October 2009
Bialla Vineyards became the newest member of the Napa Valley Vintners Assoc. this month. Be sure to go to www.NapaVintners.com it is an amazing website with incredible resources information and scoop on the world famous Napa Valley Wine Auction. We are very proud to become a member of this fine organization.
A few days ago Linda and I went to NY to meet Howard Kaplan who runs Executive Wine seminars and had an amazing experience. We met the guest speaker Robert Parker and tasted 15 of the worlds best Bordeaux's with scores ranging up to 100.
The vintage we tasted was 2005. If you have never been to one of Howard's events we recommend it highly his website is www.ewswine.com .
Speaking of Robert Parker we were just notified that he requested to taste our 2007 Cabernet when he comes to Napa at the end of October. This is big news for us because he is so influential and so many consumers pay attention to ratings that it can have a major impact on a small winery like ours. I once tried to buy wine according to his publication which lists his scores, where to buy and so on but after calling over a dozen retailers requesting some high scoring wines was basically told, "We sold out in the first hour this morning, that wine received a Parker 95".
Consumers and resellers jump on this news because it makes you an instant profit, much like Goldman Sachs issuing a strong buy on a security catching everyone off guard the stock jumps in value instantly.
Those of you who are members of our wine club and orders already in place are of course price protected. We'll see if and what he rates our wine but will obviously spread the news when we receive it.
We bottled our '07 on Sept 22nd and started our harvest on Oct 2nd. I have to say I've never seen anything run so smoothly. Generators and lights come on at midnight, picking a couple tons takes less than 45 minutes and a dozen or so workers start hand de-stemming and sorting perfect berries at 1:30 am until the process is complete some time in the afternoon.
The wines are now in various bins separated by our seven different blocks of vines. Fermentation has just started. Our brix ranges from 27.1 to 29.4 which is perfection for making a bold cabernet. You can bring the alcohol level down but you can't really bring it up so we have some room to play with perfection.
The '09 harvest promises to be a sensational year with so much fruit dropped and such perfect weather right up to the harvest we will exceed our goal of 500 cases. So while we are very excited about all the Parker interest in our wine we are even more excited about the prospect of our '09 based on all the fruit maturing and hand de-stemming and all the effort that went in to making this a really great wine.
So very soon the wine will go in to the barrels and find a place to rest for a while. The wine industry prepares to take a deep breath and starts to unwind, but not before a little month of celebration. October is always the party month filled with release and harvest parties all over Napa. Opera season is here, Halloween around the corner, Thanksgiving plans already set and holiday shopping is already on peoples minds. Our fabulous Mexican workers start to head south for the winter and in February the process starts all over again.
For those of you who are members of our wine club we are looking at releasing end of October or very early November but well ahead of your Thanksgiving celebration. We want to watch the weather closely and ship at the right time.
Thank you for sharing our passion
Vito & Linda Bialla