Like all so called arts, the art of blending a wine requires a lot of practice and hard work behind the scenes in order to make the effort look easy and seamless. I will use the 2007 Tolosa Pinot Noir as the example. The practice part started 29 years ago when I began tasting professionally. In order to make these sensual decisions you must focus your senses and quiet your mind so that you can make an accurate intuitive decision. I’ve been asked many times how or why I make a certain choice with a wine, and the honest answer is, “I don’t know why, but I am confidant that the choice is correct.”
The work part is the ongoing actual tasting which begins with tasting the grapes daily in the vineyard a few weeks before harvest. Continues during the fermentation when every fermenter is tasted every day. The wines are then tasted from barrel regularly during aging. Finally, in the late winter or early spring I taste through every single barrel and score them on a simple four level system marking each barrel with a piece of sidewalk chalk. A minus mark means the barrel does not go into the bottle. This is rare. A zero mark means it may go into our least expensive bottling, the SLO or the Estate. A plus sign means Estate level for sure. And very rarely a double plus which means 1772 quality. I then tally up the scores by lot code and age of barrel and sit down and think about what we can make. The next step is to make some confirming lab bench blends to confirm the intuitive decision. Then it’s time to pump the barrels into tank to form the blend, and finally back to barrel for a few more months aging in just the right mix of oak barrels.
-Larry Brooks, Winemaker
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