Wine Blending with Classic Winemakers!
6 Apr
As promised, my topic of discussion today is about wine. I love wine in all its many forms, varietals, countries… but I digress.
Last weekend, I took the BF and a Living Social coupon down to Lacey to partake in a “wine blending” experience at Classic Winemakers. As a lover of wine, I was very excited at the possibility of creating my OWN personal wine variety. I wasn’t sure if I would be good at this, or if my friends would even want to try my wine afterward, but my expectations were completely blown out of the water!! This was soooo much fun.
When we arrived at the winery in Lacey, we were immediately greeted and given the chance to explore the premises (we were about 10 minutes early). We then began tasting the four red wine varietals that we would be blending a bit later in the day. We tried a pinot noir, syrah, merlot and cabernet sauvignon – all from local Northwest growers.
Next, we were taken into a small back room with several taps on the wall. Unbeknownst to me, you can actually dispense wine from a carbonated tap! How cool is that? After a couple of wine “splurts” – it came out quite powerfully! – we were able to pour one more of each type of wine and were given a syringe and four LARGE wine glasses.
From there, the wine guy explained to us how most wine blends are created. Often they are a 70/30 or 80/20 blend, but American wineries have begun experimenting with 40/40/20 blends, and even some with less quantity of more types (think 5 percent of a bunch of different wines). The wine guy noted that when people add 5 percent of a wine variety, they are really just trying to influence the color of the finished product, as it’s typically not enough wine to make much of a flavor difference.
Moving on, we took our syringe and began measuring out the wine in small quantities in the bigger glasses. We took notes about the amount and type of wine blend each glass held and tasted and tasted and tasted and tasted. Oops! There I go daydreaming again.
After we decided on our perfect new blend (40 cab/40 syrah/20 pinot), we were given six clean, empty bottles of wine. We filled each with the appropriate levels of wines and took them out to the corking station. We were even able to choose our own color of cork and applied the foil wrapper at the top. Before we headed down to the winery, I had even sent in a custom wine bottle label – via Picnik – which we placed on the bottles as a nice, personalized finishing touch!
Overall, this was a fantastic experience! When I get married someday, I will definitely be headed back down to Lacey to create my own wedding wine. Classic Winemakers does provide wine blending classes even if you do not have a Living Social or Groupon deal. They also do custom batches of wine in groups of 15 or 30 bottles, which would be ideal for weddings or gatherings or any other reason you need to make your own wine!
So, get your pearly white teeth down to Lacey and get your wine tasting on! In addition to wowing your friends with your amazing blending abilities, you’ll leave with a perfectly purple tinted grill to prove you had fun!
Have you tried wine blending? I would love to hear how your batch turned out, or any other similar businesses I should check out. Also, here are a few more pics from the experience (sorry for the low quality… I forgot my camera, so these are all taken on my phone!)
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