Tasting the 2009 wines; get feedback from friends

After a few trial blending sessions on my own, I thought it would be a good idea to get some feedback from my wine making friends and also to see how their wines were coming along. So I had a tasting in late February of the 2009 vintage.

There were 6 of us at the tasting including my wine making friends, Joe and Sandy, Mike, and Harry.

None of the wines are ready to bottle, so this is just an early "barrel" tasting to see how the wines are coming along and perhaps see what may need to be done in the future.

I prepared 3 of my white trial blends, along with the 3 individual varietals, and 2 red wines.

With each wine maker bringing a number of wines, it was a tasting that could get out of hand easily....My tasting notes and memory of the wines started out pretty good, then got very sketchy toward the end. Luckily Harry made a voice recording of our conversations so I can try to decipher what was said about the wines....

With all the wines to taste, and my duties as host, I could not focus on the wines as much as I wanted but here are my impressions:

2009 is a very good wine year and I'm generally happy with my wines.

I'll need to make some different red varietals next year... as I'm ending up with too much light red wine...

Mike, Joe and I all made Sauvignon Blanc {SB} from juice picked up the same day from the same tank and it was very interesting to see the differences in the three wines.

I like Joe's higher acid, non Malo Lactic fermented Sauvignon Blanc a lot and I may re-think my strategy regarding ML fermentation.

Everyone said my white wine blends were good: Blend #1 was 50% SB and 50% Malvasia.

Blend #2 was 33% SB, 33% Pinot Grigio and 33% Malvasia.

Blend #3 was just blend #2 with the addition of tartaric acid.

It was very interesting see how the addition of the acid made blend #3 more lively. It as my favorite blend.

Joe's Grenache Rose was very good. But it contained 3-4% residual sugar and has since kicked off a fermentation.... so it will be interesting to taste it again later on... See my blog entry on Residual sugar.

By the time we got to the reds, I had reached my tasting limit, but I do remember that Mike had a very nice Dolcetto.

A very fun day!