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| The new label |
I remember first coming to Allegro in 2001 and speaking with Mark Chien (the former Penn State Winegrape Educator) about the potential for fine wines at this site. We talked technical soil/viticulture issues, but what stuck with me was that he prefaced it all with this statement: "You're sitting on a gold mine here."
And like all gold mines, it's taken years to extract the value from it. Initially, we couldn't afford to plant more vines. Nor rehabilitate the old ones. Nor the trellis. But in 2014 we realized that we could move forward with some new plantings.
In 2019, the first red wines from those plantings will be bottled. (For those of you in our wine club who have come back into the cellar with me to talk about them have gotten a chance to taste them and know what I'm talking about. They are special.
This past November we released the first wine under our new "Cadenza Vineyards" label: our 2016 Cadenza Chardonnay. From fruit from one of our original blocks of grapes (that I am now referring to as our Crouch Block), this wine is essentially what in the past we would have called our 2016 Allegro Reserve Chardonnay. It is quintessentially Allegro, just with new trappings.
This coming February we'll release our 2016 Cadenza Cabernet Sauvignon Crouch Block followed in May by the 2016 Cadenza Block Five (which will remind most people of our 2006 Bridge.)
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| Map of Cadenza Vineyards |
Our first actual Estate Club shipment will come in June then, most likely with reprises of these same wines in some quantity or another. The 2017 reds will be bottled around that time and I hope to have one in either that shipment or the next (September.)
As some of you may have heard me say, we have put some limits on our wine club membership for this club. We're still not sure how much wine we will have available, especially after our 2018 vintage where we had much lower yields that anticipated due to Mother Nature just beating the heck out of us. After telling most of the people in November that we will only take 100 members, I did some calculations and it turns out we can take more. (This has all to do with what level the members sign up at.....Turns out that most people sign up for the six-bottle per quarter membership. If it had been the case level, I would have stuck with our 100 member cutoff.)
As we all start to get into 2019 and wonder how the year is going to shape up, you all can think about us down here finally seeing the culmination of years of waiting and planning and planting and viticulture. I'm looking forward to sharing these wines with you.
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