Fabbioli Cellars

Dear Friends,

The Daze of May

Spring has arrived strongly. More to do and less time to do it. Am I farming, winemaking, marketing or consulting? Yes. Alright, that is enough complaining, back to work.

Here is the column that I wrote for the Old Town Crier. Enjoy this, and there is more at the bottom.

What is the weather impact? The month of April 2007has posted some challenges and losses for all of the growers in the East. We all received a cold snap April 5-9 but only the vines that had green, exposed buds were hurt. This was about ¾ of the state. Only Northern VA and the Shenandoah Valley were spared. This is the case because of a weird snowy spell back in March that made the vines think it was too early to come out. We had no green tissue exposed, so hopefully have come out with undamaged vines. The vines that were damaged will push green buds again, but will produce less than half of the quantity of fruit.

Pre bottling: I have some wines going into the bottle in a couple of weeks, so now is the time to get ready. The label designs and verbiage have been approved by the government and are being printed this week. I had a blending session with some customers and fellow winery people to decide the final blends. Being satisfied with the blends, we worked yesterday to pump out the barrels in the right ratio and blend the wines together into the tanks. Tomorrow I will be ordering bottles, capsules and corks. The bigger wineries will order many packaging materials at once with custom designs and colors, but I have been too busy making wine to design fancier packages. Stock will do for now. I use a mobile bottler, which is a bottling line inside a truck trailer. The truck will show up on a scheduled day, we will bottle the wine, and then the operator and truck leave for the next winery. He is so good at his job that he has very little time in his schedule to come back if I have a problem with the wine or package. I have 600 cases to bottle that day and I need everything to work right.

Blending: How can I describe this process? Each grape varietal has different characters that show themselves in the wine. The soils and climate will affect these characters along with actions of the vineyard manager and winemaker. Each batch of wine is kept separate from the vineyard all the way through the aging process. I may have 3 or 4 batches of Cabernet Franc to blend along with a little Tannat, Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. As a painter would use a variety of colors to paint a sunset, the winemaker can use other wines to accent, add complexity and round out the end product. The blending is done with graduated cylinders, pipettes, a calculator and the infamous method of trial and error to find the right mix. The key to all of this is to have great wines to start with and that goes back to the vineyard and growing good fruit.

My definition of a good wine: The terroir (sense of place) and varietal character should express itself in the final blend and the human involvement should be hardly noticeable. The marketing description of the wine should match the liquid to a point that you, as the consumer, drink what you think you bought.

Futures of 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon: For those of you who took advantage of this (and you know who you are), the labels are on the bottles and the wine is ready to be picked up. Call me if you are out this way, come by on the Farm Tour Weekend, May 19 and 20 or we can hook up soon. This wine will be a limited release at $32 per bottle now as we only made a barrel.

Bottling: If the labels are on the bottle, that must mean that Maureen did a great job in designing labels (she did), and that my fratello Joe Sullivan came by with his truck and was able to put together all of the pieces: wine, bottle, cork, capsule and label. There are 3 mobile bottling trucks working here in VA and we need another 1 or 2 for our growing industry. Joe runs the best truck by far because of his style and ambition to do it right and timely. I am telling you about this because I get very concerned when great people are overworked. Our industry is feeling growing pains of needing good qualified people to make thing happen. There are 3 winemakers needed here in Loudoun County alone. I can train people when I have time and the right people to teach. Winery owners need to recognize that we winemakers are moody artists sometimes who truly have their best interests in mind: great quality wine. Changing winemakers can be very costly to quality and to the bank account. Keep your winemaker and bottler happy. They are key to making a business successful.

Festivals: Ben and I worked the James River Wine Festival the weekend of April 28-29. I have always talked about “festival wines” with a bit of negativity. Sweeter wines, served cold, lower priced for people who are just looking to consume for the day. You guys have taught me that there is opportunity at these wine festivals to sell my kind of wines. There certainly are those consumers looking to buy a wine for the day, but I was very pleased to find a large number of people looking for dryer, better wines that they will bring home to drink as well as buy later from the wine shops. I see the festivals as a way to contact the people that want to find “their” VA wine. They will go buy it at the local store, visit the tasting room or buy it off the Internet.