The Real Portrait
of a Cooper
The real "portrait" of a cooper is the many wooden pails and barrels that he makes throughout his life.
If you look closely at our bottle, you'll see many small pails making one large pail, creating our
Portrait of a Cooper label.
Like its cousin, Pinot Noir, Marquette is a complex grape. When we set out to make this wine, our goal is to preserve its dark cherry flavor, layered against the soft toasted aroma of the American oak barrels we use to age the wine. We cold soak the grapes at 55° for three days before starting fermentation.
Then we draw off some of the juice so that the
color and tannins of the skins concentrate in a smaller volume of wine.
The wine is aged between nine and 18-months in American oak barrels that have been previously used at least once, so that the impact of the oak on the wine is more subtle.
And then, like our other wines, Portrait of a Cooper is bottled using a small manual bottler,
and corked by hand.
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