Pinnacle Ridge announces January events for Case Club members

We have some very exciting things planned for the 2014 season. We will be kicking off the 2014 event calendar this month with a special event just for our Case Club Members. Join us in the evenings the last Wednesdays (January 21 and 28) and Thursdays (January 22 and 29) of the month for complimentary food and wine pairings featuring some of the newest additions to our tasting line up.

Come out for some great food, some new and exciting wines and a chance to mingle with our staff and your fellow Case Club Members. The event will take place from 6 - 8:30 p.m. Be rewarded with special discounts, Case Club Member news, and updates about new wine releases. Reservations are required - please call 610-756-4481.

We are running low on the ever-popular 2010 Veritas, a classic Bordeaux-style blend that we only make in the best years and age in the finest oak. This vintage will be the last one available until at least 2015. The special evenings reserved in January for our Case Club Members would be a great time to stock up before it's gone.

We have already released some wines from this past year’s harvest: our 2013 Dry Riesling and our 2013 Oasis style rosé wine inspired by old world techniques with a slight pink and orange hue that displays fresh, floral aromas and crisp acidity balanced by notes of citrus fruits. We have also just released our new 2012 Chambourcin, a dry, but fruit forward red, aged in Pennsylvania oak, that possesses an intense note of crushed berries and hints of vanilla. Also, after a few months without our popular sparkling wines, the Brut Rosé returns to the line up.                    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
"Everyday Oenophile - A Winemaker Uncorked"

In this inaugural edition of the "Everyday Oenophile - A Winemaker Uncorked",  we will be discussing some of the things that are going on currently at Pinnacle Ridge Winery, as well as the story of how the business began with winery owner/operator and winemaker Brad Knapp.

Brad is a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana. He completed his undergraduate degree at Purdue University (the Cradle of Quarterbacks, for you football fans this playoff season) and received his PhD. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, during which he began developing an interest in the study of wine tasting. Brad possesses a strong and long history of wine tasting and appreciation with other wine enthusiasts. During his academic career, Brad began to experiment with amateur winemaking and brewing. After completing his education, he began looking for work here on the East Coast and spent much of his time on the road investigating the local wine scene.  
                                                                                                                                                                                     
In 1988, Brad took a position with Air Products and quickly joined some of the local American Wine Society tasting groups in the Lehigh Valley. He is still involved in some of those regular tasting groups today. That same year, he made a Chambourcin blend that won "Best in Show" in a local amateur winemaking competition and, shortly thereafter, he began looking for land with the intent of starting a winery.

In 1990, he purchased the property where Pinnacle Ridge is currently located and began preparing the property for production and planting. He had also developed a relationship with friend and co-worker, the late Curtis Luckenbill, owner of Round Ridge Farms in Kempton, Pa. Curtis had also expressed interest in grape production and the two began planting on the Kempton property in 1991 with Vidal Blanc and Cayuga. Soon, they would add Chambourcin, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to the vineyard. Pinnacle Ridge was licensed in 1993 and opened to the public in 1995 with only three wines.              
                                       
Today, Pinnacle Ridge Winery produces around 4,500 cases annually and has an extremely diverse portfolio of wines. The list today includes both red and white, dry and sweet, as well as some signature sparkling wines. In recent years, Brad has adopted some new winemaking techniques derived from regions like Germany and Austria, like flotation and hyper oxidation, as methods of removing bitterness and pheonolics from the whites. As a result, the whites age better and remain clear with nice color and are more aromatic.

This past harvest season was one of the most unique in recent memory, as our normally hot, dry summers were instead filled with an abundance of rain. Conversely, the normally wet fall season, as a result of hurricanes moving up the coast, actually saved the harvest with very dry weather and lots of sunshine. We were "saved by the fall," as Brad puts it as this unique weather for the harvest season elevated what would have otherwise been an average vintage. This enabled us to let a lot of our fruit hang much longer. In fact, we hung the Riesling longer than ever this year and this vintage looks to potentially be some of the nicest fruit for whites that we have ever had. We were also able to let some of the Vidal Blanc hang until December 10 and picked that fruit for what will become our first Late Harvest wine since the 2010 vintage. As for the reds, they're "pretty frickin' nice too" according to Brad.                
                                                                       
Have any questions about winemaking or what's going on here in the cellar? Shoot us an e-mail at pinridge@aol.com and Ask the Winemaker.

Late-summer at Pinnacle Ridge

PINNACLE RIDGE WINERY'S SUMMER CONCERT SERIES CONTINUES WITH THE HANNAH VIOLET TRIO
Saturday, August 4 from 2 - 5 p.m.

During the Saturday portion of the Berks County Wine Trail's Christmas in August event the third installment of Pinnacle Ridge's Summer Concert Series  will be taking place.  We thank the Wallace Brothers Band for performing last month, but if you missed them, there is still time to sit back and relax with great tunes and cool wine.  

We are happy to have The Hannah Violet Trio performing on August 4th!  This very talented musician, singer-songwriter plays the fiddle, guitar, piano, and sings her heart out!  She has toured through out Europe with the American Music Abroad Choir and sang in Austria and Switzerland.  Hannah has also created a Music Therapy program for Heartland Hospice in Reading.  She is currently back in the studio of Jim Heffernan, dobro player/guitarist who toured with Brad Paisley and Joe Diffie, to record her upoming CD "Violet Sky". Check out Hannah's blog and music schedule at http://www.hannahviolet.com.rom.

