Blending

Easter is a week or so away. And, for me that means it’s time to blend Pinot Noir.

While much attention is given to the harvest with the short and intense birth pangs of the vintage, I consider blending to be the greatest of the winemaking arts. It took me many years to recognize how central it is to crafting the best wines and improving the worst. In my first decade as a winemaker I practiced blending but cannot really say that I focused on it or even recognized its importance. I learned a few basic lessons early. The most useful was not to give up on any portion of the wine. Both the ’80 and ’81 Chardonnays at Acacia where I spent my long apprenticeship had significant portions that were problematic. Some of the ’80 Chardonnay had a stuck ferment, while a part of the ’81 had an ethyl acetate flaw – it smelled like nail polish remover. Both flawed portions were 15-20% of the whole. We found that when we did the blend trials that the wines with the “bad” parts added were preferred over the blends using only the correct parts. While this came as a relief, I never took it to its logical conclusion and purposefully spoiled some percentage of the vintage. Perhaps this knowledge has given me more courage to try riskier techniques than I would have otherwise.

Late in the second decade of my winemaking I headed a project that was essentially a negotiant brand. I began with the declassified wines from the six wineries in the group, and then purchased additional wines from the bulk market to more than double the volume. The process of putting these wines together took several months from late winter into mid-summer. Each Friday I would taste dozens of samples of bulk wine. With my memory of the flavor of the existing blend in mind I would have to decide whether a given bulk wine would improve or at minimum extend the blend. A couple years of this taught me to blend in my head as it were – something I had never done in practice before. I achieved the ability to taste a part and know how it would affect the whole. For this quality level of wine – medium at best, I concluded that a change in 7-8% of the blend could be significant. I would later have to revise this when it came to better wine.

I spent most of the third decade of my career as a consulting winemaker with multiple clients. A typical day found me tasting up to 50 wines. Given this amount of tasting practice my palate was never better. One of my clients was a sparkling wine producer that needed expertise with Pinot Noir. I worked with them through several vintages. When tasting blends, the sparkling wine master there would insist on trying modifications of blends that differed by only a percent or so. At first, I resisted because I didn’t believe that such small changes could be significant. Blind tastings of these minute variations on blends proved me wrong and I learned another valuable lesson – keep fine tuning even when you think you’re done!

In my last full-time job as a winemaker I had almost limitless resources at my disposal both from the vineyard and cellar points of view. During the dozen or so years I spent there I made the best wines of my life. One of the most powerful tools I had here was permission to de-classify as much of the vintage as need be to keep the quality consistently excellent. I never had that privilege before of since.  The difficult 2008 vintage I made full use of this and declassified almost 80% of the wines. This could be called subtractive blending and it works wonders on weak vintages. It is used more commonly in Burgundy than in the new world.

It was here as well that I mastered the art of creating better reserve wines with barrel selection. This process involves tasting and grading all barrels individually before any test blends are attempted. This is a very labor-intensive task.  A medium-sized winery will have 1,000 barrels, so this involves several months work of daily tasting and often retasting of barrels. Quality variation exists between barrels in even the best fermentation lots.  A great deal of variation in how a given lot of wine absorbs and harmonizes oak barrel flavors adds a significant complication as well. Once all barrels have been graded and cataloged the reserve blends can be considered using only the best of the best. I’ve concluded that this process of barrel selection is the foundation upon which the highest level of wine quality rests. Sadly, the term “barrel select” was bastardized long ago by an industrial scale Chardonnay producer known by the initials KJ.

Even after more than four decades of practice blending remains a mystery of sorts that never fails to surprise and intrigue me. Just yesterday I made a single barrel modification to a Pinot Noir blend that I anticipated would lift and lighten a somewhat ponderous starting point. The barrel I was adding was very perfumed in a floral herbal manner. Instead of lifting the aroma as I expected the change instead broadened the palate, tamped down the oak, and most curiously of all appeared to make the fruit aspect riper. The change was beneficial, but not at all in the way I’d have predicted.