2020 has definitely been an interesting year for everyone. We want to thank everyone who came out and supported us in our first commercial year. While it wasn’t what we were planning for our winery and tasting room this year, overall it went really well. The slower start was not all a bad thing as it allowed us to get our feet wet with the commercial world.

We got great feedback on our 2019 white wines. The roussanne, sauvignon blanc and viognier have all sold out. We just have a few bottles left of the Sundew White Blend and cab franc rose’. We still have several cases of the pinot gris left as well. Good news is that all of these will be back and in greater amounts with the 2020 vintage. The 2020’s have had their first racking and are smelling and tasting delicious already. They should be ready for release in the spring of 2021!

The biggest feedback we got this summer was “we can’t wait for your reds”. We offered barrel samples of the red blend to rave reviews and requests to buy it now. For a 2019 it is tasting amazing, and will just get better with a little more time. Good news is that we just bottled one barrel of it and all of the other 2019 reds except for the malbec. We want the malbec and the other barrel of the blend to enjoy more time in the barrel. These reds should be available for tasting and purchase in the spring of 2021 along with the whites.

The 2020 reds are also coming along nicely. For this vintage we will have: syrah, cabernet sauvignon, cab franc, merlot, malbec, and petit verdot. We were planning on doing a barbera, but unfortunately due to storm damage and the quickly cooling temps it never fully ripened. We just picked the 2020 red blend thanks to feedback from friends and it’s going in the barrel today! It is a very similar blend to the 2019, but with an increased percentage of petit verdot.

Finally Michael also taught a Zoom class on fruit winemaking this fall. As part of that we also have some raspberry wine that will be available in the spring. The aromas and flavors of fresh raspberry in this are amazing!

We are available for tastings through the winter, but with the current restrictions we have to be outside. Just give us a call or email if you want to come by and taste or pick up some of the remaining white wines. We’ll keep you posted on the plan for release of the 2019 reds and 2020 whites in the spring.

Once again, thank you all for your support. Stay safe and healthy. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season even if we’re “socially distant”.

Cheers! Leann & Michael Stacey

Pierce County is now in phase 2 of reopening. That means our tasting room is open with social distancing requirements. This includes no groups larger than 5 and we will be wearing face coverings. We have plenty of space in the winery and patio to spread out to maintain 6 ft of distance between groups. We are also frequently cleaning down everything in the tasting room/winery.

Fun fact: we can’t use cleaning supplies with bleach in the winery because that can contribute to cork taint (TCA). We are using high level alcohol hand sanitizer to sanitize in the winery.

We are going to be open most Friday evenings, Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We are also open other days by appointment. Our hours are flexible so if you want to come by just give us a call/text or send an email. Michael is the easiest to get a hold of during the week at 253-307-6343. Email is

Michael and Leann have decided to take the plunge and file as a commercial winery! The application has been submitted to the TTB. Hopefully 2019 will be our first commercial vintage and we’ll have some whites and rose available for sale in the spring of 2020!

Hello everyone,

We’re trying to get back in the swing of things with posting more regular updates, but it seems to get away from me.  Today we finished up bottling the 2016 reds. We bottled almost 12 cases (2 bottles short) of the second blend that’s been in our barrel.  This one was 40% cab sauvignon, 40% merlot, and 20% malbec.   The first blend that we bottled a couple of months ago was 40% malbec, 20% cab sauv, and 20% merlot.  Both of them came out very tasty.  While the volume of wine has been a lot this year, its nice to have the amount to let these age another year or 2 and see how they just keep getting better!

Michael is re-filling the barrel as I type with our 2017 reds. It will be a typical Washington Bordeaux Blend.  This will be 33% malbec, 16% merlot, 16% cab franc, 16% petit verdot, and 16% syrah.  No significant amount of cab sauv in this one – but Michael has 5 bottles of the 2016 cab that he is going to use for topping off, so that might equate to 1% cab.  🙂

We still have straight malbec, merlot, syrah, and cab franc in the tanks, plus a carboys of petit verdot and tempranillo.   We likely won’t be bottling these until later in the summer before harvest and we need the space.

We also just got our new labels printed thanks to Lore (Leann’s sister)! She took pictures that Leann had taken of frogs on our plants and turned them into cool looking labels.   She’s still working on our new red wine label – hopefully now that the frogs have come out we’ll get some better pictures for her to work with.  Stay tuned.

Cheers!  Leann & Michael

 

Hi everyone,

I know its been awhile since we posted any updates – but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy in the winery.  Today we bottled the 2017 Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, and Rose of Cab Franc. We still have a lot of sauvignon blanc and viognier to bottle in the next couple of weeks.  They’re all looking really pretty and are tasty!

We also bottled our first barrel blend a few months ago and it is very nice.  The next blend that is currently in the barrel should be ready to bottle in another month or so – then its on to figuring out our next blend from the 2017s.

Will keep you posted – cheers!

We’ve begun the bottling of our 2016 white wines.  So far we have 2 cases of muscat, 4 pinot gris, 4.5 of viognier, and 4 of sangiovese rose bottled.  Michael is still doing some adjustments with the sauvignon blanc, so we will likely bottle that the beginning of June.  The chokecherry is coming along as well and we may bottle that in early June too.  All are looking beautiful and tasting great so far.  It should be a terrific summer of wine on the deck – if we can ever get to summer.

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last posted and much has been happening in the winery.  The 2015 wines are tasty. We had a sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, rose, cab franc, malbec, merlot, petit verdot and cab sauv.  The petit verdot was particularly surprising and good.

