Katarina's Blog

Buying the land 25 years ago, we were driven by the beauty of Dry Creek Valley and a deep interest in wine. We had taken serious classes in wine tasting but we knew nothing about what really goes into the process of farming, winemaking, packaging of wine products and the many obstacles in the winery industry. Luckily. As we walked the vineyard after taking ownership, our vineyard manager told us about all the diseases, pests, insects, frost, rust etc. that can obliterate a harvest. What had we done? Read on to find out.

Chile is the wine country that can brag about rediscovering the Bordeaux grape Carménère. I visited wineries there in January and got a very warm welcome and a cool story. After the phylloxera bug killed off a lot of the vineyards in Europe in the late 19th century the Carménère grape was not replanted in Bordeaux since it was already hard to get to flower and ripen in the cool and humid Atlantic climate. It was thought to be mostly extinct when it was rediscovered in 1994 in Chile. The warm and dry climate in the middle of Chile has proven ideal for this grape and beautiful wines are produced now that the varietal is allowed to ripen to its potential. Read on for more on this story and some winery reviews.

Our barrel room is filled with barrels of wine from 2019, 2018 and 2017. Some just came in after harvest and some are ready to be bottled in a couple of months. Every month we say hello to every barrel, tasting and testing how they are doing.

There are wineries in so many different parts of the world today. Winemakers experiment with growing vines in places where the climate is quite different from that of Southern and Western Europe. One such place that I visited recently is in Myanmar, on the hillside sloping down towards Inle Lake in the south of Shan state.

What is the stuff at the bottom of the cork? Dark red, almost inky, deposits, sometimes crystalline in texture? You find it at the end of the cork which has been in touch with the wine during aging and it is actually a quality sign which shows that the wine has not been overfiltered which can strip away some of the flavors. How did it end up there and what is it? Read on to find out.