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Ancient Wagon Wheel Found as we Prepared the Land for Planting (1998)
2006 Vintage - Was "1" a Good Year?
I have been asked several times to make a vintage of ‘Pinot Noir’ Table Wine (instead of Sparkling) from the Wrotham Pinot grape ‘just to see how it does.’
As far as I know, nobody has made red wine from this grape in modern times.
We assume the Romans did it in England way back when, but they didn’t leave us any recipes or tasting comments to go on.
Modern English winemakers haven’t done it because their climate is too cool for the grapes to ripen sufficiently to produce red wine.
The Sparkling wines they’ve made have been very nice, indeed.
That may be one bit of evidence that today’s climate in Kent is much like that of Champagne, France. Perhaps the climate around the village of Wrotham was warmer when the Romans lived there than it is today, who knows? I’ve read that global warming, or cooling, can change local climates in odd ways because of ocean currents, but I’m in over my head discussing that.
Spring, 2006 was colder than usual, but otherwise, the year was well suited to red wine production in Napa Valley. To play it safe, we thinned the crop a full 10% in early July, 2006. I felt especially courageous about deliberately under-cropping because the crop level wasn’t heavy to begin with. This would be the very first red wine made from Wrotham Pinot grapes in many centuries, so we wanted to do everything as cautiously as possible. In the end, we harvested just 8.725 tons of fruit, which gave our new red wine every chance to stand out -- if its natural Biorhythm would only allow it to.
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amazingly
happy grapes grow in the Richard Grant Wrotham Pinot vineyard.
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Harvest date was September 25, about one month later than it would have been if we had made Sparkling Wine that year. Grape maturity was just over 24 degrees Brix, whereas we would have picked at 19 degrees it we’d been making sparkling wine. The crushing and fermentation were done at nearby Monticello Vineyards. Natural grape acidity was nearly perfect, we added just a smidge of tartaric acid to lower the pH from 3.54 to 3.47 to guarantee a clean fermentation. D 254 yeast was used and it fermented smoothly at 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
After malo-lactic secondary fermentation, we aged the wine in French oak barrels for just over a year before bottling on March 26, 2008. We ended up with a total of 516 cases and the first release took place in late August.
Overall, the color and ‘body’ seem full and nice.
Taste was a little oaky immediately after bottling, but that is exactly what I wanted.
Oak character in new red wines tends to diminish with bottle aging and the void is filled with increased varietal fruitiness over time.
As of July 1st, the tannic taste had softened significantly and the oak and fruit characters were nearly in balance.
It was clearly ready to drink by the August 2008 release but, of course, the quality will improve considerably with further bottle age.
I would recommend beginning to serve it seriously by Thanksgiving or Christmas, 2008 and it is certain to age well in bottle at cellar temperatures for at least fifteen and probably more than twenty years.
See aging comments in the section on ‘Now - Two Wines.’
It surprises many wine enthusiasts to learn that, many times, a Fine Pinot Noir will outlive a Fine Cabernet Sauvignon in the bottle. The best examples were provided by Beaulieu Vineyard, which produced most of California's truly world-class varietal wines in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s (long before today's classiest wineries arrived on the scene). It was astonishing how quickly the best wineries of today sprang up "out of nowhere" and were able to produce world-class wines within a decade or so. Between 1958 and 2002, I tasted all of the 1940s vintages made by Andre Tchelistcheff and can confirm that his greatest Pinot Noirs of 1945, 6 and 7 actually held up several years longer than his great Cabernet Sauvignons of the same vintages!
