Last Sat­ur­day we joined our wine tast­ing group for bar­rel tast­ing at Brian Carter Cel­lars in Wood­inville. This was real treat, as wine maker and co-owner Brian Carter hosted our tour and spent sev­eral hours with us.

Unlike other winer­ies that focus on sin­gle-source vine­yards or vari­etals, Brian Carter Cel­lars prides itself on arti­sanal blended wines, cre­ated in the Euro­pean tra­di­tion.

As he siphoned small sam­ples from bar­rels  con­tain­ing last year’s vin­tage, the wine­maker shared his phi­los­o­phy for blend­ing wines. He is inspired by blended wines from Bor­deaux, the Rhone region, Italy and the Iber­ian penin­sula.

He framed our bar­rel sam­ples event as an expe­ri­en­tial les­son. He planned the sequence of bar­rel sam­ples to ensure we could detect in our nose or mouth what he looks for before decid­ing what will be blended into the fin­ished prod­uct, and in what pro­por­tion.

Char­ac­ter­is­tics such as:

• Struc­ture and com­plex­ity
• Round­ness or sub­tlety in the mid-palate
• Veg­e­tal, herbal or spicy notes
• Fruity qual­i­ties
• Over­all bal­ance
• Degree of toast and other fla­vor ele­ments imparted by the bar­rel itself
• The impact of using largely “native yeasts”

Our tim­ing was for­tu­itous, as our tast­ing occurred just a few days before the wine­maker will be mak­ing key deci­sions to shape his 2012 vin­tage blend­ing “recipes.” Sip­ping small sam­ples from a dozen bar­rels give us a sneak pre­view how he was per­ceiv­ing the com­po­nent wines him­self.

After­wards we moved from the cel­lar itself to their tast­ing room a mile or so away. There Brian Carter hosted a tast­ing of many of the win­ery’s cur­rent releases. We were able to see how well each wine paired with our pic­nic lunch. They all did quite well.

My per­sonal favorites (based on lunchtime tast­ing): Byzance, Tut­torosso and Trente­naire. My hus­band loved the Opu­lento, although this port-style dessert wine was not well suited to tast­ing dur­ing the heat of a hot sum­mer’s day.