The Final Cut – Barrel Selection

This is the time of year when the winemaker focuses on finalizing blends from prior vintages. This involves endless tasting, mixing, spreadsheets, and excitement about the emerging wines. It takes quite a bit of work to take one’s various barrel lots and put together a seamless and balanced blend that represents the best of what a particular vineyard could do in a certain vintage. This is especially true up at Goldeneye, our Anderson Valley winery, where we have the ability to ferment and age so many different vineyard blocks separately. It is true that it creates quite a bit of complexity, but it gives our winemaking team the ability to make incredibly fine blending calls. This complexity oftens means that Michael Fay and Michael Accurso, our Goldeneye winemaker and assistant winemaker, respectively, will taste many iterations of each potential vineyard designated blend, each with minute volume differences but impactful flavor differences in blend. 

When all this work is done, and each vineyard designate blend is complete, the final phase of selection is to taste individual barrels from each blend component, to make sure that they are the best for the blend. It is amazing to me that one can taste very significant differences between wines aged in the ‘same’ new French oak barrel, meaning from the same cooper, with oak from the same forest or grain tightness, and with the same toast level. Once the final barrels are selected, they are racked into tank and blended!