Dear Sokol Blosser Fans,
How about some Peace, Love, and Understanding to finish this year and launch us into 2024? Can’t hurt to try eh? This December newsletter will start with peace and end with bubbles.
Call me a romantic (most would not) but I think that a bottle of wine is a step in the direction of peace. Wine is food for me, and I like to include a bottle of wine on the dinner table for us to enjoy along with whatever we cooked up that night. Wine helps bring us together, helps to slow down the craziness of the day, and typically helps take the food up a notch. We each have a glass or two and by the end of the meal, we are in a more peaceful state. In moderation, wine is that age old drink that completes a meal and helps create stories and memories around the table. Give peace a chance this holiday season and pop a cork!
December is the slowest month in the vineyard. Luis and our crew take most of the month off and get some rest banked up for the long days that are sure to arrive when the grapes are growing faster than they can work in May/June/July. Robin and her crew bottled our first wine from the 2023 vintage: our Rosé of Pinot Noir. It will be the best one ever (we always say that, but this time it just may be true). What is exciting for me about the 2023 Rosé is that we have added ingredients, and nutritional information to the back of the label. This is our first label with this information. As a Certified B Corp we strive to be transparent in all areas of our business, and adding nutritional information to our Sokol Blosser labels just makes sense. We look forward to your feedback when we release it in February.
In early December we held a sparkling wine event for our cellar club members at an event space in downtown Portland. We only poured our sparkling wines and had six of them: 2021 Bluebird Cuvée Brut, 2018 Blanc de Blancs, 2016 & 2018 Sparkling Rosé of Pinot Noir, and then two new sparklers with our 2020 Bluebird Blanc de Noirs and 2020 Bluebird Sparkling Rosé. Since we started down the sparkling road back in 2011, it took us a while to get to a place where we had enough bubbles to stage a tasting like we did, and to ensure they were of the quality we wanted to show. Hats off to our vineyard and production team (Luis and Robin) for bringing us closer to saying that while we are a Pinot Noir house, we are inching our way to also becoming a Sparkling Wine House too. Cheers!
Happy New Year and here’s to 2024!
Alex
