Movember Day 27

Moustaches...our winter blossoms

GAME DAY!!!

GO RIDERS!!!

Orofino hosts a Movember Party at Tavola November 30th!!

Orofino is hosting a Movember party at Tavola Restaurant at the end of the month! We have teamed up with the good people at Tavola to celebrate the end of this mo-mentous occasion called Movember. This ain't no formal winemaker dinner. Join us for a casual evening of great people, outstanding food, and of course, featured Orofino wines. We will enjoy Tavola's amazing appies and a 3 course family style dinner. There will be opportunities to wine some Orofino goods and for those of you with magnificent moes, perhaps a special prize (think Magnum P.I.)! Proceeds go towards the Movember cause.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

6:30 pm
Tavola Restaurant - 1829 Robson St

$40.00/person not including drinks,tax & gratuity

tavolaresos@gmail.com for reservations

(604) 606-4680

We look forward to seeing you there! This is an affordable midweek opportunity to get out and eat well. Bring your friends! We will definitely be ready to unwind and celebrate the Movember cause and an end to the 2011 crush!

Movember Day 14

Day 14 of Movember...moustaches are blooming alas! And don't forget that $1 of every Orofino bottle purchased in November goes towards the Movember cause!

The Last Grapes Have Been Crushed!!!

We felt like celebrating a couple of days ago as we crushed our last 10 bins of the season. What seemed like a neverending harvest season finally came to an end and we have all of the 69 tons of grapes safely packed away into our buildings. I can take a moment and reflect on the harvest and what expectations we can have for the wines we craft from the 2011 grapes.

What was truly a difficult growing year may have in the end produced some of the greatest grapes we have ever seen on our crush pad. I often talk at length of our terrific partners growing great grapes for us every year and their concientious work has rewarded us with what we think is a pretty terrific line-up of wines year after year. This year proved their skills as we received bin after bin of delicious grapes. I can't remember being quite so taken with the flavours and aromas of the whites we are working with. The fermenting juice is delicious! The reds are deeply coloured, bang-on amounts of acid, and slightly lower sugars and pHs promising ripe, lower alcohol wines. It all comes back to great farming. For more information on our vineyards and the people who run them, visit the Vineyards Page on our website.

Merlot falling into a fermenter

So now we are monitoring the white ferments and are busy punching down the red ferments. The Pinot Noir and Gamay have already been pressed and put into barrels and soon we will do the same to the bordeaux varietals and syrah. Our building is so packed with fermenting bins of grapes that we can barely slip through it.

Punchdowns

Doing a "punchdown"...I think my moustache gives me extra punchdown strength

Every corner of the winery is full of fermenting bins, tanks and barrels. The air is thick of carbon dioxide and "punchdowns" are in full swing. After inoculation, the yeast begins to break down the sugars in the grapes, converting them into ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and carbon dioxide. As the fermenting mass exudes carbon dioxide, grape skins and other solids are pushed to the top and form a thick "cap". This is the particularly "special" time of the year when we get to physically push that cap back down and stir up the mass...three times a day...for each and every of our 30 plus bins. The french term for this procedure is pigeage, but otherwise affectionately known as a punchdown. We do this for a number of reasons, primarily to introduce oxygen (which helps feed the yeast), to stop the cap from drying out, and to encourage the extraction of colour and tannins. This is that really romantic part of wine-making where we would be using our feet, if it weren't for modern day hygiene and common sense. We use a stainless steel paddle now. Although I was standing on a small bin the other day doing a punchdown and my foot went through the improperly secured lid. My jeans were red from the knee down. John laughed. Oh the joys of punchdowns.

Movember, Day 6

Day 6 of Movember... despite our best efforts, our moustaches are still pubescent at best... maybe we're late bloomers?

Days of Red, Nights of Red

Chris Scott in his
Oak Knoll Vineyard

Oak Knoll Merlot destined for
Red Bridge

It's that time of the crush season when we only see red. With the whites safely in tanks and happily fermenting or finished fermenting, all of our attention is focussed on our red varietals. Over the past 10 days, we have put through 16 tons of merlot, cabernet franc, and a bit of cabernet sauvignon. Most of that coming in last weekend when we received the first 2 blocks of the Oak Knoll Merlot. 20 bins of it with another 18 arriving today. Tasty grapes from an amazing vineyard that still has green leaves soaking up the last bits of autumn sun.

yes, thats a Rider T-shirt!

Along with the crush comes the inevitable punchdowns where we manually "punch" the floating skins back down into the juice in order to extract all of their goodness. This is very labour-intensive as we don't employ any mechanical means but use the old-fashioned method of muscle and a hand tool. I'm a big believer in this method as it helps us stay in touch with the ferments. Look, feel, listen, smell. It all counts towards making our wines what they become. The reds are all fermented in half ton or one ton bins which makes for a lot of ferments but also enables us to use a multitude of yeasts each chosen to bring certain elements to the wine. Every year we tweak it a bit and add a new yeast just for experimentation purposes.

punching down

We are looking forward to getting the rest of the cabernet into our cellar and finishing the reds off and into barrel. But in the meantime, there are more punchdowns to do so I have to get back to work.... 

Let the Moustache Races Begin!

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives...today, clean shaven, we abandon adolescence and embark on a journey to manhood. Yes, that's right, we are growing moustaches. Join us, as John and I set out on an epic moustache race for Movember. Stay tuned for more pictures of our upper lip transformation or click on Movember under Pages for details on how you can participate.