2019 Late Harvest Chenin Blanc Update

This past year, 2019, we left a small amount of clusters on our vine with the thought of making a late harvest Chenin Blanc. I wrote two blogs about it:

• Last Harvest of the Year
• 2019 Late Harvest Chenin Blanc Next Steps

Initially, we were quite worried that the wine would be very dark in color. Here is a pictorial recap of what the initial juice looked like:

We began the fermentation on November 25 and stopped the fermentation at approximately 6 Brix which is about 50 g/L of residual sugar. We then added some sulfur dioxide to 0.8 g/L free, and stored it in a 35 degree F fermentation chamber. Yesterday, we took out some wine to test and the wine looked like this shown in the glass on the left.
The numbers for this late harvest wine are:
pH = 3.75
TA = 10.5 g/L
The aromas were of an undertone of tropical fruits. When we tasted it, we got a mixture of tropical fruits and stone fruits.

Vintage 2020: February

This winter has been the warmest that I have experienced since we began growing grapevines. We have not been immune to some of the bad weather that has been rolling across the U.S. and on Friday, we had howling winds with gusts reaching 60 mph! Other than that, we have been working in the vineyard, trying to put ourselves in a good position with pruning done much sooner than we did last year. So, our task for February is to cut all of the tendrils and free the canes from the ties that we tethered the canes with last growing season. This will make pruning in March and removing the wood much easier. Our friends came to help us and put us in a good place with the tendril pruning. While we were doing the tendril removal, we came upon this weird looking, cottony "stuff".

We did some research on the internet but didn't find anything conclusive, but it doesn't look like a good thing so we will get rid of it.

2016 Agathe Bursin Strangenburg Pinot Noir

We are on a mission to understand the Alsace Wine Region and that means tasting through Alsatian wines. My husband bought this 2016 Agathe Bursin Strangenburg Pinot Noir for that purpose. We initially tasted it with Mediterranean style chicken thighs and we immediately liked the wine. It was inky purple colored in the glass the flavors were of black currents with a spicy yet, silky finish.
I learned online that Agathe Bursin, since taking over the family domaine in 2000, has rightly garnered a reputation as one of Alsace’s “comets in the sky”.
Agathe’s Domaine now totals around 5.5 hectares, split over the Grand Cru Zinnkoepflé and the Lieux-dits Bollenberg, Dirstelberg, Strangenberg, all around her home village of Westhalten near Colmar. Quantities from the 5ha estate are small and demand is high making the wines sell out fast.

To make the Pinot Noir, the grapes are hand picked then partially de-stemmed (40% – 60% depending on the vintage). There is no cold soak; fermentation begins in stainless steel tanks with eight days of maceration (longer would lead to the wine being too vegetal) before being transferred into used 228 litre pièces to complete the two months of fermentation. Maturation is for 20 months.
References:
1. Terroirs, Saturday 10th March, 2018 - Meet winemaker Agathe Bursin from Alsace.
2. WoodWinters: wines and whiskies, Agathe Bursin.
3. Frankly Wines, Fruit and Balance [Alsace Vault Vol. 1].

Alsace Part 2: The Geology - The Location of the Upper Rhine Graben

I ended the previous blog on the Geology of Alsace with an illustration of the diversity of soil types that occur in the Alsace wine region.
Little did I know that when I said that I would write a blog about the Geology of the Alsace that I was embarking on an adventure that would take me back in time some 380 million years ago when the continental land masses were in a state of flux and the world as we know it today was still being jigsaw-puzzled together.
The region of Alsace is located on a geological feature called a graben. A graben is the German word for a grave-like trench.¹ The Upper Rhine Graben (URG), where Alsace is located, is part of the 1100‐km‐long European Cenozoic rift system which formed some 50 milion years ago.²
First, in order to understand where the Upper Rhine Graben (URG) is located we need to get a 35,000 foot view of the area:³

In the illustration above, the URG is the area shown in the rectangle. The URG is bordered by the Rhenish Massif to the north and the Jura Mountains to the south. It has a length of some 300 km, extending from Basel in the south to near Mainz in the north and a width between 30-40 km.³

In the above illustration, the left side shows a closeup of the area in the rectangle in the first illustration. This is the Upper Rhine graben.³ The cross hatched areas in that illustration shows something that the inset key identifies as "the basement".
Our major focus will be on the area shown on the right side, the southern URG, flanked by two main mountain ranges, the Black Forest Mountains on the east and the Vosges Mountains on the west.² It's a little strange that the cross hatched area, known as the basement is the location of the Vosges and Black Forest Mountains, but that is because those areas are of very ancient origin.
This will be the focus of the upcoming blogs, an area known as the Southern Upper Rhine Graben, what the various soil types are and when they were formed.
References:
1. James E. Wilson, Terroir The Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines, Reed Consumer Books Limited, 1998, ppg 82-107.
2. Yair Rotstein, Marc Schaming, Tectonic implications of faulting styles along a rift margin: The boundary between the Rhine Graben and the Vosges Mountains, Tectonics, 04 March 2008, https://doi.org/10.1029/2007TC002149.
3. Markus E. Schumacher, Upper Rhine Graben: Role of preexisting structures during rift evolution, TECTONICS, VOL. 21, NO. 1, 1006, 10.1029/2001TC900022, 2002.
4. Jeanne Vidal, Albert Genter, Overview of naturally permeable fractured reservoirs in the central and southern Upper Rhine Graben: Insights from geothermal wells, Geothermics, 74 (2018) 57–73.
5. Vincent Maurer, Coralie Aichholzer, Alexandre Richard, Pauline Harlé, Régis Hehn, Albert Genter, Philippe Duringer, Geothermal reservoir temperature estimation derived from gradient wells in a continental rift context (Upper Rhine Graben), PROCEEDINGS, 43rd Workshop on Geothermal Reservoir Engineering Stanford University, Stanford, California, February 12-14, 2018.
6. Etienne Skrzypek, Karel Schulmann, Anne-Sophie Tabaud and Jean-Bernard Edel, (Palaeozoic evolution of the Variscan Vosges Mountains) in K., Martınez Catalan, J. R., Lardeaux, J. M., Janousek,V.&Oggiano, G. (eds) The Variscan Orogeny: Extent, Timescale and the Formation of the European Crust, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 405, http://dx.doi.org/10.1144/SP405.8, The Geological Society of London 2014.