TRAVESSIA Winery Blog

When rain is the enemy of good wine

Early last week I walked through the vineyards in Westport and Dartmouth to evaluate the effect of a total of 5 inches of rain in the previous four days.  Yes, 5 inches... almost as much rain in four days as we got the entire 2007 growing season.  The crop isn't completely lost, and in fact some varietals are doing quite well (Merlot, Cabernet Franc), but it isn't pretty for some of the vineyard blocks.  What are the major impacts of rain during harvest?

Dilution of flavor and sugar in the berries
The vines absorb more water than we would like them to at this stage and the result is that the intensity of flavors is reduced.  Flavor intensity is one of the most important factors in producing good wines.  Sugar is also diluted but that’s not as critical as the loss of flavor since sugar can be added to the juice prior to or during fermentation - a process called Chaptalization.  This correction of the sugar amount in grape juice is usually allowed in cold climate regions like ours where sugar in the grapes may not naturally reach the desired level for good wines to be made.  The French, especially in Burgundy, have been adding sugar to their grape juice for centuries.

The development of rot... Rot = Evil
I could leave it at that, but let me take it a little further.  Wet grape clusters tend to rot especially on tightly closed clusters as in most Pinot varietals.   Rot, even of the noble kind, does not add pleasant flavor to dry wines.  Moreover, berries can burst if they swell beyond the skin's ability to retain all the water which is absorbed.  With the "meat" of the berry exposed to insects and bacteria... it's a disaster in the making.

So, what's a winemaker to do?
Option 1: Pick early.  Yes, sometimes a winemaker and vineyard manager will decide to just go ahead and harvest the grapes the day before the heavy rain.  The problem with this is that sometimes the grapes aren't ripe enough to make good wine.  It's a "play it safe" approach based on the idea that it is better to make some wine than no wine at all.
Option 2: If the decision is made to weather the storm and wait for full ripeness despite all the rain, then extra work has to be done at the winery.  If quality wine is the goal.... the winery has to be very selective when the grapes are finally harvested.  By this I mean that every berry that has developed rot should NOT be included in the making of the wine.  This requires hand picking and hand sorting, a time and money consuming procedure.  Even with the rotten berries removed, we still have to deal with the issue of lack of flavor intensity.  Techniques like draining some of the grape juice from being in contact with the skins (called saigneé) or extending juice to skin contact can be used to try to make the best of it.

That's the price to pay for quality wine to be made in years when mother nature throws at us a pool of water just before harvest.  This off course all comes with heavy financial implications tied to the loss of revenue from sales of either lesser quality wine, or in the worst case... no wine at all to be sold.

This my friends, is another reason why wine is such a special beverage unlike any other liquid we consume.  Next time you fill the glass, think about it... not only is the wine you are drinking a reflection of its natural growing conditions during each individual year, there is no guarantee that the wine made from this vineyard and its vines will be there next year.  This is why most wine labels include the year in which the grapes were grown - it's not just to make it fancy, the year (vintage) does really matter.

 

It's harvest time

Harvest is in full swing at Running Brook.  It started this past Monday with a very small quantity of Pinot Noir which will be made into a single barrel of red wine.  Tuesday and Wednesday we brought in close to three tons of another Pinot Noir (a different clone of Pinot which is well suited for a rosé style wine).  Thursday it was 4 tons of Pinot Gris.  Phenomenal Pinot Gris I should say.  Timing couldn’t have worked any better because now… here comes the rain, apparently lots of it.  Most of the other grapes still on the vine (Chardonnay, Merlot, Cab.Franc, Vidal, etc.) are 2 to 4 weeks away from being fully ripe.  Hopefully after the rain we’ll get a good amount of sun for the final stretch of this year's growing season.  It feels like this week we were hit with the first wave of harvest.  Now things will settle for a few days and then the second wave (a much bigger one) will be upon us.

Now it’s time for me to get to work and do my best to turn this New England juice into great wine.  It's not easy with many late-night hours at the winery after a good day's of work at my real job.  But I love it and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to be doing this.

I’ll leave you with some fresh Pinot Gris pics…

In the vineyard, just picked...

 

Cool overnight temperature, very cold fruit... perfect for preserving flavor and aroma

 

At the crushpad ready to go into the press

What's going on... permits and tanks and sketches and grapes

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks now so I wanted to give everyone an update.  
 
Permits – I’ve now had two telephone interviews with the TTB and I’m waiting for my Federal permit any day now.  I’m almost done preparing the permit documentation to be submitted to the state of Massachusetts.  But the TTB permit is a requirement before Massachusetts accepts the state application…  The key word in this entire process has been "patience".
 
