Segue

From our beginnings, B Cellars has always blended intentionally.  For many years, we produced Blend 23, 24, 25, and 26 for every vintage, and in 2015, we added our Blend 27 to the offering.  These wines are “first cut blends,” meaning that Master Winemaker Kirk Venge and the rest of the B Cellars blending team sit down at the table with clear intentions in mind for recreating versions of each of these blends. These blends have combined different vineyards, soils, climates, and varietals that we work with.  The blends are not made from the leftover wines but rather from the first cuts of our barrel selections.  There is a pretty short list of barrels that are saved for the many single vineyard Cabernet Sauvignons that we produce every year.

Considering that we produce and bottle over 30 different and distinct wines each vintage, blending sessions at B Cellars can tend to run late and long.  To keep our focus up, we keep the fun level up too!  There is always a wide range of music, spanning different ages and genres, from the Bee Gees to country to roots reggae to epic film scores. Non-stop banter filled with slapstick humor is a constant presence. And there is plenty of talk about food—what we would want to prepare to pair with the wines we are trialing.  There is talk about the wines, of course, but this tends to be pretty efficient: what we like, what we think is missing, what we’d like to try next, and then it’s back to the notes and the making of the next sample blend.  When we get a blend to where we think it’s perfect, there tends to be more head nodding and smiling than words.  When it’s right, it’s just right.

Mostly it’s just a lot of fun, a lot of joie de vivre, that comes through in a blending session.  And sometimes that spirit of fun takes over, and Kirk starts putting new blend ideas together, just to see what happens next.  It was in this spirit of fun and exploration that Segue was first born.  Kirk started blending barrels that were earmarked for single vineyard wines from some of our best picks, and the result was new layers of flavor and new levels of tension in the wines.  Working with the 2019 vintage, we decided to bottle a small amount of one of these experiments as our 2019 Segue. And, well, you all loved it.  So we decided to keep doing it.

Each year, the blend is different and unique.  But what each Segue has in common is a celebration of the creative tension and palate excitement that comes when we allow varietals or regions to play off each other.  Merlot against Cabernet Sauvignon.  Mountain fruit against Valley floor fruit.  Or, as in the 2022 vintage, Oakville against Rutherford.