Into Tirage

In the weeks since we completed blending trials, the wines have moved from bench blends to full cellar blends.

What happens in the lab during trials is precise and contained: small beakers, measured pipettes, careful ratios. What follows is something else entirely. Once a blend is chosen, it has to be built in volume. That means pulling the component wines from barrel, combining them in tank, and tasting again to confirm that the acidity, tension, and balance between components hold. They did.

Before the wines leave for tirage bottling, we cold stabilize to prevent tartrate crystals from forming in bottle. We protein stabilize to prevent haze. We run lab tests to verify that the wines are microbiologically clean and stable for long aging under crown cap.

In a few days, the 2025 wines will travel 30 miles north to C2 Cellars in Orcutt, where their team will handle tirage bottling. Before bottling, they prepare three separate liqueurs de tirage, one for each cuvée, each built from its own base wine and combined with sugar and a carefully selected yeast strain. Those solutions are blended into the wines before the bottles are filled and sealed under crown cap.

The carbon dioxide produced during that second fermentation dissolves into the wine and becomes the bubbles themselves. The slow autolysis of the spent yeast cells that follows is what gives traditional method sparkling wine much of its texture and complexity over time. The French call this process the prise de mousse: the capturing of the foam.

I was there the first time this happened, in June 2025, with Amy and Alisa, when the inaugural vintage of AERILYN went into bottle. One hundred conversations. One harvest. Two vineyards. Months of tasting, recalibrating, second-guessing, and deciding again. Then suddenly, a bottle coming off the line with wine in it that we had made.

I was thrilled with the blends, and equally thrilled knowing the wines were still only at the beginning of what they would become.

This June, the 2025 vintage follows it into tirage. Different fruit, different blends, another year of work behind it.

I expect the feeling will be the same.

Ever curious,

Tammee