Winery Visit: Chateau Morrisette

The beautiful winery where the tour took place.

I have never been to a winery before and the winery at Chateau Morrisette was amazing!  The place was absolute beautiful and the wines were pretty delicious too!


We learned many things from the tour guide and we saw where the wine was stored and bottled.  Although the grapes are not grown at the winery, 90% of the grapes that they order are from the state of Virginia.  It is really nice that they use mostly Virginia fruit and it is just as tasty as California!  We learned that most of the wine is stored in oak barrels (very expensive), however some are stored in steel barrels like the Viognier.  The most expensive oak barrels are saved for the Chardonnay.

Some of the oak barrels that were holding the wine.

As for their red wines, the keep the skins and seeds on and within the grape while the ferment it.  The winery also presses their own grapes right there at the winery.

Containers that hold almost 3,000 gallons of wine!



 The wines are bottled at the winery.  The bottlers use a nitrogen process at the end before the cork is placed in order for the wine to stay preserved.  Chateau Morrisette uses mostly synthetic corks in their bottles.  However, they do use some natural corks as well.  If they do, the wines have to be stored upside down.
 

This is where the bottles are topped with Nitrogen and corked with a synthetic or natural cork.


The amount of bottles that are made every day is outstanding.  Below is a picture of the wines that were just bottled within the last 2 days.  There are cases behind that as well.

 Hundreds of bottles of wine made in one day!

We had such a great time on the visit and we learned so much that we didn't know about wine.  This was such a great way to get out and learn more about wine.  After the tour we got to taste some of the wine.  Also, we got to taste the Merlot that was just bottled 2 hours prior!

  All of us by the wine barrels.

After the tour we had some amazing wine!