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Now Viewing: Iron Horse Vineyards
The Iron Horse concept is to make estate bottled wines, which show a definite "sense of place”. The family feels very strongly about making wines that are specific to the Green Valley appellation, our special vineyard and the vintage, making the best wines of the year, and never falling back on "recipe” winemaking Generally speaking, the wines are expressive, stylish, highly nuanced, bright, focused, soft and silky. They exude quality and class. Above all, winemaker David Munksgard strives for exquisite balance in his wines. Our style is not "knock your socks off” wines. We prefer to glide your socks off. The Sparkling Wines are remarkable for exceeding the French standards for vintage quality. None of the cuvées undergo malo-lactic fermentation. The richness and creaminess come from extended aging on the yeast in the bottle. The Wedding Cuvée is aged on average three years; the Classic Vintage Brut is aged four to five years and the LD (Late Disgorged) is held for seven to eight years. To quote Robert Parker: "These impressive sparkling wines...possess more texture and flavor than just about any sparkler...from California.” The grapes for the Chardonnay are whole fruit pressed-like we do for bubbly, which yields the most delicate juice. The percentage of malolactic varies depending upon the vintage. The mix of wood also differs with the year. The constants are the vineyard and the people behind the wines.Our Pinot Noirs are cold soaked for a week to ten days, then barrel fermented-techniques with lead to great depth of flavor and character, but the weight and texture of the wine is still so light and silky it just glides across the palate.The winery is proud to offer 20 different bottlings in 2006, including the wines from the T-bar-T vineyard in the Alexander Valley. Each is both delicious and distinctive in its own category. Most wineries make one or two great wines and the others being side efforts, but Iron Horse is remarkable for its quality and class across the board. The Rest is History... Iron Horse has now been served at the White house for four consecutive presidential administrations, beginning in 1985 with the historic Reagan/Gorbachev Summit Meetings, which ended the Cold War. The first Bush administration served our Sparklings at several State Dinners and brought our Classic Vintage Brut to Moscow for the signing of the START treaty. The Clintons chose Iron Horse for many occasions-most impressively for the offical White House Millenium Dinner New Year's Eve 1999 to toast the new Millennium. Iron Horse was served at the 200th anniversary of the White House attended by all of the living presidents except Ronald Reagan who was too ill to travel to Washington. The first time the current Bush administration served our wines was on the most somber of occasions-September 20, 2001- at a working dinner with Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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