I volunteer! oh, wait...

I'm doing my part (not an Aggie, though)

I've been doing this for years and FINALLY I know why! Thanks, BSD!

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Allocations still to go:

Rivers-Marie Cab (maybe)

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I had a glass of 2012 RM Calistoga the other night...whoa! awesome wine. And from what they tell me, the 2012 Panek is even better.

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Well that settles it, I'm opening a bottle this weekend

I'm in!!

I'm just finding this thread and will need to get caught up, but what did you use to compile that cellar list that you have in the OP?

A database I wrote. Several on this thread use cellartracker

Cellartracker does everything I need it to do, except one thing. I'd like to be able to pull a wine out, and "park" it somewhere, and then open it, taste it, and score it. Half the time I pull something from my chillers, I forget to take it off the list. If this function is available somewhere on th cellartracker app, please tell me.

Don't get me wrong, this was good, but a but pricey, especially after the awesome Rivers Marie we had the other night.

2007 Stags Leap Wine Cellars SLV last night. Excellent. Just hitting its peak, probably could have gone a couple more years.

Opened a 2013 Booker Oublie. Still a baby to drink, but if you want to open one, I can't think of anything better to pair it with than fatty meat. Lots of tannins, and tannins love fat. There's enough fruit here to still be pleasurable.

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HTownAg98

Stolpman
Saxum
Ridge
[url=http://texags.com/forums/67/topics/1933033/106][/url][url=http://texags.com/forums/67/topics/1933033/106][/url]

TP Ag '87
In reply to HTownAg98

Love Stolpman. Met the son in Houston and joined their club last year. Good stuff.

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Just returned from a weekend trip to Santa Barbara county. Not sure Stolpman has a tasting room in Paso but they have one in the Lompoc wine Ghetto and I know they have one in Los Olivos because I was there Friday and really enjoyed it (so much that I joined their club.) The guy behind the table was extremely cool. Told him how I worked a crush/harvest for Pisoni in '06 but had been out of the industry since and he still gave me an industry discount.

Friday we focused on Rhone varietals in the Santa Ynez/Ballard Canyon area. Started at Andrew Murray with a private tour (where I also wound up joining a club oop$) then Stolpman, then lunch and then finished at Beckmen. All were great but Stolpman was our favorite stop of the day both wine and hospitality wise. Fun fact about Beckmen, former Houston Texans backup Bradlee Van Pelt works the tasting room. Was difficult to keep my sisters from ogling over him too obviously.

Saturday we got a little more Pinot focused. We started with a private tour at Melville. This was my surprise of the trip. I enjoy pretty much every style of wine but Pinot is my first love and I did not really have any experience or know anything about Melville's wines. Not only do they make outstanding Santa Rita Hills Pinot (and chard and Syrah) but compared to most top notch Pinots I found them to be a great value. Very excited to be a part of their club going forward.

After Melville we headed to the Lompoc wine ghetto where you could hit up over a dozen quality wineries in a few hours. Sticking with the Pinot theme we hit up Fiddlehead and then Arcadian where we had another great time. I was already at my wife-set limit of clubs I could join for the weekend but we chatted with them about my history at Pisoni (who they've pulled grapes from for years) as well as my Dad being a long-time member who had to cut way back on his wine expenses a few years ago and they treated us like family. My Dad and I split a case of Syrah that we both found to be a steal and they covered the shipping and gave us the member price.

If you're into Pinots as well as Syrahs and Grenaches with some decent Chard and Viognier thrown in I can't recommend this area highly enough. Napa is great and all but the traffic jams and the shoulder to shoulder tasting rooms kind of stress me out. Even with the boom the area got from Sideways the highways were almost all clear and we were only sharing tasting rooms with two or three other groups. Rented an airBnB in Lompoc for super cheap and cooked most of our meals. Besides my wine club expenditures one of the cheapest and most relaxing trips I've had.

Great write up and makes me feel better about my affinity for Stolpman. Maybe I'd consider a trip here vs Sonoma for next venture,..

Great writeup,

Santa Barbara area is my next Cali wine trip. I want to visit some pinot places, especially Domaine le cote since I order from them. I have enjoyed the few Stolpman syrah's I have tried. I have also heard good things about Melville, glad that was a good visit. as you said. some really good Grenache and other southern rhone varietels being grown in that area.

AmazonPrime day or whatever the sale is called has a Coravin. Wife and I have been talking about getting one so will probably pull the trigger on this. $225

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GOH28S0/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_S.vHxbK1QQMCB

Seeing MooreTrucker discover this thread lead me to go back to the beginning and read a few pages. Almost FIVE years! Wow. And speaking personally meeting some of you (coughAlex/Troy/Brad...cough) has been a pleasure and a blessing. And I've certainly become more immersed in wine and it's actually becoming a second career (or at least avocation) for me. Seeing Inwood Estates and Dan Gatlin mentioned early on is particularly ironic since I pretty much run the Reserve Tasting Room on weekends now.

I do want to address a couple of comments about grape growing, terroir and the Hill Country. Dan has been growing grapes in Texas for 36 years and has become an acknowledged expert in the field. He originated Tempranillo growing in Texas, cajolling Neil Newsome to plant Tempranillo by providing the vines and guaranteeing purchasing the crop. Now there are 2,000,000+ Tempranillo vines in West Texas.

