Posted by Gus on January 7, 2010 – 11:59 am
With the 2009 reds appearing to be finished with malolactic, it was time this morning for a visit to the cellar to taste the new wines. First, I had to freshen up my palate with a quick taste of the 2009 rosé, which has been moved to a small stainless tank for aging on the fine lees. The rosé is currently resisting malolactic fermentation, so will be warmed up a bit and reinoculated with a few liters of its red counterpart in barrel.
The 2009 reds are currently in three lots. MB1 is all Malbec, the first to be harvested, tank fermented, and now tasting like it will serve as the foundation for a 2009 Velocity. Then there are seven barrels of Cabernet franc, whose herbal character can be surprising at this stage. I admit to having had a love/hate relationship with Cabernet franc until I had the opportunity to enjoy a few Loire Valley bottlings of the grape, at which point I determined to embrace its herbal nature as varietally typical and very food-friendly.
There are also about fifteen barrels of MB2, the second lot of Malbec which boasts plenty of currant, cherry and dried herb aromas on a somewhat softer, leaner body than MB1, leading me to believe that it is likely to find a home bottled as Velo.
For such a copious vintage there is very good concentration and substantial structure, especially in MB1. These will all be fun wines to work with.
Posted by Gus on December 23, 2009 – 9:54 am
The 2009 Malbec rosé, in tank at this moment, is presenting an interesting opportunity to further refine a winemaking style. Having tried a style with virtually no skin contact and moderate lees aging (2006) , then a no-SO2 juice style with little lees contact (2007), followed by an SO2 at crush plus two to three days skin contact before saigneé and again a limited lees contact style (2008), I may finally be settling down. Still, I won’t promise to stop experimenting, especially when each year brings new variables.
For 2009 I went so far as to craft a plan, which was quickly modified as the grapes began coming in. The relatively low sugar content of some of the grapes combined with big berry sizes prompted me to increase the percentage of juice drained from the fermenter, up to about 30% in one case. The saigneé was done after as little as one hour up to one day of skin contact. By selecting only the lowest-sugar lots (around 21-22 Brix) I am hoping to finish with a wine near 12% alcohol, which is civilized for a rosé.
Fermentation was deliberately warm, in the 60s Fahrenheit, to try to capture more red-fruit character. The next step was to retain the fine lees (the expired yeast cells left over from primary fermentation) by racking the cloudy wine along with the fluffy top layer off the settlings in the tank. Now the plan was simply to age the wine for two or three months in contact with the fine lees, to build some creamy character into the mid-palate.
Tasting the wine at this point with John Quinones (the new winemaker at Roxyann Winery, which is where I make my wines) he suggested we try to promote malolactic fermentation. Since the 2009 has plenty of natural acidity, and since the flavors were presenting an herbal edge, I readily agreed. Inoculation was simple; we took a couple of buckets of newly drained, dry, free run Malbec from a tank slated for Velo production and pitched them into the top of the rosé tank, bringing a little extra color as well as a healthy malolactic culture along with it.
I’ll keep tinkering with this wine, but I think we are on a very positive track for this 2009 version.
Posted by Gus on December 16, 2009 – 2:59 pm
Vintage 2009 provided a fine opportunity to make a fair volume of my micro-project, the Velo Malbec Rosé. With 1500 liters in the tank right now, I have about twice as much as last year’s meager 80 case production. The idea for the wine came about after several vintages of wrestling with the soft-skinned Malbec, which had a tendency to fall apart on the grape-sorting table, resulting in buckets of juice being collected from the drain pan which would then be tossed into the fermenter at the end of the day’s crush. In October of 2006, we were poised once again to return the pink juice to the fermenter, literally standing there with the buckets, when we thought, “what are we doing, why not make a little rosé with this?”
We saved the run-off juice, then drained a bit more from the fermenter so we would have enough to fill one 210 liter stainless drum. A couple of days later we racked the clean juice to a new drum, gave it a little bit yeast, stuck it a cool corner of the winery and left it to its own devices. When the dust had settled by mid-November at the end of harvest, we rolled it out and drew off a sample of pale, vibrantly acidic, dry rosé scented with watermelon, strawberry and a touch of rhubarb.
As we were getting ready to bottle the inaugural vintage of Velo Malbec Rosé my wife, Julia, and I discovered we were going to be having a daughter. In lieu of cigars at her birth it seemed appropriate to be able to offer my friends a bottle of pink wine.
Posted by Gus on December 3, 2009 – 10:37 am
As I gather up the wine for tonight’s 29th annual JPR wine tasting fundraiser I am struck right away by a clear sign of my own wine’s process of evolution. The 2005 Velocity and the 2007 Velo are virtually the same wine by the numbers (a little over half Malbec, the rest Cabernet, Cabernet franc, and Syrah) yet they are such distinctly different wines. Within two vintages I had honed the decision of which grape varietals from which vineyard blocks to use, so that I was working with essentially the same grapes which warranted bottling under the Velocity label in 2005.
Looking at the first five or six vintages of Velocity and Velo is like looking at the steepest part of a graph of evolutionary change. In the beginning I hoped that Malbec would play an important role in the blend, but did not imagine that it could dominate as successfully as it does now. I feel now more than ever that it was a wise decision to let the wine follow its own natural path, and not to try to force the style into some predetermined recipe imported from another winegrowing region.