Winery Visit - "Chateau Morrisette"

For my friend's 23rd birthday, a group of my friends and I decided to take a trip out to Chateau Morrisette.  After a few missed turns in the pouring rain, we ended up walking into the restaurant instead of the wine tasting room.

Seniors at the Chateau for wine tasting

We started off by tasting, 10 wines for $8 (a really good deal!).  The man who lead our tasting even let us taste wines that weren't on the tasting menu, all we had to do was ask.  It was definitely worth the drive and the money to make the trip out there.
Overall, I felt the quality of the wine was decent.  I have had better wines at the Vintage Cellar tastings.  However, I went in with the mindset the wines would be awful, and was pleasantly surprised they were not as bad as everyone made them seem.  I would describe them as one-dimensional and harsh in their flavorings.

A picture with the birthday girl

After the tasting, we went on a tour of the winery.  It was a short tour that really involved three major parts.  The first was where the grapes are initially processed, its outside to because the winery does not grow 100% of their wines.  This area is where the stems are separated from the grapes, and they press the grapes.

The grape processing area and machine

The second area is a very large room where they ferment, age, and bottle the wines.  There were massive steel barrels that were used to ferment the wine, along with continue to age it after.  Some of the wines are aged in oak barrels, while others are aged in stainless steel.

The fermenter and oak barrels they use to age the wine

wine ready to be shipped out

The third area was the bottling room.  It was a very small room on the side of the massive aging/packaging room.  One person works for several hours at a time to ensure all of the wine is bottled before it continues to age in the wrong vessel.

The bottling room

Selfie on the wine tour

The bag of corks I would have stolen if I ever lifted at the gym

Finally, the wines are packaged and sent out to their designated distributers for sale.  I would have liked the wine tour better if they had a larger facility, but with everything shoved in to one place, the tour seemed short and rushed.  If the facility had been larger, it may have allowed for the separation of each step of the fermenting and aging process, which would have allowed the tour guide to explain each step more in depth as they lead the group through the facility.

The wine storage/packaging room

Creepin' on our tour guide