When we approached the winery the first thing that we noticed was that there were two buildings. They looked like an old English construction and showed a lot of aspects that made us feel little bit like we were in the old Châteaus of Bordeaux, or at least what we expect they would be like.
This first picture is of the building currently used for wine tasting, wine production, and bottling. The other building is used for the restaurant that they own and operate, but sadly we were not able to visit because they did not have much food that I could eat.
When we entered we saw on our right and left were two stacks of wines that were decorated with the placards seen below. These are apparently some sort of awards for their wines. High scores from the San Diego international wine competition, frankly I don't really know what the San Diego international competition is but it looked impressive and made me excited to try both "our dog blue" and the Château Morrisette Number five.
We had to bum around inside of the building and get a look at the tasting room before it was time for winery tour to leave, but it was nice to be able to look around at the architecture uninterrupted. When it was time for a winery tour we were told a bunch of things that were interesting about the history of Château Morrisette.
In 1978 Château Morrisette started making wine in a basement where a small black Labrador named Hans, who was the family dog, would drink a bunch of red wine that was made on the premise. He became famous for "sampling" the wine and spending most of his days drunk. So later when the dog past they named the wine that he loved to drink after him sales of that wine skyrocketed so that was the start of the dog theme to Château Morrisette.
The first winery that they had after the basement was a converted old farmhouse, but in 1995 they took upon themselves to build a new, more advanced building for wine production and tasting. The old building was converted into the restaurant that I talked about above. It took 250 blasts of dynamite to level the ground for them to be able to build this new building.
Unfortunately this winery does not grow their own grapes, they say that they do not have the climate nor do they have enough land for this to be possible. However, they do make Virginia wine containing 95 to 98% grapes from Virginia where the minimum percentage of grapes that you need to call your wine for Virginia wine is only 75% so they are overachievers in that regard.
When we were taken back into the wine room the first thing that I noticed and commented on was the fact that it was much chillier inside this room then outside in the wine tasting room or outside in the open air. I asked and was correct in assuming that this was to keep the wine at the optimal temperature for long term storage. However, as our tour guide pointed out, this was not quite the optimal temperature to keep humans for long term storage, which was a problem for the people who had to work back here on a daily basis.
To the left as we walked in was where the grapes were brought in, shipped from other parts of Virginia, and where they would be pressed by Lucy and Ethel, the crusher machines, that they used to press the grapes. These crushers were airbag bladders that would inflate and gently crush the grapes. The white wine is separated immediately and the red wine sits in the slurry for a while.
In this picture you can see the vast number of the barrels of wine that are stored at Château Morrisette. Interestingly the red wine can be differentiated from white wine because the red wine has a black Pawprint stamped on the outside of the barrel.
These next couple pictures show the large stainless steel tanks that are used for the primary fermentation of wine. These tanks are all temperature controlled us to keep the white wines and even the red wines at the perfect temperature for fermentation. They have varying sizes of stainless steel tanks from the small ones shown here at 1700 gallon capacity to much larger 3000-ish gallon capacity.
While all of the barrels that are used to make the wine at Château Morrissette are French oak barrels, they are complicated and expensive to make.They take about three years to make and cost somewhere in the range of $500-$2000 per barrel they are continuously making efforts to try and cut down on this cost and make less of an environmental footprint. One of the more recent and main efforts that they have gone through was trying to create the barrel seen down below this barrel is held together with strap some bolts so that it is easy to construct and easy to repair and re-shave and re-toast after the five or so years on a normal barrel would cause you to have to throw it away. They seem to be having a lot of trouble with this it doesn't seem to work as well as they would've hoped so they might not end up using this technology. However there are hopeful that someday it'll work.
I think that this is a terrible idea and just horrible for the wine industry. An apt comparison to see what I'm getting at is baseball bats in major league baseball, something that you might not notice is that all the baseball bats they use are wooden bats. The reason for this is not because aluminum bats are bad per se but that there's a quality to wooden bats can't be replicated in the aluminum. For instance the sound of a baseball hitting in direct contact to a wooden bat makes for a crack that everyone in the audience can hear and this is a sound that can't be replicated with an aluminum bat. They are therefore not as good for the authenticity feeling of baseball. In the same way these new barrels might function better than the old standard barrel but you lose a lot of that feeling of authenticity in history that the other barrels command.
Something that I found quite interesting was the difference in a barrel after five years of use versus when it's just bought. In the picture below you can see on the right barrel that a brand-new first year using it and to the left of the picture of the barrel that is been used for quite a few years. They almost look as if they're made of different types of wood like the left one is made of a dark oak in the right one is made of a birch it's hard to believe that they're the same wood and the only difference between them is their age.
Now we moved on to the winery production for Château Morrisette is quite interesting because they bottle on site and they do everything there but grow grapes. They start by cleaning the bottles with nitrous oxide because they don't want to have to use anything that will harm the flavors and complexity of their ones so counters are steam cleaned and anything that can't be steam cleaned is cleaned with alcohol such as vodka. Foils are put on by hand and there are only six people in total on the whole wine production on a given day. They can make up to 2000 bottles and given day which is approximately 4 to 15 pallets with 60 cases per pallet.
The top picture shows the equipment used to bottle the wine while the bottom picture shows the end of the wine production where workers have to take the bottles and quickly put them into crates for shipment on pallets.
An interesting thing to note here is this roof which actually comes from an old boat, specifically from the bow of the ship. Well this has very little to do with the wineries and wine production it is a very interesting architectural find as well as interesting reuse of old building materials which seems to be a theme throughout Château Morrisette.
Some of the grapes that are grown not Shontelle more is that but for Château Morrissette are Chardonnay, Nouveau, Vidal blanc, American grape varietals, Viognier , white Muscadine, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir, Chambourcin.
Lastly it seems that the most important thing to Château Morrissette right now is looking for it into how they can improve their winery. The main thing that they think that they should work on is getting more equipment such as automatic rattlers to shake sparkly right so that it does not have to be done by hand as it does now. So overall the improvement of the process of making wine is taking up most importance right now and maybe in the future the expansion of the types of wine they are making and expansion into future markets as well.
We enjoyed our time here at Château Morrisette the winery was fun and interesting in the wine tasting was pretty good the only problem I had was that I didn't enjoy all of their wines but that's to be expected when visiting a winery even if you like some you can't expect to like everything there.
We were also able to go to a winery and taste 10 different wines. TEN! Since there were so many wines and they were not a central part of the winery tour (Also I bought a few that will probably receive a full review later in a dinner or wine and cheese paring) I have just attached the list of wines that were sampled and my tasting notes that I took.
These are the wines that we tasted that day at Chateau Morisette. The whites were all okay to good and the reds were kind of weak due to the excess of rain that they had in that year. My boyfriend enjoyed these wines for the reason that the reds were not particularly strong.
The wine that I enjoyed the most was a very sweet White Muscadine varietal that reminded me of an ice cream that I used to get a lot at Baskin Robins. The port style fortified wine was a close second however.
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