The Ridge: A Wine Club

Alexandria Nicole Cellars welcomes you to our wine club, The Ridge. As a member of The Ridge, you can share in our passion for wine and our dedication to the overall enhancement of the wine experience through wine, food, family, and charity. We offer two membership levels:

• The Vineyard Series
• Over The Ridge Series

We hope our wine clubs will enhance the involvement of all our friends at Alexandria Nicole Cellars.

The Ridge is named after the dominate ridgeline of our 232-acre Destiny Ridge Estate Vineyard, and is dedicated to our belief that quality starts in the vineyard. It is here, high on the bluffs of the Columbia River, that our grapes thrive in the soils and climatic conditions of the Columbia Valley.

The Vineyard Series

Vineyard Series membership is free! As a Vineyard Series wine club member of The Ridge, you'll enjoy a year of great wines with Alexandria Nicole Cellars. The benefits of the Vineyard Series include:

• 25% discount on automatic shipment of featured wines
• 25% discount on re-orders within 60 days
• 25% case discount when purchased at the winery
• 15% off gift shop items and single bottle purchases
• Waved tasting fees for you and a guest when visiting our winery
• Advanced notice of special events at the winery or in the vineyard and invitations of exclusive members-only programs
• Subscription to Alexandria Nicole Cellars newsletter, which includes special offers, insider information, scrumptious recipes with suggested wine pairings, and notes from our winemaker about each release

Each wine in your shipment will be personally selected by our winemaker and will be shipped directly to your home or office (average cost per shipment is under $70.00, plus taxes and shipping costs, which will be charged to your credit card upon shipment from Alexandria Nicole Cellars).

Over The Ridge

A wine club like no other. A very limited, always changing, adventuresome wine club that is designed to take the overall wine experience to an extreme level. So extreme, you won’t believe it until you live it!

Here is your chance to become one of the Founding Members of the Alexandria Nicole Cellars Over The Ridge Wine Club. This is a unique opportunity to engage in every aspect of wine making and viticultural practices. Your experience will stretch over a two-year period, with quarterly events at our estate vineyard Destiny Ridge overlooking the Columbia River.

With the Over The Ridge Club membership, you will literally grow your own vineyard. By the end of this experience, you will have grown a nursery, planted wine grapes, and experienced all cultural practices involving vineyard operations, including the harvesting of those grapes in your care throughout the season and creating hand-crafted wine from them.

You will have the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of the winemaking procedures, including crushing, de-stemming, fermentation, pressing, racking, barrel selection, yeast stains and trials, bottling, labeling, and packaging selection. We guarantee that you will have a fuller knowledge of what happens in the vineyard and how it correlates to quality in the wines. As well as secrets in the winery that correlate to quality in the bottle.

The result will be 10 cases of wine that you can share with your family and friends, and the experience of a lifetime. Your guide for this journey will be Alexandria Nicole Cellars CEO Jarrod Boyle.

My goal for the Over The Ridge Club is not only to educate you on all aspects of vineyard growing and winemaking practices, but also to show you how by taking a single cutting from an existing vine, you can create a wonderful gift of love, passion, and a life-long story that started with dirt and ends with a bottle of wine.

—Jarrod Boyle

Over The Ridge Membership:
The cost of this exclusive membership is a one-time fee of $5,000.

Benefits Include:

• 10 total cases of wine created with your very own hands
• 25% discount on most Alexandria Nicole Cellars wines
• 20% discount on all winemaker's dinners and special events
• Two tickets to the Annual Destiny Ridge Vineyard’s A Night Out steak and lobster benefit dinner and auction
• Opportunity to pour your wines at the 2006 Destiny Ridge Vineyard 6th annual A Night Out benefit auction and dinner
• Updates by email about winery events and upcoming wine releases
• Special training and educational experience pertaining to winemaking and viticulture

This club is limited and exclusive. It offers fun, education, and challenges. However, please remember that you are on a working farm, so high heels will be extremely difficult to walk in and neckties may get caught up in the cordon, meaning we have to leave you there until harvest.

