Nicole Indovino

Great wine starts in the vineyard. And a healthy, productive vineyard is often the result

of good pruning. We just spent the past few weeks pruning the Russel Vineyard and

Starkraven Vineyard down in the Four Corners area of Colorado to set us up for a great

Pruning is an essential task that involves removing unwanted wood from the vine to

manage its growth, improve fruit quality, and maintain the vine’s health. Performed

during the winter when the grapevines are dormant, we use shears to c

Crested Butte is a magical little town, isolated in the mountains of Colorado with world-class skiing and mountain biking, unmatched beauty, and a lively spirit in which the locals fill their calendars to the maximum with adventurous costume parties. It’s often a joke that CB is a ‘drinking town with a biking problem’, but it’s hard to abstain with bars like The Dogwood in town.

The Dogwood is a craft cocktail cabin just off the main street on 3rd, tucked away along an alleyway in an old mining

Many people like to complicate wine, using chemistry vocabulary and French terminology to describe a very technical process. Others prefer to mystify it, describing it as a magical beverage that miraculously transforms itself from grapes to wine. We will take a middle-of-the-road approach to describe to you the fermentation process!

Starting in the vineyard, grapes are harvested at a critical point when there is a nice balance between the grape’s sugar, acidity, and phenolic content. The level of sugar is crucial to provide enough nutrition for the yeast that will turn the grape juice into alcohol (more on that later).

The acidity provides freshness, and the polyphenols contribute color and structure to the wine. Once the grapes arrive at the winery, the berries are removed from the stems and slightly crushed using specific machinery conveniently called the ‘de-stemmer’ and ‘crusher’. The berries are then put into a fermentation vessel, like a stainless-steel tank or open-top fermenting bin. Now that the grapes are in the tank, the fermentation can begin! Depending on the wine style desired, we select a dehydrated yeast strain to ‘inoculate’. The yeast is hydrated in warm water and then mixed into the grape juice and berries. The yeast ferments the juice to wine by consuming all the sugar from the grapes and converting it to alcohol and carbon dioxide through a series of metabolic processes, like how we digest food!

At the beginning and middle of fermentation, we do ‘punch downs’ and ‘pump-overs’. A punch-down is when we press the grapes from the top of the tank down to the bottom using a special stick. A pump-over is a similar concept but pumping the wine out of the tank and back onto the skins to re-wet the cap. Both processes are used to extract more color and tannin from the skins of the grapes into the wine and provide oxygen for the yeast to continue fermenting.

Towards the end of fermentation, around days 10-14, the yeast activity begins to slow, most of the sugar is now converted to alcohol, and less carbon dioxide is released as a by-product. At this point, we like to ‘rack’ the wine off of the skins and put it in a barrel to age. We also take the skins left over and squeeze any of the remaining wine out of them in a process called ‘pressing’.

And that’s the fermentation process! If this sparked your curiosity to learn more about the winemaking process check out the wine education series we are hosting at the winery.

Colorado is for the adventurous. You have your choice between skiing, climbing, biking, and hiking. The conditions that make CO such a great place for the outdoors, like the long snowy winters and hot dry summers, make the area an interesting place for vineyards. The contrast between hot days and cool nights allows the grapes to concentrate flavors and tannin structure while maintaining their acidity and freshness.

But, the uniqueness of Colorado weather also brings its challenges. Frost damage

Every year, the global community of wine drinkers consumes an average of 31 billion bottles. That’s a lot of bottles, it’s also a lot of corks.

Where do corks come from and how are they made?

Cork is harvested from a specific layer of bark from a cork oak tree (Quercus suber). This tree is native to the Mediterranean basin, mostly found in Portugal and Spain. The bark is stripped skillfully with an axe, then the cork is flattened and cut into shape. The tree then regrows its bark over nine yea

Our sparkling rosé is absolutely (DIS)GORGEOUS, but it’s no easy feat to achieve those beautiful pink bubbles that end up in your glass. To make our sparkling rosé, we bottle cap the primary fermentation with a little residual sugar leftover to allow the yeast to continue and finish the fermentation in the bottle. The yeast cells metabolize the sugar and produce carbon dioxide (bubbles!) and alcohol (wine!). Once the yeast has consumed all the sugar, they die and leave behind a sediment composed

Last week we had a virtual tasting in which we paired a bottle of our newly released 2019 Cabernet Franc with three different chocolates locally made by Crumb de la Crumb bakery here in Gunnison. It was great to see all of our neighbors on Zoom and we were able to learn so much from Shelby about the process of chocolate making, and how it affects the flavor profile of the wine we are drinking. The dark chocolate bar gave the Cab Franc a very earthy profile while the milk chocolate vanilla truffl

Colorado is not the easiest state to live in, for both humans and plants. Our winters are cold, snowy, and long, often lasting into June with surprise frosts, sometimes shocking the plants (and us) while we wait for summer. Our summers can be arid, hot and at times short, like this year when we celebrated Labor Day with a foot of snow in Gunnison Valley. As winemakers, we face challenges of a short growing season, drought, and extreme weather events.

One of the greatest challenges of the Colora

Pronounced, ‘san-so’, Cinsault is a red grape varietal that is known for its light body, fruit forward characteristics, and aromatics. Cinsault is from the south of France, most commonly found in the Languedoc region, southern Rhone, and Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Cinsault can be found around the world, but it is often called other names such as Ottanvianello in Italy, Black Prince in Australia, and Pinotage in South Africa.

Most often in winemaking Cinsault is used for rosés or as a blending wine be

Colorado has two American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), the official US term for a specific vineyard zone. AVAs are based on the specific geography, soil and climate that make the area unique for winemaking. This is similar to France’s AOP designations or Italy’s DOC classifications that we see on many labels of European wine. For a wine to be labelled as an AVA, 85% of the fruit must come from that zone. AVAs help us know where our wine is from, and also gives us a greater understanding about the