March, 2009
Has Bialla Vineyards gone crazy? Is the stock market getting to the owners or is there some rationale for doing the unthinkable??
First a short word on making wine the way the best wineries do it.
We all know fruit gets harvested some by hand but mostly by machine.
Bialla Vineyards and most upscale wineries harvest by hand, ok so now what? Once picked the fruit goes in to a machine known as a de-stemmer and then a shaker table, and then dumped in to a bin and so on in other words the fruit really gets slapped around and manhandled. It becomes abused by metal, machines, tossed from here to there. If you think treating fruit gently is something irrelevant think again. Imagine strawberries going through a process like that you'd have Jam on the other end at the end of the day.
So we researched the ancient ways of making wine and guess what?
They didn't do mass production and it was all done by hand. Sorry to say but Syria and Egypt had a whole slave trade going who became experts in making wine by hand. We think making wine 100% by hand can only improve our ultimate goal of making better wine than anyone else. So instead of imitating other wineries, yes we did our homework. We are now going to lead and do what nobody to our knowledge is doing and that is de-stem our fruit by hand and do so for 100% of our harvest in 2009. Instead of using slaves we will employ some very skilled workers and maybe even help the economy :-)
We are also happy to share the secrets of our inventions by revealing we hired Stephen Koster who is considered the best winery process consultant in Napa, if not in the world. Stephen was our hardest critic and skeptic but finally came around after discovering one tiny winery in France which de-stems by hand.
Next - what might be newsworthy - we decided to see if we are too big for our britches and have entered a real world championships of wine tasting and that is the Decanter World Wine Awards. Decanter is the largest and most prestigious wine publication of its kind, sold in 92 countries. This annual blind tasting world championship has entries in excess of 9000 wines from all around the globe and last year they had one Cab out of Napa - I repeat one, only one - that won a gold medal. We aren't worried about competition or winning anything but this type of exercise gives you feedback and our goal, as you know, is to make the best wine ever. We will never be satisfied and if we do get a score of 100 from the wine spectator we'll ask Jim Laube to raise the rating chart to 105.
There are two tastings that are off the radar and you need to know about. The first is on April 11th at Silenus Vintners - not announced yet but put it on your calendar. We sell our wine there, have a tasting room and Bialla will be exclusively featured and poured on the 11th. Grab your kids and Easter eggs come hang out play bocce ball and enjoy the wine country. It will be a great event for sure.
Separate notices will come out soon. Be sure to put this date on your calendar.
Second is the first annual tasting at Acme Fine Wines in St. Helena on April 25th. You can meet our winemaker Craig Maclean and Heidi Barrett, David Stevens and Karen Williams the owners of Acme and many other serious indigenous Napa cult personalities.
We still have a little 2006 Bialla Cabernet Sauvignon left but inventory is approaching painfully low levels therefore we ask you honor our request not to exceed a half case purchase per customer.
http://biallavineyards.com/store
As always thank you for sharing our passion,
Vito & Linda Bialla