Winemaking Journal: January 29, 2021 - It Starts With The Idea

ENTRY # 1
January 29, 2021

Well, it came to me - out of the blue, from someplace else, like a black crow winging by just above one’s head while on a blanket in a field reading a book - the idea that is. Say it was born about 1:20 pm, give or take a moment. Yes, this past Friday, the twenty-ninth of January in the Year of Our Lord of the Vine 2021: a year of the ongoing viral miasma.

Draw faith! Projects may be well born in time of strife and chaos, known and not known (or even believed).

See, our team at the “wine” shop includes winemakers and those of us with varying hands-on experience in many parts of the process. Though for me, I drink wine and have visited countless wineries and vineyards, I’ve not had even one pinch of involvement in any facet of “making a wine.”

So, birthing an idea is easy, having the idea come to life - the true birth - is something of a different matter.

The idea is this: “hey team, let’s make a sparkling wine!”

After the “are you serious” puzzlement: a unanimous hell yes!

So, follow along if you will, it’s gonna be a while…

When it comes to winemaking, each of the E&R team is at different levels of experience - and I for one have none. So I’m looking at this work from the very beginning. For everyone, it’s commonplace just go into a shop and buy a bottle and you’re done with it! For those buying wines on a regular basis, they tend to look at vintages as a continuum - and therefore there’s always stock and a replenishment, there’s always the next vintage. But, if in fact you are making a wine, as simple as it sounds; from start to finish takes an incredibly long amount of time.

For our team and me, it begins where we are at right now: January 29, 2021 (as of this writing). Looking down the road, depending on the precise type of sparkling wine we settle on, before we can open a bottle, it can be anywhere from 16 months (May 2022) to even three years (2024!) before what we began today can even be ready by regular standards to consume. That’s a hell of a long time to go from start to finish.
(E)

Entry # 2
February 5, 2021

The preliminary blending begins.