Transcription
I'm at Stratus Vineyards here in Niagara on the Lake. I'm in a field of Cabernet. Look at this fruit! It's juicy, it's ready for harvest. We're going to make some gorgeous wines today. So, JL, what are we going to do here now?
Well, we're going to look at the grapes, make sure they are mature, and then we're going to pick.
I cannot believe how much there is to harvest. So, this is Chardonnay. Chardonnay, they are really ripe because you can see through. If you look through a berry, you can see through. You can see the seeds inside. Yes, translucent, transparent. So that's when it's ready to pick, when it's ready to enjoy, and it tastes good too. It's incredible, right? And how many days do you need roughly to get this ripeness?
100 sunshine days for sure, we need that. So we're going to pick that by hand. It's very important to pick by hand to be able to have no bruising on the grapes, to be able as gentle as possible.
This is the fun part. Yeah, this is the fun part. I've got five kids. I was thinking, you know, I should really have them out here helping, helping us.
That would be great. People, these days, you know, more people are the better. Even brown grapes are good. They'll give a different type of aromatics, but they have brief complexity. Brown like this is perfect. So this gives the wine some characters.
Absolutely. That's fascinating. Each variety of their own characteristic, and they all ripen at a different time. JL, the Cabernet Sauvignon is the last great part of the vineyard.
It is, but that's great. We would be. Cabernet is always last. It has all that time to ripen, so you get beautiful ripe aromatics, beautiful color, and tannins that are going to complement food beautifully. Every time you have a bottle of wine, remember JL and all his hard work.
Big teamwork. That's true. Big teamwork. This is the way many of my dreams start. Look at this. You walk in the room, all you smell is the oak. This is a French Oak Barrel. They cost about a thousand bucks.
It's nothing incredible. Yeah. And so it's one of the best, or you can think of it's better than for furniture. It has to be great quality so you don't see nuts or anything. The oak really brings a ton of character to the wine, doesn't it?
Yes, but it's, it has to be subtle. So other, other wood will, the wood type would give more strong character, bitterness, things like that, where oak is subtle, you know, that's why oak has been the choice for two thousand years from make to make wine. So we have a Semillon 2012 here that we're going to take a sample of. Here we go. Oh, all right. It's nice. Been sitting there now for, you know, two to three years, waiting for us to enjoy it. Thank you. So, very, very intense. Send me a lot of tropical fruit, that's typical of Semillon. Some citrus as well. This is soft, very smooth, very, very nice. Beautiful. Oh, great.