Barrel Tours

So at Cypher Winery, we have a back - and very dark, spooky room - where we do barrel tours. Our last barrel tour showed off how different oaks affect the wines. For example, French oak adds the gorgeously smooth, vanilla quality - quite refined. Hungarian oak adds a spice or "kick" to the wine (think of a sexy salsa dancer.) Then American oak adds almost a harsh, vanilla flavor that  has quite the bite - but in the blend it helps add another layer of complexity. In this tour we had the most amazing wine - sexy mourvedre as a single varietal (fermented by carbonic maceration, but thats another blog post...) Anyway, I mourn the loss of the mourvedre, but sigh, nothing last forever.

Katie & Kevin from production at Cypher introduced us to the new barrel tour the other day - which is a sampling of 2009 wines that need a bit more time in the barrel. Though the wines are young and need more time, it's still awesome to be able to sample them and start to get an idea of how our winemaker starts to put the blends together. Let's start with a few basics on the barrel:

The top name is the name of the cooper, or the person/brand/firm that makes the barrel. The next line says E.E. which means it is Eastern European - specifically from Romania. The next line talks about the toast level which meaning the firing process for the barrel. They literally "fire toast" the barrel which helps add flavor to the wine - usually a nice carmel quality. So this barrel is MT - medium toast. But then the next letters read LTH which means "light toast head." This means that the sides (or rather round "top and bottom") of the barrel have a light toasting to it. Now usually, most barrels have either a toast head, or a no toast head quality. But Christian, our winemaker, is such a finicky dude, he had his coopers make a "light toast head" for his wines. This is one of those things that is unique to our winery, and shows the commitment to perfection.

So we got to taste through the wines the other day - learning about it all. The main part of it is that we have two barrel samples each of the malbec and petit verdot (which makes up our "Monarchy" wine) along with barrels samples of tempranillo & petit sirah. More on that but in the meantime, here's a picture of my adorable tasting room manager, Nicole, with a barrel sample at about 9:30 in the morning. We love you, Nicole!!!