Weird Science -- Blending the SB

We'll be doing some posts to fill in the blanks from between our trip to Crushpad in September 2007 and the arrival of the Fainwood Sauvignon Blanc last month. So, just how did Fainwood get to taste like it does? Part of it is in the blending or, more accurately, the lack thereof...

When we embarked on the sauvignon blanc project last summer, we searched our local wine stores for SBs for which the kindly winery and winemakers had provided lots of technical information either on the bottle itself or on their Web sites: information like pH and TA (total acidity) as well as if they did any barrel aging or if they let the wine undergo malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that is always allowed in red wines and occassionally in whites, mostly in the case of chardonnays; "malo" as it is called contributes a roundness and fullness in the wine's mouth feel, often described as a buttery component). Some wineries had lots of info, which was quite useful in the many SB tastings we conducted ourselves last summer. While far from being truly scientific, we were able to begin narrowing down how certain technical components contributed to certain resulting taste features in the various wines we tried. This all served to help us convert the taste that we wanted in our finished Fainwood SB into the technical criteria we needed to discuss with the winemakers at Crushpad.


While almost all of the SB picked for our Fainwood bottling was fermented and aged in stainless steel vessels, Crushpad held some of the juice separate and transferred it to oak barrels for some barrel fermentation and ultimately a little malo. The question for us, then, was how much, if any, of that barrel fermented SB did we want to blend with the pure stainless.

From the tastings we had done of other SBs, all along we thought we wanted a little barrel and/or malolactic fermented juice to take the sharp edge off the traditional acidic SB taste and give it a little more depth. So after Crushpad shipped us samples of both the stainless and the barrel juice for us to blend in February 2008, we assumed we were in for some combination of barrel/malolactic in our final blended wine.

It was like being back in science class, as we broke out pipettes and graduated cylinders (thanks Joerg!), and started measuring out small amounts of both wines. First, we were struck by how much we loved the pure stainless and how pleased we were with the Crushpad execution of our wine plan. We ran the gamut from an even 50%-50% split to a 75%-25% to an 80%-20%...you get the picture. Marc had to get more and more exacting with his tiny droplets of barrel wine that he mixed in the stainless steel. We got down to about 5% barrel fermented and worked down 1% at a time. At 1% we simply declared that the unadulterated stainless SB was the taste we were after. Try as we might, nothing beat it. And alas, the blend was no blend at all.

Yum

Well, we couldn't be happier with the Fainwood sauvignon blanc. The folks at Crushpad executed our wine plan just as we had hoped and we have a delicious and imminently drinkable bottle of summer wine. It is a straight down the middle sauvignon blanc made in what we think of as the Napa style: brightly acidic, but not overly so, fruity, but not overly perfumed like many of those from New Zealand. We've found that it drinks best after it's been open for about 15-30 minutes and once it's warmed up a bit from the fridge, which makes it a bit too cold, masking the flavors. (As evidenced by the pictures, we've had many "test" bottles so far to figure this out.) In a future post we'll put all the technical details about the wine.