It’s post-harvest season for wineries around town, which means a slow period, but it’s also the time of year that wine producers make sure the wines are at their best before going through the bottling process.
“We’ll be bottling about 1,200 cases,” says Bobby Cox, Wine Grower at Pheasant Ridge Winery.
Each case will carry 12 bottles, which means he will fill up more than 14,000 bottles this winter.
“The taste and the clarity and the aromas…all of that is coming together,” he says. “We’re doing the close analysis to make sure that the wine tastes good, is clear, and is suitable to be bottled…so a lot of work in the lab right now.”
That’s what Cox is doing now with the white wines, after he says those grapes had a pretty good year. In terms of the red wines, those are being kept in barrels.
“In the barrels, they sit and they rest. They mature in there and develop a bigger, softer, richer flavor with their time in the barrels,” Cox says.
He says he grows grapes that are best suited for the local soil, and he concentrates on adapted vines.
“That’s part of the learning process. Over the time that we’ve been growing wine on the high plains, we’ve learned these things happen. It’s about understanding our challenges and the techniques that we can use to mitigate the risks,” Cox says.
He also says weather plays a major factor in the taste of each wine. He says it can differ from year to year.
“You’re drinking weather in a bottle, you know, that’s the variable,” he says. “It’s the same vineyard, the same winemaking techniques, the same barrels…it’s just the weather was different,” he says.
Cox says he’ll probably start bottling in January or February. He will use white wines from the production this year, and red wines that have been aging since last year.
“We like to get that out of the way during the cold months of the year, and make that happen at that time,” he says.
Cox currently has his vines among 30 acres of land, but hopes to plant another 30 acres in the near future, so he can produce even more wine.