Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of pouring at the Haut Les Vins Tasting at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden.

It is the first time we have poured our wines at an event in Europe and I was a bit nervous. The event focused on terroir driven, European wine makers, many making incredible wine. I was unsure how our wines would be received, how the label would be received and how easy it would be to talk about our wines considering I know not a single word of Swedish. (And, for that matter, how the wines traveled having flown from SFO to Stockholm just 36 hours ahead of the event.)

As the event started, I marveled at the room. Trade wine events are often held in large hotels - but this one had a bit more history than I am used to . The event was extremely well organized - names tags with color codes to understand who you were talking with for example (Importer, Retail or Restaurant ).

And it went well for us. Many people in the trade enjoyed the wines - several restaurants will take the wine as soon as it makes it to Sweden. And, most importantly, I hope to announce a Swedish and Finnish importers soon.

I am just learning about taking photos with my new phone - a Droid. So these didn't turn out great but I think you will get the idea.

Labels: Grand Tasting, Sweden, Syrah

If you have a taste box, now you can taste with us. Just get four glasses and label them with each wine using a dry erase marker. After that, sit down and watch the video.

Peter Liem's recent column about un-grafted vines in Wine and Spirits is worth a read. (Found via Eric Asimov's blog. )

We often make this same comparison between native yeasts and commercial yeasts. The native yeast is not a single species - various yeasts compete. Each vineyard clearly has its own flora. Thinking about the article made me wonder if it was actually even closer to talk about nutrients. Products like Fermaid ensure safe, complete fermentation. They also make sure that any nutrient lacking in the terroir is provided. Thinking in terms of cheese, imagine a Rochefort producer taking her sheep's milk and adding nutrients to make sure it was like velveeta.

At some point, it would be fun to try wines, from the same vineyard, made with ungrafted vs grafted vines, no added yeast, added yeast, no nutrients, added nutrients.

Anyway, if you want to try a bottle of ungrafted Chardonnay, pick up our Brousseau Chardonnay. The vines are ungrafted. And in late 2010, we will release a chardonnay from Anderson Valley which may be called "un-tended". It is from old, un-grafted chardonnay without any of the typical vineyard work. Our first effort (or perhaps lack of effort) at finding what true terroir, following, however inadvertently, the work of Masanobu Fukuoka.

We are starting to take pre-orders for our Holiday Sampler pack - a combination of wine samples, killer chocolate and full bottles. You can learn more about it at adonkeyandgoat.com/holiday_sampler

Yesterday, we got another great review. As always, I like the note more than the score. But I can't complain about the 93...

Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar
Donkey & Goat
By Josh Raynolds

Nov/Dec 09

2007 A Donkey and Goat Winery Chardonnay Brosseau Vineyard Chalone

($45) Bright, slightly cloudy gold. Strikingly complex aromas of poached pear, Meyer lemon, iodine, mint and herbs, with hints of grapefruit rind and smoky minerals. Deeply concentrated, sappy and stony citrus and orchard fruit flavors stain the palate and are complemented by notes of anise, herbs and smoky lees. Really wild stuff, with excellent balance, precision and nervy minerality. The extremely long, dusty finish repeats the grapefruit, iodine and anise notes and clings with excellent grip and clarity. This is one of the more distinctive New World chardonnays I've tasted in a long time. 93pts

With harvest winding down, we have started to spend much more time tasting the wine.

As mentioned early, we made four barrels of Roussanne on their skins. Each wine was made in a different style and now the barrels are each tasting wonderful on their own way. It is popular to classify these wines as "orange" but I don't actually like the name. The reason, orange suggests a color and ours are clear. Skin contact doesn't equate to orange color.

We fermented these is 550 liter open top wood fermentors that have beed used for red wines. One was made 100% whole cluster - we just dumped the sorted grapes in. It is currently tasting the most interesting. There is a wonderful combination of clean fruit (carbonic maceration - not cold) and intense tannins.

One was made with Ver Jus to increase the acidity. We do this we our Chardonnay and wanted to see how it would work with the Roussanne. Tasted last week, the acidity is vivid. It leaps out of the glass - almost like something from the Alps. Crisp - reminds me of a cool fall day since there are undertones of earth.

The other two had variable punch downs and each show aspects of the grape and terroir. All 4 barrels show a bit of grapefruit - which is what we see every year. The grapefruit is less intense then in previous years which leads me to a question - have we lost some of the uniqueness of this site by switching to another winemaking style? One could argue that we are intervening less with this style but is that really the case?

I am thinking of calling this wine Stone-crusher (mining term since this is gold country after all) or maybe after a rapid since you can occasionally hear rafters going for an inadvertent swim when in this vineyard.

The other day Tracey copied me on an email dialog about our wines and thoughts on natural, organic and biodynamic. It's a pretty good manifesto so I thought I'd share on our blog. Tracey writes... "We make our wines for the table not the cocktail glass. We make Rhône varietals in both colors plus an unusual Chardonnay. We (my husband and winemaking partner Jared and I) strive to make wine as naturally as possible. We've done so since day one. Of late, natural is fashionable, which we do of course appreciate, but the reality is we've done this from the start because we feel it makes a superior wine while aligning with our environmental objectives.

