in the summer. They’ll also provide us some excellent home-brews next winter !

Posted By : Chris Corley

Tomorrow, we”ll be celebrating our annual Harvest Party. This party is always a great time, and an opportunity for us to gather with many of our friends and enthusiasts. The event also doubles each year as the release and first tasting of our ‘Big Reds’.

This year, we’re releasing our 2005 CORLEY RESERVE Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005 CORLEY State Lane Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, and 2005 MONTICELLO Tietjen Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. I’m very excited about this vintage and particularly these wines. All three of these wines are produced in small quantities and represent the ripe, rich fruit and balanced tannins that we find so attractive about each vineyard site.

These 2005 vintage Cabernets were all bottled in June 2007. With 15 months aging in the bottle prior to release, we are excited to set these wines free! The tannins have evolved beautifully and the fruit is very expressive at this time. I anticipate that these wines will age gracefully for the next 9-10 years, perhaps longer. All three of these Cabernet bottlings will reward proper decanting, even in their youth. Tomorrow, we’ll plan to decant the wines an hour or so prior to serving them to our guests.

It’s always a pleasure to release our wines and pour them for our guests. You can think of the pleasure you might get from organizing and preparing a special meal at your home for friends or family. There is a deep satisfaction in taking the time to select the ingredients, prepare the food and select appropriate wines to make the meal memorable and enjoyable. This is the same feeling we have each year at our harvest party. Although we won’t be preparing the dinner ourselves tomorrow night, we have spent years growing, making and aging the wines we will be serving – and we are extremely proud to be sharing them …

Posted By Chris Corley :

We had a lot of fun with our kids this weekend. We took both Jackson and Ruby to the Ringling Brothers Circus at the Oakland Coliseum on Friday night, and Jackson and I went to the 49ers-Green Bay preseason game on Saturday night at Candlestick (“we” the 49ers won 34-6). As I was driving home on Saturday night and Jackson was snoozing away in the back seat, I got to thinking about how much fun they had at their first circus and Jackson’s first big NFL football game.

That got me to thinking how much fun we’re having with some of our firsts at the winery. Our family has been growing grapes for nearly 40 years, and we’ve been making our own wine for 28 of those years. We’ve had our share of successes and pitfalls along the way, but for 40 years we’ve avoided the worst scourge of all – complacency. We are constantly reaching out for new goals and keeping things fresh. We’re still getting excited about ‘firsts’ …

 This week, we celebrated our first few days of harvest, bringing in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to be used for sparkling wine. We also brought in some Syrah, which we’ll use for a Rose, to be made in a dry, crisp, low alcohol style. We’re looking forward to making a sparkling Rose, which will be a first in a long time.

This year, we celebrated the bottling of three new wines. Earlier this summer we released our 2007 ROSE. Although we’ve bottled Roses in the past, this was the first that we’ve blended multiple varietals to create a non-varietal ‘Rose’. It is dry, crisp in acid, bright in fruit and is great for a warm summers evening. We also bottled a CORLEY PINOT NOIR from the 2006 vintage. This is the first ‘specialty’ Pinot Noir we’ve bottled since the 1999 vintage. The Pinot noir is dense in raspberry, strawberry and cola flavors and has a beautiful integration of seductive new oak. Last, but not least – we bottled our 2006 YEWELL VINEYARD CABERNET SAUVIGNON, the first bottling under the Yewell moniker and the first off that vineyard to be bottled since we replanted the site after the 2000 vintage. This 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from St. Helena is rich in texture and dark fruits and has a long finish that won’t quit. Appropriately, the first magnum of this wine to leave the winery building went to the Yewell Family themselves.

Over the last few years, we’ve released our first ever 100% Cabernet Franc and 100% Syrah bottlings, both of which have been exceptionally well received.

A multi-generational family business like ours is steeped in important and meaningful traditions, but it also requires the freshness of ‘firsts’ to thrive. It requires stability from a solid foundation of traditions and vibrancy from active and creative minds. In a word – balance … but that’s a word for another blog post …

Posted By : Chris Corley

Juliet :

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet

As a refreshing finish to a warm day or midsummers night, I’ve been enjoying our 2007 Rose with some frequency over the last couple of months. Clearly I have a natural bias, but I really like it. It’s got a nice light pink color, vibrant acidity, and a long fruity finish.

In the past, our Rose has always been varietal specific – for instance “Rose of Pinot Noir” and “Rose of Syrah”. In 2007, I did ‘saignee’ on a fair amount of our red fermentations. No, saignee is not a form of voodoo, although I have been known to use a little mojo in certain vintages. Saignee is a french term for bleeding juice from the fermentation almost immediately after crushing the red grapes. The juice that is bled from the tank is generally clear to light pink, as it is removed from the tank before it has a chance to extract much, if any, color from the skins. This pink juice is then treated much like a white wine, fermented at cool temperatures and protected from the air.

In 2007, we had several varietals of rose which we had produced by saignee, which all tasted great individually – Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Syrah. Not really inclined to bottle four separate Roses for the vintage, I started playing around with blends, and ultimately arrived at the current bottling, which includes all four varietals and even a splash of Chardonnay, which added a very nice textural component with its naturally high acidity.

Clearly, we couldn’t call this wine “Rose of …”, so we casually kicked around a few ideas. One name that sticks with me is “Rose de Sangre Fresca” because its fun to say and translates (in a somewhat macabre way) into “Rose of Fresh Blood”, tying into the winemaking technique. Ultimately, we decided to simply identify the wine as “Rose”. It’s elegant if you ponder the word a bit and let it linger …

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Posted by : Chris Corley

I love tasting young Syrah out of the barrel! It’s such an expressive grape in its youth, just exploding with spicy, peppery, deep dark berry fruit and sweet juicy tannins.

We’ve got 2 different clones of Syrah planted – Clones 470 and 174. Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on my preferences between the two, spending equal time favoring each and have come to the conclusion that, at least for us, the Syrah clones are like your kids – you enjoy their individual traits, but don’t really pick a favorite.

The 2007 vintage of Syrah is fantastic, with some barrel lots showing intensely dark, almost electric color and beautifully rich textures framed by moderate tannins which give the wine just the appropriate grip on the finish at this young age. I’m very excited to see how this vintage of Syrah develops over the next 12 months …

This past weekend marked the release of our 2006 Monticello Syrah, which is tasting great as well. With each passing vintage, we grow increasingly excited about this varieatl and its flexibility in the cellar, both as a stand alone wine and also as blending wine …