2009 Vintage

In 2007 & 2008, we continued to manage the vineyard ourselves and picked between 1.75 and 2 tons which we again sold to Clos Tita. 2009 was our first vintage we processed in our own new winery We picked slightly over 2 tons of which we sold 0.8 tons to Kathryn Kennedy winery. Then we tried our luck in making our first wine. We have no pictures from the picking, only from destemming the bunches and crushing the berries; and from punching down the cap during fermentation. We bottled our first wine in March 2012

1 Greg Martin with a bucket of grapes

2 Steve Rossi and Greg Martin

3 me getting bucket to poor into destemmer

4 Aran Healy watching berries fall into fermentation tank

5 Grapes in the fermentation tank

2009 Crush

The 2009 Crush represented the first opportunity to test or destemmer and fermentation tank. Note the destemmer sits directly on top of the fermentation tank; there is no berry sorting.

1 Standing on top of termentation tank

2 Punching down cap

Punch down

Punching down the cap in the first fermentation tank, after the destemmer was removed, was a balancing act

1 Filling the bottles

2 Putting in the cork

3 Adjusting the cork depth setting

4 Voila – the first bottle of CH

Bottling the 2009 Vintage

The fermented wine spent 2 ½ years in barrels until we decided it was ready for bottling in March of 2012. We racked each barrel into a steel tank and bottled each seperately – two regular barrels and a half barrel. This was a 1-man show with no help.

Previous page: 2006 Vintage
Top of page: Go
Next Page: 2010 Vintage
Last updated: January 4, 2016