Last Saturday, February 26, we had the rare opportunity of snowfall at Hearthstone Vineyard in Paso Robles! Below you can see a picture of our vineyards covered in snow in Adelaida, as well as at our tasting room off Vineyard Dr.
Cayla
Snow in Paso Robles
The 2007 Profundo Wine wins Gold at the 2011 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition
Winemaker Paul says, “The unique components of each varietal contribute to the complexity of this wine. This wine will continue to evolve for the next 8 to 10 years.”
“The SFCWC broke the records with 4,913 entries in 2010 and now in 2011, it continues to uphold the title of the “Largest Competition of American Wines in the World” with a staggering number of entries, 5,050 from 23 states.”
Look for the San Francisco Chronicle on February 13th to announce all the winners!
After the last wine club shipment, our customers are commenting about the food and wine pairing. This is what a 3 bottle wine club member said: “The 2007 Slipstone is perfect with a tri tip and the Southern Comfort Barbecue Sauce recipe. We used the recipe as a base and added a few personal touches. A little tobacco and cayenne pepper really spiced things up. We love that the Slipstone has a pepper finish! Yummm” Another idea for the kitchen is to add peach preserves and/or brown sugar to offset the spice in the wine, if you are not a spicy person.
Southern Comfort Barbecue Sauce:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil; ½ cup minced onion; 3 cups ketchup; ½ cup molasses; ½ cup Southern Comfort; ¼ cup red wine; 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce; 2 tablespoons ground mustard; 1 teaspoon celery seed; Lots of cracked black pepper to taste.
In a heavy saucepan heat the oil and sauté the onions until they are tender, about 4 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes. You may store the sauce in the fridge for up to one month. Serve on your favorite BBQ meats.
With Harvest season almost over- we still have 3 varieties (Mourvedre, Zinfandel and Cab Franc) hanging out there hoping for late sunny days to finish them off. This year has been very late in fruit set and slowed ripening, with little heat to help make up for the delays. Early and mid season harvests all show good to excellent quality and flavor with lower acids and less sugars, which will help us in lowering alcohol levels in our wines; something we always work to achieve. The next two weeks will spell the story for late varieties and then we will enjoy less field pressure and focus on barrel development. Based on fruit quality, we speculate having special limited case lots of Pinot, Syrah, Cab, and Brunello for our club members from this harvest. We may make a desert wine from Viognier and Roussanne and have the first rose lot since our beautiful Grenache rose of 2004. Yummmmm. See you at the tasting room!
Hoy and Paul.
This was a harvest morning: The grapes struggle to ripen in wet cool conditions.
Following a stormy 42” rainy winter and spring, our vines took off slowly. They cautiously extended their tendrils and soft shoots sensing the cold spring nights and damaging frosts. Cold damage to the tiny fruit clusters was avoided with the help of our wind machine, which worked harder than ever and kept us from losing many tons of valuable fruit. As a result of the cold spring we are now 1-3 weeks behind normal fruit development with verasion (color change) just beginning. We are expecting a later harvest in general. The vines are delighted to finally get a good soaking after 3 years of low rain fall, resulting in extra shoot growth which means more training and trimming for our crews. More work but it should be a good year!
Hoy.
Looking back at 2009 I can hardly believe it’s over. With our soft opening in May, our Grand opening in June, to Harvest Festival rounding out the year, 2009 just flew by. We have finally gotten into a groove but there is always something new and exciting to keep us on our toes.
We are very pleased with the success of our first year (seven months rather) of having our doors open to the public. All of the local wineries and tasting rooms have been more than supportive. We couldn’t have done it without their help. I love that charm of Paso Robles. We are going to continue to “gussy” up the tasting room and make it a bit more warm and inviting. We hope to get some artwork on our big red wall and feature a different artist a few times a year. Along with that we will have some evening wine tastings and art showing.
The local restaurant scene has also been supportive and taken interest in Hearthstone. We have our wines placed on a few wine lists and hope to continue to grow our relationships into the south county.
Our wine club has grown and we thank all of you for your support. We are looking forward to releasing our 2007 vintage with our new label. Our release party will be in April hosted at the tasting room. We can’t wait to meet, greet and revisit.
As for the vineyard, it made it through a cold and wet winter. We did lose a bit of fruit, but what we didn’t’ lose is turning into some incredible wine. Paul and Hoy know what it takes to make a quality product and it just continues to get better!
While we were being battered about for a day and a half I thought about the Philippines who really got smacked days before, and took the edge off of this whirling giant of a storm that still had a lot to say many thousands of miles later. The tree crews were out on Vineyard right in the middle of it just to remove the small branches, while a few slumbering giants were toppled or lost a heavy arm or two in the 50+ mile an hour winds that raged on across our hills and valleys. The earth sucked it all up like a giant sponge on a tiny spill- thanks – got more? I was sure my remaining 10 acres of Mourvedre, Zinfandel (especially), Brunello and Cabernet Franc would suffer after 11.5 inches pounded the clusters on a horizontal slant, but it all came through amazingly well, helped along by the following week of 80 degree weather that brought my sugars up to snuff, thankfully!
In all, the harvest year turned out some excellent quality across all our varieties, due in great part to the 35% reduction in crop load from a late spring freeze, which I felt persecuted by all summer and and now I see the light. I am sure the grander purposes at large are unaware of my hopeful schemes.
Hoy.
Harvest marks the end of another season but the beginning of great new wine. This time of year is the most dirty, sweaty, hard working time of the year for a handful of people in Paso Robles, and all over California for that matter.
