After a little break on Sunday with only a short day at the Domaine, we ran a full day of analysis on the wines on Monday, when I was also helping to start pumping over the wines that were releasing their juices in order to promote oxygen contact and feed the yeasts. This was done gently for some cuvees where there is a desire not to add sulphur until after fermentation, but even light pumping over filled the air with the wonderful aromatics of ripe fruit. The colour from the destemmed berries is already a vivid red, with the whole bunch always slower to turn as the juice also flows through the stems, with less direct contact with the skins at first. The “baies par baies” cuvee was the slowest to yield any juice, and it was as much as we could do to get enough liquid for a sample, so slow is the extraction of juice from the berries!
Following four days of intense harvesting and selecting at the Domaine, the time I had left in Burgundy allowed me more freedom to see the other side of the process, taste some more wines, and relax a little bit.
. Last Friday we conducted a fascinating experiment at Farr Vintners when we served, in a blind tasting, the same wine from two different bottles – one with a screwcap and one with a cork. The result was remarkable, with none of the ten tasters spotting that we were actually tasting the same wine! Before we reveal the results here’s a bit of history...
Our wine trade 2004 Barolo dinner back in July was such a success (see blog) that we decided to get together again to taste another set of Italian 2004s but, this time, from Tuscany. Although, historically, Chianti Classico is probably Tuscany’s most well-known wine, few would argue with the assertion that Brunello di Montalcino is its greatest. However, in more recent times, a new breed of wines made largely from non-Italian grapes – the ‘Super Tuscans’ – have been producing wines of sufficiently high quality to give Brunello a real run for its money as Tuscany’s most prestigious.
