Shadow Springs Vineyard’s wine are made at our winery we call The Yadkin Valley Wine Company.  The YVWC opened in the summer of 2007 and has the capacity of around 10,000 cases of wine.  We have the ability to manage the complete winemaking processing from receiving grapes to bottling completed wine in this winery.  It is truly a state-of-the-art facility.

 

Shadow Springs’s wines are made under the direction of our winemaker Mr. Kent Egon Smith.  Kent is original from Georgia and holds a degree in Enology and a minor in Chemistry from California State University, Fresno.  Kent has also received the Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) certification.  Kent is a strong believer in making the wine as complex as he can.  This is done by using different barrel profiles, toast levels, different strains of yeast and other winemaking practices.  Wines are then blended together to make a perfect vintage. 

 

Winemaker’s Corner, Spring/Summer 2010

 

Spring is a time of blending and bottling in the winery. By this time, we’ve already bottled most of the white wines from the previous crush. It’s time to finish with the crisp stainless steel fermented white wines and start with the oak barrel fermented whites. It’s also time to start pulling barrels of red wine out of the barrel room and start working on those blends.

 

When you’re blending wine to bring out the best flavors, you need to put aside your personal preference and think about your customers. What do they want in this wine? An example is that I don’t care for sweet wines, but some of my customers love them. So when coming up with a sweetness level on a particular wine, I may go well past my threshold of enjoyment.  If you blended or sweetened every wine to your own taste, they would all taste the same, right?

 

I really enjoy blending the dry red wines. It’s fun but tough. You want to smell and taste as much as possible so that you get the mix right, but you don’t want to fatigue your pallet too quickly either. You have to pace yourself during these sessions. I usually try to drink water in between sips, and clear my smells by sniffing the water (it really works). I take notes and once I’ve made a decision, I don’t go back to keep smelling. Repeated smelling of the same thing is a quick pallet killer and will make you useless during the rest of the session.

 

It’s also a good idea not to eat or drink anything for an hour before a tasting. I try not to eat any spicy foods the night before blending trials. And, even if you take these precautions you still might have an off day every now and then. That’s why the best idea is to have a team of people that decide on the final wine blend. Then if one person is having an off day, you don’t come up with an off wine.

5543 Crater Road, Hamptonville, North Carolina  27020  |  336-468-5000  |  E-mail Us