Dan's Harvest Updates

First Muscat Pick

Wed 24 Feb 2010

Wednesday 24 February

My first wine love was Sauternes. Those gorgeously sweet, multi-faceted jewels that sparkle in the glass and add almost unseemly decadence to any great meal. By the time the Sudiraut, or Coutet is served, the world is already warm and fuzzy, the company charming, witty and beautiful, the candlelight glinting in their eyes and shimmering through the wine. Bliss.

To make great Sauternes, the climate has to be perfect. Perfect for the development of noble rot, and almost incidentally, perfect for those lucky enough to live in the region. Long summers followed by autumns with damp misty mornings warming up to clear sunny afternoons. If asked nicely, I'd be willing to live in a Sauternes Chateau, even if the wine was rubbish.

One of the important tricks of producing Sauternes is the use of tries (pronounced tree). This is where the pickers go through the vineyard and pick only those bunches, or sometimes only individual berries, that are acceptably rotted. Because the botrytis does not spread evenly, it is imperative to pick with several tries to make the best possible wine.

For the first time, we are using this system to pick our Muscat. We have a gorgeous old block, planted in 1920. The vines are shy yielding and almost impossibly gnarled and twisted. In some parts of the vineyard the old-timers are so close to death that they struggle to keep their leaves through the complete season. This exposes bunches to more direct sun and accordingly they ripen and shrivel more quickly. By the time the rest of the fruit is ready these exposed bunches are beyond redemption and are dropped onto the vineyard floor. So we are using the Sauternes system of tries, and putting the picking crew through several times this vintage. The first trie is today and the first couple of bins have already arrived. The rest should be here by lunchtime. It is gorgeously aromatic, full of rose petal and candied peel character.

We shall crush the fruit into an open picking bin and leave it to macerate for a few days. The first step in a decades-long journey, more of which later.

See Also: Ask Dan