The Zinfandel Blending Seminar
Gjallarhorn Tours learning how to blend Zinfandel at Ravenswood Winery in Sonoma.
As tutor Peter Griffith of Ravenswood told us: The idea is to use the strength of the different grapes to create a Zinfandel with a balanced mouthfeel. Thus we used the Zinfandel (or Zin in local lingo) as the base wine and used two other wines for blending:
- Petite Sirah (known as Durif in the US) has lots of tannins and is used to give the blended wine body and structure.
- Carignan is an old world warm climate grape with lots of flavors and acidity, it gives the beinded wine its "bite" and freshness.
The blending was done by mixing wines from three glasses into a fourth, using a pipette to extract the exact amount (in ml) of wine. The procedure was to decide, beforehand, how much to use of each from each of the three wines. The total would always have to add up to 20 ml (thus, if one took 13 ml of Zin, added 2 ml of Cardigan one had to top the blend with 5 ml of Petite Sirah). After each blend one stirred the glass, smelled and tasted the blend and rated it. Based on this outcome one was free to continue changing the blending ratios until one found a good blend (according to personal taste).
Personally, I failed to produce a good blend but most people found something they liked. When they did, they brought the recipe up to Peter who filled up an entire bottle of their cuvee and corked it so that the person could bring home his or her personal Zinfandel after the seminar.