Equipment – Last week I received most of the winery equipment that I had ordered… this included a press, a chiller and a pump.  Immediately run into problems because the chiller requires 3-phase electric power when the winery building only has 1-phase… at least that’s what my landlord had told me.  Luckily Mark was wrong and there is indeed 3-phase at the winery.  Dodged a bullet with this one… it would have been a nightmare to try to return the chiller for a single-phase version.  Early next week I should be receiving two 580 gallon stainless steel tanks that will be used for fermentation of both red and white grapes.  These tanks were custom ordered and manufactured in Germany and fully loaded with features including jackets for chilling/heating and manholes… yes I did say manholes :-)
(I think the official name is "manway")
 
Winery – The front door at the winery should be taken down this week in preparation for a wider door so that the tanks can get through the entrance and into the winery.  Having a wider door will also help move pallets in and out of the winery.  My friend Bela Fogarty started giving me ideas as to how I can best organize the incredibly small 1,069 square feet of space I have to play with inside the winery.  It would be nice to have a good sized area for the tasting/sales room but I need to leave enough space for the actual winemaking… really excited about the sketches Bela has sent me thus far.

  
 
Website – Have you seen the latest and greatest version of the website?  If not take a look and as always feel free to comment.  It’s been up for about three weeks now.  I’ll be adding a lot of new content to the site whenever time allows it.
 
At Running Brook – We've bottled several of the 2007 wines which will be resting in the bottle for a few months before release.  Started checking sugar levels, pH and flavors on this year’s crop.  The Pinot Gris and one of the Pinot Noir clones seem to be ahead of everything else.  I'm starting to get excited about this winemaking season.  A year ago my attitude was... "Marco, just don't screw it".  I think I succeeded for the most part though it really remains to be seen when we start opening the finished and bottled wine.  This year I'm going in with a little more confidence but we still need the weather to cooperate so that the grapes ripen while developing good flavors.  We are a mere two weeks away from madness 2008… I mean harvest 2008.

My first real bottling day

This past Saturday at Running Brook winery in Dartmouth we bottled what is my first commercially-produced wine.  The 2007 Vidal Blanc is now in the bottle.  A total of 575 cases.  For those not familiar with the term, a full case of wine contains 12 bottles, so that makes it 6,900 bottles of this Vidal Blanc wine.
 
I didn’t sleep well the night before bottling.  I was worried about way too many things.  Though we had a bottling machine specialist on hand, it was my first hands-on experience with the automated “beast”.  I had been told that sometimes bottling doesn’t go as well as expected, especially when bottling wine that has to be sterile filtered on the way to the bottle like this off-dry white wine.
 
But what really had me sweating was the simple realization that this was it… once in the bottle, there is little a winemaker can do to alter the taste of the wine for the better or the worst.  It’s like saying goodbye to something you had under your watch for a long time.  Did I forget something?  Did I measure and adjust the free sulfite level correctly?  We’ll we succeed removing all of the remaining lactic bacteria from this wine?  Are the corks we selected the right size for the bottle we going to use?  Are we going to be able to maneuver in the tight space we have to work with in the winery?
 
The bottling went fine and I came home at the end of a 12-hour long day with a sense of accomplishment.  I could never imagine a year and half ago that I would even be involved in something which most winemakers would consider of small dimension but that feels quite big to me.
 
The wine will now enter what is commonly known as “bottle shock” and it won’t taste its best for a few weeks.  Hopefully within 3 months it will recover and be ready to show it’s true character.  Until then I keep my fingers crossed and move on to the next bottling session.

Day 1

I’ve done it.  Today I launched what will most likely end up as one of the biggest projects of my life and potentially the biggest risk I’ve taken to this day.  I’ve officially began the process of creating my winery.

The amount of thought and research that I’ve put into this over the last two years cannot be quantified.  Many things had to come together for me to have the chance to attempt to build my own winery.  Getting the part-time gig as winemaker for Running Brook was a critical step to get to this day.  Never before in my life have I felt how the luck of being in the right place at the right time could end up having such a dramatic influence in my future and the future of my family.

I’ll be honest and say that over the last few weeks while pondering this decision I felt very nervous.  However, once I made the decision to go for it, the nervousness immediately started to change into a sense of excitement.  Ideas are popping into my head… I can already visualize the next crush season, the labels on the bottles, people having fun and chatting while sipping my wine at the tasting room.  A couple of years from now I may look back at this day and say to myself… what in the world was I thinking?  I may end up as another victim in the cemetery of failed wineries.  But so be it.  I’ll take the risk instead of questioning myself for the rest of my life… what if I had done it?

