As promised (or threatened) we are going to give you a little background on the grapes we have chosen, the vineyards they came from and the wines we hope to make from them. I'll start, in a very biased move, with a grape that I suggested we feature, Mourvedre (pronounced more-VED-drah)
This is a relatively obscure grape in the U.S. It probably was first cultivated in Spain, near the village of Murviedre, where it is known as Monastrell. At home it is second only to Grenache in plantings, followed closely by Tempranillo. Red wines from the Jumilla appellation are usually mostly Monastrell. The plants were brought to southern France in the 1600's and flourished as the dominant grape until they were mostly wiped out during the great phylloxera epidemic during the late 19th century. It managed to survive in the sandy, phylloxera-free, soils of Bandol where it is still the dominant grape today. In fact, it was the great Domaine Tempier wines that made me a Mourvedre fan.
It was brought to California where it acquired the name Mataro and became a widely-planted blending grape. I'm not sure who brought it to Washington State but I believe it can do well here in certain spots. It is a late ripening varietal (ours came in in mid-October, well after the harvest of most of the Syrahs but before many Cabernet Sauvignons) that loves the long, hot days that we have here.
We had to look for quite a while to find anyone with any Mourvedre to sell. I put the word out in May and we met many a dead-end until we found Art den Hoed in the Yakima Valley in mid-July. Art has a lot of grapes up in the hills above Sunnyside, just east of the Rattlesnake Hills AVA. The spot where our grapes were grown is pretty much the highest spot on the hills up on Hwy. 241 before the irrigation ends. I especially loved being in the vineyard and being able to see the beginning of the Cascades in the near-distance. The elevation is 1100 feet and the south-facing slopes just soak up the sun all day. At night, the high elevation gets low temperatures that help seal in the flavors and give the fruit nice acids. Grapes love the warm days/cool nights thing that we have here in Washington--it's called 'diurnal flux' and I'll bet you that any grower in California would give his John Deere for our temperature swings. Of course, we have a greater chance of a killing frost but these vines are way off the valley floor and pretty much immune to that problem.
Anyhow, this is the first fruit off of these vines and, judging by the results we have seen so far, this is going to be a great vineyard. This is a thick-skinned grape with very dark juice. From the minute we crushed it we could tell it would be a special wine. It smelled so different from the other reds we had crushed. There was a nice black pepper bite to the juice along with an intense blackberry nose. We gave it a long maceration (left it on the skins even after the fermentation was done) to extract all the flavors and pressed it pretty hard without getting any harsh tannins or bitter flavors. Mourvedre can have a very meaty and earthy character with some nice spiciness. It is not unlike Syrah in that regard but it is a little more 'sauvage'. I'm willing to gamble that the adventurous folks who like Syrah will go for its' cousin as well.
Our plan is to blend some of it with the Syrahs that we have in a traditional Rhone-style blend as well as do some bottlings of the grape by itself. I believe this would make us one of the few wineries in the state (and probably the country) doing a varietal bottling of Mourvedre. We also took a page from the winemakers in Provence and drew some of the juice off the fermenting wine (the Saignee method) to make a Rose (not sure how to put the accent over the 'e' but it is pronounced 'Ro-say'). About 24 hours after we crushed the grapes but before we added the yeast we strained about 70 gallons of juice off the Mourvedre and put it in a stainless steel barrel. We did it the old fashioned way with a shovel and our sump-strainer and my shoulders hurt for days. It was truly a labor of love. These wines make fabulous summer-sippers, perfect for a picnic or a hot-weather lunch.
We added a different kind of yeast and started a cool fermentation. With Rose the process is much more like a white wine than a red. The wine is nearly dry (all the sugar having been eaten by the yeast) and then we will soon thereafter filter and bottle it for sale in the spring. We may blend it with our Sangiovese Rose or we may keep them seperate. We are very excited to be working with this unique and intriguing grape. My hope is that Mourvedre will become a signature grape at Trio Vintners for decades to come.
Posted by Steve
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