This image shows the pinto grigio vineyard now all leaves have fallen. The vineyard is not yet dormant, .i.e. there is still sap flowing in the vine-canes, therefore we are not ready to prune.The pinot grigio has been in barrel now for one month. It is interesting to see the wood stripped some of the pink-colour from the wine. The other major changes that ocured in barrel were that the wine has taken on some subtle vanillin characters as well as a little more mouth texture/grippyness (good for carrying food flavours). BUT I do not want to impart too much wood flavour as I hope to preserve the fruit integrity of the wine. So it is time to rack the grigio from the 225L barrique to a 300L stainless steel mueller barrel. Remembering that racking is moving wine from one vessel to another, in this case to remove the wine from wood and to remove it from its dead yeast cells (lees).
Racking to a 300L barrel meant that we had to find another 75L of a similar wine to top with, to avoid oxidation. Why rack then and not just go straight to bottle? Well, I want the wine to tighten up even further, this is possible when in contact with stainless steel, so it's off to barrel + one of the other early harvested blocks of lane pinot gris has awesome grassy fruit aromas, which after a blending trial looked great in our wine, so I went for it.
Once we had found the right wine, blending was easy. We simply took 75L of the other pinot gris from tank (below) and added this to the steel barrel of 225L of pinot grigio. These will stay in barrel now for 2 months. During this time the barrel will be placed outside, in the cold of the hills winter nights, to allow any excess potassium in the wine to settle out as a potassium titrate crystal (wine diamonds). This is purely for aesthetics, to avoid precipitants from forming in the bottle of the bottle when chilled in a fridge below 4 degrees C.
Note how frothy the blending wine looks in the bucket. This is because the wine is being kept and continually being topped with dissolved CO2 to retain freshness. This blows off once the wine is exposed to air conditions.