There is no cover charge for this event.  Chef Ben Underwood will again have his delicous creations for sale and of course there will be Pinnacle Ridge wine available for purchase.

Upcoming Music:

September 8 from noon -5 p.m. - Blues in the Barn - The Wallace Brothers Band - Mighty Manatees - www.themightymanatees.com

September 9 from noon - 5 p.m. - Blues in the Barn - James Supra Blues Band - Kelchner Brothers Band - www.kelchnerbrothers.com

October 6 from 2 - 5 p.m. - Jack Murray and the Midnight Creeps
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jack-Murray-the-Midnigh-Creep

NEW RELEASES

We recently released a variety of new wines in the past month including our 2010 Chambourcin and 2010 Syrah. The new 2011 white offerings are crisp and fruity. The 2010 Veritas and 2010 Chambourcin Reserve will be released in either late August or early September. These are exciting wines and are definitely worth the trip to the winery.

LATE SUMMER 2012

As the summer lumbers along, the days get shorter, the nights longer, those lazy afternoons with sweltering heat, katydids, cicadas, frog sounds. A delicious melody indeed. During this time of year activity in the vineyard also starts to slow down. The vines begin the process of focusing on ripening fruit. The green shoots start to turn brown and harden. The shoot tips stop growing. Canopy management activities stop. Basically we wait for the vines to ripen their crop. So it’s a time for the winemaker and other winery personnel to kick back and relax, right? Wrong!

This is the time of year that we start to think very hard about the upcoming harvest. Harvest, of course, is the most active time of the year at any winery. Everything has to be operational - the destemmer, crusher, press, clarification equipment, pumps, refrigeration equipment, hoses, tractors, etc. Everything has to be clean and ready for the receipt of this year's vintage. Do we have enough tank space for the whites? Are there enough bins for fermentation of the red grapes? Do we have enough barrels? Have we bottled everything that we have to in order to get through the fall without running out of wine? Do we have enough supplies, yeast, enzymes, and bacteria? It's a complex process planning for a small winery that produces over 20 types of wines. There are many small lots of grapes that are treated as individual batches until it is time to blend. We will be processing something like 80 tons of grapes and most of the batches are no larger than four tons. So we will end up with over 30 "batches" of wine in the cellar during harvest. It can get very confusing remembering what is what and where everything is. If you get behind on record keeping, it's a lost cause.  What yeast strain for Dry Vidal? What enzymes for the new Chambourcin?

It is also the most exciting time of the year. Every vintage is optimistic at this point in time and, as a winemaker, looking at the New Year is always a glass half-full (half-full of what you might add). I personally get very optimistic and fired up to tackle any problem thrown at me. I can't allow myself to get beaten down by the sheer magnitude of the harvest. I have to keep going, I have to get up, spread the lugs, meet the pickers, and orchestrate the picking so everybody is harvesting the right vines, in the right way. If there is rot, it must be picked out in the field. It all just has to be done - no excuses, just get it done.

Oh, and some of you might have noticed a rather large (6' 2"), young man running around the winery the last few weeks. My son is visiting while on break from his studies in enology (winemaking) at California Polytechnic State University (otherwise known as Cal Poly) at San Luis Obispo. He has to head back soon so I don't get to abuse him this harvest. Two years down and two to go.

A holiday message from Pinnacle Ridge Winery

The December e-newsletter from Pinnacle Ridge Winery in Kutztown is out and we wanted to share some of it with the followers of our blog:  

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM OUR WINEMAKER!

December has arrived once again and it is a great time to look back at some of the happenings of 2010. 
 
2010 was a great year for awards at wine competitions.Two of our wines were finalists in the Pennsylvania Wine Society competition. Eight medals were captured at the 2010 Pennsylvania Farm Show including “Best Sparkling” for our Blanc de Blanc. Pinnacle Ridge wines received six medals in the Keystone Wine Competition in April and three medals, including a gold for the 2007 Veritas, in the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition. 
 
At Pinnacle Ridge, we were very pleased and honored that our winery was chosen to be the cover story for the March/April 2010 issue of Vineyard and Winery Management magazine. This national journal has been in existence for 35 years and Pinnacle Ridge is the only Pennsylvania winery ever to have been chosen to be the cover story!

In 2010 Pinnacle Ridge was included in the newly released “Opus Vino,” a wine reference book that has compiled information about the best 4,000 wineries in the world. Only two wineries were chosen from Pennsylvania and Pinnacle Ridge was one of them!
 
Another wonderful happening in 2010 was the fabulous vintage. Mother Nature cooperated and gave us hot, dry weather that resulted in outstanding grapes from our vineyards. We will have an overview of the vintage and the new wines in the January newsletter. Some of these wines are just now being bottled (Riesling and Naked Chardonnay) and others will continue to arrive as spring approaches. 

All in all, 2010 was a great year for Pinnacle Ridge. As we reflect back about the past year, it is obvious that what really made 2010 great was YOU (our loyal customers). We are fortunate to have so many fantastic customers. Thank You for your business! Have a great holiday and we’ll see you in the tasting room!