Beasting off the Riesling

The last couple of days has been a whirlwind of labeling, lifting, cleaning, and tasting. I'm working on learning how to identify grape plantings by their leaves. This is not easy! The differences are very slight. I've collected some samples from Wiemer's vineyards - Riesling, Gewurz, Chardonnay - and I'm hoping to put together a complete collection of their estate grapes.

Now that I'm spending some time on the other side of the tasting bar I'm brushing up on my Wiemer stats. 70% of our production is Riesling, and we grow it on our 3 vineyard sites. HJW vineyard is behind the winery, and the Magdalena and Josef sites are 10 miles up the road. Each site has slightly different soils and mesoclimates that bring different properties to the grapes. Wiemer has 7 Riesling wines that they produce, and the fruit comes from some combination of the sites, with the exception of the HJW and Magdalena vineyard-specific wines. These are the only 2 Rieslings I haven't tried yet - better add that to my to-do list.

On my first day working the tasting room I got 2 tips! Hope tomorrow is another good retail day :)

It's all happening

I officially started my Wiemer wine adventure yesterday with a charity tasting in Cayuga Heights, just north of the Cornell campus. I have no clue what the charity was for but people loved the wines! I poured the 2007 Dry Riesling and 2007 Gewurz. It was nice to be back in Ithaca for the afternoon, and on my way home I was driving on a really fun bumpy road into the sunset, thinking, when did I ever notice the sky in Manhattan? The sunset followed with a beautiful starry night, and I saw a shooting star for the first time! I also got a lesson from a new friend on how to distinguish grape types by their leaves. So cool!
Today at Wiemer I put my muscles to work, moving cases of wine from here to there and learning how to work a palate jack to lift multiple cases at once. Tomorrow morning we're going to do some labeling in the morning and then visit a couple other wineries in the area as a group in the afternoon. I hope I'm able to lift my arms, at least enough to raise a wine glass!