Talk to winemakers and you’re likely to hear the phrase “low intervention.” It describes a hands-off style in which a winemaker guides the grapes into expressing their varietal character and the terroir rather than beating them into submission to fit a preconceived idea of what wine should taste like.
“Low intervention” — sometimes referred to as “minimalist” — may become the next big marketing buzzword for wine, but it reflects a stylistic shift away from dense, highly extracted trophy wines, meant to impress, toward lighter wines, meant to refresh. It’s also a generational change, as younger winemakers challenge the rules and preconceptions their parents poured into the glass. It echoes the “less is more” philosophy of natural wine practitioners without adopting that movement’s acceptance of technical flaws.
Brianne Day’s winery is a modest facility along Route 99W north of Dundee, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Heading south from Portland, you have to do a U-turn, and even then it’s easy to miss the entrance to her parking lot. But Day Wines is worth searching out.
Day, 44, found wine through Jehovah’s Witnesses. Raised in a religious family, she chose at age 19 to do her ministry in Italy. “I got very distracted by everything there,” she says, especially Italy’s food and wine and the conviviality of their enjoyment. In her 20s, she traveled through Europe, learning about wine and cuisine. Back in Portland, she founded her wine label in 2012, while working at several wineries in the Willamette Valley and simultaneously at jobs in distribution, at restaurants, and even with a barrel maker. She decided she wanted to make low-intervention wines priced affordably enough that restaurants could offer them by the glass.
“In my travels I realized that wines made with organic farming, minimalist winemaking and native fermentation” — without added yeast — “were the wines I responded to the most,” Day told me when I visited her at her winery last summer.
But back in the States, “I saw a method that was very predefined and methodical,” she said. No matter the quality of the vintage, the grapes were destemmed, cold-soaked for extraction, dosed with sulfur dioxide and had nutrients and yeast added. The wine was warmed and cooled, all at specified times, to bring out certain characteristics.
“It’s a recipe-driven method devised to create predictable results year to year, without much vintage variation,” she said.
She wanted a more hands-off approach. “Low intervention means stepping in when a wine needs a minor correction, but mostly being strategic about picking, processing and fermentation to minimize the need for corrections,” Day said.
There’s also a style difference. “I’m not going for chewy and extracted wines,” she says. “I want lighter balance in my reds.” She likes “chillable reds” that are juicier and fruitier than we are used to.
And the grapes — Day seeks out legacy varieties from Oregon’s experimental days, before winemakers settled mostly on pinot noir and chardonnay. In Dazzles of Light, she blends melon de bourgogne (the grape of France’s muscadet) and sauvignon blanc with chardonnay into a compelling, tropical and flowery white that defies comparison to any benchmark wine. It’s totally new. Lemonade Rosé is not made from lemons — it was her response to the wildfires that devastated the Willamette Valley in 2020. “I bought every grape I contracted for and did what I could with them,” she says. She took the lemons life gave her and made a wine that was picked up by Whole Foods Market and is now entering wider distribution with subsequent vintages. Infinite Air Castles combines gamay and dolcetto into an Oregon echo of Beaujolais.
Phil Plummer, winemaker at Montezuma Winery in New York’s Finger Lakes, has always been resourceful. While studying bioinformatics at Rochester Institute of Technology, he discovered that the hospitality program’s wine appreciation courses were open to underage students. “Then I realized that you could buy all the things needed to make wine even if you’re underage, so I had an underground winery in my dorm room,” he says. Now 38, he’s been tinkering with wine ever since.
Montezuma, in Seneca Falls, is a bit of a detour from the usual Finger Lakes wine route. That suits Plummer fine, as it gives him freedom to play.
“These are the wines I’d be making if no one was paying attention and no one was paying me to make other wines,” Plummer said as he poured me tastes of some of the most oddly compelling wines I’d tried in years. There was a sparkling lemberger (rhubarb in a glass) and a pét-nat of diamond, a native white variety. He fermented saperavi on riesling skins to give it lift and tannin.
“This one’s a weird one,” he said as he poured a skin-fermented traminette in its cloudy, citrusy glory. “It’s like you opened a can of mandarin oranges and sprinkled five-spice powder on top.” Well, they do call them orange wines.
Plummer’s style is intuitive. “I want to make wine the way Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star,” he explains. “Take the instruments away and go by instinct.”
While embracing the low-intervention moniker, Plummer sees the irony. “Winemaking is itself an intervention,” he says. “There's a lot about these wines that sounds really cool in a wine bar but doesn't mean anything in a winery. Is there a way to define what we find compelling about these wines and figure out how to chase that?”
Last year, Plummer gathered a group of fellow Finger Lakes winemakers to discuss ideas and explore the low-intervention concept. “We're more or less letting the fruit lead the dance and following it as far as we can afford to without grabbing control,” he explains.
“The nature of winemaking is such that we have to wait a year before we put our ideas into practice, but it’s obvious to me that we’re getting better with every vintage,” he said. “The wines we’re making in these styles, even the dirty ones, are some of the most compelling I’ve had a chance to work with. I think I’ll be following this rabbit hole for a while.”
"low" - Google News
March 15, 2024 at 12:12AM
https://ift.tt/Hgbk9SD
Light and refreshing, low-intervention wines let grapes take the lead - The Washington Post
"low" - Google News
https://ift.tt/SD3NLd1
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Light and refreshing, low-intervention wines let grapes take the lead - The Washington Post"
Post a Comment