With the Over The Ridge Club membership, you will literally grow your own vineyard. We guarantee that you will have a fuller knowledge of what happens in the vineyard and how it correlates to quality in the wines, as well as secrets in the winery that correlate to quality in the bottle.

There is an old expression that the best thing farmers can put on their field is their shadow. This means being out in the field and observing what is happening.

A Sneak Peek

The Philosophy of Terroir
Terroir is a French term, defining the factors that play a role in differentiating one vineyard site from another, including soil, climate, topography, varietal selection, sun exposure and heat units. At Alexandria Nicole Cellars, we believe that wine is grown in the vineyard. We are fortunate enough to be able to assist nature as she slowly creates the wonderful aromas and characteristics of full maturity, while the wine is under our trust. We strive to optimize the fullest potential of our terroir to ensure that our winemaker can emphasize the fruit and employ winemaking techniques that will capture and accentuate the fruit expression unique to Destiny Ridge.

Nursery
You will be taking prunings (cuttings) off existing vines and gathering them into bundles of 100 sticks. You will learn how to tie the bundles, soak and pit them. We will explain why we turn the bundles upside-down in the pit and bury them approximately 4-6 inches below ground level. We will explain how the top soil heats up faster, causing the cuttings to callous around the initial cut and begin growing small roots before the portion of the cutting that is buried (upside-down) deeper in the soil starts to root, where the ground is still cold, maintaining dormancy.

Soil Profiles
You will learn about the soil profiles on Destiny Ridge, which are mostly sandy loam with plenty of fractured basalt. The broken basalt in turn has a moderating effect on temperature by absorbing heat during the day and releasing it at night. While being very detrimental to the equipment the rocks, this aids immensely in drainage. We have adopted a program where we till every other row, with the alternate rows being left in wheat. This builds a micro-climate for pests and beneficial insects to live in, as opposed to living directly on the vines. It also slows the vines' vigor, resulting in less vegetative characteristics in the wine.

Trellising
There are many techniques we use to increase varietal character in the wine, including the choice of a vertical shoot-positioned trellis system, or VSP. The fruiting cane is twisted around one wire and tied flat. This allows each bud the same amount of sunlight and guarantees even growth, allowing the shoots to enter the bottom catch wire at the same time. The shoots will continue to grow through the catch wires (with some help from our skilled workers), creating a thin, yet tall canopy maximizing the leaves' exposure to the sun. As the shoots are even, so too is the fruiting zone, which helps in the manual removal of all leaves around the grape clusters.

Crop Loads
There is a strong feeling among winemakers that lower yields result in better quality. While we agree with this, we also realize that balance is the key. If the crop is adjusted to just 10% of the norm for that site, then the vegetative characteristics will be pronounced due to excessive growth with the lighter load. The other extreme is also detrimental to not only the quality of the fruit, but also the health of the vine. An excessively heavy crop will produce spindly canes, while the other extreme produces bull wood, both of which are not winter-hardy.

Planting Cover Crops
Destiny Ridge plants a cover crop, which improves soil quality by adding organic matter, building soil structure, increasing the populations of soil microorganisms, and improving water penetration. Cover crops also provide refuge for some natural enemies of vineyard pests.

Monitoring and Using Economic Thresholds
The foundation of any IPM/sustainable farming program is monitoring the numbers of pests and their natural enemies frequently and keeping a written record of what is observed. Control of a pest does not occur until the level of the pest has reached a point where the damage it will cause exceeds the cost of controlling the pest. This is the economic threshold.

Leaf-pulling or Leaf Removal
This technique involves removing leaves around the grape cluster when the berries are about the size of a pea. This improves air circulation in the grape canopy, reducing the likelihood of bunch rot. Research has shown that leaf-pulling is as effective in preventing bunch rot as a fungicide spray. Leaf-pulling also allows for better coverage of mildew sprays, and exposes grape bunches to sunlight, which significantly improves wine grape quality. An additional benefit of leaf-pulling is that leafhoppers and mites are concentrated on these leaves at the time of year that leaf-pulling is done (when berries are pea-sized), and this reduces leafhopper and mite numbers.

