Wine of the Month: Padrino!  Offering a savory nose with herbal aromas and black cherry notes, Padrino has chewy firm tannins and smoky flavors or red currant, cedar, and cigar leaf.  Who knows if this Padrino will be on the menu ever again, so come try it while you can!  

We finished our last bottling of 2014 in mid December.  There is a lot of prep work leading up to bottling, including filtering the wine through a plate and frame filter.  We use pads of varying gauges to filter the largest particles down to a sterile pad which takes out the finer ones. We had to filter the wines for this bottling through five different size pads and it took over 30 hours. The process took much longer and was more challenging than I expected; I even broke my glasses in half. (I'm a nerd - bring on the tape!)

After filtration we add the final touches to the wine before bottling. We bottled 400 cases of Raspberry Merlot, 440 cases of Paco Rojo, and 65 cases of a new wine, Luna Nera.  There are only a few rackings that still need to be completed and then the last of the work on the Harvest 2014 fruit will be complete. Rackings are what we do to remove the lees from the red barrels after Malolactic Fermentation is complete.

Padrino is created using these red wine rackings. When filling barrels, it's necessary to fill as much of the barrel as possible, leaving as little air as possible in the barrel. This sometimes leaves you with a partial barrel that needs to be topped off through the rackings of other grape varietals. In the end you may have 2-3 barrels that have 3-4 different types of wine in them - and there you have Padrino!