Sure I’m speaking for Matt, but I think he’d agree that yesterday was his best birthday ever. He took the day off work and spent it getting his grapes ready for this year’s wine production. I’m pretty sure he was in Heaven.
He purchased both Dolcetto and Tempranillo grapes this year and they arrived from Yakima Sunday afternoon. Yesterday morning, he rented a de-stemmer and crusher from our local wine & home brew store, and now has 300 pounds worth of grape skins and juice hanging out with their proper fermentation ingredients.
The production name, at this point, for the Dolcetto is ”vite nero” which means “dark vine” in Italian and since the Dolcetto is an Italian grape, he thought this was quite fitting. Along that same thought process, the production name for the Spanish Tempranillo grape is “oscuro” meaning “dark” in Spanish.
For dinner, I took Matt to a great Italian restaruant in downtown Seattle called Il Terrazzo Carmine. It claimed to have the best Osso Bucco in town, which we didn’t find to be the case, but it was still really good, as was their Spaghetti Bolognese and the atmosphere. Also, Matt claims that they have really good wine, but I have to take his word for that one.
<jenna>
Filed under: birthdays
So, I’m pretty interested in starting my own wine making process. Do you have any suggestions of how / where to start getting ideas and equipment and all the stuff needed or should I just pop over to the local wine making supplier and just start getting things from there?
[...] was handed out as souvenirs at our friends’ documentary premier in Napa this fall. Our annual crush was in October and we are now working on a 2011 Dolcetto, a 2011 Tempranillo, and a 2011 red blend [...]