Tis’ The Season
It’s hard to believe that we are approaching 2011!! We are in the heart of the winter Holiday season and for some reason it seems like it always sneaks up on us. At Castoro we are in full Holiday spirit after our company Holiday party this past weekend. The whole crew got together and headed out to the Loading Chute in Creston, for a night of wine, music, food and fun. If you have not been to the Loading Chute, put it on your list of places to check out on the Central Coast. It is a bit out of the way but it is a really neat old place and a very good spot for a party or a good ol’ time. They may even serve Dam Fine Wine!!
As I mentioned in my last blog, we are now out of harvest and into the winemaking process. Tomorrow we will be pressing the last of our tanks, which means we will have all of our juice ready for the journey to the bottle. Right now at the winery there is a lot of tasting, racking and filtering going on and for those of you who don’t know what racking is, I will explain. Racking tanks refers to the process of pumping out the clean juice from a tank while leaving the sediment or lees that gathers on the bottom of the tank, which will later be filtered. Racking is a very important process and filtering the lees allows us to get as much of the juice out of the sediment as possible.
We’ve also been up to a lot of barrel topping and some of our new wines have already been put into barrels. The Petite Sirah, Pinot Noir, and Merlot are all safely stored in barrels as of this week. The Late Harvest Muscat is also still looking very nice and will probably end up being at around 10% alcohol with a nice sweetness. For the grape juice lovers out there, we are proud to announce that our 2010 Grape Juice has been bottled and it happens to be a Bordeaux Blend!! Next week we will be bottling our 2010 Fume Blanc and according to Tom “it is full of flavor and very fresh!”
With the Holidays fast approaching, be sure to keep an eye on our website for specials, including our Holiday Gift Packs and if you are in the area, stop by the tasting room and pay us a visit.
Cheers,
Luke
