Running Brook Update #3 - 2007 Reds

Back in mid January I wrote about Running Brook’s 2007 white wine vintage.  Here is a summary and latest status for the red wines made from the 2007 harvest:

• Rosé of Pinot Noir – The grapes were left in contact with the skins longer than we had planned for due to the chaos that was developing at the winery during harvest/crush time.  With three days of juice to skin contact, this wine is not really what you would expect a rosé to look like, but it is lighter in color than any Pinot Noir.  This was one of our first wines to be made in 2007, so the temperatures of early October were high enough to allow it to go through a natural malolactic fermentation.  We took advantage of the cold winter to add some tartaric acid, drop its high pH to just below 3.6 and cold stabilize it.  Should be a great summer time red.
• Pinot Noir – Have I told you about my feeling towards Pinot Noir?  Well, add another strike to the count.  The problem is that this wine ended up with pH above 4.0 which makes it extremely difficult to maintain healthy.  More importantly than any pH numbers, the wine just does not taste like what we had hoped and worked for.  We haven’t given up on it but may feeling is that 2007 still was not the year for our Pinot Noir.
• Petit Verdot (*pictured)– The color is just phenomenal.  I won’t forget pressing this small lot of wine into a single barrel until past 2AM sometime in late October.  My hands were purple for days.  Still a bit "harsh" mouthfeel especially for someone who may prefer lighter reds.  It is young so this is not surprise.  It may be used to blend with the Cab.Franc and Merlot as it is usually done in Bordeaux, but we haven’t made a final decision.  We love to take a barrel sample and just look at its color… wine geeks do this you know.
• Merlot – Even Eric Fry commented during his visit in January that this is a “Nice Wine”.  Coming from one of East Coast's top winemakers it was a huge complement.  This wine had a juice to skin contact of about 13 days which resulted in a beautiful color extraction.  It has enough tannin and acid backbone to carry it for the long run.  Still very young and it has a major step to go through... mallocatic fermentation.  Very promising.
• Cabernet Franc/Merlot – This is a field blend of the two grapes, de-stemmed and then crushed together right at the crushpad.  What’s the ratio of Cab.Franc to Merlot?  We aren’t really sure… it’s Manny the Vine Man secret… :-)  Just like with the Merlot, 13 day maceration resulted in beautiful color.  You can taste the tannins easily but they are not overpowering.  We are very happy with this wine thus far.  It promises to be one of our best reds.

There are also a few other reds that Manny Morais made on his own with natural yeast fermentations.  I detect a bit of an acetone aroma/flavor in the Cabernet Sauvignon but besides this the wines are showing good.  The 800 pounds of Pinot Noir that I took home from the Dartmouth Vineyard ended up pretty disappointing.  The wine developed a slight taste that can be described as “mousy”.  This is something that usually occurs with wines made with very low levels of sulfite.  It’s bacterial in nature and my research seems to indicate the worst… it can’t be fixed.  The wine is drinkable, but I can’t get over the “mousy” taste so I think it is heading to the drain at some point before the next harvest.  A good example of a wine that I would never attempt to sell to anyone.  In fact, I would not even give it away for free.

But let me end this on a good note.  The wines that we really had high hopes for right from the start are the Merlot/Cab.Franc/Petit Verdot.  I’m honestly holding myself back in my assessment because wine this young changes on a daily basis and who knows next time I taste them I may be disappointed.  Let me just say that I’m very confident.  This past weekend after tasting every single red wine barrel (unfortunately there are only 11 of them), I left the winery with a big smile on my face.  Yes we can make good red wines in the Southeastern New England AVA.