Blend: 100% Merlot
Analysis:
Alcohol: 14.0 % | PH: 3.75 | Titratable acidity: 7.9 g/L
Tasting Notes:
This wine has aromas of dark black cherry, blackberry, and subtle notes of violet, tobacco, sweet vanilla and spicy oak. On the palate, the wine is rich, dark and brooding, with abundant silky tannins and bright natural acidity. The finish is soft and the flavours long-lasting.
Wine Making:
The 2007 growing season was one of the coolest on record in the Okanagan Valley. This cool weather, comparable to the 1999 and 2001 seasons, has enabled a slower ripening of the fruit, allowing for pristinely preserved primary fruit flavours, powerful tannins and a firm acid backbone that will give the wines from this vintage a long life.
The grapes for this wine were harvested in between October 12th-23rd, 2007 from the Burrowing Owl Estate vineyards. The fruit was destemmed and crushed into closed-top stainless steel tanks and inoculated with our preferred yeast strains. The fruit was fermented for 14-28 days on skins before the wine was pressed off and transferred into barrels for malolactic fermentation (MLF). At the conclusion of MLF, the wines were racked off of lees and transferred back into a mixture of French, American, and Hungarian oak (33.3% new oak) barrels where it was aged with occasional rackings until June, 2009. The wine was given a light fining with casein (milk protein) to polish the tannins prior to bottling.
