Crushalicious

taste, texture, flavors ... an update

So it’s been many months since a post and so much has happened … holidays, a fabulous new president, “Black Dynamite” was purchased by Sony, couple of new companies in the fold, my youngest brother got engaged, but let’s talk wine.

The Sangiovese

This wine is VIBRANT!  It is a beautiful bright reddish-purple color with a crisp cranberry, cherry, currant flavor.  It pops in your mouth and sort of reminds me in a good way of eating a sweet tart. 

For fun we took a sample and blended it with some of our cab (11%) to see how it would change it.  Wow – the tart cherry flavor mellowed out a bit and the wine felt fuller and longer lasting.  It maintained the vibrancy and the cranberry-cherry taste but had a better and more sustained mouth feel.  So, given that this little darling will become a super Tuscan, we’ll start doing more blending trials in February so that the Sangio can absorb the new flavors before we bottle it.

Bottling ….. will happen before harvest, tentatively we are saying August.

Details for those of us who are wine geeks –
In mid-December the Sangio began Malolactic conversion with 100mL of malic culture.  By January 9 the malic acid was at .33 g/L.   (Malolactic conversion transforms the tart malic acid to softer lactic acid which softens the wine’s acidity and produces ethyl lactate which enhances the feel of the wine giving it a more creamy body).

The Roussanne

White wines are testy little buggers in that they shape change over and over again unlike red wines that have a slower process.   At this point, I dare say the Roussanne is impressive.  Having had numerous heart palpitations over the crazy flavors it has had (banana, peach, apricot pit, black tea, orange blossom, mud, honey), it has mellowed out into a citrus-coconut-honey type of flavor and has a fabulous yellow-gold color.  Eventually, the flavor will ease over to more stone fruit then citrus fruit but it still has time.

The finish falls a bit short in that after you swallow it doesn’t linger, so we will keep an eye on that.  We plan on blending it to get to a certain mouth feel and richness that we are looking for.

Bottling … towards the end of spring

Geek details –
On Dec 22 it moved from the steel tank to a neutral Francois Freres barrel.   On Jan 12 it was sulfured as a means of protecting it against microbial spoilage.


The Cabernet

Oh baby, this is one is a beauty!!  It underwent Malo in mid October and has been slowly developing in the barrel, which was a new oak French barrel.  On Jan 13 it was racked and returned to the barrel.  (Racking = remove the wine from the barrel leaving the layer of solid precipitants behind, wash the barrel, returned the wine to the barrel for continued aging) As of last week it was a beautiful ruby-purplish color with a good dark redness to it.  It has an herbal smell on the nose as well as a fruity, berry thing going on.   In the next couple of months we will probably rack it to a different barrel and let it continue to develop and age.

In other news …. we are developing a new name and new label for the wine!  Chateau Bebes des Mamans while it absolutely made us roll with laughter, the tshirts are now a collector’s item and new shirts will be created once we have the new name.

where have we been?

So since the last press, sigh, we’ve been going through the post harvest depression.  Waking up with a jolt in the middle of the night thinking you’re late for a punchdown, only to realize there are no more punchdowns until next harvest.  No more presses, no more crushes.  The smell of fermenting grapes and yeast isn’t stuck to your clothes.  Your hands have returned to their normal pale color, no longer grayish purple.  And so another harvest falls into memory.

So now the babies are toddlers.  All three are barrelled (two in oak one in steel) and are constantly evolving, some are even trying to show off.

The cab is definitely the eldest child.  It has finished it’s malolactic fermentation and is has a beautiful purply-red (blackberry meets raspberry) color.  It tastes more mature than we expected and has a great feel in the mouth.  So excited to see how it ages over the next many many months.

The sangio is a perfect middle child, not moving as frenetically as the other two yet has it’s own surprises.  It has not undergone malolactic fermentation but continues to evolve gracefully.  The color is more of a tart red fruit - cranberryish with a purple ring around it.  The taste is more fruity than the cab and much lighter.  It dances in your mouth.  Some individuals are trying to convince us to keep it as a sangiovese and not make it into a super tuscan because it is truly a bright, tart, crisp sangiovese.  However, we still think that eventually blending in another varietal will give it added depth.

