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Now: Two Richard Grant Wines
I now produce two types of wine from my 2 acre Wrotham Pinot vineyard in Napa Valley – Wrotham Pinot Sparkling Wine and Wrotham Clone of Pinot Noir table wine.
They are distinctively different from each other, yet the grapes for both were grown on the same vines in the same vineyard.
All the vines in this vineyard were propagated from bud wood taken from the single wild grapevine that was discovered in the village of Wrotham in Kent, England in the 1950s. (See The Wrotham Pinot Story)
These vines are Pinot Noir by DNA test, but they have their own peculiar ‘look,’ having mutated over the centuries since Romans first brought their Pinot vines into England some two thousand years ago.
Wrotham Pinot is the name I use to remind us of the vine’s origin, but it may be more scientific to call it the Wrotham Clone of Pinot Noir.
Because I have so few vines and small wine volumes, I’ve decided to alternate between producing the two wine types from year to year. Consequently, the early vintages (2000 through 2005) produced only Blanc de Noir Sparkling wines while we made only Pinot Noir red table wines in vintages 2006 and 2007. Keep in mind that nearly every year so far has been an experiment, since we had so little information on which to judge which would be the best use of these grapes grown in Napa Valley.
Today’s English winemakers haven’t been able to ripen this variety sufficiently to make red table wines as their climate is much cooler than ours. None of us has known what to expect from the same variety grown in Napa’s warmer region. Now that I’ve worked with the 2006, I like what I see and plan to make red Pinot Noir for one more year (2008). Presumably, we'll use the 2009 vintage for more Blanc de Noir Sparkling wine.
The 2006 Pinot Noir table wine was bottled in April, 2008 and we will release it for sale in late August.
I expect that the wine will be enjoyable by that time but I also expect that it will have improved after another year at cool temperatures in your cellar.
It should age well for more than twenty years, judging from my experience with other coastal Pinot Noirs, and it may well remain quite good for thirty or more.
Certainly those old Beaulieu Vineyard Pinots that I made in the late 1960s and early 1970s did so.
Be sure to write and let me know what you like (or dislike) about the red wine, after you have a chance to taste it.
I already know the Sparkling wine has been enjoyed by all and will continue to be.
