Every year it happens: Here at Cave B Estate Winery we prepare…once in the spring, and once in the summer…to release the wines.
It sounds like a fox hunt. A horse race. Buckets of butterflies popped open at the end of a wedding. And yet, we’re talking about wine. Why “release”? Why not the more formal–albeit stodgy–“present” or “introduce?” What accounts for such an active verb put with such a noun? After all, we don’t line up the bottles at the end of Silica Road and cheer as they lunge forward in their fragile glassy clunkiness, watching as they race for the finish. We don’t hurl them into the sky to see them swept up into the warm air currents above the gorge, watching them flutter away in a great flock of green and amber. There’s no holding back, then letting go…
Or is there?
Every spring presents the end of a tremendous period of becoming for the white wines. They have been harvested, crushed, put in barrels or tanks, ever so carefully watched and nurtured; added to or carefully left alone, crafted and brought along…all within the confines of the estate winery; dynamic and ever-changing, but contained.
But finally some of those wines have become just that, and they are ready to be removed; to be funnelled out of their containment and brought into the light, allowed to breathe, be seen, be tasted and felt on the tongue, in the throat. Their journey to this point is finished; the rest of their life just beginning.
Why are wines released? Because they cannot be held back any longer, or they will become something entirely other than what they have become at precisely that moment. They leave the domain of the winery and winemaker with purposeful timing, yet with that great sense of hope–ribbed with confidence, lined with unknowing, shaded with total abandon–that there will be people there on the receiving end of their release, ready to catch them up on the palate and experience through taste and nose and feel their entire life to date. Release and catch…. Winemaking–it’s a horse before the cart art. A grand risk. A tremendous rush.
Cave B Estate Winery’s Spring White Wine Release: Saturday, March 28, 2009. Come experience the release of the whites. Be there to catch them.