La Vina Loca
Welcome to La Vina Loca, the Majek Winery blog. Here you will find a mixed bag of information, including tales from the winery and vineyard, recipes, and other news.
The blog started in 2013ish, as we planned and planted the vineyard. There are huge gaps in time because I underestimated how hard it would be to keep up with all of it! With new software, I hope to post more regularly...we'll see.
Welcome to my slice of Texas.
August, 2021 Bottling of Blanc Du Bois Barel
Blanc Du Bois is a grape variety that we grow in our vineyard. Many styles of wine can be made from Blanc and it is most often finished in a Sauvignon Blanc-style....stainless steel tank aging that yields a crisp, tart, citrusly flavor.
We have experimented for a couple of years with a barrel-aged Blanc Du Bois, to provide a Chardonnary-style wine for our guests. Barrel-aging provides a slightly more rounded mouth-feel and provide more honey and vanilla notes, instead of citrusy notes in a stainless-steel finished Blanc. The results have far exceeded our expectations both last year (20 case test) and this year.
Our winemaker, Tim Drake, has really created something special....amazing aromatics on the nose, to begin with ....delicous complex notes to taste, and a wonderfully long, smooth end note. More to come on the tasting notes in a couple of weeks when the wine settles down from bottling.
Blanc Barel (ber-rel') is named for the Czech word for Barrel. I'm sure Randy's great-grandfather is pretty proud of us.
Thanks to winemaker Tim Drake, cellar rats Randy Majek and Dylan Crye, and bottling teammate Rhett Mays for making all this happen over the last year.