Good Morning!

I have the great fortune to be involved in a circle of amazing home winemakers. This all start back 12-13 years ago when I still lived in Indiana. There are people all over the world making wine. Wine can be made out of anything that can decompose, I know how gross that sounds but stay with me on this, I promise you might expand your mind and palette a bit.

OK, so my first winemaking class the winemaker says, If something can rot, you can make wine….I almost fainted. But once I took a step back and started thinking about it he is right. I thought about my friends who’s dad’s used to make some weird hooch in their basement and garages growing up. Many of us were raised on or around farms and My parents had a 3 acre apple orchard and we made cider every year. We had pears and we also had an acre garden with any veggie known to man, so I could have been making wine as a kid, I just did not connect the dots.

Then I heard how if you go to jail and you would take your orange juice and put it in a dark spot for ten days then pull the “top layer” off, the juice that was left would rock you out of your socks! Hahaha, I hope to never have to try that. Anyway, wine is really yeast and fruit working against each other. Natural yeast is flying all in the environment and if you took any fruit and just burst the skin or peel or outside to expose some of the flesh, the yeast will grab on and yeast will find the nature a sugars, fructose, and once those two meet, well, the yeast will turn the sugar in to alcohol and the process is on.

So back to wine, once I met some other winemakers we started sharing resources, like tanks, barrels, fruit ( Like raspberries, currants etc), then I met folks who were working with grapes and not just concord grapes making sweet wines. We wold pool our money and buy riesling, chardonnay, zinfandel, cabernet, barolo you name it we were machines. The really cool thing was how expereimental some of these guys would get. At first I wanted to only make the veritial of that grape, then we started each one of us making a batch, bringing in the wines and tasting, then we would start blending. One batch I made was half Viognier and half zinfandel, it looked like a blush wine but it was dry, everyone there LOVED it. The real test was to take it to my friends and see what they thought, those fools took one look and thought I was making White Zin and decided they did not want sweeter wines….I would have been mad but I had 3 cases all for myself!

We would trade wines all the time make 4 cases each and then trade with each other. I loved the fellowship and going to someone’s garage in February and tasting and catching up with life was awesome.

When I moved to California, these folks are not joking. These people have bought property and they are managing a backyard filled with 15 year old zines and when we would barrel taste, I have had much better wines from a garage than most tasting rooms in the world will ever offer.

So the next time you are offered some “Homemade” wine, try it. You might just be surprised! That is how I got started…you might be witnessing something really special.

Much LOVE and wine,
Cheers, Tammi

Good Morning,

This week is going to be AWESOME. I am headed to Sacramento for the UNIFIED Grape and Wine Symposium. I have never been to this event. It will have an exhibit hall with 1000’s of people to connect with, then displays for me to check out. From what I have heard about this function there will companies representing every aspect of grape growing, winemaking, marketing and anything it takes to make, drink and sell wine. I am excited.

There is so much I do not know, so much to learn and being in a place where I can ask questions and try to understand what will it take to produce an amazing wine, get millions of people to try and buy it and then of course create loyal customers who will introduce their friends to my wines.

Then later this week is the infamous ZAP wine event in San Francisco. This event is all about Zinfandel, the grape that is known as the “American” grape. It is said that zinfandel is indigenous to the USA. After some research there are some conflicting accounts of this information, but I am just gonna go with it.

When I still lived in Indianapolis, I would hear all about the 1000’s of people who would leave the exhibit with purple teeth and many of them were also swaying down the street. But I am going to take a tasting note pad and seeing how long I can last. I love Zinfandel. I love the huge dark berry fruits, and once the high alcohol wine opens up, then I am ready to enjoy it. I bought these grapes from Lodi, CA one year and made one of my best wines ever. I did have to let it relax for months before I bottled it. I had it picked at brix 25.2 (Brix is the unit of measure for percentage of sugar in the grapes). I wanted the Brix to get to 26, but the rains were coming and I did not want to risk it. The higher the brix, the higher the sugar and as a result when the wine ferments the alcohol is pretty high, mine turned out a 15.6….it would blast your mouth with heat!

I love the way Zinfandel opens up in the glass. After you pour your glass, take a quick sniff, you will mostly get what I call the “boozie” aromas. You will know the scent. Give it 30 minutes, swirl it around the glass and take another sniff, you will get that rich, lush, berry and tons of white pepper.

So if I were going to pair it with anything, my all time favorite is cheesecake with Zin. It will blow your mind. The sweet, savory, creaminess of the cheesecake and the bold berries will merge and you should find yourself smiling as the wine finishes in your mouth. If you are looking for a savory pairing, I like Zin with ribs, grilled and just a little sauce, actually I like the pairing better with dry rubbed ribs and no sauce, but my family thinks I am weird when it comes to ribs. But the rich, fatty rib meat is easily cut with the bold Zin.

There, you have heard about my upcoming week…Zinfandel, Wine Symposium and I plan on sushi dinner with my pals in San Francisco. I will blog from all these events! As I learn more, I will share with you!

This shot was in Vegas at Aurerole, Best wine Angels ever!

Hola!

Today I signed up to start taking Spanish classes, I should have taken a second language back at Yorktown High School. But who knew that I would need to ever speak anything besides English? I love Spanish wines and cava and I want to know more about all the latin countries plus, I love to travel but I have a real reason to learn Spanish.

