Tis’ The Season

December 13, 2010

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

Let The Winemaking Begin . . .

December 2, 2010

Now that harvest is essentially over, we get to move on to the fun part . . . the wine making. With all of our fruit off the vine and in the cellar, we can now turn our focus to making the best wine possible out of the 2010 vintage. It has been an exciting year and a challenging year and as usual we have a wide range of wines we are working on, including the old favorites and some new varietals and styles.

One new style we are excited about is our 2010 Late Harvest Muscat Canelli, which was made by drying the berries out in the sun on trays to bring up the sugars. They came in at 30 brix and are now midway through the fermentation process. According to Tom the Late Harvest “tastes very good so far.” It is always exciting to make wines in new styles and experiment with the wine making process because you never know exactly what you are going to get and when it turns out well you have learned something new.

Other standout wines from 2010 include our Petite Sirah, Viognier, Sauvignon Blanc, Whale Rock Chardonnay, Whale Rock Pinot Noir and our Cabernet Sauvignon. Tom is particularly pleased with the Petite Sirah this year, saying “it has great aromatics and really good color.” Our Petite Sirah has become more and more popular in the past couple years and this vintage should definitely keep that trend going. This will also be the first year we have produced Whale Rock Chardonnay and Tom says it will most likely be used for our Reserve Chardonnay, and that means it must be very tasty!! Our Whale Rock Pinot Noir is also a “standout” varietal for the 2010 vintage and should turn out to be a very nice wine. Compared to past years our 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon has a bit lower alcohol percentage but overall the flavors are very pronounced and Tom is sure it will be a great year for Castoro Cab.

As we have said farewell to the fall season and embraced winter we have watched the change of the seasons in our vineyards. In the past week we have had extremely low overnight temperatures, dropping into the 20s and the result has been evident in our vineyards. The leaves have changed from vibrant yellows and reds, to brown and crispy and in some places they have already fallen off the vine.

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and don’t forget to start thinking about what wines will be appropriate for the upcoming holidays!!

Cheers,

Luke