The always-cool Santa Maria
Valley was even cooler in 1999, and we harvested these grapes
in early October. The grapes ripened slowly, but just as they
were getting close to being ready, a hot spell caused all the
tiny shot berries in the clusters to raisin, and the sugar level
soared. In two days they went from definitely not quite ready
to extremely ripe. We grabbed them off the vines immediately,
but the fermentation went tumultuously, to say the least. I tried
every trick in the book to avoid disaster and wasn't sure that
I had succeeded until summer, when the wine finally fell clear.
A friend of mine who helped
with the bottling of this wine tasted it recently and said he
thought it was our best effort to date. This surprised me, so
I went and found a bottle in our cellar, tasted it and decided
he might be right! Amazingly, what we have here is a dark, full
throttle, savory, flavor-y wine that is delicious to drink. I
bit my nails a lot over this one, but this wine proves the point
that, if you have great grapes in an exceptional year, you are
likely succeed in making a special wine.