Woodworth Vineyards

The weather yesterday was perfect for wine tasting.  In anticipation of the weather, we decided to check out Woodworth Vineyards, a winery that offers tasting by appointment only.  We have been interested in them for some time, as they are one of the few wineries in Southern California to produce a high-quality Pinot Noir from grapes grown in our part of the world.  More on this below.
We opted to go with their wine tasting plus lunch.  The day turned out to be one of those good news/bad news thingies.  The good news:  the tasting and lunch was held at their beautiful house in the De Luz hills west of Temecula, as shown in the pictures below.  We had a truly great time.  You know you’re in the right place at the right time when it’s just you and the owners, and they join you in the tasting.

Now for the bad news:   they sold their vineyard!  To make matters worse, while they will continue making wine, all they have left of their Pinot Noir is the 2015 vintage (which we snared six bottles of, so you can’t drink it all up on us!).
A little history.  Back about twenty years ago, Marlene and Gary Woodworth purchased a large property in the De Luz hills west of Temecula.  They planted avocados, flowers, and grape vines.  Somewhere along the way, as they learned how to make wine, they realized that the De Luz hills had the same micro-climate as the hills in Santa Barbara County, i.e., perfect for Pinot Noir, so they changed some of their vines to Pinot Noir.  Their first vintage was 2008, and they entered it in a big Pinot Noir tasting in San Francisco --along with ~500 other wines.  Lo and behold, their wine made it to the gold level (top fifty), so they headed up the coast for the finals, feeling pretty good about the fact that their very first offering had made the top 10%.  Well, that pretty good feeling turned into pure ecstasy when their wine placed third in the final competition.  Every year since then they’ve scored in the top 50 )though they haven’t broken into the top three since that first vintage).
Wanting to do things the hard way, they decided to make a brut sparkling wine from their Chardonnay grapes – using the Method Champenoise.  This is a very difficult undertaking.  You begin with normal barrel fermentation, but then bottle the wine and finish the fermentation in the bottle.  In the fermentation process, yeast converts the sugar in the juice to ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and carbon dioxide.  So, if you ferment the wine in a sealed bottle the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go but into the wine.  When all of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, the yeast dies.  The trick is to remove the dead yeast without releasing the carbon dioxide.  First you have to hold the bottles upside down and move them about until the dead yeast settles on the cork.  Then you have to freeze the yeast to hold it in place when you turn the bottle right-side up and pop the cork.  The pressure in the bottle blows the frozen yeast out of the bottle.  The winemaker must then replace the wine that goes out with the yeast and recork the bottle without losing pressure.
Their first time through the Woodworth’s had some success with the process.  Not so the second time... The pressure in the bottle can reach around 100 psi, so special bottles have to be used.  Unfortunately, they purchased fancy Italian bottles that did not hold up, so they lost an entire vintage.  Third time through they found an old Frenchman whose business is removing the dead yeast from sparkling wine bottles.  This was the wine they began the tasting with, followed by their Pinot Noir rose, Golden Maggie.  From there we went to the red wines, their 2015 Pinot Noir and two of their blends (Wild Bandit and Black Dog).
The full list of their wines is shown below.  It includes another wine that gave them fits in making, namely their Herc’s Field Blend.  Field blending, common in France, is a technique whereby you grow and ferment the grapes for the blend together, rather than blending after fermentation and barrel aging.  A bit of a crapshoot, first because you don’t know if you’ll get the same yield from year to year of the different varieties and second because they don’t ripen at the same rate.

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Wine tasting with lunch is $30 per person; with just cheese its $20.  The lunch is also shown below – a very delicious salad, three gourmet cheeses, a bit of meat, and in the small bowl chocolates and date candies.  I should add that two of the cheeses were so good that we stopped in the Temecula Cheese Shop on the way home to buy some.  Did I mention that the three red wines we tasted were on the table, should we have been interested in re-tasting.

They have three wine clubs:  mixed, all red, and Elect.  Mixed is $75 for two bottles of white wine and two bottles of red wine three times a year.  All red is four bottles of red wine three times a year for $90.  If you are interested in buying two cases a year of their wine you can go with the Elect Club.  You choose the wine and get it at a 30% discount.  You can taste and purchase their wines at Crush and Brew in downtown Temecula.