Optical Sorting for Our 100% Estate Grown, Texas Wines

We built our winery in 2021, so that we could move all winemaking in house to best achieve our stylistic and quality vision for our wines. Our winery is designed to produce exceptionally high quality, small batch wines from our own vineyards in Texas (Narra Vineyards in the Texas High Plains AVA and at our Fredericksburg tasting room site in the Texas Hill Country AVA).

All fruit harvested at our Texas High Plains vineyard is picked into half ton bins, and kept cold during the 5 hour transit time to our winery where we begin the winemaking process. Upon arrival, we process our red grapes with our Pellenc Vision 3 optical sorting line. We are the first winery with an optical sorter in Texas, and provides us significantly more control over the grape shape (no raisins), size (no shot berries), color (no green / under ripe berries), and material other than grapes (MOG like stems) that make it into our wines. This allows us to dramatically elevate the quality of wines we produce.

After grapes have been sorted, we then bring the half ton bins of fruit into our winery where we bin ferment the grapes to create alcohol. This small-batch approach allows us to closely monitor fermentation during our multiple check ins each day. Once fermentation is complete, we use our Pellenc SPC50 press to separate the wine from the grape skins. This is a very advanced press that provides us full control over the press cycle so that we can gently press the grapes to just extract the wine, and not extract liquid from the seeds that could affect the wine quality. After primary fermentation and press out, we will then kick off malolactic fermentation to soften the wines.

Once all fermentation is complete, we then store the wine away for aging. As we started as grape growers, we like the fruit flavor of the grapes to shine through. Because of this, we primarily age in neutral oak barrels, with only a small amount of new oak introduced. This means that our wines are not dominated by oak flavors. Over the coming months we taste through wine during barrel aging and make final decisions on blends, volumes, finishing protocols, etc. before bottling.