Special tasting events feature young wines

All around California right now, an ocean of wine sleeps.

The bed is a barrel and the wine inside is like a newborn. It's just young, fermented grape juice at this point, and it needs plenty of rest – up to a year, perhaps – before it blossoms into a wine ready for bottling.

But there comes a time to stir these infant wines from slumber. That's done by removing a small amount from the cask and taking a sip, all the while pondering the wine's growth. And then the wine goes back to its long winter nap.

Barrel tasting is an occasion to get a sneak peek into a wine's evolution and to also step into a winemaker's purple-stained shoes and consider the components that make a great wine.

And if you taste an evolving wine you like, there's a chance to save some money. The prices for pre-ordering a wine during barrel tasting – or purchasing wine "futures" – are generally cheaper than the retail price once the wine's bottled.

Barrel tasting is sometimes offered during winery tours or a stop in a tasting room. Festivals are also on tap each season to roll out the barrels and let the masses taste away.

Locally, El Dorado County kicks things off this weekend as 21 of its foothill wineries participate in "Bring Out the Barrel." For $25 (or $20 for Sunday only) you can taste your way through the weekend. Many of the wineries will be open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and most will include light food pairings.

Three weeks later you can check out "Behind the Cellar Door," which runs Feb. 14-15 and features barrel tasting from 30 Amador County wineries, along with seminars and food events. "President's Wine Weekend," which also goes down Feb. 14-15, will feature barrel tastings from 25 Calaveras County wineries.

Barrel tasting basics

"It's a way to get people excited about our vintages," says Amador County's Leon Sobon, the owner of Shenandoah Vineyards and Sobon Estate. "We'll probably bring up to four barrels to the tasting room."

Over at Shenandoah Vineyards they've got plenty of barrels on standby, awaiting a crush of tasters on Valentine's weekend. A small river of purple flows through the parking lot, where the sediment from some barrels is being cleaned out.

Sobon turns to a barrel of a 2008 zinfandel, a wine that won't be for sale until the latter part of this year. A small sample is siphoned into a glass.

"Ah, what a beautiful aroma," Sobon says before taking a sip. "Hey, that tastes pretty good, too. That's young zin, but a lot of the flavors are right there."

Barrel tasting is a different sort of beast than the sniffing and sipping done in a tasting room.

Tannins, acids have yet to soften

In barrel tasting, a small stopper on the barrel, called the bung, is popped off and a small amount of wine is siphoned with a wine thief, a gizmo that looks like an oversized test tube or tricked-out turkey baster. The wine is then poured into glasses from the wine thief.

Take a taste, and you'll find that the wine is primary and young. In some cases, the wine was grapes only a few months ago. Time in the barrel is needed for oak flavors to come around. Acids and puckery tannins still need to soften and integrate.

"This is not the wine you'll be tasting at bottling," says Sobon, considering a barrel taste of syrah that literally tastes meaty. "If you were new to barrel tasting and had some samples you might go, 'Whoa! That sure puckers me up.' Some people won't understand that, but we're here to help people learn."

For winemakers, barrel tasting is necessary throughout the aging process to figure out what fine tuning the wine needs before bottling. Everyday wine drinkers can benefit from barrel tasting, too. It's a way to sharpen your palate and think about a wine's structure.

Is the wine already lacking in fruit, or bursting out of the barrel? Is there enough acidic kick to make this wine ageable? Is the wine boasting enough tannins, or in need of some heft?

"There are essentially four reasons why wine is kept in a barrel," says Todd Taylor, the namesake behind Clarksburg's Todd Taylor Wines. "There's the flavor of the oak itself, so in barrel tasting you're checking how much of that is imparted in the wine. When you use a new barrel, that imparts color in a wine. Also, the wood is porous, so air passes through and softens the wine. We're making sure in barrel tasting that the wine's harsher edges are being reduced. Some wine will also evaporate out of the barrel, and when that happens the fruit flavors tend to intensify. We're looking for all of these four things to marry."