So, what’s next...?

I’ve registered as a business at the local and state level but the biggest hurdle is yet to come… obtaining the necessary licenses from the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) and the Massachusetts ABCC (Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission).  It involves a lot of paperwork and a considerable amount of time (3 months or longer).  After submitting all of my applications, I will start thinking about other aspects such as the brand image.  I’ll be counting on you for opinions and feedback on some of the decisions that I will have to make.  But here is what I can already share with you today…

The name of the winery:  TRAVESSIA
The place:  Downtown New Bedford

TRAVESSIA is a Portuguese word for Journey or Passage.  There were other names but once I thought of this one, I quickly and easily realized that it would provide me with many opportunities to tie it with what I want the winery and the wines to be all about.  Besides I wanted to avoid naming the winery after a place or the family’s last name.

The winery will be in the downtown area of New Bedford.  A few months ago I failed to convince the owners of a small piece of land in Dartmouth that I was the right person to take over their property.  In retrospect, that was a good thing.  I’ve since realized that building an Urban Winery is more in line with my immediate objective.  The number one question on everyone’s minds… where do the grapes come from?  Well, certainly not from the roof tops :-)...   That’s a topic that deserves its own post but I can tell you that the vast majority of the wines made by TRAVESSIA will be from grapes grown right here in Southeast New England.

Feel free to comment here or send me emails of encouragement… or discouragement :-)

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.

Running Brook Update #2

2007 WHITE WINES
(As of mid-January 2008) 

• Pinot Gris – Flavors of very ripe fruit with a hint of caramel.  Good acidity will make this a food-friendly wine.  We’ll probably prevent malolactic fermentation from occurring so that we can preserve this acidity.  Unoaked, it will probably be released sometime this upcoming Summer.
• Gewurztraminer – The earliest grapes to be harvested ended up as a bit of a disappointment.  Logistical problems at the winery led into an extremely quick first half of fermentation resulting in a wine that lost much of what a Gewurz is well known for… aromatics.  There were also some off flavors that we were only able to partially eliminate.  This wine was not up to the quality standard that we would like to produce.  There will be no Gewurztraminer 2007.
• Chardonnay – The 2007 Chardonnay had a sugar content just above 23 brix at harvest which is not bad at all.  Brown seeds and flavors were a good indication of ripeness.  The wine is not showing its true potential just yet.  We’ll probably allow this wine to partially go through a natural malolactic fermentation and age at least a portion of it in oak barrels.
• Auselesen – I blogged about Botrytis Cinerea and this wine back in early November of 2007.  Truth be told, there was probably a small percentage of rot in this Chardonnay which was not of the “noble” kind.  It shows in the wine right now so we’ll have take care of this.  It is difficult to predict if this vintage will be up to par with the excellent 2005.  We’ll have to wait to see/taste.
• Vidal Blanc – The Vidal was the last varietal to be harvested.  We finished harvesting it on November 12th and it looked/tasted fantastic.  The juice chemistry test results were close to perfect so we did nothing but whole cluster press, settle the juice and ferment at a cool temperature.  We finished this wine just off-dry with its natural residual sugar.  Not an easy and risk-free thing to do while avoiding sterile filtration but we’ll give it our best effort.
• Vidal Blanc Sweet – We took a portion of the original Vidal juice and stopped its fermentation earlier so that we could preserve a higher content of residual sugar.  Again, not easy but if we succeed this may be an excellent desert/aperitif wine.

The owners of Running Brook were also kind enough to give me a small portion of Vidal so that I could fulfill my desire to run crazy winemaking experiments down in my basement.  This case involves a juice-skin contact (a.k.a. maceration) of 12 hours and 48 hours in two separate fermentation bins.  Not typical for white wines, especially Vidal Blanc, but the grapes were so good that I wanted to give it a try.  I started by de-stemming about 200 pounds of Vidal… by hand.  I finished de-stemming in about four hours and couldn’t really feel my fingertips two hours into it.  Yes, I’m stupid!  Definitely one of those nights when I ask myself… why?   But once I had started there was no going back.  Fermentation went according to my expectations and we’ll see what the results are in a few months.

Next post:  Reds

Eric Fry

Last Friday I met Eric Fry, winemaker at Lenz winery in Long Island, New York. Eric refuses to carry a cell phone and drives a Honda Civic hybrid.  After following me on 195 West for about 30 minutes he complained that his car’s mileage went down from 55 to 50 miles per gallon...!  He uses an email address and does check his email… once a month.

