Today is a cold and rainy November 9th….my oldest son’s birthday! And while we celebrate with cake and festivities (and a new hamster….yikes!) we are also finishing the last work at the winery that will finally put the 2009 vintage into the history books.
Our final fruit to be harvested was Riesling from the Hyland Vineyard. It was pressed about a week ago and put into barrels to slowly ferment over the next several months.
Our last Pinot Noir fermentations are finished today and we are pressing those and putting the fresh wine into tanks to settle and the wine will be taken to barrels over the next three to four days.
The barrel cellar is full. Probably the most full it has ever been, with towering stacks of barrels freshly stained with sweet dark fresh Pinot Noir. The Chardonnays are all still slowly fermenting on the other side of the winery where the temperatures are still cold enough to ensure that none of these wines will be finished with their primary or secondary fermentations until next spring.
2009 in retrospect was a long harvest with several chapters. The harvest began early as we scrambled to deal with the heat and dehydration of our youngest vineyards This small percentage of our harvest has yielded pleasant wines with dark color and low acidity which will make for early drinking wine. As time progressed, the cold weather returned and blue skies remained, giving way to a longer hang-time under more ideal conditions for our older vines. These wines are incredibly dark and intense with vibrant aromas and flavors and good acidity. Our oldest parcels were harvested in the final days prior to the big rains that came at the end of October and these wines have tremendous potential to be some of the finest wines that we have ever crafted at Bergstrom! Wow.
Our Chardonnay program grew by leaps and bounds this year with our first ever estate harvest from the winery estate block and several smaller blocks in the de Lancellotti Vineyard. These wines are all still fermenting but the quality looked to be very good to excellent.
My team worked very hard this year and I am proud of everyone’s efforts and thankful for their support. My dad did not miss a day of work over a forty-five day work period, leading the charge as he has his whole life..At 73 years old he is still a Swedish work-horse!! Jorge and Rodolfo and their team worked tirelessly as they always do, never asking for anything other than “how can I help?” Are there really still people out there who are just happy to be working towards a common goal? I am proud to say that there are and glad to have them on our team. And this year we had a new face at the winery; Cory came to Bergstrom from several years of working with Tony Soter at Etude and Soter and he was a very hard worker and a pleasure to have around.
Bergstrom Wines are a team effort and every bottle that you drink from Bergstrom represents over 1,000 days of our lives. We spend one year farming a wine, one year or more making a wine and one year or more taking that wine to the marketplace. There are a lot of faces and names behind our product who may not end up on the pages of Wine Spectator or quoted in Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, but believe me, they are here, family and staff, every day working tirelessly to help bring our vision to bottle. And I thank them all for another great year!
Cheers everyone!
