Hi, I am Michael Zitzlaff, chief winemaker at Crushpad and welcome to the Fusebox experience.
What you have in front of you is a series of wines. Each individually provided to you to be able to show you the new ounces of what a cabernet is, what a merlot is, what a cabernet franc, malbec and petit verdot. And once you look at these wines we believe, you should be able to put together a wine that is better than some of the part. So, you can actually synergistically put five individual components together and create a wine that is a next step up and that is the art of blending. We can look at all these wines and in their own right, they are really smart wines but hopefully through the course of your evening or day or whenever you are doing your Fusebox blending. You can actually put some of these wines together and find that you are building extra levels of density—extra levels of complexity—extra pallet length.
Typically, when we look at wines and I use the cabernet and use it as an example. We would like to pour 30 ml into our individual glasses and look at the aromatics that each one possesses like the first thing you want to look at is color. There is two components, density and hue. Density, this is not going to be technical but density is how deep is the red? Is it a black dark red or is it a lighted cherry rose that is not red? The hue tends to relate more to—is it very purple and vibrant? Or is it a little bit browny and brick red? And that is the variations that we are looking at when we come to color.
The next main thing behind color is aroma. Tasting actually is 60% to 70% aroma. And once you put wine into your mouth, it gets warm and the volatile come up into your nose. And the actual—your nose senses play a very important part in the taste of the wine, which is a fact. Swell it in the glass which increases the surface here of the wine within the glass and you need that surface here to volatile and lift all the aromatics of alcohol and fruit flavors and fruit aromas but you must swell it in the glass and you will get the hang of it. Swell it around. Take a nice, long, deep, deep smell. You will get initial aromas and then you will get later aromas. The initial ones are the really important ones. The first word that hits you that says, “Plum, cherry, cassis, black currant, smoke,” they are the key words that you are going to just lodge in your mind and put down as a script on your sheet for that wine for the aromatics.
The next part is tasting. And usually you get that sweet fruit feel in the palate and it has got some really fine grain tenens and it has got a really long finish. There is nothing that is offensive there. It is such a solid, structured wine—I still got the flavor and it is still going on and on and on, a fantastic example of cabernet. Once you get that initial flavor feel of the mouth, you then lift with the texture of it, that satiny silky pallet texture that gives you the length and the persistence made up of the fine grain tenens. The wood tenens if they are there as well than the acidity that are very much, provided that link of pallet which is very much summed up as the overall texture of the wine. Link to that is alcohol which will also fill the pallet out as well. So, as a whole there is really much of things that is actually going to—you are going to look for.
Previously, I talked about a satisfaction course. This is what you have really feel about this wine? Are you 10 out of 10 or you are sitting on a fence on a four out of ten, I do not know it is like—the overall impression is one that you will use as a summing up impression. And that is the key thing and the way that we structure this is that if you look at it, you are going to, “Yes great length, great fruit, great flavor. Yes, I will give that 8, 9 out of 10. I really like that.” That is the important thing about the overall perception of each individual wine that we will be tasting.
I hope this has been a help for you. There will be a lot of discussions. There will be a lot of agreements and disagreements. And that is the great thing ab
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