Shadow Springs Vineyard’s wine are made at our winery we call The Yadkin Valley Wine Company.  The YVWC opened in the summer of 2007 and has the capacity of around 10,000 cases of wine.  We have the ability to manage the complete winemaking processing from receiving grapes to bottling completed wine in this winery.  It is truly a state-of-the-art facility.

 

Shadow Springs’s wines are made under the direction of our winemaker Mr. Kent Egon Smith.  Kent is original from Georgia and holds a degree in Enology and a minor in Chemistry from California State University, Fresno.  Kent has also received the Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) certification.  Kent is a strong believer in making the wine as complex as he can.  This is done by using different barrel profiles, toast levels, different strains of yeast and other winemaking practices.  Wines are then blended together to make a perfect vintage. 

 

Winemaker’s Corner, Winter 2010

 

The grape crush is finally over. The grapes stopped coming into the winery back in October. The last ones to ripen are red grapes. And, as you know, we soak the grape juice on the skins to get that red color in the wine. When we’ve extracted enough color and flavor from the skins, we press the juice off and pump it into tank. After some time in tank, the solids settle to the bottom and we can rack the clean juice (or by now it’s wine) into barrel.

 

Barrel aging does a couple of things. The first thing people think of is that it gives the wine an oaky flavor. But it doesn’t just give oak flavor. Depending on the barrel, it can impart flavors of cinnamon, toffee, cloves, leather, brown sugar, vanilla, coconut, cookie dough, soy, bourbon, and too many to list here. The point is, there are a lot of oak derived flavors that come from barrel aging. The other main thing barrels do for wine is micro oxygenation. Since wood is porous, it lets in tiny amounts of oxygen over a long period of time which softens the tannins in wine. Remember tannins? Those compounds in wine that dry out the sides of your mouth like when you’re drinking iced tea. They can be rather harsh in a young red wine.

There’s something else that goes on in the barrel that most people don’t know about. A secondary fermentation happens about this time of year. We call it a malolactic fermentation. We add a kind of bacteria to the wine that converts the malic acid (like in green apples) to lactic acid (like in milk). This softens the wine and gives it a creamy mouthfeel. This also helps stabilize the wine. Think about it. If yeast have eaten everything they can eat, and bacteria have eaten everything they can eat, there should be nothing else left. The wine is now a nutrient desert for microorganisms. Therefore there should be no microbial spoilage if someone ages the bottle in some dark wine cellar for several years.

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