A Cellar Story

This week in the Cellar, we’re all thrilled to be able to take a deep breath this Friday!  It has been a busy (but successful!) week and, believe it or not, this plywood box is the end result.

 

What are we so excited about?  Sekt!  Or, to be more precise, the bottling of our 2019 Sekt.  Sekt is a term in the Germanic wine world for sparkling wine, and in our case it describes the traditional method sparkling Riesling that we make each year from Tango Oaks Vineyard.  And what does traditional method mean?  It means that the second fermentation, the one that will give the wine its sparkle, is very carefully done in the bottles themselves.

 

Some of our more ardent fans may be wondering, if we make this every year, why haven’t they seen any yet?  This wooden crate holds the answer – we’re still aging every version we’ve made since 2015 on the yeast lees inside the bottles.  This process, while time consuming, will deepen and broaden the wine considerably before we clean it up for release.  Due to the pressure in the bottles – six times pressure at sea level! – we store them in a container where any weak bottles that shatter won’t cause any harm.