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1. Make better wine.
2. Make more wine.
3. Don’t give so much wine away.
4. Buy more neat gadgets to help me make more/better wine.
5. Taste my bulk-aging wines more often to make sure they’re still good.
6. Don’t enter so many darn contests. It takes away too many bottles of wine from my stash!
7. Enlarge the wine cellar.
8. Make more friends who make good wine and like to give it away to appreciative folks.
9. Find the time to tour California, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Chile, and anyplace else that makes good wine.
10. Remind self daily: life is too short to drink cheap wine.
Every now and then I get questions from folks reading this column, or from friends who are making wines at home. Here’s a recent question about using wine kits to make champagne-like bubbly.
Q: I've got a Pinot Blanc that I was thinking of turning into a champagne. I also have kits for Bordelais Blanc and Bourgeron Blanc. I emailed the manufacturer, but they wouldn't divulge what grapes they used. I assume that Bordelais Blanc is a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon, and Bourgeron Blanc is a blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc. Do you think I could make a decent blend from any of these? Maybe the Bourgeron Blanc would do better?
JA in Henrico
A: Tim Vandergrift had a good article on making champagne-style bubbly from kit wines in the April 2003 issue of Winemaker Magazine (http://www.winemakermag.com/departments/288.html), and I highly recommend looking it over. Traditionally, champagne is made from Chardonnay (blancs de blancs), from Pinot noir and/or Meunier (blancs de noirs), or from a blend of any of these three grapes. Germans and Alsatians make Sekt or bubbly from Riesling, and Italians make it from Muscat and Pinot blanc.
Any white or pink wine will work, but the wine should be low in alcohol (only 18-20%), because the sugar added for the bottle fermentation will add an additional 1.5-2%, and nobody wants to drink 14% champagne! You can dilute a kit to reach the desired level by adding water, but remember that you will also be diluting acid. Wine for “champagne” should be quite high in acid. Real Champagne often begins with a total acidity of 9 or 10 grams per liter. The bubbles and the small dosage of sugar added at bottling time balance the acidity. Low-acid wines make flabby bubbly. Another consideration: you don't want any hint of oak in the wine.
Of the kits you mentioned, I would think the Bourgeron blanc would come closest, as long as it's not made with any oak powder or chips. It probably wouldn't hurt to add a more tartaric acid. Whatever kit you use, don't use any “F-packs” or other additive packages, and don't add the sorbate that comes with the kit. That will prevent the second fermentation. You may use ½ the packet of metabisulfite that comes with the kit to protect the still wine while it matures, and feel free to use the finings if you like. After the wine is stable and clear, add a small amount of tannin, some good yeast nutrient and yeast energizer, and make up a lively starter of champagne yeast (Red Star Premier Cuvee or Lalvin’s EC-1118). Blend it in and bottle in champagne bottles with proper wired stoppers or beer-bottle caps. Let the bottles stay in a fairly warm spot for several weeks, then lay them down on their sides in a cooler spot and let the yeast do its magic for at least a couple months…preferably a couple years! Good luck, and happy bubbly!
Whether you make wine from the annual harvest (of grapes, berries, apples, pears, or whatever), or bulk age wines made from kits for realistic periods of time, January is an excellent time to start thinking in terms of making changes in the direction your evolving wine may be taking. Find time this month to systematically taste each of your wines and make some decisions. Is the wine developing as you like? Does it need a little more (or little less) acid? Might it need a touch more or less sweetness? Is it starting to show some signs of trouble, such as oxidation, or infection by aerobic bacteria, anaerobic bacteria or Brettanomyces yeast? Have you allowed too much oak to weigh down one of your wines, or do you have a wine that could use a little oak enhancement? Is it time to rack it off the fine lees? Is the wine staying cloudy, suggesting it may need some tannin, or some fining with kieselsol or bentonite?
If the wine is sound, but perhaps missing something, do you have another wine to blend it with that might offset the shortcoming? Now is the times to start doing “bench trials:” take measured amounts of wines and blend them, make detailed notes on the results. Of course, you don’t want to try too many samples at one sitting; perhaps just two or three per day—and keep them small! Call on a couple wine-savvy friends to taste along with you. When is the last time you tested total acidity, Ph, and SO2 levels? Have any of your wines shown signs of malolactic fermentation? If so, now may be a good time to start doing paper chromatography tests for MLF completion—although I usually wait until Spring for that. If your wines haven’t apparently undergone MLF, your tasting results may suggest that initiating it is a good idea, especially if you still have lots of “green” flavors or high acid levels in your red wines. Do you intend to cold stabilize your wines? Now is a good time to consider doing it. The winter weather might just mean that you have a spot in your cellar or garage that will get sufficiently cold at night without freezing your wine and cracking your carboys.
Whatever you do, don’t let the wine just sit there for months on end without any attention from you. If there are problems developing in the wine, now is the time to catch them and stop them. Anyway, these are perfectly good excuses for you to try some of your own delicious new wines.
At a recent meeting of the Central Virginia Winemakers, I tasted some Luna Rossa and some Luna Bianca. These are proprietary names for a big red and a big white wine made from Brew King’s Selection Series kits. I have made the Luna Bianca myself, but someone else made this particular edition, and he had aged it for 90 days in a small Hungarian oak barrel. As I mentioned, both these wines are “big.” They are made in the popular California style with moderately high alcohol, full body, rich complex mouth filling flavors, and big aromas. Each carries the imprint of new oak from large additions of granular oak and oak chips during fermentation. The extra barrel aging of the Luna Bianca seemed only to enhance and soften the somewhat wooden flavors of the younger wine. If you are smitten by the “big” California Cab and Chardonnay styles, you may well love these well-designed kits. My only real criticism is that I think the Luna Bianca would be improved substantially with about half the amount of residual sugar in the “F-pack” added at the end.
If you are fond of better white Burgundy wines than your pocket book normally permits, let me recommend Jefferson Vineyards 2001 Chardonnay Reserve. At about $17 a bottle, you’ll enjoy a nice complexity, with butter-and-vanilla notes, and with fresh fruit showing through. In general I am fonder of really good Virginia chardonnays than I am of most of the huge oak-and-alcohol selections from Napa and Sonoma, and this Jefferson is a very nice example of what I like best about the locals.
‘Tis the season, of course, for bubbly, and Virginia produces some good ones. Horton has made quite a splash with their non-vintage Sparkling Viognier. Virginia produces some really fabulous Viognier, but I’m not convinced the grape is shown off to its best in this bubbly version. It is a nice, well-made, off-dry sparkler, but a bit overpriced, to my mind, at $25-28 per bottle. Every year I make a point of enjoying some of Oasis Vineyard’s Brut. This is a really fine chardonnay-based bubbly—generally the best in the state. This year oasis has released a deluxe, limited edition called Cuvee D’Or Brut. I haven’t yet tasted it, but I can’t wait…
Copyright 2004 L. Daniel Mouer