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A New Year, a New Look, and Two New Vintages

Tuesday, January 5th

 A New Year, a New Look, and Two New Vintages

Here at Claiborne & Churchill, we want to wish you all a very happy, healthy start to your 2016! In the spirit of celebrating “the new”, we have several announcements about exciting things happening at our winery in San Luis Obispo.

Renovated Tasting Room

We opened our straw bale winery here on the Central Coast back in 1996, and since then, we’ve grown a lot! For the last few years, we have put some serious elbow grease into expanding our garden area to accommodate more guests, and now we have an updated tasting room to go with it! Our indoor renovation includes a new feature wall and rolling barn door, both made with reclaimed wood from our old dairy barn. We now also have large crystal tasting glasses, new lighting, and a beautiful, custom stone-topped bar. Be sure bring your friends — with an expanded serving area, it’s the more the merrier. Added bonus: Ladies, you’ll be more comfortable than ever. (The new bar has hooks where you can hang your bags and coats!)

Now that our garden and tasting room are all ready for 2016, we’d love to host your next private event. Contact Angela at angela@claibornechurchill.com for details and pricing.

New Website

If you’re reading this blog, you may have noticed that we recently overhauled claibornechurchill.com with the goal of making our website more usable, visually pleasant, and informative for you. Feel free to explore our site, and if you’re new to our blog, check out some of our recent posts to learn about the 2015 harvest, recent events, and more.

Guest House Available for Vacation Rental

One of the more exciting pieces of news we have is that next door, we’ve been hard at work remodeling a two-bedroom duplex cottage on our property. Soon, it will be available for vacation rental! If you are from out of town, staying with us will be a marvelous way to enjoy the heart of wine country here in San Luis Obispo. Centrally located, we’re only a five minute drive to Pismo Beach and a fifteen-minute drive to Cal Poly. Stay tuned for photos of the space and pricing information. Note: Club members will have access to a special, discounted price on accommodations!

New Releases

This holiday season, we released brand new vintages of two of our most anticipated wines: 2013 Runestone Pinot Noir  and 2014 Pinot Blanc. Be sure to come by our tasting room for a pour of each of these exciting vintages.

To all our readers, Happy New Year, and we hope to see you soon!

’Tis the Season – Holiday Events at Claiborne & Churchill Winery

Wednesday, December 2nd

We can’t believe it’s already December! We’re decking the halls of our beautiful, newly remodeled tasting room, and to celebrate the holidays and share our new space with you, we are pleased to open our doors to friends, fans, new visitors, and our wine club with two festive events this week! Come raise your glass and enjoy the holidays with us!

Holiday Open House – Open to the Public
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Time: 5:30-8:00 pm
$5 tasting fee for visitors

In the giving spirit? We’ll comp your tasting fee if you bring canned goods or an unwrapped, new toy for donation to Season of Hope!

Join us in our newly renovated tasting room for a fun-filled evening of Holiday Shopping! Enjoy a tasting of our aromatic white wines (Dry Riesling, Dry Gewürztraminer) and hand-crafted Pinot Noirs and Syrah. Enjoy our live holiday music, and take advantage of great holiday wine specials. We can even create custom gift boxes for your friends, family, and co-workers! Come hungry: The Grilled Cheese Incident food truck will be there, too, selling their delicious sandwiches!

Cellar Club Pickup Party
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Complimentary for Club Members
Time: 3-5:30pm

If you’re in our Cellar Club, we hope you’ll join us to pick up and taste our Holiday wine selection. Enjoy small bites paired with the featured wines, listed below!

To RSVP to our Pick Up Party, click here.  All members are complimentary; guest tickets available for purchase by members.

HOLIDAY WINES

2014 Dry Riesling
A favorite around here! We couldn’t resist putting it in our Cellar Club Holiday Shipment.

2014 Pinot Blanc
Grown by our friends and neighbors at Laetitia Vineyard, this delicious white wine is 100% SIP Certified. Pressed whole-cluster and then fermented in well-seasoned, neutral French oak barrels, this wine has body, richness, and bracing acidity.

2013 Runestone Pinot Noir
After years of pouring our beloved Runestone Pinot Noir under our original gold and burgundy label, we knew it was time for an update. We are so excited to unveil our beautifully repackaged 2013 Runestone Pinot Noir, available to both the C&C Cellar Club and the public.

2013 Classic Pinot Noir
This stunning and well-priced 2013 Classic Pinot Noir is available to Cellar Club only for this shipment and this shipment alone!

From all of us at Claiborne & Churchill Winery, we wish you a happy start to your holiday season, and we hope to see you this week! If you are interested in receiving more information about our Wine Club, please follow this link.

Cellar Notes: Bottling 2014 White Wines

Friday, April 3rd

Making good wine is hard and exciting work, but getting these good wines safely into the bottle is something altogether different: hard and stressful work, you might say. Here at Claiborne & Churchill we can certainly attest to this; we’ve already bottled most of our white wines, having held three major bottling sessions in the first three months of this year!

The 2014 Dry Gewurztraminer, our most popular white wine, was bottled in January and has already been released to a thirsty wine club. February saw the Pinot Gris, the Dry Muscat, and the ever-popular Dry Rose ushered into bottles, and in March the Pinot Blanc, the Edelzwicker and the Dry Riesling (another signature wine) were bottled.

We now have a good handle on what the 2014 vintage has brought us, and we are very happy with how these wines have turned out. They taste fresh and vibrant, with beautiful aromatics, lush flavors, and great acidity. Sometimes a vintage brings quality to one varietal but not another, but the 2014s are all showing well in their youth, across the board!

Why was the 2014 such a good vintage? Ironically, California’s drought had a lot to do with it. If the dry and warm summer brought us one good thing (besides perfect beach weather), it was quality in the vineyard. Vineyards tend to thrive under a little stress, in this case limited water. A dry springtime and ideal weather during bloom and berry set helped create solid wines and above average yields. Moreover, during the peak of the growing season we did not see any nasty heat spikes. June was a warm month, but July, August and September brought us pleasant coastal weather, ideal for our cool-climate varietals.

Claiborne & Churchill 2014 Fall Wine Tasting Notes Video: 2012 Estate Dry Riesling, 2013 Pinot Blanc,
2012 “Classic” Pinot Noir, 2012 Malbec

Thursday, September 25th

Tasting Notes:

2012 Estate Dry Riesling: 2012 marked the fourth official harvest of our SIP (Sustainability in Practice) Certified Estate Riesling vineyard. And what a great vintage it turned out to be! Rather than releasing this soon after bottling (as we do with our Central Coast Dry Riesling)…Continue reading here.

2013 Pinot Blanc: Speaking of SIP, we are happy to source sustainably grown Pinot Blanc from our neighbors down at Laetitia Vineyards. This rich and mouth-filling wine delivers intense jasmine, peach, and citrus aromas while offering flavors of melon, toasted almond, and spice. Continue reading here.

2012 “Classic” Pinot Noir: Since the late 1980’s our “Classic” Pinot Noir has been a staple of Claiborne & Churchill. It has always been made to showcase the elegance and complexities of Pinot Noir from the Edna Valley. Continue reading here.

2012 Malbec: Malbec is back! It’s been over 3 years since we last released our Malbec, and we couldn’t be more excited to have it back in our line-up. Continue reading here.