We pick early, often weeks before anyone else considers it. Our whites are frequently at and under 13 and some of our reds are at/near 13.5 (both directions). Many of our vineyards are cool climate - we grow Syrah in Anderson Valley in order to get profile we want at a low alcohol. That said, we also don't adjust alcohol to meet our goals. We have seen our wines end up higher in alcohol than other wineries in the same vineyard (who picked later) because we let the native yeast do their thing and don't add water or use reverse osmosis. So, yes we would love to make under 12.5 wines but to make wines naturally at that alc in California is impossible. We believe alcohol is a byproduct of our winemaking decisions and we try to live with the repercussions of our decisions rather than cover them up after the fact.

We have vineyards that are organic and even have a new one that was effectively abandoned - closer to the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka. Biodynamic is very interesting to us but we are hesitant to adopt a management system that is dependent on copper sulfate due to health concerns. We are not alone in these. Alice Feiring blogged about Eric Texier's thoughts around this last Feb here: http://www.alicefeiring.com/feiringsquad/misc/fukuoka_of_char.html We have also strived to find vineyard managers who share our overall concern with the environment and desire for growing natural wine grapes. We struggle with doctrine that ignores excess and risks simply because it was determined to be okay for THAT doctrine. The religious analogies are so plentiful that I won't bother but I'm sure you get the idea. When it comes to dogma, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In the winery, we are extremely careful with our winemaking to ensure we encourage but not manipulate the wines expression of origin (terroir and varietal). We also make decisions to ensure our wines belong on the table with food and not in cocktail glass in advance of anything edible. That means we pick based on flavor and acid. We ignore brix. We picked Syrah this year at 21.5 brix and it is gorgeous. We also picked Syrah at 23 brix and it is equally gorgeous. In both cases we were examining acid structure and flavors.

We ferment all wines (red and white) in wood vats. This is so key and no one is talking about the vast amounts of small lot wine made in plastic in this country. We abandoned plastic in our personal lives when we had our daughter and discovered the extensive research around chemicals like BPA leaching into liquids. We NEVER considered a square plastic bin for fermentation because it's plastic and it's entirely the wrong dimension for vinification and IT IS plastic. But look in most US wineriers and you will find a square plastic vat with fermenting must.

We add nothing at the vat after crush save the occasional miniscule dose of SO2 if we have a rainy year where rot is an issue. That means no enzymes to enhance color and extraction, no tannin, no commercial yeast, no nutrients to feed the super yeast and 95% of the time no SO2 (until after MLF completes). We can control temperature via manipulating ambient temperature with a refrigerated container and warm rooms within the winery. That's it. For the labor it's all manual. Picking. Sorting. Foot stomping. Punch down. Our hands are in the wine each day and we taste each day and the only time we've ever had a problem was in 2004 when we inoculated a few vats as an experiment to prove our wild yeast preference. The inoculated vats had stuck fermentations and we later dumped the wine rather than fall down the slippery slope of additions to correct additions (we dumped the equivalent of 50 cases). That is one of the problems we have with inoculations. Winemakers choose cultured yeast for various attributes that include performance and aromatic profile. But the lab yeast need huge amounts of food. So the regimen becomes, kill the microbial life with SO2 & Lysozyme, add super yeast, add vitamins and nitrogen (DAP or diammonium phosphate being very popular) to feed these hungry microbes. Then hope the yeast don't put off any off aromas like H2S because of the imbalance in their diet. If they do, add Copper. Then rack and filter and add more SO2... it never stops. And don't get me started on the great irony of adding vast amounts of DAP to the vat to feed yeast. Guess which yeast also LOVES DAP and for that matter any additive rich in thiamin. Read the ingredients on most wine additives and you'll see thiamin at the front. That would be brettanomyces, the dark angel.

Back to us, we complete primary with just wild yeast sometime near the end of the year although in warmer years like this one I expect to be done going into December. MLF is also natural or with wild bacteria. This is easy for us because we do not buy ANY new oak barrels. We buy a supply of 1 year old barrels each year from a single source (relevant for cleanliness) and rotate them in. Our lots see from zero to 35% one year old barrels. As a result we have plenty of Lactobacillus in our used barrels so again, no inoculation, no nutrients and no problems. We have one wine (our Brosseau Vineyard Chardonnay) that does not complete and rarely starts MLF. We do not kill the wine with SO2 and we do not filter. The pH on the wine is in the 3.1-3.2 range which is a natural prohibitor of MLF and we've never had a problems with bottle ferm and been making this wine since 2003. We do make it in an unusual manner. Again back to France. Eric taught us a trick he uses in warmer years. Pick the vineyard twice and blend to lift acidity. It's that simple. The first pick happens to be hugely unusual at veraison but still, pretty simple. You can get a better idea of this here: http://www.inwinecountry.com/?cat=5970254&subcat=5038749&video=218. Oh, and that is an organic vineyard.

The rest I'll just list and save you the rationale given my dense email. We stay sur lie until the wines tell us not too (no prophylactic racking or micro oxygenation). We do not clarify or heat/cold stabilize and we almost never fine or filter. On the occasions we have we've labeled accordingly.

I do hope if nothing else I've managed to convey we are hugely passionate about what we are doing and why we are doing it."

when we don't post for over a month. Isabel has been helping at the winery this year. She knows how to wrap fermentors for sulfur candles, lower the press tray using the down control on the forklift when we need to place it back on the trolley (it takes two, one to lower, one to move the trolley) and punchdown. Here she is last night wearing pink, working hard.