Dan has developed a system of vineyard architecture which has allowed him to grow grapes rich in phenolic development not only in the Hill Country but even Dallas County and the city of Dallas. The notion that you can't grow vinefera grapes in the Hill Country is absolutely untrue. I have barrel tasted Cabernet Sauv and Petite Sirah grown just north of Fredericksburg and they are outstanding.

Essentially, clonal selection, vineyard orientation, spacing, trellis design, canopy management, precise irrigation, nutritional upgrades and most of all yield management are a complete methodology for producing high quality grapes that work almost anywhere. For example, transducers are now available to apply to the vine trunk and precisely measure the water the vine is absorbing and adjusting irrigation appropriately. Vine spacing and cordon design (short cordons for fewer clusters) allow yield management to be precise.

Yield management (specifically lower yields) allows the vine to provide nutrients to fewer grapes and therefore accelerate their phenolic development so that the grapes are physiologically ripe when they are sugar ripe. Dan aims for 1.5 tons per acre. As a reference point Napa is 3-4 tons per acre. The $25 bottle of Central Coast wine you buy on Wednesday night is about 6 tons per acre. And that box of Francia my daughter snuck into the dorm is 12-15 tons per acre.

So yes, you can grow great wine grapes almost anywhere, but no, you can't do so for the same price.

I hope to occasionally post more about this stuff, if anyone is interested. Also, if you do a bit of research Dan isn't doing this alone, much of it is mentioned in the grape growing literature as new methods are developed.

As always, if you can get by Inwood Estates (I'm there every Saturday and most Sundays) your tasting is on me!

P.S. I'm on my second glass of Myriad Semillon (Chinese leftovers for supper) so apologies for any typos!.

Yield management is the next step. It seems we have now figured out what grows best where. Now the industry has to figure out what is the best yield given a multitude of factors.
I'm on my second glass of Chinon, so I may not make much sense either.

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I'm on my second glass of Chinon, so I may not make much sense either.

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I bought some Cab Franc from Paumanok on Long Island when we were there last month and it was very, very good.

Some warm years recently have produced some cab francs from Chinon that don't taste like you've run a bunch of bell peppers through a juicer.
I'm also starting to get into Burgundy. Pray for my wallet.

In moderation I like the bell pepper /vegetal Chinons, just as long as, the minerality is there. I need to learn much more about Burgundy! Share as you go...

On to a 2011 Cab from Wofford on Long Island...

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I'm also starting to get into Burgundy. Pray for my wallet.

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I've bought a few recently, as well. I'll let you know how they are in about 20 years.

Thanks to you, Cecil, for starting this thread. It has given me a further education in this world and I too value the folks I've met personally (your wife! ha./BSD/Stan) and via the interweb.

So, after 5 years, you taking a liking to any whites yet? Kinda surprised by your Long Island love but, then again, I grew to appreciate Finger Lake whites very much, especially after visiting.

EDIT: and as I type this, it's only 0952 and I'm at the office, so my first glass isn't 'til at LEAST lunch!

Anyone been to one of these "Winemaker's Dinners"? Worth it?

Based on this thread, we've been on some of the Mike Smith mailing lists for a couple of years. He's evidently hosting a dinner here in Denver next month.

Just curious if it is something worth doing or is it just a marketing deal?

Interested as well... I just saw his email and got with my wife about it....

I live in Houston but travel all the time for work. One of my territories is Denver and the wife and I were talking about her joining me for my trip there in August anyway to spend a weekend in the mountains. So this dinner could be perfect for us.....

ETA, we met with him in Napa and thoroughly enjoyed it. He's a great and genuine guy who you can tell thoroughly enjoys what he does and sharing it with others. That's the main reason we're considering.

I've been to a few Myriad dinners in the past. The dinners are a great time. I wouldn't hesitate to go. If there is a marketing component to it, it is small and towards the end where they pass out an order form. Mike doesn't really have a problem selling his wine so who knows if he'll even do that. So...go...have fun and report back!

thanks for the quick responses. Looks like we are going to sign up if we can make it work with my wife's schedule.

htxag09 - if you end up going let me know. Send me a pm and maybe we can meet up.

Will do! Just double checked the schedule and we may be busy both those weekends. So we'll see

hey cecil, I actually tasted some Texas wine last night. Guy from Lubbock that has been working for Kim McPherson makes a bit of wine on his own now. Tried his rose, which I thought was pretty good but not for the $20/bottle price tag. For a similar price he had a southern rhone blend that I thought was really nice. Had an absolute killer nose. the flavor in the mouth didn't quite match the nose, but still highly enjoyable.

The winemaker is Bo Salling and the red wine is called Windblown. He uses all high plains fruit and he and I talked a lot about the progress the growers are making into really growing good grapes. He thinks the next few years the quality in that area will really increase as the farmers learn.

Yeah, apparently as cotton farmers out there are learning they can grow grapes for much less water, they're also having to learn that (unlike growing cotton) the goal isn't to grow all the grapes they can!

Make those contracts have a top end on yield, and those farmers will be cluster thinning tomorrow.

Yup. But depending upon your definition of it, cluster thinning may be too late. Needs to be buds, blossoms or immediately after fruit set.

It can be done later. Lots of expensive cab gets thinned right before veraison.

I will say that Texas wines have made tremendous strides in 10 years.