As it says in the old commercial- we will sell no wine before it’s time.  The 2008 Pinot Noir has been bottled after carefully aging it for just over 12 months in French and Hungarian Oak. (we even tested one barrel of homegrown Oregon oak). The 2008 wines are darker and fuller than 2007- with much more black ripe fruit and vanilla textures.  2008 is a totally different wine – mother nature sure is interesting-otherwise we’d be making & selling the same thing every year- which isn’t as much fun.  We will start to release the 2008 vintage around May- after tasting the bottles on a bi-weekly basis to see when they are ready to go….get ready!

But not all barrels are the same.  For the 3rd year in a row we are making some fun & fantastic special ‘batches’ of Pinot that are not normally available to the general public.  In 2003 we made  4 barrels of “Starling Hill” which we just released this fall.  Rich, dark & jubilant!  For the 2007 vintage which was generally light & more fruity we made 2 barrels (that’s right – just two) of a really exquisite ruby red which we will release in this fall to our wine club & special guests.  This year we convened a fun crew of ‘expert’ tasters to run through our favorite 24 barrels out of the 200 in the cellar.  We’ve come up with 9 barrels of lovely, full ‘cherry bomb’ Pinot for the 2008 Kitara Reserve.  That’s only a couple of hundred cases of really special wine.

In addition the tasters found out about our special lot from one section of our estate hillside vineyards.   Since we keep track of these grapes we know when & where the barrels were harvested, how they were fermented & aged.  Well rows 2-11 in the ‘Starling Hill” vineyard have struck again!

Our tasters were fixated on how different- richer, fuller, more unique a couple of barrels were for the 2008 harvest.  So we’ve decided to do two special bottlings- each just two barrels or about 20 cases each. These will be bottled in a week to be released in 18 months or there abouts. (remember the wine let’s us know when it’s ready- not us).

The fun thing about having a small family business is that you can do things that people suggest that you do- and have fun with it.  Hopefully you will get a chance to come by and taste some of these wines.

Coming up- Valentines Dinner with 5 course wine pairing on Feb 13th