Our
marketing team is going to give me heat about this but here goes; I am not a big
fan of Rosé, but I sure enjoy our Rosé. Let me explain. Many Rosé wines are the byproduct of an
attempt to intensify a red wine. Once
red grapes are crushed and put into a tank for fermentation a portion of the
must (Skins, Juice, Pulp and Seeds) is drawn off as juice and removed from the fermenter. The French term for this is saignée which
comes from the verb saigner which means to bleed. The theory is that the source of color and
flavor in a red wine comes primarily from the skins of the grapes and is
extracted into the juice during fermentation.
If by removing a portion of the juice the skins will flavor a smaller
volume of juice and therefore be more intense.
I’ve tried it, and the difference isn’t significant and more importantly
it has some unintended consequences that I would prefer to avoid, most notably
intensifying the tannins. Okay so the
vintner has bled off some juice, what’s he or she going to do with that
juice? Throw it away? I think not.
Most make it into a rosé. The
resulting wine is produced from the juice of grapes that were intended to make
a big sturdy red wine, and what so often happens is that the Rosé is often big
and sturdy too. The chemistry of the
must is not what I would want to make a Rosé.
It is high in sugar, lower in acid and contains phenolic material that
tends to be bitter. The resulting wine
is alcoholic, flat, and pithy. Not too
appetizing.
Here at Jeff Runquist Wines, we
harvest grapes with the specific intention of making a Rosé. Therefore, the wine is bright, zippy,
refreshing, and smooth. Perfect for a
warm afternoon or evening. For the 2024 Rosé,
we chose to use Barbera. In the past
Barbera was in short supply and we made red wine from every grape we could get
our hands on. Today there is a surplus
of grapes and there is Barbera available, and we gave it a try because we think
the color will have hues that are pink and not copper. Furthermore, we anticipate that the fruit
character might drift from strawberry and watermelon towards raspberry and dark
cherry.
We ferment Rosé
in temperature controlled stainless steel tanks to slow the speed of the
fermentation and prevent the evolution of the carbon dioxide from carrying off
the grape’s aromas. We aim for a month-long
ferment with a rate of about one degree brix per day. Once the sugar has been consumed, we rack the
fresh wine into neutral barrels. The
objective is not to add an oak character to the wine but rather to clarify the
young wine quickly and retain the fresh fruit characters. Wines aged in oak clarify much more rapidly
than those aged in Stainless Steel.
Microscopically, the barrels provide much more surface area for the
yeast to settle upon. The slick walls of
stainless steel tend to keep the yeast in suspension. After just a month or two we stabilize the
wine and bottle it early in the year following the vintage.
