#8: Rosé! Journey to Harvest…and Beyond!

VARIETY VS VARIETAL

Now that we are well into harvest, I thought it would be interesting to chat a bit about some different grape varieties that we make into varietal wines here at GlenLyon. Incidentally (for you Cork Dorks or Grammar Freaks), variety is a noun, whereas varietal is an adjective and should not be used as plural. I learned this after I gave a wine talk a few years back and I used the words incorrectly. A very nice woman (who happened to be the head of the Sonoma County Wine Library) quietly corrected me…and I’ve never confused that noun and adjective since.  She was very kind and even joined our wine club! The adjective has been misused and pluralized so often, (even by wine writers) that it is now sort of acceptable. But if you do hear someone say “How many varietals of wine do you make”, you can gently correct them by saying “I make wine from six different varieties of grapes and they all have different varietal characteristics”.  (But, then again, you can say whatever you want….)

ROSÉ 

The first wine to talk about will be Rosé…a fabulous style of making wine from a lot of different varieties of grapes that is a perfect wine to begin any evening or perfect for afternoon sipping. It’s perfect for a couple of reasons: first, it is usually a bit higher in acid, making it a perfect match with almost any appetizer; second, Rosé is traditionally lower in alcohol (our Blush ‘O The Boar Rosé is only 12.4%). Suzy and I usually enjoy a glass of our chilled Rosé while we talk about the evening’s menu. We both love it ice-cold…and, as a matter of fact, we oft times enjoy ours with some ice cubes in the glass. I know that sounds terribly bourgeoisie, but we like it! I would suggest, however, first doing trials with Rosé and ice first, one glass just wine, the other glass with ice cubes. If they taste the same, I’d prefer to drink the one with ice cubes. I will hydrate myself, lessen the alcohol, and I won’t get a headache the next day! Try it with your Rosé, white wine, or Sparkling wine. From trial and error, we’ve found that if the alcohol in the wine is under 13.4%+/-, the ice doesn’t seem to make the wine bitter and it’s simply refreshing. Try it! If you like it, then do it! 

HOW DO YOU MAKE ROSÉ?

Rosé is not a variety of grape, but a style of making pink wine from different red grape varieties. Rosé can be made in a couple of ways, but here’s how we do it here at GlenLyon: we pick all the fruit in our lower 2.5 acre vineyard (Syrah & Grenache are the two varieties of grapes we use to make our Rosé). The fruit is picked a bit earlier than our upper vineyard (Syrah & Cabernet Sauvignon) so there is less sugar and more acid (Brix @ 21+/- and pH at 3.3 for you Enophiles), which translates into a lighter-in-alcohol and higher-in-acid wine. We pick the fruit in the middle of the night and the full macrobins arrive at the winery door at about 6am. Why that early? Because, after they are picked, the grapes might start fermenting in the afternoon sun and it is much easier to make good wine if the grapes arrive cold and we can totally control the fermentation from beginning to end!

After the clusters of beautiful red Syrah and Grenache grapes arrive in our winery, we weigh each macrobin (860-960 net lbs each) and then load the fruit into an elevator hopper, which takes the clusters up to our bladder press. After the press is loaded with whole clusters of red fruit, we close the press trap door and begin the press cycle. 

The press’s job is to simply squeeze the clusters any number of times to separate the solids from the liquid, which we then pump into a covered stainless steel tank. In almost all red grape varieties, the pulp and juice is clear. The color of the juice comes from the skins, so the amount of time spent on the skins will be how pigmented the Rosé will be. We usually toss a cup of dry ice into the press pan to replace any oxygen as CO2 is very heavy. It looks very mystical as the dense fog covers the juice. (It should be noted that breathing too much CO2 is very dangerous…too much of it makes you dizzy and you could pass out, so we must be very careful using it.)

After the grapes have all been pressed and the now-pink juice is safely in our covered tank, we then begin the protocol of turning that juice into wine!

HOW DOES THE JUICE GET TRANSFORMED INTO WINE?

As soon as the pink juice goes into tank, there are many steps involved with testing and adjusting…and that testing and tweaking will happen a number of times a day. The moment the juice is in tank, we send out a sample to a local lab to analyze the juice. Those results will dictate what (and how much) of different products we might add to the juice before and during fermentation. An early add is a special yeast that will consume the glucose and fructose (sugars) in the fruit, creating CO2 and alcohol. If everything goes correctly, that entire process will take anywhere from seven days to two weeks. And then, voila! The sugars have been transformed into alcohol and the juice has been magically transformed into a young Rosé!  Then we remove the wine from the lees, (what’s left over at the bottom of the tank). We’ll put those “left-over” cloudy lees into plastic carboys, let them sit for a day and then siphon off the clear Rosé and (if it tastes fresh) add it to the bulk of the wine. Then we add a miniscule amount of our preservative, Sulfur Dioxide. (We’ll chat about the oft-misunderstood Sulfur Dioxide at a later date)

WHAT THEN?

We choose to rest our young Rosé in neutral (used) French oak barrels to allow the wine to “micro-ox”, which will smooth out any rough edges over time. There will be a few rackings (removing any additional sediment from the barrels, blending the wine in a tank and putting the wine back into those same sterilized barrels), and the wine will be tested multiple times for levels of SO2 and adjusted. We will constantly smell and taste the wine and evaluate. We bottle our Rosé during March, the following year.

“A ROSÉ BY ANY OTHER NAME, IS STILL A ROSÉ” (Wm Shakespeare)

Rosé is a magical light wine preferably consumed within 18 months after bottling and it is a unique wine because it can be made from any number of red grapes. If you travel to Tuscany, the Vino Rosato is most likely made from Sangiovese; in Burgundy the grape will be Pinot Noir; in Northern Rhone Valley it’s made from Syrah; in Southern Rhone it’s mostly likely Grenache. They all make terrific Rosés and it’s fun to compare a style of making wine from many different grape varieties. Here in Sonoma Valley, we are lucky enough to find Rosés made from all the above grape varieties, so you don’t have to travel all the way to Europe!

“In Wine there is Wisdom; In Water there is Bacteria!”  (Benjamin Franklin)