It's Harvest Time!
The moment we have been working toward all year is here–harvest! We begin our harvest by picking the Albariño for everyone’s favorite Albariño Verde. As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we start picking the fruit for the Verde at 19 brix and a pH of 3.3; giving us the perfect chemistry for the racy white wine that our Albariño Verde is. After the Verde harvest, we will begin to turn our attention to one of the trickier wine styles, a rosé. Truth be told, the most popular topic in the cellar currently is the rosés. Despite popular belief, making a great rosé can be one of the most daunting challenges in the cellar. This is due to a couple of things in particular: color and ripeness.
When producing a rosé wine, the best place to start is in the vineyard. Instead of narrowing in all of our focus on the brix, we also analyze the pH and color of the juice. Rosé is often viewed as a white wine made from red grapes. With this in mind, ripeness is viewed as the same as a white wine. Which is why we focus more on the pH and acids in the fruit as opposed to brix and physiological ripeness.
The most difficult part of rosé production is getting the color just right. With a few exceptions, squeezing red grapes produces white juice. This is because anthocyanins or color pigments reside within the grape skins. Meaning, when you press the skins harder you will release more anthocyanins and gain a more intense color. There are two popular methods for increasing color for a rosé.
The most common method is maceration. Simply put, maceration is when you crush the grapes and allow them to steep with their skins. As time passes, more color is extracted. The fruit is then pressed off the skins at the desired intensity of color. This style of rosé tends to be darker in color and more fruit-forward.
Saignée is another method. This French word translates into English as the phrase “to bleed”. Which makes sense, since the method is the process of siphoning off juice from freshly crushed and de-stemmed red wine grapes to make a rosé. This style of rosé lends itself to wild strawberries, raspberry, and some herbaceous flavors due to the ripeness level of the red grapes. These wines tend to be more intense on the front of the palate and lengthier than more delicate rosés.
At Chrysalis we produce two very distinct rosé wines that utilize both methods. Our Mariposa is produced from both maceration and saignée. Our Petit Verdot, Tannat, and Tinta Cao are macerated to increase color, but a saignée is performed on the Nebbiolo to extract dark berry flavors. Our other rosé is Tximeleta. The grapes for this wine are picked early and go through a brief maceration before being lightly pressed. This style focuses more on the varietal characters of our Fer Servadou, which has a profile of wild berries, white pepper, and delicate acid. Both rosés can be enjoyed in our tasting room right now!