Wine Tasting at OS Winery
16-Oct-2005
Yesterday afternoon I enjoyed a couple hours of wonderful wine tasting thanks to my friends DW and MG! They had purchased a tasting at OS Winery at an auction and what made this extra special is this winery doesn’t do public tastings. I was lucky enough to be included in the group of ten that descended upon the winery at 3:00 pm.
This winery is in an industrial park in South Park. I could have sworn that over my lifetime here in Seattle that I had visited every little nook and cranny but I found that I have missed this little area. Nestled back behind the Boeing plants south of downtown is little 4-block neighborhood center. Just south of this center is the industrial space the folks at OS Winery call home.
DW wanted to make sure we did a proper tasting so he handed out tasting sheets and pens for us to record our notes. And, as incentive, he even brought along "door prizes" – the winners to be selected from the completed tasting notes!
Other than the hosts I had not met any of the others in the group, which seemed to pretty much be the case for all. We all introduced ourselves and it was great to meet such a nice group of people. All had some level of wine knowledge or interest and it was interesting to see which wines different people preferred.
We tasted through OS’s line of wines. To date they have specialized in reds, although it looks like a new white, a Riesling, is in process. All wines we tasted were the 2003 vintage. We started with "Red", a red table wine made with grapes from Klipsun, Champoux and Sheridan vineyards in Eastern Washington. The blend of grapes changes from year to year, of course. This was a nice wine, although I thought the nose was a little off to begin with. I think this wine would benefit from a little air time prior to serving.
We then moved on to "M", a blend that is 70% Merlot with the balance being Cabernet. This wine was big upfront but I thought it tended to fade fairly quickly on the palate. However, people I compared notes with did not necessarily agree with me.
Next up was their Cabernet Franc. A couple people in the group were really looking forward to this one as they have a particular fondness for Cab Franc, which often seems to play a secondary role to Cabernet Sauvignon. I believe the wine met their expectation. I liked the wine but felt it should have been a bit bolder. Next came R3, which turned out to be my favorite wine of the group. R3 is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. The color was gorgeous, as was the nose. In the mouth it was full of flavor – lots of berry and cherry – and lingered in a very pleasant manner! Luscious.
Next was their BSH, a blend very similar to R3, but slightly different proportions of each grape. We weren’t positive where or how the vineyards varied for this wine compared to R3 but the difference in taste between this and the R3 was pretty amazing based on just the slight variances in percentages. I found the fruit much more pronounced. I liked this wine a lot but still preferred the R3. Our final finished wine was Ulysses. This was a big, bold, beautiful wine. As I tasted the character of the wine revealed itself in different ways. Sometimes the fruit was taking the lead and then the tobacco and leather notes would push to the front. This really is a gorgeous wine!
Next we moved out into the production area. OS is in the middle of crush at the moment so we got to see tubs of mash, watch as the juice was separated from the must and generally just see wine making in action. This is a very small winery – they released about 2000 cases total for the 2003 vintage – and is basically just a couple person (and some volunteers) operation. While in the production area we also sampled from the barrels – I don’t really remember exactly which red as, by this point I was busy chatting and snapping photos but I do remember we sampled their new Riesling which seemed to have a lot of promise.
This was really quite a lovely afternoon and I recommend that, if you have the opportunity, you sample some of OS Winery’s wines. I would assume that over the next few years their production will be increasing and you should be seeing the wines more readily available and in more places.
2 Comments
Comments are closed.
Culinary Fool 
Fun, fun, fun. Being Asian I can\’t drrink a lot of alcohol, I spit or just taste a few. In 2 weeks Torino will host the slow food, wine awards and we are going to be there.
Gia:I\’ve gotten better over the years at, at least, dumping my glass if I don\’t really care for a wine or if I know I have the opporunity to sample a lot. It\’s just so hard to toss out perfectly good wine, though! :-) Torino sounds like so much fun! Have a great time (for me, too!) ~ B