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

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

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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.

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Drone Footage taken by Andy Gail

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

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Cartizze: Prosecco's Greatest Vineyard

Visit the greatest vineyard for Prosecco: the Cartizze Vineyard in Valdobbiadene, Italy. Bisol Prosecco takes us to their piece of the Cartizze Vineyard. We drink Prosecco while he explains the vineyard's importance.

After returning to the Bisol winery, we'll get an explanation of how Prosecco is made and what is the challenge behind making a natural wine prosecco with no sulfites.

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

This is Episode #71 of Understanding Wine with Austin Beeman.

Download the Video directly here. // Subscribe to the Video Podcast Here

Transcript:

105 hectares divided in 154 owners. And one acre is $1 million. And that's make it the most expensive single plots in Italy. And using the French words, here the terroir is perfect. So have different soil, Cartizze which is this one, this rock, top sandy soil, south facing, the winds coming from the valley, which is cool down during the day, and make this Terroir unique. Which make the grapes, only at this vineyard, we've got fully ripeness, rich fruits, but retain the acidity.

Prosecco is a sparkling wine. But not like the Champagne and Cava. It is made with the charmant method, or as we call it the metodo Italiano, Italian method. So we press [the grapes.] There is over there the de-stemmer, it's a long screw, we separate the stem and the grapes. After it goes in this press, one, two, and three press, where it is a kind of pipe which gently press the grapes. Really important the gentle press because we don't want bitterness from the seeds. After got the grape juice, it's filtrated and it goes in a normal tank. For the normal tank, the yeast, the sugar and produce alcohol. And that's the way 99% of the wine is made. Harvest, de-stemming, pressing, tank, where fermentation.

The Champagne and Cava goes in the bottle with the addition of sugar and the yeast because they want to secondary aroma, maturity, complexity. For us,Prosecco is all about uncomplicated aroma. It's all about the freshness. It's all about the easy fruitiness. You drink it, and leave a nice, refreshing, fruit driven. And that's why the Prosecco has been so successful. You give a glass of Prosecco to everybody, and they want the bottle. Because it's got lower acidity compared to Champagne. Smaller, fine, elegant bubble. A touch of sugar to make it more soft and more gentle on the palate. And lower alcohol. And that's why I call it the uncomplicated bubble.

You open it, you drink, and you enjoy. It's ready 24/7.

All our vineyards are organically farmed. But the only problem Valdobbiadene, the average plot is less than one hectares. So we've got one hectare here, two, three, five. Only one place we've got 20 hectares, so 50 acres, which are organic certified. But it goes, blend into the wine. So the vinification is as natural as possible. That's why we came out in '09 with a Prosecco with no use of sulfites. It's just grape juice, natural yeast, and nothing else. Its as natural as possible.

Lenné Estate with Proprietor Steve Lutz

Take a walk on Lenné Estate with the Proprietor Steve Lutz. This small estate in the Yamhill Carlton AVA of Willamette Valley, Oregon has - To hear Steve Lutz tell it - the poorest soil imaginable. “The worst in the county,” he boasts with pride and bravado. That’s because the depleted ancient sedimentary soil, outside of Yamhill, OR. he believes, is the best in which to grow Pinot Noir grapes.

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

This is Episode #70 of Understanding Wine with Austin Beeman.

Download the Video directly here. // Subscribe to the Video Podcast Here

Special Thanks to Carl Giavanti https://carlgiavanticonsulting.com

Transcript:

Steve Lutz:

In fact, I burned out a clutch on this hillside. I burned the clutch of the tractor out trying to stop and start and hand water with a pull tank. It was really difficult to keep them alive. We don't have irrigation here and in the beginning, we just didn't have a water source. So we dry farmed all this and of all the blocks, this was definitely the most difficult.

I'm Steve Lutz, owner of Lenné Estate in the heart of the Yamhill Carlton-Appellation in the northern Willamette Valley. We have 21 acres here. Small, south-facing slope which is really what you want in this part of Oregon.

We're sitting at an elevation of about 424 feet here and we go up to an elevation of about 585 feet. In Oregon, there's basically three parameters for great vineyards and that's elevation, orientation, and aspect.

This particular area, the Yamhill-Carlton Appellation, is all sedimentary soil. It was old ocean floor that got pushed up when the plates collided about 16 million years ago and so it's basically sandstone and silt stone.

So we're kind of in the cross hairs of the vineyard here in the middle where we have blocks going out each way and interestingly enough, the whole soil type here is a soil type called Peavine which is a very poor sedimentary soil. It's actually considered one of the worst sedimentary soils in the county by the county. Really one of the worst agricultural soils, but that's what we want for growing grapes.

We want soils that control the vines' vigor, that make the vine struggle a little bit more to produce canopy, and give us smaller, thicker-skinned berries.

So if you were to come and look at these mountain vineyards with these very poor soil types, you would see that the berries are much smaller than vineyards closer to the valley floor where they have a lot more nutrients.

So really, the best wines in the world come from the poorest soils and that's why you'll see in this part of the northern Willamette Valley, you'll see that most of the great vineyard sites are on these steeper, south-facing slopes.

So the vineyard is broken up into blocks and these first six rows here are a specific clone called 114 and then we transition into our 115 block. This is Pommard on the other side and then up top we have more Pommard and we have two other clones split up in a block we call Kill Hill up above which we'll take a closer look at.

So everything we do here is kind of modeled after Burgundy. It's called single guyot and vertical trellising. We train all these canes up this trellis, exposing the leaves to sunlight and the fruiting zone is really interesting here. Because we're getting warmer here, we're starting to move the fruiting wire a little bit up off the ground.

If you go to Burgundy, you'll see that the fruiting wires are way down because they want to get that radiant heat from the ground and we used to do that as well.

We used to keep them much closer, but over the last few years we're responding to some of these warmer vinages and we're gradually moving the fruiting wire a little bit higher because we don't need all this heat because we've got plenty of heat the last few years and we really are not sure where that's going to go.

We can always adjust them back down if we start having much cooler vinages, but I think obviously the warmth is here to stay for a while and so we're responding to it in some of our farming practices.

This was old ocean floor and it's really compressed silt stone and sandstone. If you dug down into this, you would get these orange-ish, yellow-ish chunks of compressed silt stone and you can see there's just not a lot of organic matter in this particular soil.

These vines are going to have to work a little bit harder and they'll produce more intense fruit than if we grew them in a nutrient-rich soil base.

We chose different clones for diversity. We had a pretty good idea of what clones would work in this soil type when we started and because this is a fairly homogenous site although there are certainly differences in this site even in this little 21 acres, because we are fairly homogenous though, we wanted to add diversity through clonal diversity because each clone has its own personality.

We do have five different clones here at Lenné and I love to blend those clones together. Sometimes they enhance each other, but we also like to feature single clones here as well. So we have four single clone wines we make here which is really interesting because you get to see the personality of each clone. Some are more black fruited, some are more red fruited, and even though the year changes every year, the personality of the clone always stays the same.

So out of this small 21 acre site, we're making now eight different Pinot Noirs and also Chardonnay and a rosé in some years. 

www.lenneestate.com