Sokol Blosser Bluebird Cuvée Brut Sparkling Wine

The Bluebird Cuvée name embodies Sokol Blosser's long-time support of the Prescott Western Bluebird Recovery Project, with a pen-and-ink style image of a Western Bluebird. For more than 20 years, Sokol Blosser has offered needed shelter and support to preserve a breeding habitat for Western Bluebirds, with 15 birdhouses on its organically-farmed property. Bluebird is primarily assembled from both the Blossom Ridge estate in Eola-Amity AVA and the Dundee Hills home estate. The Bluebird Cuvée Brut Sparkling is a vibrant example of a wine made in the traditional method. The fruit is hand-harvested and sent to the press whole cluster. They lightly press the fruit, taking only the cuvée cut and diverting the end cuts to another tank. They inoculate with a strong sparkling focused commercial yeast and ferment the base in all stainless steel tanks, additionally aging the wine in more stainless steel tanks for 10 months before bottling and being put in tirage. They are looking to create a sparkling wine with bright acidity and citrus zest characteristics along with other intense floral and tropical fruit characteristics. It is kept in tirage for only 12 months as the shorter tirage time is essential to gently build the mouthfeel by the secondary fermentation that occurs in the bottle. They balance the bright acidity of sparkling with a brut level dosage of 5g/L.