Now that harvest is behind us, we can look towards taking the necessary steps to get our new wines ready to bed for the winter. Reds get barreled down so that they can go through secondary fermentation and shed all of the dead yeast cells that make the wine cloudy at this point. In the case of Whites, there is still much work to be done to get them ready for a winter bottling. They will either stay in tanks, or will be barreled down in some cases. The dead yeasts will stay in the vessels and get stirred back into the wine every week or so until the wines develop that lush, creamy, sweet characteristic that define our LaZarre wines.
Much work is still to be done, especially to protect these wines from secondary fermentation or oxidation. They are still babies and are particularly fragile in many respects, especially when it comes to bacterial spoilage and aroma loss. But just like babies, they are also particularly resilient and can bounce when you drop them on the floor. They can handle oxygen much better at this point than they’ll be able to in a few months.
We plan on getting the 2017 Sauvignon Blanc into the bottle by January 2018. It’s really a remarkable process and getting it into the bottle early will help to keep me from f*^king it up down the road.
But enough about bouncing babies and malolactic fermentation…let’s talk about the holidays. With Thanksgiving AND Christmas and Chanukah coming up, you should start thinking about your menu and what you’ll be pairing up with it. If you’re like us, you start squirreling away wines early on with an eye towards using them at some point in the meals. For us, we’ll have an older vintage bottle of LaZarre Pinot Noir to go with our turkey or duck or prime rib. Also, our 2014 Chardonnay will be begging us to prepare stuffing and green beans. Yum. Let us know how we can help make your holidays merrier!
– Adam & Angie LaZarre
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