My ’07 Pinot Recipe

September 19th, 2007 → 2:31 pm @ Josh Hermsmeyer


I’ve gotten some comments lately that pinotblogger has been dealing too much in marketing and bloggy matters, and not enough with the business of wine making or how our winery has been progressing.

I have quite a bit to say about the difficulties we’ve been facing lately (mainly with licensing issues) and I’ll have an announcement soon that should make the folks who’ve been kind enough to join our samples list and who sent in shirt photos happy.

Today though I’m going to get my hands dirty and share this year’s pinot recipe.

The High Extraction, Moderate Alcohol Style

First a little explanation on the choice of style. Since I was sporting my “Parker’s Bitch” shirt for this year’s crush I decided to try my hand with the California high-extraction recipe, but with a twist. I didn’t want the black fruit or the high alcohol typical of the CA style. My goal was to pick at physiological ripeness but before things got too black-fruity, and then use the high extraction methods to craft a flavorful and relatively intense red fruit driven wine that also sported a little of the floral elegance that I love in pinot.

Nothing goes completely according to plan of course, and it was an interesting year for berry ripening at Rebecca’s Vineyard. Things were going along great for most of August: nice and cool with relatively warm nighttime temps which allowed for nearly constant flavor ripening both day and night. This is great because it lets the berries ripen independent of sugar accumulation. It’s the best of all possible worlds for pinot. Indeed, it was beautiful.

But then, typically, along came a late August heat wave that sent sugars into the stratosphere. Here’s a graph of daily temps courtesy of our Ranch Systems weather station.


Click to enlarge

As you can (hopefully) see, after August 28th temps began to spike and the grapes began to desiccate (dimple and shrivel like a raisin) on the vine, causing Brix to rise quickly. Tasting the grapes I didn’t feel as though the red fruit had been completely eclipsed by the late August heat wave, so I was still hopeful I could make a wine close to my preferred style while still employing the now tried-and-true high extraction protocol for CA pinot. I called up my good friend and longtime winemaking partner Ken Lippe and scheduled a quick harvest. We picked on September 1st.

And there we were, surrounded by pinot fruit. Lots of it. In my opinion, after when you pick, the next most important decision you can make as a winemaker is how rigorously to sort your fruit. No matter how good your fruit, no matter how talented your vineyard manager, you are going to have some berries that are either under-ripe or over-ripe scattered throughout various bunches.

One of the benefits of long hang-time is that you pretty much eliminate the under-ripe berries from the equation, but this often comes at the cost of more over-ripe berries and raisins. Bottom line: to get high quality wine you need to sort pretty rigorously. Which we did, Ken and I. And it took a long time. Oh yes, it took a long time. Let me tell you, when the SBA loan clears, the first big equipment purchase I’m making will be the Vaucher-Beguet Mistral® system. Lovely.

Let the Spoofulation Begin!

Anyway, after sorting and de-stemming (no crushing), into the fermenters the grapes went for a 5 day cold soak using dry ice. I tried to keep the must under 50 degrees, and was generally successful, but there were periods where the temps rose above 50 for a few hours. At the same time I added some enzyme to the must which helps to speed up what can otherwise be a lengthy extraction process. In general, enzymes help increase color (important in pinot), improve mouth feel and release more aroma and flavor precursors into the must. You have to be careful though, if you have grapes with green or off flavors you’ll extract those as well. And that can really ruin a party.

My targets for Brix and pH pre-ferment were 25.5 and 3.4 respectively. After soaking up the must was extremely sweet at 27.5 Brix. The pH was high as well, clocking in at 3.6. So things weren’t perfect. Without some intervention we’re talking about a potential alcohol of around 15.7% and a finished pH of 3.8 plus. Both are extremely scary numbers for pinot.

Cue the ominous music.

But never fear! Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I went about correcting these relatively minor problems using some useful rules of thumb. I’ll also give my initial thoughts on how this Capozzi vintage is shaping up based on how things are tasting right now. I may even have a cool announcement for the Pinotblogger tee shirt crew so be sure check back then.