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Is This the Best Grape for Virginia Wine? Winemaker Jeff White of Glen Manor Vineyards

Austin Beeman

Winemaker Jeff White of Glen Manor Vineyards takes Austin Beeman into his vineyards in Front Royal, Virginia to discuss the Petit Manseng grape variety. White explains why he thinks this is the ideal grape variety for Virginia's hot and humid wine growing climate.

Check out the four-minute video or read a transcript below.

THIS IS EPISODE #74 OF UNDERSTANDING WINE WITH AUSTIN BEEMAN

Transcript

Winemaker Jeff White of Glen Manor Vineyards:


So we're in the middle of our one and a half acre Petit Manseng planting and this is a grape that is a fantastic match for Virginia. It's a little known grape. It grows in the southwestern corner of France, near the Jurançon region at the base of the Pyrenees. It's a little teeny grape. You can see, very small cluster, very loose and open cluster. The skins are very tough and so it's almost impervious to the weather we have here. It gets very high sugars, but also at the same time, retains a very high acidity, so that lends itself to different styles of wines. You can produce a dry style, you can produce a demi-sec off-dry style and can also make it into a very sweet, beautiful dessert wine.

Like I said, it has very small clusters, but inside the grape, it's mostly pulp. There's not a lot of juice. So when you press it or crush it, the yields of the actual juice to ferment into wine is very low but that juice is explosive with both flavor and aromatics.

In Jurançon, they actually grow two grapes, Gros Manseng and Petit Manseng. And the Gros Manseng is a big grape, thin skinned, very juicy. And the bulk of their wine is Gros Manseng but it doesn't have a ton of flavor and they produce then Petit Manseng and add that to the Gros Manseng to boost up the flavor and the acidity.

The Gros Manseng wouldn't do well here because of that tight cluster, thin skin characteristics of it, growing here in our wet humid environment.

But and one thing I've done different with my Petit Manseng trying to boost yields somewhat, and also at the same time, trying to moderate some of the sugars and even the acidity some is I've established two sets of canes.

Originally I had a trunk come up and a cane going here on the fruiting wire and a cane right here on the fruiting wire. And now I have another cane going up to the very next wire on both sides. Some vines have four canes, some vines have three, some vines only have two depending on the vigor of the vine.

What this has done though, it has not increased my production by double, the vine has a way of compensating. So I'm seeing about a quarter to about a third increase in production, which is great. So the berries tend to be just a little bit smaller, even though I have more of them.

This is a grape I'm really excited about for the future in Virginia, with the highest acidity and the great flavor profile, the very loud expression of flavor and aromatics, and the alcohol and the acidity, a little bit of sweetness. I'm likening these wines to a Vouvray and a wine that can potentially age for 10, 20, 30 years. That's my kind of theory on this wine. I'm excited about tasting some of these bottles in 20 years and see how they compare.

Drone Footage taken by Andy Gail

MUSIC CREDIT Music - “Darien Gap” by Josh Woodward. Free download: http://joshwoodward.com/

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