Drip Irrigation
Drip irrigation systems minimize water use in vineyards. We at Destiny Ridge can apply fertilizers to the vineyard through the drip system. Since the fertilizer is applied to the soil where the grape roots are concentrated, less fertilizer is needed when compared to broadcast fertilizer applications. Applying fertilizers through the drip system can result in up to a 50% reduction in fertilizer use.

Winemaking Procedures

Receiving Procedures
The health of our vines is monitored daily by Jarrod and vineyard foremen Jose Luis Yanez. Jose and his crew carefully tend to their needs, gently hand-harvesting clusters and delivering them to the crush pad for hand sorting. Having the production facility on-site affords us the opportunity to use asparagus boxes, which hold approximately 35 pounds of grapes. The smaller boxes reduce the amount of pressure on the berries, eliminating premature crushing of the grapes. The grape skins have wild yeast present on the skins, so if the skins break, they begin to go through natural, uncontrolled fermentation. We control all the conditions of the winemaking process to ensure the quality of wine. For further quality control, the crew cleans the picking boxes—it is essential to have clean picking boxes returned to the field for the next group of grapes harvested.

Crushing Procedures
The question is how to get the juice out of the grapes as gently as possible. At most wineries, the first stop for grapes is the crusher/de-stemmer, where stems are removed and the berries crushed in preparation for fermentation. "We've found, especially with our white wine varieties, that the process of crushing and de-stemming can grind stems and seeds, adding bitterness and green flavors to the wines. Therefore Alexandria Nicole Cellars uses a new, gravity-fed, whole cluster press pad for its white varietals. Unlike the red varietals, white juice does not need to be in contact with the grape skins. Therefore, the whole grape clusters are gently carried directly to a membrane presses, totally bypassing the crusher/de-stemmer. The membrane press is a large cylinder with a giant balloon inside. When the balloon is deflated, the press is filled with grapes. The balloon is then inflated to gently squeeze the juice from the grapes. Once pressed, the juice is quickly drained before it has a chance to pick up bitter flavors or lose any of its fragrant, varietal character. Then the juice is transferred into barrel where it will go through fermentation and the pressings are hauled away.

As both the red and white grapes arrive at the winery, they are placed onto our new vibrating table. The vibration helps distribute the grapes evenly, allowing the sorters to examine clusters once they are delivered to long sorting table.

From here, the red clusters take a different route than the whites. The reds will continue from the cluster-sorting table and are gently gravity-fed into the de-stemmer. The berries then fall from the de-stemmer into the crusher, the must pump and finally the fermentation tank where the juice remains in contact with the skins and seeds during the fermentation period of approximately 10-14 days, or until dry.

Our winemaker also evaluates numerous strains of yeast and selects those that he feels give the optimum quality for each varietal Alexandria Nicole produces. Delicate processing are implemented to handle grapes more gently and to preserve the inherent quality of the fruit. We diligently work to prevent the tannic bitterness that makes red wines difficult for some people to enjoy fully. The winemakers have found that the best way to prevent bitterness is to gently handle grape "must" (the collection of skins, seeds, and juice), ensuring that it is not ground up as the wine is mixed during fermentation…almost as if the mixing were being done by hand…the old-fashioned way. This is why the winery has installed a pneumatic punch-down system that gently pushes the cap of the fermenting reds down to be rehydrated in the juices. The gentle mixing of juice and skins that provides for complete extraction of color, aroma and flavor resulting in rich, smooth, full-bodied wines without the bitter tannins.

Barrel Ageing
The barrel cellar at Alexandria Nicole Cellars has the ideal environment for fermentation and aging: a constant 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 85% humidity. Special humidifiers have been installed to assist with our temperature control requirements, ensuring our wines are kept in the very best atmosphere conducive for producing world-class wines.

Varietal
A varietal is simply the name of the grape from which the wine is made, such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Sauvignon Blanc. In order to list the varietal on the label, the wine must contain at least 75% of that grape. Many varietals are blended with others (such as Merlot with Cabernet) to round out either the aromatic or flavor profile of the wine. This is a winemaking decision based on the style that the winery is trying to achieve.

For more information, please contact Jarrod Boyle at (509) 832-3497.