Our Production Process

Monte De Oro Win­ery started mak­ing wine from its estate vine­yards with the 2005 har­vest. A major­ity of the red grape har­vest was retained, while the white grape pro­duc­tion was sold.

Monte De Oro’s wines are made under an exclu­sive cus­tom crush, wine­mak­ing rela­tion­ship with Temec­ula Val­ley Win­ery Man­age­ment. Tim Kramer, Monte De Oro’s pri­mary super­vis­ing wine­maker, works closely with Monte De Oro’s man­ag­ing mem­ber and the winery’s Napa Val­ley wine con­sul­tant in the cul­ti­va­tion of unique and qual­ity wines. This three-way wine­mak­ing part­ner­ship has resulted in sev­eral award-winning wines from Monte De Oro’s 2006 and 2007 vintages.

Giv­ing Spe­cial Atten­tion to Our Grapes

Monte De Oro firmly believes that qual­ity wine starts with qual­ity grapes. Each year, the first signs of annual grape bud­ding (in March and April) are eagerly awaited, after which metic­u­lous vine­yard man­age­ment prac­tices are followed.

With guid­ance from Monte De Oro’s wine­mak­ing team, Monte De Oro’s farm­ing team (Stage Ranch Farm Man­age­ment, a pre­mier farm­ing com­pany in Temec­ula Val­ley) care­fully mon­i­tors grape devel­op­ment all sum­mer long: thin­ning shoots, culling grape clus­ters, mon­i­tor­ing grape verai­son, con­duct­ing a last clus­ter thin­ning, man­ag­ing vine­yard canopy designs for opti­mal sun/shade inter­ac­tion and plan­ning effec­tive water strate­gies for full-bodied, yet con­cen­trated grapes to ensure a qual­ity harvest.

Monte De Oro’s white grapes are gen­er­ally ready for har­vest in late August/early Sep­tem­ber, while its red grapes are ready in late September/early October.

Our Invest­ment in the Wine Aging Process

Grape crush gen­er­ally fol­lows within six hours of grape har­vest. Our grapes are weighed and sorted to remove any stems, leaves or other debris and the fer­men­ta­tion process is begun in either steel tanks or man­ual punch-down bins. Monte De Oro’s white wines are then tank fer­mented for up to eight months before bot­tling. Our red wines fer­ment for 30–60 days after which the grapes are pressed to opti­mize juice color and then racked into barrels.

Monte De Oro makes a tremen­dous invest­ment – one crit­i­cal to the end prod­uct – in the pur­chase of brand new French Oak bar­rels annu­ally. In fact, Monte De Oro is one of only a very few winer­ies in Temec­ula to do so; the aver­age cost is in excess of $1,200 per bar­rel. Monte De Oro’s red wine bar­rel regime, on aver­age, calls for 25–35% brand new French Oak Bar­rels, 15–25% one-year-old French Oak bar­rels and the bal­ance (up to 60%) in 2– to 3-year-old French Oak barrels.

One excep­tion to this French bar­rel regime is Monte De Oro’s Zin­fan­del wine, which requires the spe­cial qual­i­ties of Amer­i­can Oak to bring out the varietal’s characteristics.

Fol­low­ing bar­rel rack­ing, Monte De Oro’s wines are del­i­cately racked peri­od­i­cally to sep­a­rate wine liq­uid from any lay­ers of solids. Rack­ing is mov­ing wine from one con­tainer to another with­out trans­fer­ring the sed­i­ment. This labor-intensive process is less intru­sive than fil­ter­ing the wine, which removes more of the desir­able ele­ments. Addi­tion­ally, the wines are “topped” monthly by adding wine to the bar­rels to min­i­mize any bar­rel head­space and reduce the risk of oxi­diza­tion dur­ing bulk wine stor­age and aging.

Monte De Oro’s red wine bar­rels age for 16–22 months. Just prior to final rack­ing, sev­eral wine blend­ing ses­sions are held to care­fully deter­mine each year’s wine com­po­si­tions – for exam­ple, 90% of one wine with just a touch of another wine and a touch yet another wine – to accen­tu­ate the main wine’s char­ac­ter­is­tics. Once this is done, a final rack­ing and fine-filtering is con­ducted as part of the bot­tling process.