Harvest is in, wine making begins

We’ve had quite an unusual growing season this year in London. A cold winter was followed by a very warm and early spring that saw only one frost around 2-3 May on the outer, higher edges of the city. It stayed very dry until June when rain and colder air unfortunately co-incided with flowering. The Madeleine Angevine were anaffected and pollinated well. But on the Regent vines the fruit set was very uneven. Cool and wet summer months followed.

So my five Madeleine Angevine vines did very well this season, giving me a harvest almost twice as big as last year’s, though with a much lowered sugar content (12.5 Brix). I couldn’t leave them on the vine for long  because, even though the wasps were nowhere to be seen, rot was already setting into the bunches. So I picked them on 9 September. Then after trampling the grapes in a barrel, throwing in the starter yeast colony and fermenting on the skins for about three days (as opposed to one day last year) I pressed out 23 litres.

The 2010 Mad Ange has turned out fresher and fruitier than I’ve ever made it before, with a distinct Muscat nose. I put that down to the fact that I fermented it on the skins for a day rather than removing the skins before fermenting. This year I want to prolong the extraction even more and enhance the complexity of flavours and counterbalance of sweetness and acidity. Of course, with such a low natural fructose content in this year’s grapes, I’ve had to top up the must with refined cane sugar, but just enough to bring the alcohol level to around 10-11%.

My 14 Regent vines, on the other hand, gave me 43 lbs (20 kilos) of grapes, less than half of last year’s harvest. I can think of two reasons: the fruit set after flowering was uneven and I had allowed these young vines to carry too many fruiting buds in 2010, which exhausted them. One vine, in fact, didn’t give any fruit at all this year.

These black grapes on a hybrid vine are much hardier and more disease resistant than the vinifera white grapes, so they fare well in the cooler and wetter weather. So I was able to leave these grapes longer on the vine to pick up the last rays of summer and get sweeter. When I picked the Regent at nightfall on 21 September they were all clean and whole and cold, and their juice measured 18 Brix. I trampled them right away, leaving the skins and stems with the juice. After 24 hours I removed the stems.

So the skins steeped in a thick and soupy must that looked like cherry jam.  There was no evident fermentation. Two and a half days after the initial crushing  I threw in the starter yeast colony (a small amount of Pinot Noir and Kubishevsky started two weeks earlier). Within an hour pinpricks of carbon dioxide were piercing the black liquid in the pail. 

As with the Mad Ange I want to increase extraction of flavours  by macerating the skins and holding them and the stems longer in the must. The 2010 Regent wine seems to lack complexity of flavours or length of finish in the mouth – not much “structure” as the wine critics say. Sure, its palatable and with a faint effervescence, and its from very young vines.  But its taste and aroma seem “short”, something like a Beaujolais nouveau, and that may have as much to do with my method of fermentation as it does with the vines’ youth.  I want a fuller bodied wine from these grapes, so I’m going to experiment.

Advertisement