August 23rd– First Bottling

On the 23rd of August I will be bottling the first Bedrock WIne Co. wines– sharing a day on the bottling truck with Squire Fridell up at Glenlyon Winery. The inaugural bottling for the winery will be 200 cases of Bedrock Heirloom Wine and 55 cases or so of Rebecca’s Vineyard Pinot Noir.

Since the label is not ready yet I am planning on bottling into shiners (glass with cork only), and then manually labelling and foiling once the remainder of the packaging is ready, approved by the TTB, etc.. This is more expensive and a pain, but the wines are ready for bottling so I really do not have a choice.

Obviously, when one is putting a wine under any type of closure the utmost care has to be taken to ensure the highest quality is met. I am not a big fan of screw-caps, for any number of reasons, so I will be bottling under the highest quality cork available from Ganau closures.

When most people think of corks they think in black and white. Either it is a good cork or a bad cork. However, even corks with no trace of TCA have their own smell– it is, after all, a piece of bark. In the next few days I will be doing sensory analysis on a number of cork batches– both whitened and natural color–to ensure the best smelling cork will be used. In terms of aesthetics I prefer the natural color, and I tend to prefer the woodsy aromas they impart rather than the slightly hydrogen peroxide like smell that the whitening process leaves. That said, I could be suprised.

In doing the sensory analysis I will try corks from each batch in a number of mediums. One cork will be placed in water, another in neutral white wine, and the other in vodka. Each medium has a different extraction rate, and as such, will extract the full scale of aromas the cork could impart over time. If there are off-putting aromas at any level– the smell of mushrooms, chemical, etc.– then that batch of corks will not be used.

Sensory analysis of this type is new to the cork industry, and is most certainly a response to the growing number of complaints regarding tainted corks and the increased market presence of screw-caps. In fact, the best thing to happen to the cork industry has been alternative closures as it has forced them to either clean up or lose business.

I have chosen Ganau because they tend to have a miniscule amount of taint and they have a great cleaning system for their corks. Also, the corks that will top Bedrock wines will come from the Ganau families ancient and private estate in Sardinia– where chlorine containing fertilizers, cleaning agents, etc. have never been used on the trees. These are the same corks used by Kistler and Peter Michael, and though they are extremely expensive as far as corks go (over $1 a piece), I believe it is will worth the money.

The top picture is of the 54 mm (i.e. very long and sexy) corks I will be using in the natural and whitened color. Below is a mock-up of what will be burned onto the cork.