Monochrome Wines

Dixie (a former shelter dog) has a nose for great wine and great deals! Come on out this weekend for the @wine4paws benefit (or order online) to support local shelter animals in need. Monochrome is participating Friday through Sunday and is offering a deal on a special 4-Pack, so make an appointment to come visit!

Well, Snorts is kinda bummed it’s not called Wine4Swine, but urges you and your friends to get out this weekend (or order online) and support shelter animals in need by stocking up on wine at some of the 50+ wineries participating in the @wine4paws benefit.

Join Monochrome and 50+ other local wineries and small businesses in supporting Wine4Paws, a benefit to support local shelter animals in need! A portion of all proceeds from this coming weekend will go to support the cause. We are also offering a special Wine4Paws 4-Pack of some great wines at a very attractive price (link in bio)

Wine Club Members - we have included a wine glass polishing cloth in your shipment as a small token of our appreciation for your support and encouragement during the trying times of 2020-21. We hope you get a lot of use out of it. Thank you!

The cherry blossoms are in bloom here in Tin City, and it’s a great day for wine tasting!

Now that it is Fall and the weather is cooling down (uh... in theory) we are going back to our normal tasting room hours.

Well, this should be fun. Grenache Gris, pre-fermentation. We crushed 25% and then let it all soak overnight to extract some color and flavors from the skin before pressing. Some of the color should drop out during fermentation, but it should be interesting!

Wait.... what?!? Is this white or red? Any guesses?

We intentionally treat each barrel of wine differently during fermentation and aging to spread the range of flavors and textures available for blending. That includes fermenting at different temperatures. It turns out a flat black surface will radiate 2-3 times more energy than a bare stainless surface, which should result in lower fermentation temperatures. So I painted all our small stainless barrels flat black to test the hypothesis. The small size should also help, as the surface area to volume ratio is higher. We’ll see how much difference it makes soon!

Normally I don’t recommend over-chilling white wines, but when you’re pouring outside and it is forecasted to be 116 degrees... bring on the liquid nitrogen!

We barrel ferment nearly all our wine. We also intentionally make each barrel differently to spread the range of flavors, aromas and textures available for blending. Most of our barrels ferment at 60-64 degrees, but these pieces of high technology allow us to selectively ferment some of them a big warmer. Sourced from L’petco.

The design for this was lifted from a winemaking textbook written in the 1880s about how they made wine at the Bordeaux First Growths back in the 1860s. So a version of this is what the Cool Kids at Lafite and Latour used back before they had things like electricity. Sound familiar, California 2020? Anyhow, we use it for hand destemming our skin-fermented Albariño, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier (and perhaps Picpoul and Gewurztraminer). Celebrity hand model: @hubbawines

Dug this one out for dinner tonight. Still fresh and vibrant, ten years on. Congrats to the team at @th_estatewines !

Okay... so how do you get the gas to come out of these newfangled pumps?

The tasting room is closed today due to the smoke from the fires to the north of us. We will monitor the situation for Saturday and Sunday

Well, despite some good guesses, nobody won the new Ferrari. The three new varieties for Monochrome’s 2020 vintage are: Picpoul, Gewurztraminer and Grenache Gris. No idea yet what we’ll do with them, other than it likely won’t be anything conventional.

First person to guess all three wins a prize. Those with insider information will be disqualified.

Well, that was quick. We sold out of the first batch of Virtual Tasting Kits within a few days, but we just completed preparing the second batch. So we now have some in inventory... for the time being!