Update on wines and winery

Things always move so slowly until they move too fast. Here are some updates on what we’ve been up to.

In late 2024, Candice saw a neck freezer for sale on Facebook Marketplace. If you don’t know, a neck freezer is used to freeze the yeast and sediment in the neck of a bottle of sparkling wine before disgorging the bottle to get rid of it. We went to see it at Iris Winery in Cottage Grove, Oregon. We bought the neck freezer, but didn’t return to pick it up for about a year. At some point, we found out Iris was closing its doors and would have a bunch of equipment for sale. Steve went back and forth with Eric about this and that, and we ended up with an entire lab and a bunch of other equipment. As it got closer and closer to the date Iris had to be out, they had barrels of wine for sale at prices we couldn’t turn down, so we ended up with several beautiful barrels of Syrah, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, and Port.

This involved a lot of driving, packing, loading, unloading, unpacking, and late nights.

One of the reasons we bought all the barrels of wine is so we could have more blending options. Our Syrah suffered from smoke taint, as you may recall, and the measures we took to deal with that left our poor Syrah lacking in fruit character and body. Our hope is to be able to blend some other wine in with it to give it more of what it’s lacking.

We did a blind blending tasting of several different wine blends and wrote up extensive notes on each sample before making a few decisions on what to blend, what to explore further, and what was pure garbage.

We are very happy with our 2023 Tempranillo and Iris’s 2024 Malbec on their own and plan to release them in the fall. We’re planning to blend some Iris Syrah with our Syrah to give it a little boost.

Candice is always searching the wine marketplace to see what grapes and bulk wine are for sale. We love dry, aromatic white wines, like the ones produced in Alsace, France, such as Gewürztraminer and Muscat. Candice for a great price for some bulk dry Muscat from Rogue Valley, Oregon, so we bought a 275-gallon tote of it. It is heavenly. It’ll make you want to follow a fairy into the woods and join a cult.

We’re very interested in releasing some of the Muscat as is, but we also want to use it in some blends. We’ve had some delightful red blends that use aromatic white wine in them recently, and we want to try our hand at that too.

That’s it for updates. We’re hoping to start bottling some wine soon!