The sticky

Every winemaker will tell you the same thing: great wine is made in the vineyard. You cannot make great wine out of bad grapes, simply put. This is a basic truism of winemaking, and it is the reason why many winemakers spend more time out in the vineyard than in the winery. I mentioned before the special love many winemakers have for Pinot Noir. This is in part because it is a grape which vividly reflects the vineyard and land (aka terroir) that produced it. So a lover of Pinot, like Adrian Baker, takes great care to preserve that vineyard character in his Pinot Noirs.

But sometimes, especially when one is often engaged in such subtle winemaking, a more interactive approach can just be fun. So Adrian has been having some fun with a bit or Riesling. The grapes were solid but lacked that special something in their inherent vineyard character. WineMAKING was necessary to turn this into a great wine. So the approach was to leave the grapes out on the vine longer into the season and ripen them to the point of sticky sweetness. Accompanying this ripening is a vineyard issue called "Botrytus Bunch Rot." I say issue to maintain ambiguity, because in spite of being a rot, it is not universally detrimental to your grapes and wine. If it is the right kind of Botrytus, it does not detract from the wine quality, in fact it contributes a honey and floral aroma which is quite lovely. Botrycized wines can be very expensive and very good. This Riesling was picked with partial Botrytus, perhaps 30% infection, but it was the best kind of infection: a dry rot. This means that the rot is growing in a reserved clean sort of manner, with clean neat clusters, rather than a mess of broken wet berries as can happen (and which is the bad kind of Botrytus). So the grapes were looking promising when they came in the other day.

We layered the grapes into a large bin, filling the bin halfway. We then hopped into the bin and stomped them with our feet. I wish I could say we were barefoot, but actually we were wearing sanitized rubber boots (the modern world and heath standards can be a real bummer sometimes). In any case I had the opportunity to dance a jig, stomping the grapes with my feet. Then we added acid (to balance the taste of the wine, which will be quite sweet and will need good acidity to balance it out), sulfur dioxide (to keep the grapes from spoiling), extraction enzymes (to increase the release of juice from the grapes), and dry ice (to protect the wine in the short term). Then the grapes were left overnight, to extract some phenolics (for weight and mouthfeel) and aroma (that special honeyed Botrytus character I spoke of earlier) in the soak. The next day we took the bins and filled up a small press with them. We then put them through an incredibly long, gentle press cycle. This way, the juice was collected in a manner ensuring that the quality was high, and that the Botrytus character (which was largely dry, and therefore difficult to extract as juice during a shorter pressing) was intense. It was interesting to taste the juice over the course of the press cycle. Early on, the juice was only a little sweet, fresh, but with some Botrytus character. With time, the juice was sweeter, and picked up a darker denser aroma, like a wild honey or oxidized pear. The different levels of the pressings were separated into two tanks, the sticky stuff and the really really sticky sweet stuff.

It's fun stuff, this type of wine work, because it diverts from the usual minimalistic path of winemaking, while still maintaining the highest integrity of natural processes. It is a matter of the winemaker utilizing the tools at his disposal to get the best wine possible, with the assistance of Botrytus and yeast.