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