Eric has been in the wine business for over 30 years.  He started at Robert Mondavi winery in California as a microbiologist right after college.  From there he went on to work at wineries in Australia and France.  When he returned to the US he worked as winemaker at Dr. Konstantin Frank’s Vinifera Wine Cellars in the Finger Lakes region.  He has been winemaker at Lenz for the past 18 years.  Eric has a tremendous amount of knowledge in wine “growing” and he’s not shy when it comes to sharing his knowledge with others.  I can tell that he's committed to making quality wine above any commercial accomplishments.

How good are his wines?  I have never tasted any myself (yet… day trip to Long Island in the works), but professional blind tasting results have concluded that Lenz wines are as good as some of the top French Bordeaux wines with a much smaller price tag.

Eric “downloaded” a lot of information onto my brain in the span of four hours.  By the time he left on his way back to the ferry, my eyes were spinning and I had a serious headache.  pH was one of the main subjects of discussion during our conversation.  I already knew that high pH was not a good thing in wine (despite what many California winemakers will tell you), but Eric just confirmed it further to me.  I got a quick pH for dummies lesson that I’ll have to revisit many times in the future I’m sure.

Eric is also consultant for many wineries including several in Massachusetts, such as Westport Rivers, Truro Vineyards, and now Running Brook.  We tasted and discussed 12 wines that we made at Running Brook this past harvest.  His impression was that we could have adjusted some things differently prior to fermentation, especially in regards to pH.  But overall, only one wine really seemed to fail the tasting.  I have finally found someone who can clarify some of my winemaking doubts and troubles.  I’m definitely looking forward to learning more the next time I meet Eric.

Oh…. I also asked Eric if he had any recommendations for someone like me who is looking to start his own winery.  His answer went something like this… <<anyone who starts a winery is insane>>.

* Eric's picture from this source.

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.

Running Brook Update #1

October 20th and 21st we celebrate Harvest Weekend and hope to see some of you at the winery/vineyard.  Though Running Brook does not yet have the most luxurious tasting room or hospitality center, there is always a friendly person there to receive you.  Be it Scott, Denise, Pedro or Manny, there is always someone to welcome you with a smile.

There is a lot of activity at Running Brook these days.  We are well into the harvest season but with the bulk of wine still to be made:  Below is a summary of the 2007 harvesting season detailing the grape varietals which we have already brought into the winery and those which we are about to pick.

Grapes already harvested and fermented:

• Pinot Gris - Currently settling in tank after fermentation.  Expect to see this released by Summer 2008.
• Pinot Noir - Already transferred to barrel for aging and malolactic fermentation.

Grapes fermenting right now:

• Gewürztraminer - Cool temperature fermentation under way.  Most likely to be finished dry but we'll see how it progresses.
• Sauvignon Blanc and Alvarinho - Very small quantities of these grapes were produced this year.  Really just for experimental purposes so don't expect to see these on the sales brochure.
• Chardonnay - A small amount that we plan to ferment in barrel.  A lot more still ripening in the vineyard.

Grapes to be harvested in the next few days/weeks:

• Chardonnay
• Vidal Blanc
• Petit Verdot
• Cabernet Franc
• Merlot

Harvest 2007 Has Begun

Last weekend, with the great help of my cousin Edson and good friend Eddie, I harvested 120 vines of Pinot Noir from Running Brook's Dartmouth Vineyard.  We started at 6:30AM under some showers that just didn't stop... until after we were done.  RB offered this fruit to me so that I can run some winemaking trials.

We took the fruit home, approximately 900 lbs of it, crushed it and initiated something that in winemaking we call "cold soak".  The crushed fruit and the juice mixture (called must) is brought down to a temperature below 50F.  The pros do this either in tanks equipped with chilling mechanisms or in open containers with cooling snakes or plates.  At home I do this with sealed water gallons and bottles which I have previously frozen and sanitized.  Cold soaking helps extract flavors, color and tannins from the skins prior to fermentation.  Basically, the juice is in contact with the skins for a few days allowing all of the "goodies" to be extracted into the juice which eventually will become wine.

On the third day of cold soaking I removed a few gallons of juice out of the cold soaking vessel with two goals in mind.  First, "bleeding" off a small percentage of the juice from contact with the skins should help concentrate the flavor of the finished wine.  Second, I plan on using the juice that was removed to make a rosé wine, something I have been wanting to try to make for a while.  I hear that this Summer sales of Rosé wine increased in the United States.  Maybe people are realizing that there is a lot more to rosé wines than what the typical White Zinfandel offers.

