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Winemaking Tips: Blending, Fining, and Filtering

by Benjamin Spencer

It’s almost a cliché – the image of the winemaker sitting in some kind of laboratory perfecting the blend for a final wine. In truth, it’s much more hands on. Wine is made in the cellar, after all, using tried and true methods and careful handling.

For the commercial winery, the selections of barrels for blending can be very arbitrary – a final quantity taking precedence over a final quality. The micro-winery has a much greater incentive to strive for quality, having limited resources from which to create a final blend.  

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Loren Sonkin

An attorney by day and a full time wine enthusiast, Loren focuses on Italian wines for IntoWine.com

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Recent Articles for Wine Experts

The IntoWine.com Annual “Top 100 Most Influential People in the U.S. Wine Industry" – 2012

by Michael Cervin

People love lists; they can be a great source of education and discussion. But making a list such as this is not an easy process. Who are the most influential wine people in the U.S., and how exactly do you define ‘influential?’ Does influential mean people who move markets, impact consumers, inspire winemakers, and create debate? In a word, yes. These 100 people, from winemakers to law makers, bankers to bloggers, and sommeliers to celebrities are definitely people who influence wine; how it is made, marketed, perceived, sold, shipped, purchased and shared.

As this is the first annual IntoWine.com list, we hope that it will help educate you about the wonderful world of wine right here in America. To help assemble this list we asked for suggestions from a lot of people, many of whom are named here, though they did not name themselves (well, OK, one guy did). We are grateful for all the help we received in compiling this. And we chose to release it today, January 29th, as it was on this day in 1919 when the lunatic policy of Prohibition was ratified on a national level. So to honor winemakers, wine drinkers and wine lovers of every conceivable demographic, we hope you use this list, comment on it, share it and learn from it, and continue  to enjoy being into wine!

100-Bill Knight: of The Wine House in Los Angeles opened his doors 35 years ago and has been a destination for savvy wine buyers ever since. Revenues hit $20 million in 2011 and 45% of their wine sales are California wines. Knight competes against the major U.S. retail chains in his market by focusing on service, and he eschews selling private labels or direct imports. To round out the customer experience they started Upstairs 2, a restaurant on the second floor with small plates and 50 wines by the glass. They continue wine classes, wine and food pairings, and winemakers dinners with tremendous success.

Q&A with Richard Sanford, Owner and Winemaker at Alma Rosa

by Michael Cervin

Santa Barbara wine pioneer Richard Sanford is among the inductees into the 2012 Vintners Hall of Fame. Sanford started one of the first modern wineries south of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982 and for several decades, his Sanford Winery and Vineyards was the lone outpost in the now-sizzling Santa Rita Hills area of Santa Barbara County. He was the first winemaker to prove the potential for Pinot Noir in the Santa Rita Hills and spent the next 20 years making some of the best regarded Pinots from the region including bottlings from arguably his best vineyard, Rinconada. Sanford left his namesake winery in 2005 and founded Alma Rosa Winery & Vineyards in Lompoc.

What prompted you to pursue winemaking as a career? If not winemaking, what path would you have chosen?

Upon returning from military service in Vietnam in 1968 I wanted to pursue an activity more connected with the land. During my tenure in the Navy I had been introduced to a wonderful Volnay by a fellow naval officer. That became my inspiration to pursue a career in agriculture and I chose winegrowing to attempt to duplicate the quality of that wine. After 40 years as a winegrower I cannot imagine any other path.

Q&A with Ernst Loosen of Dr. Loosen Rieslings

by Michael Cervin

If there is one international name associated with Riesling it is Loosen. Ernst Loosen is the owner of Weingut Dr. Loosen, located in the Mosel wine region in Germany, a family winery dating back over 200 years. He has won accolades such as "Riesling of the Year" and “German Winemaker of the Year”, by the German wine press, and he was selected as "Man of the Year" by Decanter Magazine, and Wine & Spirits called him one of the “World’s 50 Most Influential Winemakers. In 1999 he launched a joint Riesling project with Chateau St. Michelle in Washington State, Eroica, which has helped ignite Riesling sales in the U.S.

You actually were heading into the archeology field. What prompted you to pursue winemaking as a career?

Well, I was studying archaeology at the University of Mainz, but I’m not so sure that I would ever have gone into it as a profession. At least, that’s what my brothers and sisters said when our father fell seriously ill and someone needed to take over the family wine estate. I was quite interested in Roman archaeology, especially since there is so much Roman history right here in the Mosel, but someone had to take on the winery or my mother was going to sell off the vineyards. My older siblings were already in careers, and the younger ones too young. So it was me or nobody. I certainly have no regrets, though. They were quite right that I really had no prospects in archaeology as a profession, and it was agreed that I would have full control of how the wine estate was managed. It had always been more of a hobby for my father and I wanted to do a better job with the great vineyards we had.

Wines to Go Buy This Week: "Comfort Wines" - A Zinfandel by Glenn Hawk and Tulip Hill's Cabepulciano (yeah you read that right)

by Brad Prescott

I live in San Francisco and January weather here means 50 degrees and rain. Constant bone-chilling rain, or so it seems. And before the rest of America emails to remind me how good I have it and how freaking cold it is in New York or Ohio or whatever other frozen tundra they call home, I'm just gonna say that when you are cold, you are cold, and comfort food -and comfort wine- goes a long way towards warming your heart when Old Man Winter starts to have his way with you. So with this in mind, I bring you two comfort wines you should go buy this week.   

Glenn Hawk Zinfandel - I typically don't gravitate to Zinfandel. I associate Zins with "cocktail wines", that is, wines that are delicious for a few sips of a single glass but can be a bit too fruity and overwhelming for those of us who tend towards enjoying multiple glasses. So I don't recommend many Zinfandels simply because I don't drink many of them. Every once in a while I stumble back down the Zinfandel path and am reminded of how good the varietal can be. I recently tried the 2009 Glenn Hawk Zinfandel from Livermore Valley (just south of Napa in the shadow of Mt. Diablo).

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