By: Fritz Hatton
Welcome to Arietta’s Proprietors Blog
Welcome to the inaugural blog of the new Arietta website. Another step for me into the 21st century! With this blog, we hope to share with you Arietta news and release updates as well as an inside look into our family’s deep history within the wine industry.
With this announcement, we are also celebrating the release of the Arietta Red Wine Quartet 2017. We love this wine! Two nights ago we poured it for our winemaking and local marketing team. Among the forest of bottles opened, this was the first one to be finished.
Its most remarkable feature is its balance and freshness right “out of the gate.” It is a shameless crowd pleaser. Caren made an extraordinary mélange of roast vegetables and potatoes, served with rack of lamb. She procured heaters so we could enjoy a November evening outside under a clear and starry sky. We carried on almost to midnight and would have gone longer had it not been a school night.
(Pictured here is our Winemaker, Andy Erickson, Assistant Winemaker, Patrick Nyeholt, and Harvest Intern, Joaquin Brandini)
The 2017 Quartet is distinctive in that it has the highest percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon— 68%, of all the Quartets since 2006. That gives the wine a brightness of flavor, and lots of high notes. In this Quartet, the tenor voice is particularly pronounced—as it typically is in a string quartet, or a barbershop quartet. To learn more about the 2017 Quartet, and our entire list of current offerings, please click here.
We celebrate during a particularly frenetic season. The fall is always a half year squeezed into three and a half months. For us, it includes harvest and the busiest sales season. The great news is that the 2019 harvest came off without a hitch. A warm spell in late September brought grapes to the point of ripeness. A long period of relatively cool weather followed. This made possible longer hang time for the fruit, producing greater phenolic ripeness without excessive sugars. Experience in vertical tastings of the Arietta wines has shown us that an extended harvest ultimately produces more complex flavors and a richer texture.
We finished harvest on October 29, relatively late even for the our vineyard sites in the cooler climates of Carneros and Coombsville. The weather remained beautifully temperate to the end. Hard to imagine something better than the 2018 harvest, but 2019 could be it.
I look forward to carving out a little space of my own on the internet with this Proprietors blog. I hope you’ll join me!
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About Fritz Hatton
Fritz has over four decades of experience in the fine and rare wine business and in addition to being a vintner is the nation’s foremost wine auctioneer. He serves as principal auctioneer for Zachys Wine Auctions, and as auctioneer for many charities nationwide, including Auction Napa Valley.