The little bit of rain did not detriment Paso Robles fruit at all. Contrary to what many people think, our soil doesn’t stay saturated…especially when we get such little rain and still have warm days. It was all dried up before noon.
We have harvested our Roussanne, Viognier and Pinot Noir. Our small lot of Pinot Noir was picked on September 4 and has just now finished fermenting. It cold soaked for four days then fermentation started. Paul added whole cluster to the bottom of the fermenting bin and crushed whole berries on top of it. This is some pretty intense stuff. It is a very small lot and will definitely be allocated. We are very excited. It will now be pressed and put into new and year old French oak barrels for aging.
After throwing the idea around a bit we decided to make our award-winning Pearl again. We lost quite a bit of our crop from the frost we had in April. The fruit that survived came off the vine at 23.5 and 25.0 brix. It was then immediately pressed into neutral white barrels for fermentation. It has finished and has sweet aromas of ripe apricot and pear with a hint of honeysuckle. We are very excited. Paul may end up putting the Roussanne into new French barrels when the time comes to add a bit more mouth-feel.
The rest of the fruit is ripening slowly as usual. We expect a pile up of harvest in two to three weeks. Our Mourvedre and Cabernet Franc is normally the last to ripen and we expect to pull it in November. Hoy likes the quality all around and is seeing nice, lower yields this season.
Other than this bit of action Paul is trying to take it easy before harvest really gets going in October. Same for Hoy. As for me…I help out with morale support and assist when I’m needed for punch downs. I hold down the fort you know?!
The best way to truly enhance your pallet is to taste as many wines as possible. There is no standard taste in wine. There is generally no right or wrong answer either. However, there are typicities to each variety that make them unique and easier to recognize. Here are the five basic steps to wine tasting that will assist you in developing a better understanding of wine.
The first thing you should notice about wine is the color. The best way to get a real good look at the color is to have a white background and to tilt the glass at an angle in front of it. Color plays a major roll in recognizing if you are about to drink a young wine or an old wine. White wines become darker with age and red wines lose their color with age. White wine may also be different in color because of oak aging and because of difference in variety.
Swirling is the next part of wine tasting. We swirl wine because we love it, but the main reason is to aerate the wine and release vapors from the sides of the glass. As the wine mingles with the oxygen we enjoy its bouquet. Simply put…swirling releases more aromas in the wine.
Next is smelling the wine. This is the most important part of wine tasting and most people do not spend enough time on it. The average person can actually identify over 2000 different scents, and wine has hundreds on its own. Believe it or not, smelling the wine in your glass more than once will give you a much better perception of what your smelling too. Try it! Sniff once, twice then three times. The third smell will give you much more insight to the wine then the first or the second.
Determining the nose of the wine really helps in identifying the wine’s characteristics. I think that most people are still so intimidated by the notion of right and wrong answers that they /we often look to others opinions. I try so hard not to be subjective, so making comparisons to style is more helpful for people, then there are others who just have to know what I smell. It all takes practice.
Now we taste. You can only actually perceive four tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. When you taste wine you should leave it in your mouth for three to 
five seconds to really let your taste buds work. Be aware of where sensations occur on your tongue while its rolling around in your mouth. Remember there are only four tastes, but there is no salt in wine. That makes it easier right?
Sweet is detected on the tip of the tongue, so it will be recognized right away! Acidity is found on the outer part of your tongue as well as on your cheeks. Typically white wines have a higher and more noticeable acidity content than red wines. Bitterness is tasted on the back of the tongue and not so desirable in wine.
So what is tannin and how do we taste it? Tannin is not a taste but an actual sensation. The sensation of tannin begins in the middle of your tongue and if there is a lot of tannin in the wine it can actually coat your whole mouth and block out the fruit. Other times when a red wine is consumed to young or if it has been aged in oak the tannin will dry your mouth much more.
There is my take on the simplicities of wine tasting. Now, we savor! Enjoy your wine! Maybe take a minute to reflect on what you’ve experienced. What style of wine is it? Was there any sugar in the wine or how acidic was it? Which characteristic really stood out and did you like it or not? The key to great wine is balance and, if you like it or not. Discovering what it is that you dislike is the challenge.
Simply put, decanting is just transferring wine from the bottle into another container (the decanter) before serving. Sound silly?
So what is decanting all about and when is it necessary if necessary at all? The two reasons to decant wines are to aerate young wines and separate sediment from older wines.
Young wines, particularly red, benefit from decanting by softening more coarse tannins and by revealing more of its flavor. For old wines, decanting separates the bitter or unsightly solids that have dropped to the bottom of the bottle known as sediment.
Wine could also be destroyed by oxygen. Very old wine should be consumed immediately after decanting. Although decanting will separate th
e sediment, too much oxygen will take away the small 15 minute window of pleasure you could have enjoyed from that 1945 Burgundy. If you decide to decant an old bottle of wine, do it immediately before service, not hours ahead of time.
Proper decanting requires forethought and a steady hand. If you really want to get “geeky” with it, there are specific decanters for specific wines. Younger wines benefit from larger bottomed decanters because of the surface area. But, any old carafe and decanter will do the job. For the older wines with sediment, it is beneficial to remove the entire capsule to be able to see the sediment as it reaches the neck of the bottle.
Really…that’s it. Plus, wine looks so much more sophisticated when it’s in a pretty crystal container. Wine tasting 101 still soon to come!
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