Bottlenotes.com recommends our 2010 Matchbook Rose of Tempranillo for the spring season:
Matchbook Rosé of Tempranillo 2010 (Central Valley, CA) $11. This wine screams “drink me outside” so it’s perfect as the weather gets warmer. It’s crisp and has hints of peaches and melon, which will of course make you think of what comes after spring: summer.
Read the entire article: http://www.bottlenotes.com/the-daily-sip/wine-recommendations/warm-weather-wines
2007 Matchbook Tinto Rey is Wine Pick of the Week in the Arizona Daily Sun:
Matchbook 2007 red blend Tinto Rey, California ($17)
Wine is great fun because there’s always something new, as in this blend of mostly Tempranillo and Syrah. The “Red King” is a solid all-around wine, with full flavors, medium body, good complexity and acidity for food friendliness. Serve with red meats and red-sauced pasta.
Ask your favorite store to order this wine for you. Prices may vary.
— John Vankat, Daily Sun wine writer
Anthony Dias Blue Reviews features our Matchbook Tinto Rey in the January 2012 issue of Tasting Panel magazine!
89 Matchbook 2007 Tinto Rey, California ($17)
Tangy and fresh with racy cherry and blackberry fruit; spicy, dense and smooth with lively acidity; balanced and clean; 44% Tempranillo, 36% Syrah, 13% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Graciano, 2% Petite Sirah.
Sandra Silfen chose our 2007 Matchbook Tinto Rey as the Detroit News recommended wine for January 11!
Selections are by wine columnist Sandra Silfven
“Smooth tannins, ripe berry fruit with cherry, blueberry and tobacco nuances characterize this sassy red from the Dunnigan Hills with coastal fruit blended in. It’s made by the Giguiere family, which planted the first vineyards in the Dunnigan Hills, northeast and inland of Napa Valley. Their noted labels included R.H. Phillips, Toasted Head and Hogue Cellars, all of which were huge successes and eventually sold. In recent times, with partners, they started the Crew Wine Co., and planted Matchbook Vineyard in the Dunnigan Hills. “Tinto Rey” means Red King and is the main grape in this dry red blend, and Tempranillo is the king of Spanish reds. It also has Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Graciano and Petite Sirah in the blend.”
Read the entire review on line.
Crush is a little like New Years for us. It’s the start of a new vintage; the slate is clean and hopes are high. And all our wine experiments are a little like New Year’s resolutions. Our creative juices flow with the prospect of trying out the new ideas we’ve been noodling for the past year. We have a couple pretty adventurous experiments in the works with the 2011 vintage. One that is keeping us fit is the Red Wine Barrel Fermentation.
This is not a new concept. The practice of fermenting red wine in barrel has been around for some time. The “new” is putting this high-end-wine concept to use for a wine that sell for around $15.
Normally, red wine juice is fermented in stainless steel tanks; the lees are pressed off at dryness and the wine is barreled down for aging. Tank fermentation is a very effective and very efficient way to extract flavor and color from red grapes. The advantage of going straight into barrel for fermentation is a more complete integration of the oak with the wine. It intensifies the flavor, stabilizes the color and softens the tannins. The disadvantage is that the method is laborious and time consuming. That is: expensive. One of our goals is to figure out a cost effective way to pull this off.
Ten brand new barrels were purchased for this experiment. Our first task was to pop off one of the heads of each barrel in order to shovel in the grapes. The first top was a little tricky, but our crew quickly got the hang of barrel deconstruction. We used our 2011 Lake County Cabernet for this experiment because we wanted a varietal with big tannin structure that could handle the onslaught of all that new wood. And we wanted a varietal with tight, firm clusters. That second reason was self-serving. Shoveling tight, whole clusters into an open-top barrel is much easier than trying to shovel sloppy, loose clusters. Once filled, we inoculated the barrel with yeast and closed it up.
Our second task was to mix the fermenting juice with the “cap” of grape skins and seeds. When we ferment in tanks, we pump the juice over the skins to extract color and flavor. We can’t really do that with wine locked inside a barrel. So we did the ingeniously practical thing: we rolled the barrels. Now, those barrels are really heavy and lifting them off the barrel rack and on to the ground for a good roll would have been problematic. But our crew shaved off the ends of some old barrel racks, welded a couple shaved racks together to make one long, sloped run and cozied them up to the sides of the barrels. And then just rolled the barrels off their racks. We walked the barrels up and down the run four times a day, seven days a week while fermentation was roiling. As fermentation neared completion, we rolled just once a week. Turns out this is a great upper-body work out which you can see in our video.
The barrel-fermented Lake County Cabernet will be pressed off the skins in January and put back into the same barrels. The wine tastes great at this point, the color is fantastic and flavors are complex. We’ll keep you posted on the progress.