Blending In

In California, labeling laws require that if a geographical area or AVA (AmericanViticultural Area) is stated on the bottle, then a minimum of 85% of the contents must be from that area. If a vintage is stated, the minimum is 95%, and if a grape variety is stated the minimum is 75%. So, that bottle of 2009 Merlot from Santa Barbara County may be 25% cabernet, 5% 2008 and 15% from San Luis Obispo.

At Babcock, for our high-end wines, we don't mess around with any of this stuff. Everything is 100% across the board, and usually from a single vineyard. Some places will top up their barrels (when natural evaporation occurs) with a different wine than what's in the barrel, but we don't. Where we do take advantage of blending opportunites is with our more everyday wines that we produce in very large quantities, relatively speaking--say, 15,000 gallons as opposed to only 350 gallons for our top, single-vineyard bottlings.

Doing anything with such large quantities of wine is a daunting task. In order to blend it, you have to move it, and that takes hours and hours. For our blending project this week, though, we used a neat trick that saved a heap of time. We had a 12,000-gallon tank that was full of one thing, and a 1,000-gallon tank that was full of something else. We wanted to blend them together. The obvious thing would be to pump them both into a 13,000-gallon tank. Unfortunately, we don't have a tank of that exact size. We have a 16,000-gallon tank that we could have pumped them both into to make the blend, but we couldn't leave it in there because that breaks a cardinal rule of winemaking--every vessel has to be completely full to avoid spoilage (more on that in a future post). So, we could have used the 16 to make the blend, but then we'd have to pump the whole 13,000 gallons back to their original tanks afterwards, and we really would have been there until midnight.



early morning in the vineyard

 So here's what we did: with 12,000gls of one thing and 1,000gls of another, one thirteenth is different, right? So we took the 1000gls and moved all but one thirteenth temporarily into another tank. Then we filled the 1000-gallon tank from the 12,000-gallon tank. Now we have the exact blend we want in the small tank. Finally, the larger amount from the 1,000-gallon tank that we took out in the first place, got pumped into the 12,000-gallon tank, topping it up and giving us the exact blend in that tank too. The whole project only took a few hours, and we blended 13,000 gallons by moving under 3,000 gallons. Easy-peasy, Gary Sinise!