Spokane Wineries Offer Tours, Tips, Tastes Spring Barrel Tastings Uncork Both Fun, Education

Heidi Minor placed the green bottle she had just filled with red wine on the strange-looking machine and pressed the foot pedal.

With a whoosh, the bottle went up, a cork came down, and Minor had her own personalized bottle of Latah Creek Lemberger, vintage 1995.

All the Spokane woman had to do was heat the foil cap to make it adhere to the bottle and glue on the label.

“We’re going to take it home, save it for about a year and drink it for a special occasion,” Minor said a few minutes later as she and her husband Tim looked at the finished product.

The Minors are fledgling vintners themselves. They recently moved into a house with a good supply of grapes and are making wine. They’re not sure of the variety, but it’ll be a rose, Heidi Minor said.

They’ll have to tap in the corks without the help of a pneumatic machine. But using the winery’s corker was fun, she said.

A little fun, a little knowledge and a lot of wine was what five Spokane wineries’ spring barrel tasting was all about this weekend. There was plenty to satisfy the serious oenophile and the novice connoisseur.

Traveling from the West Plains to downtown Spokane to the Valley to Green Bluff, wine drinkers sampled a wide variety of varietals.

At Caterina Winery, they learned the distinction between different types of French oak.

Winemaker Mike Scott served up samples of two 1995 cabernet sauvignons, the same in every way except one. The first sample was aging in oak barrels imported from Allier, the second in barrels from Nevers.

The Allier oak gave the red wine a slightly sweeter, vanilla taste. The Nevers oak imparted a fuller taste.

“It’s amazing the difference,” Bonnie Aagard said after sampling each batch.

Next February, the wine will be drained from the barrels and mixed together so the bottled product will have the benefit of each set of flavors, Scott said.

And, hopefully, everyone who stopped by for the barrel tasting will buy a bottle to see how it turned out, he added with a laugh.

Up above Green Bluff at Mountain Dome, wine tasters learned all the different steps required to get those tiny bubbles into sparkling wine. (Only the true novice would call it champagne, a title reserved for a specific region in France.)

Winemaker Michael Manz explained how bottles of young wine were turned each day to force the sediment into the neck, then the necks were quick frozen to produce a small plug of sediment. Wine sippers watched as such bottles were opened, the frozen plug extracted, more wine added and then corked.

While they don’t drink copious amounts of sparkling wine, Jim and Sue Orovic of Spokane decided to buy a bottle at Mountain Dome.

“Everybody should have a good bottle of wine on hand for a special occasion,” said Sue Orovic. “And it should be a local wine.”

, DataTimes