Every year, when I hand in my post-harvest inventory, I get a call from our accountant. She looks at the amount of fruit I harvested and at the resultant barrels of wine I produced, and calls to tell me it doesn’t compute. “You’re missing a lot of wine,” she scolds. And every year, I smile, sheepishly, and remind her the wine’s not missing – it’s rosé.
Making rosé, the way we make rosé, is an accountant’s nightmare, and she tells me as much annually. And while I hate to torture her, I’m a little obsessed with making rosé in exactly this way. It’s a long explanation but I’ll tell you what I always tell her….
As you know, because I talk about it all the time, we don’t call out anything in advance. There isn’t a rosé vineyard or a rosé block. I don’t say, “Ok, Block 7 is going to be for rosé this year,” (and therefore, we’re going to crop it out higher, pick it earlier, make fewer passes in the vineyard…..). We farm everything to be pinot noir. Every vine is picked when the fruit is flavorful, symmetrical in structure, perfectly ready. All of the pinot noir is sorted twice, by hand, into small, open-topped fermenters, is allowed to come up to ambient temperature over time and to ferment using only the ambient yeast of the vineyard, our winery, our hands. There is a moment, maybe two or three days into active fermentation that the aromatics crack open. This may be somewhere between three to nine days on the skins depending on how long the lag between harvest and the start of fermentation. At that moment, you lift the canvas cover on the vat and the aromatics explode forth, filling the room. And it’s at that moment that you get your first glimpse of what the character of the resultant wine is going to be. Finally, you can see (smell): this one is oceanic, this exotic, this one, deeply red-fruited. And it’s only at that moment, at the height of their aromatic development, all through harvest, that we find things that we can’t bear to leave on the skins for another day, because they seem too expressive and too perfect for rosé. Prior to that moment, you can taste the quality of the fruit, the tannins, the shape of the acid but it just smells grapey. You have to get a certain way through alcoholic fermentation to crack open the aromatic compounds within to be able to really see what the wine wants to become.
An example. Say I have two one-ton vats of pinot noir picked on the same day. When I come to them on day five, one of them is autumnal, all yellow leaves and forest floor and the other is hyper-floral. I’ll leave the first one on the skins to continue on the path to red wine while the second, no matter where it’s from, my oldest blocks, my youngest blocks, this vineyard or that; I’ll pick up with the forklift and pull a siphon with my breath, dropping not a percentage (or saignée) but all of the juice/wine from the vat directly into barrel. I’ll get enough from that one-ton of fruit to yield one barrel of wine. It will continue fermenting in barrel, go through full malo in barrel and will be in barrel, sur lie, for a year before being bottled, unfined and unfiltered. Its twin vat (same size, picked on the same day, destined for red wine) continues fermenting for ten to twenty days, receiving movements daily (remontage and/or pigeage), the berries breaking, giving up juice. It too gets lifted, siphoned into barrel, and tipped into the press to express the last of its juice. This fermenter will yield four barrels of red wine. Same fruit, same farming, same winemaking, same barrel, same time in barrel…but the one selected for rosé has one-quarter of the yield as the one chosen for red wine. One barrel of rosé = four barrels of red wine. If a bottle of our pinot noir costs, $125, the equivalent rosé must cost $500. Truth. But even though I’ve got a lot of nerve (or so I keep hearing…) I’m not sure I can put that price tag on that wine. And so, I keep making it at a loss. Certain death for my little business but the only real salvation for this winemaking heart.
Enter Luciferin, the pink equivalent of Aequorin and Obelin. One absurdly exotic expression of pinot noir, in its most aromatic form; so distinct and so compelling that we had to bottle it on its own. One puncheon, from one hillside, from one incomparable season. Oceanic and soil-inflected, this rosé winds between oyster brine and humus, pomegranate, and leather oil. It’s a serious wine.
It’s expensive, yes, but it’s worth it, I promise. And ask our accountant, it’s still being offered at half-price.