by Alan on August 23, 2011
I had to share a few pictures that I grabbed while looking at the grapes at Floodgate the other day. The Pinot is through veraison (when the berries turn from green to purple) and The Gewurztraminer is almost there. In the Gewurz pictures you can see a few berries that are starting to take on a golden hue. These berries are already tasting quite sweet so I’m wondering if the Gewurz will be the first fruit in this year???? The crew has been through the vineyard and dropped any green clusters that were not going to catch up with the rest of the crop so things are quite uniform throughout the vineyard. You can see what they dropped in one photo and there were some sections of the vineyard that actually set enough fruit that we thinned it out a bit to separate clusters and balance the fruit load.
Cheers, Alan
Photo credit: Christian Kallen
Thanks to the 100 or so friends who showed up to celebrate the upcoming opening of Garagiste Healdsburg. Garagiste Healdsburg is a cooperative micro winery and tasting room we built with Stark wine. The space is looking great and we now know we can handle a crowd with a little help from our friends. How many of your facebook or twitter friends can you see in this 30 sec video clip?
Click here to see the whole evening fly by in 30 seconds – Video
After our Grand Opening Celebration we’ll be open Thurs – Monday 11-6pm and Tues/Wed by appointment
Hope we see you soon.
Alan
by Serena on July 18, 2011
We had the pleasure of pouring for two days in San Francisco last week. Sonoma in the City is a great event where you get to taste a bunch of wines all from Sonoma County. Why is that so cool? – because you get to see how various producers in one AVA or across the various regions in the county approach their wine making. For example, you could taste our Pinot Noir from Floodgate Vineyard in the Russian River Valley and then walk around the table to compare it to Gary Farrell’s Alysian Pinot Noir also from Floodgate Vineyard.
What I truly loved about these two tastings were the great comments we received. People who did not want to sample our Gewürztraminer “because it’s sweet” tasted our 2010 Floodgate Vineyard Gewürztraminer and loved that it has the classic floral, honeysuckle nose but is lean and dry on the palate (not sweet at all). The 2009 Floodgate Vineyard Pinot Noir got rave reviews for having the fruit flavors in balance with the subtle earth and loamy characters that make Pinot such a wonderful wine. The two comments I heard repeated several times were “it has so many layers,” as well as, “really, 2009? I thought it was an 07.” I think the four clones (667, 777, 828, Pommard) used give this wine a great deal of complexity that should deepen as it ages. We’re very eager to watch this wine evolve.
For more info on Sonoma County Vintners and other upcoming events, go to: http://www.sonomawine.com/. We will be pouring at the Sonoma Wine Country Weekend in August. Tickets are on sale now for the Taste of Sonoma at MacMurray Ranch and other events over the Labor Day weekend. For Taste of Sonoma Tickets, click here.
Hope we see you in Healdsburg at the tasting room or at MacMurray Ranch.
- Serena
by Serena on June 21, 2011
We spent Saturday 6/18/11 in San Francisco at Fort Mason pouring our 2009 Floodgate and Perli Pinot noir at the San Francisco Pinot Days grand tasting. We have not yet released the 2009 vintage so it was fun for us to hear people’s thoughts on the wines, which we love and can’t be more thrilled that 2009 was the year we made the leap into Northern California making our home and wines from the vineyards around us.
Brandye Alexander took this fun photo of our Pinot noir as we were setting up
We poured the 2009 Floodgate Vineyard Pinot noir from the Russian River Valley, and the 2009 Perli Vineyard Pinot noir from Mendicino Ridge. Considering we pick these grapes at nearly the same time. their flavor profiles are wildly different owing to the classic foggy RRV days juxtaposed to the rugged mountain terrain and proximity of the Pacific ocean in the Perli Vineyard.
We had great conversations about temperature inversion, slope, flooding, and other nerdy ag related stuff with the smart folks wandering around tasting Pinot. That passion for grape growing from the attendees is something we love about this crowd. Because the focus is on Pinot, we get to have really detailed and geeky conversations about the winemaking and growing conditions. If we were pouring other varietals as well, we would not have had the time to go into such depth with folks.
Grape nerds unite!
It was also so exciting to be able to officially invite everybody to come visit our tasting room that will be open in July downtown Healdsburg.
Brandye and Alan are ready to pour some Pinot
So to all of our friends, old and new, and wine making friends who share our devotion to this amazing grape, cheers for making this a great event.
Serena & Alan getting ready to pour (photo by Brandye Alexander)
See you in the tasting room!
Serena
by Serena on June 6, 2011
While the silence on our blog was deafening, we were heads down building our new tasting room! We found a space in Healdsburg about 2 blocks from the central square. Because our focus is on small, handcrafted lots, we got together with another winemaker (Christian Stark of Stark Wine) who is also a boutique wine producer and decided to launch a tasting room and microwinery.
What does that mean? It means we have an awesome tasting room space where you can come taste all of our wines as well as hang out on the patio and enjoy the warm afternoons and evenings this summer with a glass of wine. The tasting room will always be staffed by either one of the winemakers or owners of Cartograph or Stark wine. Between Cartograph and Stark we will be able to offer a tasting that includes Gewürztraminer, Viognier, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Syrah.
In addition, our space is a bonded winery which means we will be producing wine in that same space. So, you’ll be able to dip into barrels with us and get a real hands on winemaking experience.
We are really excited to see this project coming to fruition. We’ve spent numerous days and night building the space with the help of several friends. We should be finished building the tasting bar in the next ten days. The final furniture delivery happens tomorrow. Right now we’re focused on building a really cool chandelier (made from de-stemmer gears!), finishing the lighting, making tables, and finalizing the numerous licenses and permits in order to open this summer!
We’ll keep you posted on our official opening and get some photos up soon.
Spring is an amazing time to be in the vineyards of the Russian River Valley, especially Floodgate where we get the majority of our Pinot noir for Cartograph wines. As the days get warmer and longer you see and hear all sorts of birds migrating north. Even though you can’t see any visible growth on the vines, you know change is in the air, and soon we’ll see the first shoots emerge. Vigilance is required to protect the vines from frost and mildew as conditions are volatile but there is nothing like watching those first buds swell and release the leaves and potential clusters that have been waiting all winter to burst forth.
I’ll let the images speak for themselves but this was a particularly interesting year. The vineyard went from flooded, with the vines completely under water, to budbreak in a single week. The span between flood pictures and full-on shoots with leaves is seven days!
Alan
