Ciao Friends,
May is Oregon Wine Month – a celebration of an industry that has built itself in just a handful of decades! I write about a lot of things in these newsletters and this month seemed like the right time to talk a bit more about…the wine!
We’re beginning this celebratory month with the release of the newest vintage of POP! and it’s *meet-cute* new pop art inspired label. I had a lot of fun with this one – and no – that’s not me on the label but you can pretend it’s whoever you want it to be. The POP! Is paired with our SIP, SNAP and SEED campaign which encourages you, citizen scientists, to support our Bee Certified vineyard designation. Here’s your invitation, come in for a glass and upload a bee or flower sighting to iNaturalist, we’ll send you home with a seed packet harvested from the farm – all month long.
As we released the POP! At Remy Wines on May 1 – so did Red Hills Market in Dundee, we are their featured winery of the month! They are pouring a full flight of our Oregon wines.. all month long! It makes for a pretty perfect day: lunch and a flight there, then come over and wander the gardens with a glass of POP!, and take in all the pretty flowers (there is lots of purple right now – camas, iris, lupine, foxglove and more). Brut Wine Bar in Astoria joined the party and released POP! As part of their all Oregon, all Remy, Flight Club – and I was there to serve it up!
Let’s talk about the winemaking! I grow three grape varietals at our Three Wives Estate Vineyard; Pinot Gris, Lagrein and Pinot Noir. From there we make a variety of wines. From the Pinot Noir alone we regularly produce POP!, Jules and Black Heart; three very different wines! We have four clones of Pinot Noir planted 667, 777, 828, and 115 “intentionally’ mixed throughout the vineyard. Every vintage is a field blend.
We’ve identified sections of the vineyard that we prefer for each wine but they all start in the same small place. During harvest, Matt or I are at the picking bins, field sorting; as the buckets are emptied, we’re pulling leaves, watching for underripe or overripe fruit, giving real-time feedback to the vineyard stewards about what we want to see being harvested. When we harvest depends on which wine we are making – Black Heart first, then POP! And Jules is the grand finale. It’s not unusual for us to pick the same site multiple times. This is where the process starts to shift depending on the wine we are making.
Black Heart goes into the press “whole cluster”, we press it very slowly and lightly, just barely increasing the pressure with each squeeze. The color of every wine is bound up in the skins and we want to make that beautiful golden hued bubbly that you all love, light pressing, light color. If we’re extracting more color or structure towards the end, that juice will be marked for POP!
POP! Is a similar process but we pick later and don’t need to be as gentle.
After the grapes are pressed, they go to barrel for fermentation.
Jules is totally different; the bins of fruit that come into the winery are emptied onto a sorting line, where we inspect each cluster and then destem them. Literally the fruit comes off the vine, the skins are broken (releasing color right away) and we fill 1.5 ton fermentors with cold, cold fruit (we pick early in the morning or sometimes at night with headlamps); the must will now sit for anywhere from 3-10 days to ‘cold soak’. Cold soaking builds complex flavor, extracts tannins and deepens the color profile of your wine. It can also be dangerous – which is also what makes it so good – the longer it sits before starting fermentation the more we have to monitor it to ensure it’s healthy.
Then we inoculate to begin fermentation. Okay — let’s talk about inoculation vs. native ferments. With inoculation, you’re choosing the yeast strain (and the various attributes it tends to encourage from the grapes) and you’re protecting the wine from all the other things that could start fermenting it. Native ferments can be beautiful, but they’re unpredictable — and sometimes they don’t finish. And that’s… not ideal. If you’ve had a wine made in a facility that used commercial yeast, even if it’s a native ferment, it’s probably the commercial yeast that is fermenting it. I’ve selected yeast strains over the course of time that I think are a large part of what makes my cellar taste like my cellar. The yeast doesn’t make the wine and there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the outcomes but this is one area where I use ‘modern’ winemaking practices.
For our Pinot, we mostly use a yeast strain isolated in the early 1990s in collaboration with the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino and the University of Siena — a slow starter, great for long maceration, building those jam, spice, and earthy notes while minimizing vegetal character.
Jules and all our red wines get daily ‘punchdowns’; literally twice a day we use a large metal wand with a plate on it and push the grapes on top to the bottom of the ferment. It’s a full-body workout. Red or white wines, we measure the brix (sugar levels) and temperature daily.
When the sparkling wines are finished they hang out for a while in barrel. When the red wines are finished we press the fermented must to remove the solids from the wine. Matt or I climb into the fermentors (after a sulfur-citric scrub of our feet), and we bucket each 1.5 ton fermentor into the press. It’s also a full body work out. And here’s why we do it by hand: we leave the seed layer behind.
As the fermentation progressed, seeds fell to the bottom and created a dense layer. Seeds are bitter. If we were to break them up during pressing, we’d introduce that bitterness — so we don’t. We press gently, in stages, tasting as we go, making our press cut based on flavor. We first settle this wine in tank and then go to barrel where it will undergo malo-lactic fermentation, turning malic acid (like apples) into lactic acid (like milk) – it changes the composure of the wine. After that, our red wines, including the Jules age anywhere from 14 months to 3 years. That’s an unusually long time, many wineries will age and bottle before the next harvest. Like with many things – TIME is a magic ingredient.
When we make our methode champenoise sparkling, Black Heart, we age the finished ‘base wine’ for about 6 months then re-innoculate it and put it into a bottle with a beer cap. That secondary fermentation is what makes it sparkle (co2 is a byproduct of fermentation and when the gas doesn’t have anywhere to go – it goes into solution). Then we ‘tirage’ the wine for a couple more years before we ‘riddle’ – shake all the yeast in the bottle into the neck – and ‘disgorge’ – remove the dead yeast and beer cap, add a dosage of aged white wine and put the cork and cage in it. That whole process takes about 3-4 years.
And that brings us back to POP! – once that baby has finished it’s primary fermentation, we bottle it within a few months using a very modern winemaking process – forced carbonation. It’s bright, fresh and ready to drink!
All these wines are made with care, love and intention but they are not all made the same way. They are all Estate fruit, Oregon grown, LIVE certified, Bee Friendly Certified – and all about celebrating diversity (ps Black Heart is a permenant fundraising wine for the ACLU of Oregon).
So come on over and SIP, SNAP and SEED …..One more thing – we’re also releasing the Arneis for Memorial Day Weekend – two great wines, one great month and a whole bunch to celebrate (pun intended).
POP! on by -we hope to see you soon!
Remy and the gang
