In January, the cellar is cold and quiet. The wines are sleeping in oak. This is when the real work begins.
For our Estate Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, blending is not an afterthought — it's the culmination of everything. We barrel-age different blocks, different lots, different levels of new oak separately. Come January, we have forty to sixty barrels to consider. The final wine might include components from twenty of them.
The process is methodical and unhurried. Each barrel is pulled and tasted blind by the winemaking team. We take notes separately, then compare. We're looking for complementary qualities: one barrel might offer exceptional aromatic intensity; another, structural backbone; a third, the mid-palate richness that makes a wine satisfying in the glass.
We build trial blends. A hundred milliliters of this barrel, fifty of that one. We smell them, taste them, and let them sit for an hour in small vials to observe how they evolve with air. A blend that tastes beautiful immediately but falls apart after thirty minutes is not a good blend. We're looking for wines that improve over time in the glass — because if they improve in a glass, they'll improve in a bottle over years.
The final blend percentage is almost never what we expected going in. The 2021 Reserve started as an experiment with 5% Petit Verdot for aromatic lift. It ended with 3% because we realized the Cabernet itself was providing all the aromatics we needed. The Petit Verdot added structure instead — invisible to the nose but essential to the palate.
This is the patience that the name SOLERA honors. The slow accumulation of knowledge, season upon season, that makes a winery's identity.