And the roussanne….a petulant youngest child.  Within the span of ten days the flavor went from:  black tea with orange blossom and honey to banana to nectarine slushy to peach and apricot with a hint of pumice to a peach and banana smoothy.  It is all over the map changing every single day.

So what we are doing over the next several months is many tastings, mulling and learning about blending, and working on the label design.

What can you do?  Ah….

• Dec 3rd join us for a blending class at Crushpad. Space is limited so sign up quick.  We’ll pull some samples so that we can start figuring out how to blend the babies.  (http://applications.crushpadwine.com/event/132.3)
• Join us for tastings which essentially means shoot us an email with dates/times that work for you and we’ll make it happen.
• If you see any cool labels or neat bottles, send us pictures
• Give us suggestions for how to add bling to a bottle (I might be kidding)

Grape juice the likes of you've never had before

Imagine a grape juice that is milky and has body in your mouth.  It smells nutty and warm and has a taste that coats your tongue causing all tastebuds to explode.  Well, had you been at our press, you would have tasted all that excitement.  The flavor of the Roussanne juice was intense.  Susannah contemplated the market for premium free run grape juice …

Given that the press was much longer for the Roussanne than our reds, we got to spend loads of time with the lovely folks from Crushpad.  We had fun wines to taste - a slew of tasty white wines as well as wines that were made by Crushpad folks from the same vineyard as our Roussanne albeit previous years - very tasty.  Pair lovely wines, fabulous people, excellent cheese, and funny stories together and you end up with an evening where time runs away from you.  In other words, another wonderful night at Crushpad.

Alas, our third baby is almost done ….  so sad.  Now, we understand why years later parents opt for an additional kid.  Yep, we are mulling the idea of another barrel, however, a strong summons back to work will probably negate that desire and we shall instead focus on our label design, bottling, and thinking about what to do next harvest.

And, a side note - we were able to taste our cabernet (thanks Kristen!) - wow!!  It is coming along beautifully!!

Roussanne Crush!

With Philz fabulous Silken Splendor in hand, Crystal and Serena showed up in the early hours of the workday to meet baby #3 - Roussanne.

The grapes were beautiful!  Big fat clusters of green and rust colored translucent grapes.  The sweetness exploded in your mouth as the grape burst.  Unbelievably tasty (as said by a hardcore red wine drinker).  The pick was incredibly clean so we just had to pull out handful of leaves and some pincher bugs. The clusters were perfect in size with very few raisins.  The acid bombs were sweet!  Mother Nature was genius with this ton of grapes.

The grapes went through the destemmer but no need for the shaking table as we had done with the red grapes.  In about 20 minutes we had a beautiful vat of greenish sludge that tasted so good!  Jonathan (our winemaker for the Roussanne) tossed stems back into the sludge (so unlike our reds!) to give it some additional complexity.

Now, the grapes will be in the cold room soaking for the next several hours until this evening when we go to press!

So, if you are reading this before 5:30pm, you clearly don’t have a busy work day so feel free to come visit us for the press.  The press itself will take almost 2 hours (totally different than our reds).

Sangiovese Press

This post is delayed due to all sorts of goodness in the wine world that was keeping us from our blog.

On October 11 the Sangio was pressed!  And what a fabulous event that was.  First, the color of the sanio was phenomenal!  Emi is brilliant (as it was her idea to let the grapes macerate for longer, thus, more contact with the skins and juice, thus extracting more color).  Ariane named it “purple rain” as it was coming through the press.

Second, the flavor - knock your socks off!  Cranberry, a little smoke, some tartness and depth in the flavor.  Mmmmmm.  It is going to be amazing!  The temptation to grab the second barrel so that we have two potential super tuscans play with is huge.

The barrel - for the sangio we went with a zebra barrel so as not to have too much oak coming through.  This barrel was created by putting half a new barrel and half a neutral barrel together - other zebras can be done with alternating slats.

We are so looking forward to seeing how this one develops.  Stay tuned.

See the previous post for the photo link.