Dan’s Cellar Notes for December  2003

By Dan Mouer

Carbonic Maceration

 

AT ONE MINUTE PAST MIDNIGHT on the third Thursday of each November, from little villages and towns like Romanèche-Thorins, over a million cases of Beaujolais Nouveau begin their journey through a sleeping France to Paris for immediate shipment to all parts of the world. Banners proclaim the good news: Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé! "The New Beaujolais has arrived!" One of the most frivolous and animated rituals in the wine world has begun.

            Into Wine: Exploring Beaujolais

When I was first learning to make wine, my mentor taught me about “partial carbonic maceration,” the technique that is used in Beaujolais to produce the bright, short-lived, intensely fruity wines known as “Nouveau” or “Primeur,” meaning the “new” or “first” wine released from the recent vintage. In the Beaujolais section of France, the gamay grapes are usually picked in late September or early October. The first wines are bottled and released for sale the third weekend in November—just 6-7 weeks from vine to wine. These nouveau style wines tend to be a love’em or hate’em proposition, and the whole annual release has come to be attended with so much marketing hype that it gets boring very quickly.

However, behind the hoopla is one the oldest winemaking techniques in the world, and a lengthy tradition practiced nearly everywhere wine is made: celebrating the season’s first wines. The technique is called “carbonic maceration,” although what is more typically practiced in Beaujolais and elsewhere is usually called partial carbonic maceration.

Normally, red-wine grapes are crushed, then macerated in the juice for some time before, during, and/or after fermentation. This time in which the broken skins are in contact with the juice determines much about the color, flavor, and aroma of the resulting wine. In partial carbonic maceration the winemaker crushes some of the grapes, and leave others in their whole clusters, with skins unbroken. These would all be poured into a large vat which would be tightly sealed and left in a warm spot for one or two weeks. In this case, the crushed grapes begin fermenting from the yeast that lives on the skins. The fermentation creates lots of carbon dioxide gas, which settles over the must, keeping oxygen away. Oxygen is needed for the yeast to keep multiplying. (It also turns wine into vinegar!)

At the end of this period, the vat would be opened and stirred, the yeast would spring back to life, and fermentation would complete as usual. The grapes which had been left uncrushed now are literally bursting at the seams, because, while sitting in that warm vat, deprived of oxygen, enzymatic reactions have been taking place which create an entirely different spectrum of wine colors, flavors, and aromas. These are the very characteristics we associate with nouveau Beaujolais. Today, the sophisticated winemakers of Beaujolais practice a highly refined for of partial c.m. using stainless steel tanks, temperature control, sterile filtration, etc.

When I was learning my way in those early days, I was taught to use partial carbonic maceration with pinot noir grapes, rather than gamay. Very little pinot noir is grown in Virginia. It’s a persnickety grape that can be a nightmare for both the vineyardist and the winemaker. However, some vineyards grow a bit of it for those who want to pick it early to make champagne-style sparkling wine. This year I picked pinot noir to make bubbly, but then I went back and gleaned the same vines two weeks later. The grapes were no riper, due to cloudy, cool, wet weather. But, I wondered, is there any chance that carbonic maceration would produce a nicely fruity pinot noir from these under-ripe (and decidedly unfruity) grapes? Wouldn’t hurt to try…

This time I decided to do a “pure” or “complete” carbonic maceration. None of the grapes would be crushed beforehand. With the help of friends, I stuffed some 5-gallon, stainless-steel Cornelius kegs (the kind that fountain sodas come in), full to the brim with whole clusters of pinot. I then connected the hose from a compressed CO2 cylinder, which I use for pressurizing my kegs of homebrewed beer, and purged all the air from the kegs. I then placed 5-10 pounds of CO2 pressure on each keg, and left them to sit for about 10 days.

The berries had nearly all burst, and the huge aroma that came hissing out of the newly opened kegs told me good thing had been happening. I crushed the grapes, added Lalvin 71B yeast (the yeast of Beaujolais!), and fermented it dry. The wine was pressed, sulphited, and quickly fined with kieselsol and isinglass. On the third weekend in November, I invited folks to my house to play music and drink the new wine. I heard many happy remarks on that wine, including some from old nouveau hands. In fact, one of them told me I had captured the flavors of the old-days’ nouveaus, flavors now lost to sterile filtration, focus groups, and mass-marketing miracles.

One thing I feel fairly sure of: this is probably one of the freshest, fruitiest-tasting pinot noirs ever produced from Virginia grapes! Hoo-Ray for Boo-joh-LAY!

Virginia Wine of the Month

Cabernet franc is making the best red wines Virginia has to offer. Of course, they’re not ALL good, but as growers and winemakers keep perfecting them, the cab francs are bound to out red Virginia wine on the world map, just as Viognier is promising to do for Virginia white wine. I have a  number of Virginia cab francs in my cellar, hoping that a few of them will develop St. Emilion/Pomerol-style elegance with age. Every now and then I pull one out to say how it’s coming. Most recently I drank a bottle of Villa Appalachia’s 2000 Francesco. I have always enjoyed this wine, but I do believe it is beginning to develop a level of finesse in the bottle that is exceptional. A really exceptional wine. If you cannot find the 2000s at your wine store, the 2001s are just as promising—perhaps moreso!

Comments? Questions? Write me at dan.mouer@verizon.net

Copyright 2003 L. Daniel Mouer