Scouting & Sourcing
Scouting & Sourcing
Quality fruit is key to making quality wine. I work with established estate vineyards and grower contracts, help a client pick the best varietals for their land or climate, and help make sure that the highest quality fruit is used to produce your wine.
- Visit the client’s vineyards to ascertain that the grape source/ vineyard management is consistent with the winery’s goals for quality
- Determine potential gems within a vineyard site that can be used to create reserve tier wines
- Communicate with growers: Work with the grower and the buyer, make sure that the highest quality fruit reaches the winery
- Harvest sampling & calling a pick
- Schedule and logistics of fruit picking and fruit receival
Harvesting & Winemaking
Harvesting & Winemaking
Provide a way for wineries to bring in expertise when and where they need it on a part time basis. This includes providing suggestions on how to improve various aspects of making the wine during harvest or the entire year.
- Work as a liaison between client & custom crush facilities
- Prescribe fermentation monitoring and treatment
- Examine all winemaking SOPs. Work with winemaking staff to develop and implement new protocols if necessary
- Experience with hands-on micro-lots to tank-processed mega-lots
- Correcting musts pre-ferment
- Monitor wines during fermentation daily
- Determine press protocols for optimal flavor extraction
- Work with winery staff to monitor malo-lactic fermentation, barrel aging, and lot selection for various programs by tier.
Aging & Blending
Aging & Blending
Enhance the style of the wines that have been established by the winery or help the winery create a new style. This involves understanding the story that the owner wants the wine to tell.
- Review barrel programs and help the client have wood sources and oak aging that work with the wine style
- Blend new wine or existing inventory to take the quality to another level
- Select and assist in the buying of wine on the bulk market…
- Improve fruit profile, color stability, overall complexity and positive mouthfeel characteristics
- Guide tasting trials
- Finish a wine to prepare it for bottling and aging
- Be at winery for bottling to insure wines and packaging all are at expected standards.