I will post updates on the making of this Pinot Noir as it moves along.

Got Pinot?

Pinot Noir – The varietal that is the soul of red wine from the Burgundy region in France.  It is also one of the three varietals typically used to make the sparkling wines of Champagne (the other two being Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier).  In the United States most Pinot Noir is grown in California with Oregon coming in second.

By all accounts Pinot Noir is one of the most difficult grapes to cultivate and make quality wine with.  The vine tends to bud early making it vulnerable to spring frosts. It reaches its fullest expression when it’s allowed to ripen very slowly, making it susceptible to cold and rain in the fall.  In the winery, Pinot Noir is prone to damage from poor technique and it requires gentle care from the time it is crushed to the time it is bottled.

The popularity of Pinot Noir over the last couple of years has soared to new heights.  Some say this is mostly driven by the Sideways effect.  Others say that its gamut of flavors and bouquets make it one of the most versatile wines to pair with food and thus its increased popularity. In the words of wine critic Robert Parker:  "When it's great, pinot noir produces the most complex, hedonistic, and remarkably thrilling red wine in the world..."  This increase in popularity coupled with the challenges faced by growers and winemakers in producing a quality wine from it has lead to a higher fruit cost (basic supply-demand) and ultimately higher cost for the wines that are made from it.  The majority of us who don’t have a boat load of disposable income to spend on “trendy” wine might have to wait for the Pinot market to cool off before we can put a quality Pinot Noir on the table.  Good deals are out their to be found but far from what you can encounter for a Merlot or even Cabernet Sauvignon.

Honestly, I’m still discovering and trying to decide where I stand with Pinot Noir wine.  I have a love/hate relationship with it at the moment.  The fact that it took me $24 for a bottle of Pinot (Thanksgiving being the special occasion) before I could say “yeah this is a wine I would drink every day” does not help the cause when I can find quality reds of other varietals for a lot less money.

But hey… I have a chance to make my own Pinot Noir!  Sure it probably won’t stand up to a Burgundy or a California Russian River Valley… but the mere fact that we can make Pinot Noir red wine here in New England constitutes a great accomplishment.  At Running Brook we are expecting a good Pinot Noir harvest this season.  The weather has been quite dry this Summer which helps concentrate the flavors in the fruit (7.46 inches of rain recorded in Dartmouth from May 1st to August 31st, far the lowest in the past 8 years).  Unlike Californians, we don't have to worry about fruit that isn't completely ripe while sugar levels have gone through the roof due to extremely high temperatures.  On the contrary we may sometimes want more heat.  If mother nature continues to cooperate and rain is kept to a minimum between now and harvest, we’ll be on our way to a great Pinot Noir 2007 vintage.

So, you got Pinot?  Let me know what you have tried and what you liked/disliked about it.  Have you found any good deals?  Any other New England red Pinot out there?

Making Wine at Running Brook

Early this year I was invited by the owners of a local winery to help them in their winemaking activities.  Running Brook is a winery founded in 1998, located in Dartmouth - Massachusetts, producing wines from estate grown Vitis Vinefera and hybrid grape varietals.  The winery has faced many challenges and things haven't always run smoothly.  It certainly isn't easy to start a winery business from the ground up here in New England.

But Running Brook has a key ingredient to success... very good vineyards.   Approximately 21 acres of vines planted in two separate vineyard sites with Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Vidal Blanc, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir and Petit Verdot. Their estate grown Chardonnay wines are as good as any that I have had, especially at the $10 per bottle price range – actually… I think that’s a steal for a locally grown "boutique" wine.

My role at Running Brook is of part-time winemaker. This is a great opportunity for me to learn from people who have been in this business for a few years and I’m very thankful to Manny Morais and Pedro Teixeira, co-owners of Running Brook. We are currently bottling the last few barrels of the 2005 vintage. I’m very excited about the upcoming harvest because it will be my first experience making wine in a fairly large scale. Although Running Brook can be considered a small winery, 40+ tons of grapes will result in a reasonable quantity of juice to handle. The vines are looking great and certainly the hot and fairly dry summer we have had to this point here in the Northeast should result in grape clusters with flavorful berries.

There are several options to consider in preparation for harvest and winemaking… crush techniques, cold soaking, fermentation temperatures, press timing, etc. I will regularly post updates on what is happening at Running Brook.

If you happen to be in the New England area please visit Running Brook.  After your visit you can continue to the other four local wineries which are part of the Coastal Wine Trail.