AJA Vineyards
Happy Wednesday everyone! I’m back giving you a weekly update. Today, I wanted to talk to you about our bottle process and about corks vs. screw caps.
If you’ve purchased our bottles, you know that we have two main types of enclosures: natural cork and screw top/Stelvin. We chose these for very specific reasons and I wanted to share that with you.
When designing a wine bottle, we all know how important labels are. As much as we’d like to say it’s genuinely just the production and taste, it’s really not like that anymore. I know and appreciate wine, and yet if I know nothing about the wine–aside from the region–I’ll definitely gravitate towards a label.
Similarly, making sure your wine enclosure matches the occasion is key! When we decided on doing screw cap wines for our rosé and Happy Canyon Sauvignon Blanc, it was pretty simple: we wanted these wines to be purchase and drank on the same day! Our rosé and Happy Canyon SB are easy drinking wines. We wanted them to be your beach picnic, lakeside, or porch wines. Something you don’t have to grab a wine key to open. Just unscrew it, pour it, and enjoy it!
You’ll notice all of our estate wines have natural cork enclosure. The reason for selecting a cork to close our bottles is because it ensures proper aging. When you ask me how long you should wait before enjoying one of our red wines, I usually say enjoy one bottle now and a second between 4 and 8 years from now. I just love seeing how these wines develop in the bottle! They cannot properly age without a slight bit of “oxygen ingression” which is the ability for the oxygen to flow ever so slightly through the porous holes of the cork. It allows for tiny bits of oxygen to age the wine gracefully. Then, once it’s ready to enjoy, grab your wine key and decanter and gracefully pour the wine into the decanter. Let is rest for about 45 minutes to an hour, and then feel free to enjoy that wine. And it’s aged to perfection.
So, in a little less than two weeks, we’ll be bottling our rosé and our estate Sauvignon Blanc. I’m excited because this is our estate Sauvignon Blanc from Eds’ Vineyard, and it’s our first debut of this wine!
We will be enclosing the rosé in a screw cap bottle. Once it’s on the market, we’ll be wanting to share that wine right away! If you wish to pre-order, make sure you’re on our mailing list.
As for our Eds’ Vineyard, we wanted to utilize a cork enclosure. Seeing as this wine did much time in barrel, we want to mimic the housing of the new wine to ensure minimal bottle shock, and maximum opportunity to shine and continue to age. This wine is stunning and has such beautiful flavors. I cannot wait to share it with all of you!
Thanks for reading along. Stay tuned for more info every week!
Cheers,
Amanda