Road Trip, Part Whatever. Gimme that hooch!

Saturday was sleeping in day.  That meant about 8:30 AM.  For me that's really late.  I get up at 5 AM for work every day, and I "sleep in" 'til 6 or 6:30 on the weekends before I start my weekend bike rides.  Then there was a brunch and good cistercian coffee from a monastery in South America.

 

 

So, around noonish, after much catching up and trading stories amongst ourselves (ourselves being the bros and Sean), we sauntered over to the Wine Tasting Room in the pouring rain.

 

 

So here's Jeffrey with his daily portion of wine.  Just kidding!  That was my brother James' joke, don't blame me.  Actually, that's not just a decorative cask, that is aging white vinegar that will be for sale later this year.  Okay, everyone pose with the big vinegar barrel!

 

 

What else they got in here?  Here's the banner of the Abbey's Crest, which appears on the wine label.

 

 

Remember, I showed you the picture of the label in the last entry?  What do you mean, you don't remember?  Okay, okay, I'll show it to you again.

 

 

All the grapes grown at the New Clairvaux Vineyard are Spanish varieties.  The Spanish Syrah, Petite Sirah, Albarino, Tempranillo, Viognier, and Zinfandel grapes all like the hot weather, and in Vina, it can get into the 100's for weeks straight during the summer.  The reds they have are Zinfandel, Tempranillo, Syrah, and Petite Sirah, from lightest to heaviest.  The Zinfandel and the Syrah are my favorites.  The Petite Sirah does not have a lot of flavor yet, but the brothers believe that is because the first harvest grew too much in the plentiful topsoil.  The trappists are still new to wine growing since they're used to taking care of orchard trees, which have a lot more patient timetable.  The blush they have is a New Zinfandel which is very tasty.  The whites are the Albarino and the Viognier.  The Albarino is like a dry Cabernet Sauvignon, crisp with a fruity finish.  The Viognier is not like anything I've tried before.  It's definitely dry, a bit tart, which I was not expecting, with a hint of a Chardonnay finish.  Weird.

Oh, I'm a bit of a wine buff, although I don't have any favorite labels.  I just know what a certain wine is supposed to taste like.  My favorite wine is the Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc from Napa.  Leave it to me to enjoy obscure fruity wines.

Then Jeffrey took us on the backroom tour of how the wine is made and aged.  Now, remember, their operation is taking place in the largest freestanding brick structure built west of the Mississippi. Two square acres. The winery used to be filled to the brim with equipment and barrels, up until 1919 when Leland Stanford sold it away.  The trappists operation takes place in less than 2000 square feet.  That's less than 2.5% of the area underneath the Old Winery's roof.  So, here's where all the action takes place.

 

 

The crushed grape stock gets placed in those big silver vats for fermentation and mixing.  Here's the crusher:

 

 

Once, the effluvia has been mixed, aged, and a little fermented, and after Sean, ahem Fr. Sean, takes a little sip to make sure everything's okay:

 

 

Some of the mass gets placed into a big vat for the reserve:

 

 

And the rest gets poured into the barrels for final aging:

 

 

During this time, the wine is periodically tested to make sure the aging process is going well and there are no other problems.  Part of the room looks like a mad scientist's laboratory:

 

 

Thank you James for pointing that out.  But the best part is sampling the wine with nature's best testing kit, your own taste tester!  Here we see Br. Placid sampling barrels that are two weeks away from bottling.  That means this shit tastes pretty good!

 

 

Gimme some more of that hooch!

 

 

And so that was our rainy day wine tasting tour.  Let me put in a word about the weather.  It tried to rain on Friday as we drove up to the monastery.  It started raining sometime Friday night, and the rain did not stop until Saturday afternoon.  But the sun came out for one day, right before it was going to rain for 3 days straight.  And that was Sunday, just in time for Placid's Solemn Profession.  There were some more interesting serendipitous coincidences, or graces in Catholic theological terms, that happened during Jeffrey's big day.