On Saturday, August 21, a group of wine lovers showed up at Vintners Own Winery to create a wine profile for a barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon. The barrel sharing group recently bought a full barrel from our winery, which will be bottled with a custom label and shared among its members in 2012. The wine profile is the first step in the winemaking process, where clients sit down with Vintners Own winemakers to conceptualize a blueprint for their customized wine.
Saturdays barrel sharing group was co-organized by Bob Scheidemann and Steve Bergman, two Houstonian's who work in the oil and gas industry. Steve has been interested in red wine tasting for the last 30 years and in 2005 taught a class at UT Dallas called 'The Geology of Wine' which explored the effect of terroir on grapes.
"I had independently been searching for a suitable winemaking entrepreneur when Bob told me about finding Vintners Own," Steve said. Bob and Steve are both members of a Merlot barrel sharing team which they got together in 2009. After testing the waters with a Merlot, they assembled another team to create a Cabernet Sauvignon.
"Our group consists of colleagues and friends who all share a passion for drinking good wine, and for many of us, getting to lift the hood and learn all the art and science involved is a real joy," Steve said.
The groups first goal on Saturday was to reach a consensus for the Cabernet blueprint. They decided to bring in five familiar brands of beloved Cabernet to narrow down possible characteristics in their wine, such as alcohol content and acidity. The five bottles, which came from the Napa and Sonoma regions included: Chalk Hill, Freemark Abbey and Sequoia Grove.
The different types of wine were put up to an olympic style blind taste test and voted on. Blind taste tests which are conducted by Soda companies (think Pepsi and Coke) Vodka companies and wineries are often used to determine which product is most favored by a panel of voters. The 'blind' part of the test was conducted to weed out favoritism and biases toward one particular brand. The winner of the test on Saturday was Sequoia Grove Cabernet, Vintage 2005.
After the blind taste test, profiling began to further define the groups desired characteristics in their barrel. During profiling, structure of wine is separated into distinct categories, such as sweetness, tartness, dryness, mouth feel and color depth. Not to mention flavors such as: earthy, woody, caramel, nutty, hebacious spicy and floral. The group chose, on a scale of 1-5, how prominent these features will be in their Cabernet. Other decisions such as yeast type, tannin level and oak blend were also chosen. The winemakers at Vintners Own will use this blueprint to create a customized wine for the Olympics of Cabernet group.