La Crema Winery has been turning out classic Sonoma County cool-climate wines for over three decades. Their Pinot Noir and Chardonnay have been crowd-pleasers for 30 years and they have recently added a Pinot Gris bottling to the portfolio.
What distinguishes a wine is a lot more than branding or corporate storytelling (at least—if it isn’t a lot more than that, I’d argue you ought to buy a different bottle). It’s an intimate relationship between a grape, a piece of soil, a weather system and a winemaker, whose individual palate, philosophy and methods all influence the final product. It’s a delicate and complex situation. So what happens when you Poll The Mob in an experiment in collective winemaking?
La Crema Winemaker Elizabeth Grant-Douglas is about to help us find out.
As of August 11, 2014, the Virtual Vintner project is open to participants who will join in a collective experience of winemaking, where you can help choose everything that goes into the wine, from grape to bottle. This should prove to be a fun and highly educational process for the winery as well as its invisible “partners.”
What you need to know Right Now:
•Virtual Vintners can sign up to be part of this experiment at any point in the process.
•August 11-24 is the voting timeframe for the varietal and appellation that will be used. (You vote for Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, and have a choice of two growing areas from which the grapes will be procured.
•August 25-31 participants will select a single vineyard based on the results of the previous step.
•September 1-7 you will help to select the yeast that goes into the fermentation process.
•September 8-14 you will evaluate and help select barrel types.
•September 22 – October 15, you will get updates via social media and email, offering details of the harvest. At this time there will also be the option to participate in the Sensory Contest—a flavor profile prediction based on what we’ve learned from the process up to that point. The participant who comes closest wins a cash prize.
•October 2014 – February 2015 Wine name and label design. Participants will help to choose a name and label for the wine. There will be monthly updates through the aging process and the chance to purchase the wine when it is released in late fall 2015.
•Also, from , participants can enter the La Crema Wine Country Experience Sweepstakes. The winner receives a trip for two to the wine country, including airfare, accommodation, and exclusive tours and talks with La Crema winemaker Elizabeth Grant-Douglas. (You can get the deets at La Crema).
What do you get out of this?
Actually, a lot. If you’ve ever wanted to understand more about how wine is made, this is a pretty cool way to start. The La Crema Website gives you step by step descriptions and details for every stage of the process. Why would you choose one grape over the other? That might be as simple as the personal preference you happen to have for red stuff or white stuff. But how hard have you ever thought about the average temperatures, humidity, soil composition or exposure of one block of real estate over another, and why a vintner would be attracted to one or the other? How much do you actually know about yeast and fermentation? Bourbon fans know a lot of the flavor of a good whiskey comes from the barrel it was aged in. Wine’s no different. The type of wood, level of “toast” and age of the barrel all impact the final product in any wine (and if you’re on team Chardonnay, you will perhaps find this to be a particularly glaring difference, more on which later).
If you already know a lot about how wine is made, this is still a fascinating way to learn about how wine is perceived by the people who love it. The crowd-sourced decision-making tells a strong story about what people like or believe they like. If your inner anthropologist isn’t turned on by that, maybe your inner marketing professional is. And if you don’t have an inner marketing professional—well, God bless you, first of all, but second of all, you might be surprised at how connected you actually feel to the final product, even if you voted on it from Alpharetta, Georgia or Lexington, Massachusetts, and have never been to Sonoma County in your life. Even if you’ve never set foot on a vineyard or taken a tour of a winery. Even if really, you’re a Beer Dude. A Gin Gal. A teetotaler. The point is, you learn a whole bunch about this mysterious process in which sunlight is turned into wine. And a highly-regarded, well-established winery gets to find out more about the people who care about their product.
Get thee to La Crema right this minute and sign up! Your humble Column-bard (see what I did there?) will be reporting on this experiment as it progresses. Meanwhile—get involved! This is going to be really fun. 