Oh, that's right -- this blog is also supposed to be about wine.
So here is a glimpse of passerillage. This method of making dessert wine involves drying out the grapes -- basically, letting them shrivel up like raisins -- so their flavors become more concentrated. It's time-consuming and labor-intensive, and because the grapes shrink so much when they dry up, you need a lot of them to make a small amount of wine.
One of the wineries I represent makes a Sauvignon Blanc-based dessert wine using this method. On Monday, we had a passerillage party. The whole team got together to sort Sauvignon Blanc grapes -- picking out leaves, bugs (yes, bugs -- I picked out a moth and several spiders) and any fruit that didn't look or smell so great -- and lay the clusters out in a single layer on screens to dry. You can see the setup in the photo above. (By the way, the guy in the striped shirt is the assistant winemaker, who introduced the process to the winery.)
After the grapes were laid out -- it was sort of like putting puzzle pieces together -- the screens were stacked on top of each other in a big storage container that resembled the trailer on a big rig. The grapes will sit in that storage container until they shrivel up, and then the juice will be pressed out of them, most likely in December.
No comments
Post a Comment