Another fun week making wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The yield was down about 1/3 compared to last year due to heavy spring rain that damaged the flowering (we call it “shatter” when a grapevine’s delicate flowers don’t pollinate and develop into grapes). The Chardonnay grapes suffered from excessive powdery mildew also due to the early rain, so we got a limited crop this year. However, the fruit we did harvest was outstanding and of high quality.

This year, we decided to focus on making sparkling wine, rosé, and Port-style wines. We have so much Pinot Noir red wine in the cellar, and it’s always fun to focus on other wine styles. We pressed the Pinot Noir grapes whole-bunch (no destemming) in our new horizontal press, and the juice was rich in sugar, acidity, and flavors (yummy). We let the juice settle overnight and then made a 100% Pinot Noir sparkling base wine (Blanc de Noirs) and a 100% Pinot Noir rosé. The acidity was higher than last year, so we expect both wines to have a fresh fruit profile with a crisp and zappy edge.

We dried about ½ ton of Pinot Noir grapes on our drying racks in a cold space to further concentrate the sugar, flavors, and acidity. This is a similar technique to how you make Amarone wines (known as Appassimento), and I learned to use it for Port-style wines when I failed to make an Amarone-style red wine five years ago, as the grapes got so concentrated I couldn’t ferment the juice. The fermentation is still going and will probably take another 30 days before it reaches the right alcohol/sugar level. More to come!