My Blending Session Notes for Our 2020 Wines

by Danica Olivo

Our blending team met on Monday, Feb. 7th, 2022 to taste Nello Olivo Winery’s 2020 vintage wines and to decide their fate! Which, and in what quantities, would we denote as single varietals? Which, and in what proportions, would go into our Toscanello, Super Tuscan, Drop Dead Read, Family Secret, and Grapefather blends?

We Have An Excellent Blending Team

The head of our team is our winemaker of ten years, Marco Capelli. Gary Ritz of Hwy 50 Brewery joined us for the first time this year. As a master brewer and good judge of wines, Gary has an experienced and sensitive palate. He made a valuable addition to the team.

We Taste All of Our 2020 Wines

We grow eleven estate wines at Rancho Olivo Vineyards. At first taste from the barrel, our impression of the entire 2020 vintage is that the wines are very young still. But immediately we recognized that, even so, they are—each one without exception—absolutely delicious.

This is the first year we had no Cabernet Sauvignon to taste or use in blends. We had no 2020 Cab harvest because in 2019 we grafted Negroamaro over those vines. Negroamaro is a rare heavy red Italian variety. Our first harvest of it was in 2021, so we will be tasting it with next year's blending.

We Follow Our Usual Blending Approach

Our blending day approach this year was basically the same as other years. First we taste each varietal to determine if it is good enough to bottle on its own as a single varietal. If we LOVE it and cannot imagine doing anything else, we select that wine to be bottled as an estate offering to receive our classic black label.

Next comes the challenge of creating our red blends. Not every barrel of each varietal, even the ones we love, will go into single varietal bottles. We reserve some—in different portions depending how much is available—to go into our top red blends: Toscanello and Super Tuscan. Then on to our other blends, Drop Dead Red, Family Secret and Grapefather.

To create each finished blend, we taste different combinations of our wines, deciding which ones go well together and at what proportions. Sometimes we go through many iterations of a blend to get it right.

Our Top Blends

Toscanello is always a blend of our most elegant wines. We used to say the "best of the best," but all the wines this year were excellent and we had a hard time deciding! Since 2020 gave us a bumper crop of Sangiovese and Barbera, we let the high quantity decide for us.

Our estate Sagrantino also goes into Toscanello. It grows in two areas of our vineyard. Typically, we bottle wine from one area as a single varietal and use the other in our Toscanello. This was true again this year.

The resulting 2020 Toscanello blend—we think—is superb.

For our Super Tuscan style wine, we try to make it as true as we can to the recipe of the original SuperTuscan created by the House of Antinori in Italy. Using a base of Sangiovese, they blended in some famous wines from Bordeax in France. This went against strict Italian-imposed rules of the day prohibiting the blending of Italian wine with any French wine.

For our version, we started with Sangiovese and—since we had no Cabernet—we blended in our estate Merlot and Petite Sirah, which are typically used in Bordeaux for blending. The result was a spectacular Super Tuscan which we're so excited about!

Other Blends and Malbec

As for Drop Dead Red and our newer blend, Family Secret, we may have to use outsourced wines for these. We concluded that our 2020 single varietals are so fantastic, we could not give any more of them up for blending!

Well, except for one blend.

After final decisions are made for our major blends, and for how many bottles of each single varietal we'll produce, there are usually some quantities of juice left over from some or several of them. These "remnants" go into what The Grapefather (being rude and completely politically incorrect) describes as "good old Dego Red." (Sorry, but my husband IS Italian...) This is our popular Italian red table wine that sells out every year and which we (more politely) call "Grapefather,"—as in "Pour me another glass of Grapefather!"

It's a fun and easy-going wine that fits any moment or celebration—preferably with all the noisy family gathered round.

We should also mention our white blend, Bianconello. It is field-blended, as the two grapes that go into it, Fiano and Arneis, grow side-by-side in the vineyard. All available juice from these go into Bianconello and does not enter into our tastings on blending day.

But we did taste our outsourced Malbec, which comes from a wonderful vineyard in South El Dorado County, El Dorado Canyon Vineyard. This Malbec, once again, is fabulous.

Final Thoughts: We LOVE Them!

As wine enthusiasts know, every wine exhibits slightly different aromas and tastes based on the terroir in which it is grown. Since climate is a big part of terroir, every year's vintage tastes a little different. In the case of Nello Olivo Winery's 2020 vintage, we love what Rancho Olivo Vineyard's terroir produced for us!