The Press October 31

Our good friends/partners pressed our latest wine endeavor. Sorry we missed it.

2 Birds 1 Stone

Well we "Racked" our Chilean Wine last Saturday and "Crushed" our California Grapes for this coming season on the same day. We drank a little wine and ate a little cheese, it was fun to get together with our friends/partners. Should be Pressing in a week or 2.

1982 Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande

1982 Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande

Celebrating last long run before the marathon.

Our 3rd Wine

Just placed the order for wine grapes for this coming season. This will be our 3^rd barrel of wine we'll be making and each time we seem to learn a little more.  I've ordered Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc grapes which should make for a nice blend. This season the grapes are from California. We'll make Approximately 62 gallons/288 bottles and we'll age it in 1-year-old French Oak. Grapes should arrive in a couple of weeks at that time we will do Step 1, "The Crush”. 

New Label Completed

This will be our new label for our Chilean Grape Wine. We've made this wine with 3 other couples so we thought "CUATRO FAMILIAS"
would be a great name for our wine.

The Gathering of Winemakers

Last evening at the Wine Press in North Haven we had the first gathering of the groups who had participated in the making wine starting back in September 2008. There seemed to be about 20 to 30 winemakers who brought their wines to share and trade with each other.  The room was set up kind of like a trade show where everyone had a table to displace their wines and snacks.

I thought it was really remarkable that these wines came out as well as they did given that many of us were first time wine makers. Although we used the Wine Press’s equipment these are still considered home made wines.

We received some very nice comments about our 2008 Brookwood Vineyard Cabernet. Many folks thought it was the wine of the evening, which was really nice to hear. Personally I enjoy the “Super Tuscan” made by the group to our right. We swapped about a half dozen bottle with these guys who seemed to enjoy our wine also.

There were many red varietal made this season, we tasted Zinfandel, Merlot, 100% Cabernet, Cabernet Blends, Petit Syrah, Super Tuscan, and even a Meritage. There was no shortage of food either, it seemed like everybody brought enough for a small army.

At the end of the evening we went home with two cases of all different kinds of wines made by home winemakers just like us. This will be a nice addition to our cellar.

Started Labeling

Brookwood Vineyards 8/25/09

Wow it’s been 10 months since we started our winemaking process. Our first barrel has been bottled and stored in our cellar. We are hoping to age it in the bottle for about 1 year. We will taste a bottle every month to determine its readiness to release to all our friends who have been waiting patiently for a sample bottle or two.
We’ve had some loyal visitors to our “Brookwood Vineyard Blog’ this last year following our progress. These people will be first to get our 2008 Cabernet. If you’ve been stopping by and checking out our blog leave me a message that you’d like a bottle of our wine.
While our second endeavor of winemaking using Chilean grapes is aging in American Oak barrels, we are already doing research to find the perfect grapes for round three. We are looking at an area called Suisun Valley, which is just east of Napa Valley over a range of hills. Suisun Valley is only eight miles long, but its geography is very diverse. The south is very cool, with temperatures increasing to the north. The resulting network of microclimates allows many different varieties of grapes to grow in precisely the conditions they prefer. I am hoping to buy Cabernet grapes for the section called Koch Ranch the soil type is volcanic which should make for a very interesting wine.
You know what they say, “You can’t make good wine without good grapes”

Let's Try Bottle #1 of 288

We just couldn't wait to put on the new labels!

Welcome "Brookwood Vineyards" 2008 Cabernet

Friday was our day to bottle our ‘2008 Cabernet Sauvignon.”  This was the last process in our first wine making season and may have been the most labor intense of all the steps.

1.     We taste the wine to make sure we feel it’s ready for bottling. Even if I say so myself our wine came out great! I am really surprised, without any previous experience we made a very nice wine. I think more time aging in the bottle will bring it to another level.

2.     The wine is now pumped from it’s home for the last 9 months in our “French Oak Barrel” through a high tech filter system which should remove any unwanted sediment.

3.     The Stainless container is now lifted to the shelf above the bottling area so that the wine can be gravity feed to the bottles. By gravity feeding the wine to the bottler less unwanted air would be transferred to the bottle.

4.     Now all bottles are cleaned with a sulfite solution and placed on a drying rack. From the drying rack the bottles are loaded onto a 6-head bottling device, which fills each bottle to the perfect level. They are then brought to an automatic corking machine were the bottles are corked. Now the foils are placed on top and the bottle is placed in a heated coil to tighten the foil. From there we put the bottles back in the cardboard cases and readied to be brought home.

5.     24 cases of wine time 12 bottles per case equals a lot of wine to load and carry to the truck. My bad back and me watched as Karen and our friends loaded our wine. Now all we had to do drive home carefully and unload.

6.     When we arrive home we decided to remove each bottle, wipe them down and store them in our cellar.   The only thing left to do is to label our wine which we will do a few each night as we sit in the cellar and sample. I hope we can get the labels on straight after a couple of glasses.            

Ready to Bottle

Our 2008 Brookwood Vineyards "Cabernet Sauvignon" is ready for bottling. 

After 9 months in French Oak we will be bottling our barrel this week.

Photos and more info to come...

Brewer-Clifton Pinot Noir

A friend of mines son is the the Brewer in the Brewer-Clifton Pinot Noir. He gave us this bottle as a gift and we opened it this week with dinner. This was the one of the best Pinot Noir I have ever tasted. I think you can only buy it direct, I've never seen it locally.



The dark ruby-colored 2006 Pinot Noir Cargasacchi Vineyard displays notes of beef blood, underbrush, Asian spices, and plenty of sweet raspberry and cherry notes. It is broad, very flavorful, but again, the tannins are somewhat elevated and the wine firmly structured and in need of some bottle age. This, too, would benefit from 1-2 years of bottle age, and should be counted on for relatively long-term aging for domestic Pinot Noir – 10-15 years.

I guess we'll call it "Meritage"

A Red Meritage is a blend of two or more of the red “noble” Bordeaux varieties — Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Merlot, Petit Verdot and the rarer St. Macaire, Gros Verdot and Carmenère. If the blend includes any other grape variety, it is, by definition, not a Meritage. Also, to qualify as a Meritage, no single grape variety can make up more than 90% of the blend.

70% Cabernet Sauvignon / 29 cases

15% Malbec / 7 cases

10% Cabernet Franc / 4 cases

5% Carmenere / 2 cases

This sounds exactly like the wine we are making now using our Chilean Grapes. I guess since it's for our own personal use we could call it anything we want but "Meritage" make the most sense to me.

For our 60 bottles I am designing a new label, should be completed real soon.

6/9 "The Press"

Last evening we did step two of our Chilean Grape wine making. The Press took place, all four families in our new endeavor were on hand to help. We pumped the juice and skins into the Press and over to our New American Oak Barrel. After the barrel was full to the top " to keep out any air" we continued to fill about 10 extra gallons of juice which will be used to top off our barrel as it works in the cellar turning our juice to wine.

Below are some photos from last evenings "Press"

6/5 Chilean Wine Update

Just heard from the "Wine Press" looks like our juice is just about perfect and the brix reading is at zero which means it's time for the "Press". If I remember to bring my camera we will have pictures. Stay tuned