Dear Colorado Wine Club Member,

Crush is in the air, and an interesting growing season is coming to a close.  It’s was very hot early in the summer, then unusually wet in the six weeks or so prior to full veraison.  For those growers who are on top of their game, powdery mildew is easy to control.  If you get caught off guard, though, it can prove fairly difficult and damaging; especially with those midnight thunderstorms we were getting in late August and early September.  No doubt we’ll have some great wines from this challenging season, but we’ll just see how hard they are to find.  Rest assured we’ll be doing our best to find the best there is in Colorado.

Enclosed are your Wine Club bottles.  This month’s wines for the Vintner’s Choice Colorado Wine Club are:

2006 Pinot Gris, Sutcliffe Vineyards  

This wine is very unusual in a fun and tasty way.  Pinot Gris is the French name for Pinot Grigio, and is usually made into a white wine.  In this case, Ben Parsons from Sutcliffe Vineyards gave the wine a little extra hang time on the vines, a little extra time on the skins, and followed up with a goodly dose of barrel aging in new oak.  The result is a lightly pink, eye opening experience of unique deliciousness.  When I tasted the wine, something entirely unexpected hit my palate.  I asked Ben what it was, and when he told me, the light went on instantly . . . watermelon.  It’s the word you use when singing in a group and you don’t know the words to the song, and it’s what you taste when Ben gets creative with Pinot Gris.  Enjoy!

2006 Zero Below, Whitewater Hill Vineyards

This is a fine example of a dessert wine.  It’s a Late Harvest Chardonnay with 14.8% residual sugar.  The grapes were harvested at 29.5 brix, which is very sweet.  FYI, Brix is measured in degrees and is approximately equivalent to percent sugar.  It is usually measured with a hydrometer, which floats higher or lower depending on the quantity of solids dissolved in the liquid.  Dissolved solids, in grape juice are almost all sugar, produced by the vines using sunlight as the original energy source.  Residual sugar, which is what’s left after the fermentation is over or is stopped by the winemaker, is about 15% in this wine.  That’s sweet enough to put on French Toast.

As always, enjoy the wines in good health!

Sincerely,

Glenn & Natalie Foster