Botrytis & Sweet Wines

A few weeks have gone by since my last post…  I’ve been very busy at the winery, not that I want to make excuses, but I’m well into the making of approximately 12 different wines, over 5,000 gallons in total.  How much wine is this… about the equivalent to 25,000 bottles of 750mL.

One of the most interesting wines that I’m currently working on is labeled by Running Brook as “Auslesen”.  It is a sweet desert wine made with Chardonnay grapes which have been infected with a fungus called “Botrytis Cinerea”.  Special conditions in the vineyard coupled with alternating wet and dry periods around harvest time are necessary for Botrytis Cinerea to turn into what is called “Noble Rot”.  The berries shrivel leaving behind sugars, acids and minerals.  The end result is a more intensely concentrated juice leading to a wine with complex aromatics unlike other sweet and late harvest wines.  But Botrytis also causes a fair amount of loss in the total volume of juice extracted from the vines.  As a result, wines made from these grapes usually demand much higher prices compared with some other desert wines.

There is no agreement as to where Botrytis was first discovered in the world of wine and winemaking, with Hungary, Germany and France all claming that they were the first.  Sauterne is the most famous wine region to produce these wines, a small appellation about 25 miles south of Bordeaux in France.  Chateau d’Yquem dominates this region and is historically one of the world’s most famous desert wine producers.  Their desert wine is made from mostly the Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapes… infected with Botrytis Cinerea.  D’Yquem wines usually sell for very high prices.  Their 2002 vintage received a score of 96 from the Wine Spectator so if you want to buy it you’ll have to dish out close to $450 per bottle.  If any of you ever buy or steal a bottle I expect to be invited for a tasting… :-)

Running Brook has successfully grown Botrytis infected Chardonnay at their Wesport Vineyard for the third consecutive year.  I walked the vineyard while the grapes were being harvest in late October and would say that at least 90% of the grapes were infected with the fungus.  Nasty stuff… in a good way.  In the two previous vintages, Running Brook sold its Sauterne style desert wine for $25 a bottle.

Making this wine requires special considerations.  Botrytis usually depletes the grapes of most nutrients and the winemaker needs to be certain that the yeast have what they need for an healthy fermentation.  But at the same time, the addition of too many nutrients can result in a wine which ferments beyond what is typical of a desert wine.  Fermentation is carried at a very cool temperature and since the wine is finished with residual sugar, other winemaking processes need to be considered such as filtration in order to avoid re-fermentation at a later stage after the wine has been bottled.

P.S. In the next few days, I hope to be able to post some wine recommendations for Thanksgiving.  I've already started working on it, so stay tuned.

Comments

[Golly]

Wow those grapes look lovely, you must be so excited about how they'll turn out.

[Marco]

Hi Golly,

To be honest my first reaction when I saw the grapes during harvest was more of disgust than anything else. I thought... How am I going to make good wine from this crap? It smelled horrible too. But, we are just about a third into the fermentation and I'm starting to notice some good aromas and flavors. We'll see out it turns out in the end.

Thanks for checking in! Hope all is well across the pond.

Take care,
Marco

[Elisa]

"Vinho do Porto" has always been a part of celebrating the holidays at my home...along with good food, family, and friends of course. :)