mary's swil page

I belong to a wine-tasting group called SWIL (Sonoma Wine Interest League).  The group gets together once a month to taste different kinds of wines, although we usually prefer reds.   It's always a blind tasting of six similar wines, where each person rates their favorites from 1 to 6.  Then our de-facto leader announces the winners and unveils each wine.  Nine times out of ten, our top wine is one of the least expensive.  Hmmmmm....  We have a lot of fun, eat a lot of great food and drink a lot of great wine.

The last two years (1998 and 1999) we made our own Zinfandel wine, all the way from picking the grapes to bottling.  The grapes were donated to us by one of our members, who owns Rockpile Vineyards — Thanks, Jack!!  (I recently found out that he and I graduated from the same high school class!  Talk about a small world.)  The wine was stored and taken care of by Rosenblum Winery, in Alameda.  Thanks Rosenblum and a really big thanks to Ryan Flock, the winemaker; without his help and coddling of our wine, we couldn't have done it.

 

1999 SWIL Zinfandel, Rockpile Vineyard

Gold Medal, 2001 Harvest Fair
The label from our 1999 SWIL Zinfandel

The label from our 1998 SWIL Zinfandel
St. Peters Vineyard (Cloverdale)
The load of grapes on our truck.
Our grapes after going through the "stemmer crusher"
The stems and junk left over.
The crushed grapes spend the first week or two in the cooler.  These are our two bins at the front.