Winery within the Winery

The Winery within the Winery demonstrates the Klein family’s dedication to making our premium wines as good as they can possibly be.

Previously, founder Rodney Strong recognized the best vineyards and isolated those for individual bottling (for example, Alexander's Crown). Then Rick Sayre took it to the next level, identifying individual blocks within those best vineyards and harvesting and fermenting their grapes separately in order to better assess their qualities as potential Reserve or Symmetry lots.

Now, the Winery within the Winery takes Rick's idea further, allowing for a precise vineyard block focus that can isolate individual areas, even row by row, for very small lot harvests, a sorting process that naturally starts in the vineyard. Those select rows are hand-harvested, either at dawn or sometimes at night, for early morning delivery of night-cooled fruit.

The small half-ton bins are delivered inside the cellar to keep them cool. From there, each half-ton bin is carefully tipped onto a belt. Crew members then sort through the clusters by hand, removing those showing any defects (rot, raisins, unripe coloration, etc.) as well as leaves, stems, or anything else. They also ensure that the clusters are fed into the de-stemmer at a slow, steady speed.

The destemmed berries drop to another belt, where another crew inspects them one more time to remove anything not ideal. Now this near perfect fruit is fed directly into one of a series of small capacity tanks (sized to handle as little as a few tons at a time), to undergo fermentation. The results of this meticulous process have been spectacular wines.