As the holidays have flown by, our White Merlot has had time to settle in. In early December we ended the fermentation process by placing the wine in the cold, inhibiting the yeasts from reproducing. Now the wine has been racked off the lees (the sediment created during fermentation) and sulfured. The wine created has a nice refreshing lightness and the sweet flavors enhance rather than overwhelm. Next week we will rack one more time to increase the wine’s clarity in preparation for the next process, bottling.
But, before we can bottle we have one last order of business . . . we need a name for our wine! Please submit via a comment below, facebook or via email to lindsey@delriovineyards.com your name selection. All entries will be due by next Wednesday January 4th.
We have secured a date for bottling . . . those who helped process the wine in November are welcomed back to the winery to help us bottle. Please join us on Saturday January 7th from 3-5pm in the winery to bottle and take home your very own bottle of White Merlot.
A what?” “Yes, you heard me, a White Merlot.” Now, we all know what a Merlot is, but a white merlot? Let’s delve a little bit further to discover what this wine truly is about.
Merlot grapes were harvested on November 11, 2011, at 24° Brix. (Brix is a form of measuring the amount of natural sugar in the berry.) This number will help us determine the final alcohol of our finished wine.
After picking, the clusters were left in buckets for attendees of the URWT 2nd Saturday, Grape to Glass. Participants now had a great opportunity to get their hands a little dirty. This process consisted of de-stemming (pluck the fruit from the stem), sorting (bug, leaf & stem removal) and pressing. After we were sure that we had clean berries, the grapes were then heaped into a wood grape press. Luckily, we had some savvy participants here to help operate the manual press. Once the berries were inside the press, pressure was forced down upon the grapes by a ratcheting motion. This light pressing of the berries was just enough for the juice to flow without extracting the bitterness of the skins. The juice was then racked off into a 5 gallon carboy for fermentation. The White Merlot was then inoculated with active yeast drawn from a winery tank. It was clear that fermentation had taken hold as the gasses released through the fermentation bubbler were filling the kitchen. It is now time to let the yeast work their magic. I realized today that we did not have to leave the back door open to ventilate the kitchen so I thought I would take the juice into Jean-Michel’s lab for testing. Upon analyzing the juice, it was clear that we were indeed almost finished! The Brix came in at 3.3 and the Ph was sitting nicely at 3.55. We will need to stop fermentation within the next couple of days as the desired outcome will be to have a slightly sweet wine. The flavor of this wine is delicate and has just the right amount of sweetness, without being too cloying, which is excessive sweetness. I’m still not sure what I can smell on the nose as there is still a lot of CO2 remaining in my glass which is a byproduct of the fermentation. After we rack this wine several times, the CO2 will dissipate. Stay tuned to find out what happens next!
Today, I came across a great letter from our winemaker, Jean-Michel, describing his style of winemaking. Enjoy!
I believe that most of my wines represent my origins, my life experiences, my personality and my belief in winemaking. My family produces Muscadet in the Loire Valley, France. This vibrant wine is always on my mind when making whites. As a result, I like to feel some acidity on most of my blends. It’s helped the wine keep its freshness and lifts up the fruit as well as extends the mouth feel. My style of red wine comes from my experience in Bordeaux and Australia. I strive for fruity reds with a deep color as well as round and rich tannins. I barrel age red and white wines according to the vintage and its potential. In any case, I do not try to overpower the fruit of wines. To achieve the ageing that suit the wine, I select oak from France, Hungary and America. I also used lees ageing, Malolactic fermentation, and different techniques of maceration and yeast strains to create several nuances into the wines.
Ultimately, I want the taster to go back to my wines and find at each new sip another layer of complexity and aromas. A good wine in my opinion arouses curiosity by its originality, respectfulness of the fruit, balance, texture, and must express to its best the vineyard site and the work of the grower.
We are still making wine, but the excitement of the wine club party and holidays placed winemaking on the back burner. It is about time we share our progress.
We left off in mid November when we were “punching down” the cap on our four buckets of Cabernet Sauvignon. Since then quite a bit has happened to our wine and I would like to mention a few particular milestones. The first big and possibly my favorite step was pressing our wine. In order to extract color we left our wine on the grapes skins for just over two weeks. The skins and seeds also contribute to the amount of tannin our finished wine will have. As we personally don’t have a press we purchased a cheese cloth, strained our wine through the cloth, and pressed with our hands the remaining berries. Although, our fingers were frozen we had a great time squeezing as much juice as possible. As luck would have it, we ended up pressing the very same day that Jean-Michel pressed his Cabernet Sauvignon, it made us feel like we were doing something right.
Check out this quick video of the day we pressed.
The second milestone, that is important to mention, is the completion of the fermentation process. In order to stop fermentation you must kill the yeast. There are a variety of ways to stop the fermenting wine such as Campden tablets, but we decided to get ours cold by placing it in large refrigerator. After a night in the cold we then experienced our third milestone, racking. Racking consists of removing the wine from the lees at the bottom of the bucket or the residue from the grapes. This will take place a number of times before our wine is finished. We also were transferring the wine from the four buckets to two five gallon carboys. Now with our carboys full and our wine having gone through fermentation we had a few things left to do. The first is adding oak. Both Jen and I like slightly bigger and spicier wines so we decided to add a bit of French oak. As we don’t have a barrel the size we need, nor does Jean-Michel have barrels to spare our option was to use oak supplements. We quickly learned that there are a variety of oak enhancements to choose from. Jean-Michel was kind enough to offer us his sample kit. We had the choice of type of enhancement from staves, beans, chips, and rice, in addition to the choice of oak from Hungarian, American, and French and even the choice of toast light, medium and heavy toast. We chose to go with medium toasted French oak staves. Oak enhancements can be powerful so we have slowly added ours and continuously tasted the wine to make sure the oak flavor does not take over.
The next step in the process of making red wine would be to allow the wine to go through a secondary fermentation called Malolactic fermentation. This process is a bacterial fermentation that transforms the tart tasting Malic acid to the softer Lactic acid. The purpose is to stabilize the wine. We, however, have not started the Malolactic fermentation. The fermentation will only take place if the wine is kept at a warmer temperature. At the moment we are keeping our wine cold and have chosen to wait until later this winter or early spring to kick off the secondary fermentation. Our wine will remain in the cool warehouse and will be checked on periodically with tastings.
Stay tuned for more of our winemaking adventures in 2011!
