Starting Monday, March 12th through Thursday, March 15th 25 Lusk in San Francisco will be featuring Breggo wines on their weekly tasting menu. http://www.25lusk.com/menus.html. Reservations can be made by calling 415-495-lusk (5875). This a great opportunity to taste a line-up of our wines, paired with an amazing menu!

Nantucket is renowned for its natural beauty, stunning architecture, cosmopolitan fare, and, of course, its 19th century role as a whaling community. From May 16-20, 2012, the world’s historic whaling capital will become the nation’s wine capital during the 16th annual Nantucket Wine Festival. Enjoy five days full of wine and food in Nantucket. Breggo will be there participating in many of the events.

Come experience Pinot Noir produced by some of California’s finest vintners, from grapes grown here in the beautiful and rugged Anderson Valley. To our knowledge, this is the only festival in the world that celebrates a single varietal from a single appellation. This festival is a three day event including a Technical Conference &  social BBQ in the vineyards on Friday, Grand Tasting on Saturday with 40+ wineries participating, many elegant winemaker dinners on Saturday evening, and open houses at all area wineries on Sunday.

Freshly fermented Pinot Noir can be frustrating to taste and evaluate in November and December. The Malolactic fermentation is underway and the wines are constantly changing – one day a barrel can taste amazing and the next day less so. It is only after the wines have been sulfured and left to rest for a month or two that they start to show their true character. I’m happy to report that after tasting through all of our 2012 barrels, the wines are starting to consistently shine.

January 10, 2012

We started pruning the Chardonnay vines at Savoy last week. We tend to start with the Chardonnay first and then move on to the Pinot Noir. Pruning is the process of removing last year’s growth and leaving the right number of buds which will grow into this year’s shoots. There is an art to pruning to maintain a healthy balanced vine. On vines that were weak last year we leave fewer buds so that the vine will hopefully produce more robust shoots this season. If, on the other hand, the vines were too vigorous last year and produced growth that required lots of hedging, we will leave more buds so as give the vine an outlet for it’s energy.

You don’t really need a weather station to tell you its cold when there is a heavy frost outside, but it is still interesting to look at the temperature data at Savoy vineyard for the first two weeks of December. We had a ten day run of clear nights and hard frosts in the morning while the afternoon temperatures warmed to around 60°F. This week, the fog has rolled into the valley most nights keeping the temperatures well above freezing.

Our Donnelly Creek and Filigreen Pinot Gris are now done fermenting and the blending trials to put together our 2011 Anderson Valley Pinot Gris are underway. There are a number of components to play with including, lots fermented in stainless steel tanks, neutral French oak barrels, our 900 gallon oak cask, and our Nomblot concrete egg. Most of the lots in tank and cask fermented completely dry while the barrel ferments still have a small amount of residual sugar that helps add weight and texture to the wine. We will put together dozens of blends over the next two months with a final blend going to tank in March.

The odd looking machine in the background of the photo is an old centrifuge we use to spin down samples of wine. Having only just finished fermenting, the wines still have lots of yeast suspended in solution, resembling something like a Hefeweizen. Centrifuging settles out all of the cells and gives us an idea of what the wine will taste like once all of the yeast settles out.

As soon as harvest is complete each autumn, vineyards are typically sprinkled with a cover crop that grows throughout the winter.  These seeds help build soil structure, prevent erosion, and return nutrients to the vineyard. This year we are experimenting with an insectiary mix of seeds that includes native flowers, which attract beneficial insects that prey on many of the pests that give us headaches in the vineyard including leaf hoppers, thrips, and mites. Bringing in these beneficial insects to control pests is an important part of sustainable farming, allowing us to avoid using insecticides at Savoy.

Fermenting Pinot Noir must from Donnelly Creek is pumped through an irrigator which gently splashes the must over the cap of grapes that forms during the fermentation. Pumpovers improve extraction and help keep the cap from over heating.