Last year, I was reading about a contest in the Wine Enthusiast by Lapostolle Wines. It was called Uncork Your Passion, I thought it was interesting so I signed up. Then I had to tweet why I would be a great apprentice winemaker and get friends to “RT” (retweet my message). The winner would be decided by the amount of folks who “liked” your tweet and then the judges would then define who had the best content. I wrote several tweets and the great friends I have on Twitter and Facebook thought I was a good fit and they really rallied together and I was selected the Grand Prize Winner! I am thrilled!

Lapostolle Wines are a 180,000 case a year production winery of high quality wines located in the Colohagua Valley area of Chile. I will be there for weeks and besides working with the harvest team and their winemaker Andrea Leon. I will get to take cooking classes, visit surrounding wineries and anything else the country of Chile has to offer. Lapostolle is owned by the Marnier corporation, they make fine spirits like Grand Marnier liquor. ( I love it after dinner).

I want to understand what is being said and I want to add to the conversations. Talk about teaching an old dog new tricks but I am up for the challenge. I used Rosetta Stone to try to learn French for my trip to Rhone, France. It was helpful and while I was around those speaking French, I could figure out what was being said. But I have a thick southern accent and I only hear out of one ear so when I listen to the voices on the system, many times I did not always hear the nuances of the french accent and so I hope when I was in France I did not sound like Paula Dean. But if I did, I am sure the French folks had a good laugh and that makes me giggle to think I made their day.

So to learn Spanish I am going to take a new approach. I am going to class 2 nights a week 3 hours each night and then 2 nights a week, I get to be with a tutor and he will not allow me to speak English. We will go to only Spanish speaking places to dine and he has found several wine bars that have Spanish speaking bartenders. I am thinking I might have a good chance to at least be conversational by mid March. I will keep you posted on how the Spanish lessons are going.

So for right now I can say this…..Hasta luego Salud!

One of the wines I made at home.

Good Morning!

I had an email from a pal the other day asking about starting to make his own wine. He was asking how to get started and sifting through all the info out on the internet and thought I should share where I get my information.

I have made 100’s of batches of wine at home and I always relied on trail and error and after the errors happened I would look up info a couple different places.

1. I would meet up with my other home winemaking buddies and bring a sample of the wine and after a taste most would have ideas of what had happened. I normally could tell what was happening as the fermentation process was occuring but from time to time I was stumped. Many of these guys make 100’s of cases of wine per year and most made fruit wine instead of grape wine and so they had issues I really did not have to consider. But they were so generous with information and we all shared wines and equipment and we shared a bond of our love of wine and the passion making it.

2. The book by Jon Iverson, Home Winemaking Step by Step was a great first read and reference book over the years. This is a great start up book when it comes to equipment and processes and Iverson does a great job discussing what to spend money on and what to skip and things around the house you can use instead of spending a boatload of cash on equipment you really do not need.

3. Get the WineMaker magazine…huge resource for everything and recipes. I liked the very down to earth writing…I like technical writing because it is very specific and gives exact instructions. Super easy to follow.

4. Buy the book The Wine Maker’s Answer Book by Alison Crowe. She was a writer for WineMaker magazine and I think any issue I have ever had she has had a clear and concise answer. She also will tell you if your batch of wine can be saved or should be poured down the drain.

If you are considering making wine, go buy the beginner winemaking kit at WineArt. If you fall in love with making wine you can easily upgrade the beginner equipment, but the starter kit will walk you through the entire process and give you a nice starter wine to try on your friends and family.

Or you know you can write to me and I can help you get started. It is fun and the final result will thrill you and your palette!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

I took the last year of my life and turned it into what I call an “adult internship”. This might sound funny to some, but after a 15 year career finding others their dream opportunities I took the leap of pure faith and said to myself “Well, if you really want to make wine you might as well go for it”. I took a deep breath and called a winemaker I have known for years and said what are you doing the next couple of weeks and can I shadow you? He said yes!

This is not a new concept for me. I was an executive recruiter with a pretty healthy track record of placing some of the top manufacturing talent with the best companies in the world. And I used to tell my candidates during the interview process to ask if they could shadow one of the players on the leadership team they would be working on. I did this for two reasons, if the company was painting a “happier” picture of the situation the candidate would know it and for the company they would be able to tell if the candidate was going to “fit in” with the current team culture. So everybody knew what they would be getting into before committing to anything.

Over the past year I volunteered at 14 different wineries and did everything from running a bottling line, working in a tasting room, working directly for the winemaker helping to blend and create the next great release. I sat in marketing and sales meetings, attended winemakers dinners, poured wines at fundraisers, drove a fork truck, cleaned barrels, tanks and manually worked harder than most would imagine. Many nights I left the place with shriveled toes from having wet feet from hosing the place down, my back was sore from stacking cases of wine manually and sometimes my tongue would be purple from sampling.

I left happy and a little more educated. The most challenging days were the days where we where doing things like figuring out alcohol by volume, acid levels and percentages of the blends. All this fortified that I wanted to do this full time. I owe so many folks for their generous gift of time and knowledge shared with me. I am thrilled to say each job was great and the day I can open my doors and welcome you to come into my tasting room and you say what are you doing next week? I can say we are pruning or bottling or pressing or topping off barrels, you wanna help? When you want to hang out, watch, learn and listen I will give you a big YES come on over!

One thing that might make the cellar at TJR Select different from the other 90% of the cellars I worked at is the ear splitting volume of the country music or really crazy rock music….I am into old R & B, so if you love old Motown we will get along just fine. BTW the best job in the winery is being the winemaker, they get to do everything!

Much Love and wine!
Tammi

Tasting with Merry Edwards Pinot Noir