Barrel samples

If you’re familiar with the Long Island Merlot Alliance, you know we make a cooperative blend of 100% merlot called Merliance, the sale of which we use to fund our research and quality efforts. Each member-winery contributes two barrels of finished wine to make Merliance, which is blended and barrel-aged for about a year before it’s bottled and sold.

How does this work, exactly? What wines go into the blend? If it’s all 100% merlot, do different lots make that big of a difference? And how can seven winemakers make one wine? On Thursday, January 21, I witnessed this collaborative process in action, as the group got together to make the 2008 blend. Here’s what happens:

Each winemaker brings up to three barrel samples of his vineyard’s (or vineyards’) 2008 merlot for all LIMA winemakers to taste. As the samples are poured and the group begins to taste through them, each winemaker shares details about what he’s brought–details he clearly knows intimately and by heart about the product of his labor. The winemakers relate the kind of barrels the wines are aging in: new (e.g., coopered in 2008 and more recently) or older barrels, made from French (they question one another about which forest the wood comes from), American (one lot was made in Virginian casks) or Hungarian oak, or stainless steel tanks. The clone (or variety) of merlot (of which there are many), or blends of these, from which the wine is made. And the vineyard plots where the grapes were grown. 

Does this data really matter? Yes! As you might guess, newer oak barrels impart more woody characteristics to the wine–tastes and aromas of vanilla or tobacco, for example–while the stainless steel lets the fruit shine through; older oak barrels are somewhere in between. What you may not know is that different merlot clones can have subtle but perceptible differences in taste (think of the many varieties of apples and their range of flavors). And different plots of land may get more or less sun, irrigation and drainage, exposure to birds, bugs and wind than others; these variations can affect ripening and thus the character of the fruit.

Russell Hearn blends samples to create the 2008 Merliance

So, we taste through all these samples and make notes about the qualities of each wine. Then, like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together, we (or rather the winemakers) decide which lots work best together, sometimes choosing two different barrels from one vineyard, to create a wine that best represents the taste and aroma profile of Long Island merlot. (See earlier posts on our ongoing research in this area.) Working from the consensus of possible combinations, one of the winemakers–Pellegrini’s Russell Hearn took the honors this year–concocts the blend right there, in a blending beaker, for all to taste and approve. And voila, a blend is born!

And so, the 2008 vintage of Merliance is on its way. It will age for a year in the barrels the original wine was made in, bottled in early 2011 and released that Spring. Judging from what we tasted last week, it’ll be well worth the wait.
-Donnell

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