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...}

Bottled First 2009 Wine!

OK, It's now May and I have not posted anything for quite a while.....well, I did finish off and publish a few posts that had sat as drafts for some time....

One thing that happened during April is that I bottled one of my white blends. I know it's early in my typical yearly schedule, but I was out of white wine and needed some everyday white...

Back in Feb. I posted some "Trial Blends" information, and also had a tasting where we tasted the 2009 wines including the blends.... So I decided to make a batch of "Blend #3" which is 33% Sauvignon Blanc, 33% Malvasia, and 33% Pinot Grigio.

I have about 20 gallons of each white varietal, so my plan is to make a blend or two, and bottle some wine as 100% varietal. For this "Lot1" of "Blend #3" I used 5 gallons of each wine. Therefore I have enough wine to make a "lot2" depending on how well lot 1 turns out...

15 gallons of "lot1" will make 6 cases of wine, so that should keep me in everyday white for some time.

I like to use a container to mix all the wines together to get uniform blending.

I also prepared a mixture of a fining agent, bentonite, to add to the blend to help settle out any suspended particles and make the wine clear. I also added 1-1/2 teaspoons of tartaric acid.


After mixing well, the blend was racked into 3 carboys.

It took about 1 month for the bentonite to settle to the bottom of the carboy and leave a clear wine.

I racked and bottled one of the carboys on April 30.

Why only bottle 1 carboy?

1. The weather has not really turned warm yet and I don't want to bottle all the carboys in case a secondary fermentation {ML} should kick off. e.g. Don't want this to happen in the bottle. In the carboy is OK.

2. It usually takes two racking to get a really clear wine off of the bentonite at the bottom of the carboy. So I racked off 5 gallons of clear wine off of the top of two carboys and bottled that. The remaining wine in the two carboys was racked into a new carboy.

Here's the label of lot 1 blend#3 which I call "Tre Palme" because of the Capri tile I use in the label and of the three wines used in the blend.

Of course, I started drinking the wine right away.

At first the Malvasia was dominating the blend with some heavier body and the floral nose. However, the wine began to change after a week or two and is now the flavors are much more integrated. e.g. none of the 3 wines dominate.

At times different flavors do come out: floral overtones from the Malavasia, or pear from the Pinot Grigio. The addition of acid makes this a lively wine with a clean finish. It comes off like a white Rhone blend....

The early awkwardness of the blend I'll attribute to bottle shock.

I'm enjoying this blend very much....I've got to resist the urge to go out to the cellar and use up the rest of my white wines as blend#3. Got to stick to the plan...

I'll do another post later on about my bottling methods.

Trial Blending Session

In my last post I wrote about creating "Trial Blends". In that session, I blended my 09 Malvasia Bianca with the 09 Sauvignon Blanc {SB}. A 1 to 1 blend seemed to be on the right track.







In this session, I'm going to throw in my 09 Pinot Grigio {PG} into the mix.





The techniques outlined in the last blog post still apply...e.g. mix small amounts {20-40 ml of wines} in a glass and taste.





One reason to do multiple trail blending sessions is to be able to focus on a subset of wines and combinations to avoid getting hopelessly confused.





For this session I want to see if adding my Pinot Grigio to a blend with the Malvasia and Sauvignon Blanc will yield a better wine than the 1 to 1 Malvasia-SB blend from my last session.





the wines....


PG: light straw yellow, hints of pear fruit in the nose, tart and clean. Slight bitterness in finish.



Malvasia: Nice floral nose, thick in the mouth, tart with fig-like flavors. Very nice.



SB: Grassy nose and flavors with a slightly hot and bitter finish. This sample was pulled from a different carboy than was used for the last blending session. This one does not have the aggressive SB nose like the previous sample!





Note: at some point it is a good idea to blend all containers of the same variety to get a uniform wine, unless a container has something bad or good going on as a reason to keep it separate. Also you won't have to wonder why one bottle tastes different than another later on....

I blended up the favorite blend from my last session, the 1 to 1 Malvasia and SB, to taste the new blends against.

First I tried a 1 to 1 PG and SB:

The PG pear nose comes through and the bitterness of the SB is toned down, but still there. Only OK.

Next I tried a 1 to 1 to 1 PG, Malvasia and SB blend:

The Malvasia adds some floral component to the PG pear nose and the thickness of the Malvasia helps to further smooth out the SB. Very good acid and complex flavors though no variety stands out...e.g. it will be hard to tell what variety you are tasting later on...Very Good blend. I like it better than the 1 to 1 Malvasia and SB.

I tried a few more blends that were dead ends... and finished off the samples with dinner. Woke up this morning with a headache from too much sampling....

I have one more trial blending session planned for later in the month. My fellow home wine making friends will be coming over to taste everyone's 09 wines. I plan to pour my two favorite blends at that time and get everyone's opinions... should be fun!

Pinot Grigio - Yes, I'm making that too

I am making a Pinot Grigio. The grapes came in before I started the wine blog, so I decided not to write about it.... but then a friend asked about the wine....



The Pinot Grigio is from Villa Spatafora. It came in at 21.5 brix which is a little lower that I would have wanted. But tasting the wine now, 21.5 was probably a good brix number for this grape.



The wine has a mineral and flinty character and a nice acid level like the New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs. One of the knocks on Pinot Grigio, is that the grape makes a somewhat thick and low acid wine, so I'm happy to have something different at this point.



Pinot Grigio is a red grape. If you press the juice right after it is crushed, you get white juice. But if you let it sit on the skins in a cold soak for a day or two, you will get pink juice.



My friends at the Wine Group With No Name (WGWNN) are making their Pinot Grigio as a pink wine. I think that's a great idea and will be very interested to taste it.



While I was pressing my Pinot Grigio, my first two carboys were filled with free run juice are white. But the last two carboys that were pressed, were a very light pink.



I've kept the carboys separate and there is a difference in taste between the white and pink wine. As you might expect, the pink wine has fuller flavors. I'm looking forward to see how these two batches turn out...

The photos on the right show the pink and white Carboys of Pinot Grigio,