In honor of the festive weeks ahead, we’ve put together our ultimate guide to potluck pairings – the perfect lineup for your friendsgiving or family gathering this season.
Salads & Apps: Olema Reserve Rosé
The Olema Rosé Reserve is explosive and dramatic – the perfect match for family get-togethers and best way to kick off a celebration. Its lively notes wild strawberry, crabapple, and violet on the palate, plus its vibrant acidity, make it a great pairing with leafy salads and zesty vinaigrettes or a heaping charcuterie board.
Starchy Sides: Olema Reserve Chardonnay
Yellow peach, baked apple galette, roasted grains, lemon oil and brown spice… it sounds like a holiday dish in itself, but it’s the flavor profile of our Olema Chardonnay Reserve, one of our absolute favorites during the holiday season. The wine’s richness depth makes it a gorgeous complement to the whole range of potato dishes, from gratin to frites and mashed or sweet.
All the Veggies: Olema Pinot Noir
Depth and balance: the key words to a beautiful wine, and the secret to a harmonious pairing. With black raspberry and strawberry notes leading into the silky-smooth finish, the Olema Pinot is delicious on its own— but when matched with the classic holiday side dishes, it’s a match made in heaven. Our particular favorite? Roasted beets.
The Main Event: Olema Cabernet Sauvignon
Cabernet Sauvignon is the iconic entree pairing, and for good reason: the wine’s bold tannins and dark-fruit flavors cut through the fattiness of a slice of filet mignon, a prime rib, or a piece of slow-cooked tenderloin. As a bonus: this wine happens to pair beautifully with ultra-dark chocolate. Bon appetit.
Still Looking for the Perfect Gift? Shop Olema Gift Cards for the Perfect Last-Minute Gift for Your Wine-Loving Friends!
The season of giving has arrived! Looking for the perfect gift for friends, family, coworkers and clients? We’ve got you covered with the Olema Holiday Gift Collection. Wine gifts for every palate, at every price point, and all with shipping included.
Read on for our recommendations on what to gift this year—and use code OLEMAGIFTS to save 15% on your gift order this year!
For your bestie – Olema Double Bubbles Duo
Individually, the Olema sparkling wines are festive and fun; together, they’re the ultimate celebratory pair. Both hail from France’s Loire Valley and are made in the traditional champagne method, with secondary fermentation occuring in each bottle to result in perfect effervescence in every sip. Pair with holiday hors d’oeuvres or your New Year’s caviar.
For the coworkers – Olema Essentials Duo
Refreshing, lively Côtes de Provence rosé and complex, robust Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon: it’s a duo that checks every box for your wine-loving coworker (or even the boss). Plus, the numbers don’t lie: both of these wines receive 90+ reviews year after year.
For the Francophile – Olema Best of France Duo
We have the distinct pleasure to make multiple wines from France each year, flying our winemakers across the pond to join in on the harvest and blending in both Côtes de Provence in southern France and the Loire Valley, north of Bordeaux. The result are wines that nod to the old world style while delivering outstanding value and drinkability here in the US. Cin cin!
For your in-laws – Olema Core Four
Sometimes the best gifts are the ones that can be opened—and enjoyed— during the family White Elephant party. With a bottle each of Olema Rosé, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, there’s something for everyone… even the most particular names on your nice list.
Harvest 2022 for Olema Wines is coming to a close—so we wanted to take you behind the scenes and into the cellar for a peek at a day in the life of Olema harvest. It starts in the vineyard…
5:00 am
We start many harvest days, and days leading up to harvest, with crisp early mornings at the vineyards. Beginning in late summer, we’re sampling grapes—picking a representative sample of grapes and clsuters to bring them back to the winery to test sugar levels and acidity to determine when it’s time to pick. Actual picking days may start even earlier, with night picks beginning anytime between 11pm and 3am to get the fruit back to the winery bright and early.
7:00 am
Time for fruit processing at the winery! In other words, this is the first step in the winemaking process, moving the grapes from their picking bins, over the sorting table, into the destemmer, and into a fermentation tank.
9:00 am – 12:00 pm
After fruit processing, our harvest mornings are filled up with pumpovers, measuring fermentations to test their sugar levels and see how far along the fermentation process they are, and cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning!
Pumpovers, just as the name suggests, mean pumping the juice from the bottom of the tank and pour it back over the top of the fermenter. This extracts flavor and tannins from the grape skins, imparting beautiful complexity into the wine.
12:00 pm – Lunch!
…Just kidding, we eat more than just grapes (but wine grapes ARE particularly delicious…)
1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Afternoons are spent with more pumpovers, pressing, digging out tanks, and cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning to wrap up work for the day ahead! Because we source from vineyards all around Sonoma County and have three different varietals (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon), we might have some lots of grapes coming in the door while others are midway through fermentation and others are fully fermented and ready to be drained out of tank. The wine goes into barrel, and we get to dig all the pommace (fermented grape skins) out of the tank and clean it thoroughly to get it ready for the next lot of wine. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it!
5:00 pm
Dinner as a crew to toast to a great day and watch a beautiful Wine Country sunset as we prepare for the next day ahead.