We had an interesting experience with our apricot wine.  It seemed a little too tart so we added some simple syrup to sweeten it and lessen the acid.  However even with filtering it restarted fermentation and we ended up with some popping corks.  We unbottled everything, which was like pouring out shaken bottles of beer, and let it finish out fermentation again.  For our wine club competition we entered 3 of the apricots of varying levels of sweetness; and the one that we didn’t add any extra sugar to won 1st place.  The sauvignon blanc and cab sauvignon both came in second place.

Michael and Leann, along with friend and fellow winemaker Dawne started on a 3 year process for becoming certified wine judges through the American Wine Society.  We also started a local chapter of the American Wine Society and have had a lot of fun with monthly meetings/tastings.  Our group grows monthly, and anyone is welcome to join.  In November 2016 we attended the AWS National Conference in Costa Mesa, CA.  We had a great time at the conference and passed our 1st year exams for the judging program.  Michael won a bronze metal for his malbec (50/50 2014/2015).

The 2016 wines are coming along nicely.  For whites we have muscat, viognier, sauvignon blanc, and pinot gris.  For reds: cab sauvignon, merlot, and malbec.  We also are doing a sangiovese as both a rose and a full red as part of our wine club competition.  We still have chokecherries in the freezer that need to get started on their wine journey soon.

Things are pretty quiet now with Michael just doing testing and racking.  We should be ready for bottling the whites in April/May.

Hopefully it won’t take me another 18 months to do another post!   Happy tasting!  Leann

The 2014 whites and rose are ready to be bottled and enjoyed for the summer. We have pinot gris, sauvignon blanc, and viognier.  The rose of syrah ended up a little dark – like a light pinot noir, but still tasty.  We’re bottling over memorial day weekend.  And good news on the trouble child syrah – its turning out very nice!

April update….

In my last update, I was retesting the SG, pH, and TA of all my wines and making sure that all of my equipment was truly clean for the season. Well I found out that my syrah had not finished with the primary fermentation; it was “stuck”. I have syrah in three different containers, the specific gravity (SG) readings were, Tank #1 1.010, Tank #2 1.001 and #3 1.006. This is a big spread from the same batch of grapes.

So why was the syrah stuck? I think the main reasons are that the brix were too high, at about 27. I should have watered the wine down to 24. In addition, I was out of town and was not monitoring and feeding the yeast, as I should have been. I quickly made a few calls to confirm what my next step should be, and all agreed that I needed to do a restart.  I have never done a restart before so I went to Winemaker Magazine.com and to Scott Labs.com to find the best procedure. Scott Labs had a good print out for the step-by-step procedure. Both web sites said the same thing but Scott Labs was easier to follow.

I will just give a quick overview of what I did. I am not giving amounts, because they are based on volume of the wine. So my numbers are based on my volumes. First, I added yeast hulls to help remove toxins from the wine 24 to 48 hours before the restart. When yeast struggles to finish due to bad conditions, they produce unwanted compounds in the wine.  After the 48 hours I racked it off the lees. Next, add half as much yeast hulls and start hydrating the yeast. The recommended strain for this is Uvaferm 43.  This is where you need to read the steps carefully because this yeast is going into a low sugar, high alcohol environment and you do not want to overfeed the yeast. The next step is a slow process designed to prevent the yeast from going into shock in this high alcohol low sugar environment.. I mixed a small amount of wine into the yeast and waited 20 min. Then I added 5% of the wine volume and an equal volume of water into the restart bucket and added yeast starter. Wait 30 min add 10% of wine volume, wait 30 min add 20%, and wait 30 min repeat this until all the wine is in the new fermenter. The wine should be warm, about 70° F or more; the range for this yeast is 56-95°F.

I had no clue how long this was going to take or how long it should take. There is no big foaming head, just a few small bubbles each day. However, this is how it went for me and the temperature was about 65-75°F. Make sure to correct for temperature with the hydrometer. Warmer wine is less dense than cold wine and most hydrometers are calibrated to 60° F.

#1 start 1.010, 1 wk,1.008, 2wk 1.007 3wk 1.005

#2 start 1.001, 1wk 0.999, 2wk 0.999, 3wk 0.999

#3 start 1.006, 1wk 1.004, 2wk 1.004, 3wk 1.001

 

Tank #2 got to dry”0.999″,but there is most likely still residual sugar in the wine,  so I quickly put it back into the tank to protect from oxygen.  But what to do about the other two batches of wine? Well, I was planning on making a Cab-Syrah-Merlot blend anyway so I thought, why not now? I had a small blending party to get some input on what percentages to do and this is what we came up with, tank #1 69% Syrah 15% Merlot and 16% Cab Sav. Batch #3 70% Syrah 13%Merlot 17% Cab Sav. Both the Syrah and Cab Sav are 2014 and the Merlot is from 2013. I blended the wines hoping that the blend would drop the SG some more and give it more acid, but wanted to wait a week to give it time to work things out while I was out of town. One week later, it was time to check on the wine and to my surprise, the two blended batches of wine were bubbling away. “It’s fermenting again!”

I had to wait a few more weeks for the bubbling to stop. I now have the results for tank #1 and batch #3. Tank #1 the SG is now 0.995 and a pH of 3.79.  I am adding 50 ppm SO2 and adding tartaric acid in small doses until the pH and taste is where I want them. Batch #3 the SG is now 0.994 with a pH of 3.81, I will do the same as I did with tank #1 with the SO2 and acid.

I am not sure what the future will be for tank #2. I need to buy a clinitest to test how much residual sugar is still in the wine.  I may bottle some of it as an almost off dry wine and save the rest for blending with next year’s grapes. If I do that, I will add it before new grapes are done fermenting so that any sugar in the syrah can be converted.