It seems as though sauvignon blanc has been around for a very long time and so it has. A few wineries at Marlborough on New Zealand’s South Island really got it going way back in the early 1990s. I loved it, and so did a good deal of the wine-drinking world.
In just on 20 years we have encountered the grape grown in vineyards all over the place and processed neat and in varying blends into wines ranging from brilliant to very good and plain ordinary.
No surprise then that the Giesen Brothers (Theo, Alex and Marcel) and their winemaking team have been wanting to push the boundaries for Marlborough sauvignon blanc. We are told their aim was “to dispel the myth that the region’s sauvignon blanc was a one trick pony”.
They wanted to show sauvignon blanc could make complex, multi-dimensional wines. Well here’s a wine they reckon does that: Giesen traditionally fermented sauvignon blanc. $39 or thereabouts at your local shop.
A fair amount of thought and hard work goes into this job, as of course it does into many of the fine wines now offered on our market. If you would prefer simply to drink and enjoy the stuff, read no further. If on the other hand you find that knowing how that delicious liquid came to be made improves your pleasure, read on. This is basically based on notes provided by Giesen.
The vines were pruned to two canes then shoot thinned to remove double shoots, downward growing shoots and to clear dense areas. After flowering and fruit set the vines were thinned to a maximum of two bunches per shoot.
The vines were hand-leaf plucked to improve fruit exposure and promote even ripening. Near veraison greener bunches were dropped by hand to even up maturity. Pre-harvest a quality control thin was conducted to remove damaged or botrytis infected bunches. The maturing fruit was regularly tasted to monitor acid degradation and flavor profile to select the optimum harvest day.
The first block was picked on April 8 2009 with the last on April 21. fruit was hand harvested into small picking crates which were put in a cool store overnight to chill the fruit before processing. Three days before harvesting they picked a bucket of grapes and crushed them to make a wild yeast starter, which was left in the warmth of the pump shed to get the temperature up.
This bucket of juice, skins and stems started fermenting within a day or two, at which stage they added more freshly crushed grapes. When the vineyard was harvested these yeast starters were brought into the winery, drained off and added to the juice from each block. The idea was to ferment the juice using the yeast that was on the grapes and therefore indigenous to each vineyard.
The whole bunches were pressed without de-stemming and crushing. The pressure was gradually increased with minimal rotating and macerating and the juice was run off to tanks before the barrels were gravity filled. A selection of oak was used including one new barrel and used barrels including some which were five-years-old and previously used for chardonnay.
Once the juice temperature was around 16°C the wild starter was introduced and the ferment was under way. From there the winemaking team were “hands off” with no nutrient additions or temperature control.
The ferments mostly went to dryness with some petering out at around 5 grams/litre residual sugar. It was decided not to allow malolactic fermentation so sulphur was added to the barrels about two weeks after the end of ferment. The wine rested on yeast lees for five months until blending in early October 2009.
End of the technical talk. Hope you learned a lot. It really is a good wine.
