We have planted almost half of our vineyard in Chenin Blanc. It's one of the white wines that really appeals to our palates. Our first harvest of Chenin Blanc occurred in 2015. We took a very minimalist approach to making the wine. We let the juice that came from foot stomping the grapes with our friends and let it cold settle in the refrigerator that my husband converted into a place that we could conduct a long and slow cool fermentation.
After cold settling, we racked the juice and little of the fine grape pulp to use as food for our yeast of choice, QA23, to conduct the fermentation. At that time just shortly after fermentation was over, we sampled the wine and my husband thought that the wine tasted like "jet fuel". Over the years of making Chenin, we have come to understand that this is what Chenin tastes like just shortly after fermentation and if we achieve this, then we know that our Chenin is on it's evolution to tasting delicious!
There are many Chenin styles that include:
- Sec
- Dry
- Sec-tendre
- Off-dry
- Demi-Sec
- Semi-sweet
- Moelleux
- Sweet
We make our Chenin always in the "sec" style because we ferment the wine to dryness. We tried our hand at making "sec-tendre" where we have fermentated our wine to dryness and then added a sussreserve, in the style of some German Rieslings. We also made a pétillant naturel, which is a sparkling wine made in the ancestral method without disorgement of the dead yeast and lees. We do make a sweet wine, in our case it is botrytized Chenin that is infected with noble rot and harvested in December.
What we really enjoy about Chenin Blanc is that it is food friendly, especially with oysters and seafood that is found in our area.
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