At 7am today, Tammie and Andy were rinsing tanks and hoses while many of you were fast asleep. For us in the cellar, we are celebrating a different kind of holiday, filtering. OK, it’s not a holiday at all; it’s back-breaking work running up and down stairs, hauling heavy hoses, and cleaning multiple tanks. All this work insures that your glass of Anne Amie wine will be brilliant, clear,and sound. For us in the cellar, these two very long work days mark another milestone for the 2009 vintage. All that stands between the cellar crew (after tomorrow evening) and the 2009 white wines being finished, are four painful days of bottling.
We are almost there!
We were blessed with a warm, dry harvest. Our 2009 white wines sti
ll have the signature brightness of acidity, and low alcohol that one expects from Anne Amie wines, but they may be a tad richer on the juicy, ripe fruit scale. That’s Mother Nature putting in her two cents. The past five months have been spent capturing the essence of the 2009 vintage in each wine, while crafting what we believe to be our unique expression of what each wine wants to be. Countless weeks of tasting and blending and refining our choices are now now passing the final hurdle before bottling. In three short weeks, the 2009 vintage will be yours. The last year of our lives here at the winery- first in the vineyard, and now in the winery, will soon be distilled into shiny, new bottles and shipped off around the globe. All the long days and nights of vintage, the many early mornings since then tasting and blending, a few long, repetitive days on the bottling line, and then…
Quiet.
Our focus will shift as we nurse our 
Pinot noir through malolactic fermentation. By nurse, I mean wait and monitor and taste. If we continue to have a warm winter and spring, the malolactic fermentation will continue on ahead of schedule. If it is a cold spring, we wait longer. Since we rely on indigenous flora for malolactic fermentation, we are on its schedule. Therefore , there is never a time around our winery that absolutely nothing is happening. Remember that as you sit and drink coffee and peruse the ads in the newspaper for sales this President’s Day. I propose you twist off a screw cap, pour a refreshing white wine, and toast your cellar crew on this alternative holiday, Filtering Day.
Happy Filtering Day 2010 from the Anne Amie crew
Very cool post! Thank you!
Posted by: Tia G. | November 25, 2011 at 09:18 AM