Not long ago, four of us sat down to taste through various barrel lots of our 2008 Pinot Noirs. Such tastings are always a learning experience, and this was no exception. I must say that at the end of it, I thought my feelings about barrels are justified.

I used to buy Burgundian oak barrels from a variety of different coopers, made from different forests at different toast levels. Those sorts of combinations can multiply rapidly. Through the years, I’ve undergone a honing-in process in barrel selection. I’ve found that, depending on the individual wine, usually a particular barrel (one forest, one drying regime and one toast level) from each cooper works best.

I simply ask myself, which barrel enhances the wine best? If you try to use several different barrels to build a wine – this one enhances the entry, this one builds up the middle palate, that one fills in … More…

AMR: After a warm January and early suckering, we aren’t so early any more. The last three weeks of cool weather have really slowed the vines. I estimate that we have another two to three weeks until flowering, and mid-May is normal.

I should explain suckering. It means removing undesirable shoots from the vine, whether they are too small or in the wrong place. This practice takes its name from pulling off “ground suckers” or water sprouts on the rootstock. But because Pinot Noir likes to push out more than one shoot per bud, and sometimes three, we remove additional shoots to make sure the canopy has the potential to ripen the fruit. Pinot Noir requires more leaf surface to ripen a given quantity of fruit than other grape varieties. We need a certain caliber of shoot – it must be larger in diameter than a pencil and grow up … More…