Getting Serious - Made Rose Blend

In my last post I wrote about a plan for the final blending and cellar work for the 2009 wines. So it was into the cellar last week to get to work.

The first wine I worked on was the Rose' blend. I planned to use a 4 to 1 ration of the "press" Pinot Grigio to Zinfandel. This blend tasted very good in late June when I made a trial blend and tested it with my WGWNN friends.

So I blended 10 gallons of the "press" Pinot Grigio and 2 gallons with the Zinfandel. This Rose blend went into 6.5 and 5 gallon carboys and a few bottles left over to sample....

I was surprised when I tasted the blend; it was just not as good as I remembered it from the trial in June... it did not have the same Raspberry/strawberry fruit flavor, and it had more tannin in the finish. What happened????

My guess is that one of the carboys of the "press" Pinot Grigio had more tannin than the other, and that the final ML fermentations changed the flavors of the Pinot Grigio and Zinfandel

slightly. While it was a perfectly acceptable blend, it was just not as good and lively as my trial blend.

One of the procedures I try to follow, is to blend all containers of a wine together to get a uniform wine. e.g. You don't want one carboy to taste different than another... so I guess I forgot my rule and got caught....

So in an attempt to get back some fruit and mask some of the tannins, I added a small amount of Malvasia and a little more Zinfandel. I also added a small amount of tartaric acid to bump the acid slightly to make up for the lost of acid from the ML fermentation. {1 gallon Malvasia and 1/2 Gallon Zinfandel to the 12 gallons of Rose blend, and 1 teaspoon tartaric acid.}

The Malvasia and Zinfandel additions got the Rose blend back closer to my trial blend from June.

I shared a sample of the final Rose blend with my wine making friends Mike and Holly and Joe and Sandy last night and I think it's going to be a very good wine....

I'll probably give the blend a week or so to meld and bottle it to enjoy the rest of the summer.

Here's the label I intend to use for the Rose'. The artwork for the label was created by Joni Tanis. The colors in the drawing are a perfect match for the Rose'.

{Yes, this is the proper orientation for the label... I wanted a long label for a clear Bordeaux style bottle...}