Why Smaller Can Sometimes Be Better
The quality of a wine is not always dictated by the sweetness of the juice. Many winemakers make decisions on when to pick by simply measuring the degrees brix (percentage of sugar) in their grapes, and generally pick when the sugars are at their highest possible level. Lane and I, however, pick when the flavors of the grape are at their peak, regardless of sugar content. That's not to say that we ignore sugar - we do test for it, as well as acidity - but our main decision to pull the trigger is based mostly on what our palates tell us.
The 2014 Chardonnay has now gone from vineyard through the crusher to barrel, and has completed its fermentation. As I mentioned in our last newsletter, we brought in two clones of Chardonnay from Sierra Madre Vineyard this year: Robert Young and Wente 15. Robert Young looked as he always has - handsome, debonaire, and a bit plump - but the Wente 15 clone behaved completely differently. What was most striking was how small the berries were. And small berries make for better wine.
Why, you may ask? Because more skin means more flavor. So many flavors are locked up in those crunchy little grape skins. If the skin-to-juice ratio is high, so will the concentration of flavors in the wine be. Wente 15 has such small berries this year, the skin-to-juice ratio is off the charts.
We expect a rocking good year for the 2014 harvest. All of our Sierra Madre Pinot came in over the last two weeks as well, and is fermenting away in open-top bins. Needless to say, it looks (and smells) awesome, but more on that later. The 2013 vintage is almost ready for release as well, so look for stellar new Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, as well as a few new surprises! Stay tuned…. more harvest stories to come!
- Will Henry
The 2021 harvest was near. I called my winemaking partner, Lane Tanner, and asked her to find as many neutral oak barrels as we could gather - we had to accommodate extra fruit coming in. The quality in this new, mysterious vineyard was just too good to pass up. I dubbed the vineyard ‘The Wild King,’ […]
I was always a believer that being wild was a good thing - to a point. Be it a confrontation with a bear on a remote surf trip in British Columbia in January, or a night spent adrift on the open ocean in a boat that had lost its engine, wild is exciting, invigorating, and […]
Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind were made by accident. Perhaps the best known (and beneficial) was made by scientist Dr. Alexander Fleming, who went on vacation for a few weeks and returned to see that his petri dishes had overgrown with mold. His discovery: penicillin. Other examples of benign errors include potato chips, […]
There’s a lot of geeky stuff on the back of a Lumen bottle - wine-geeky stuff. So why is it there? Not only are the basic facts listed - vineyard source, AVA, variety, clone - but also we share the pH, TA (titratable acidity), and Brix at harvest. What, you may ask, is the significance […]
