We Must Boil This Wine To reserve it [Blotto]

Oregon’s Willamette Valley produces many of the country’s best wines. Nevertheless it’s also subject to the infamous ” Pineapple Express” -heavy rains blowing in from the Pacific which can ruin grapes. Unless you’ve got a vacuum.

Ken Wright has been making wine since 1978, moving in 1986 to Oregon, ending up within the heavy-lidded town of Carlton. Like much of the northern Willamette Valley, it’s awesome land for growing the finicky pinot noir grape. The further west a vineyard, the closer it really is the weather rolling in off the Pacific, wet damp winds that push through a niche inside the Coastal Range called the Van Duzer Corridor. The cold air from the ocean pushes the warm air off the valley floor, preserving the acidity of ripening grapes-a pinot noir trademark.

The long growing season of the Willamette Valley comes at some risk: as the polar jetstream pushes south in winter, it carries moisture from the Pacific. Specifically, from Hawaii-at the least nominatively, if not actually.

When that first wave of rains hit Oregon, usually in mid-October, it could waterlog a grape before it is harvested.

” Ideally what you wish to do is to take that fruit down-to harvest it straight away -before disease sets in,” explains Wright, standing in front of a nondescript stainless-steel machine in one of several Cellar’s outbuildings. Unfortunately that ripe fruit, having weathered sometimes weeks of nonstop rain, will also be waterlogged. Diluted, its delicate flavors faded, the grapes are processed by hand as they’d be in a really perfect harvest. But in preference to chalking up the entire vintage as a foul lot, Wright has a more sensible choice.

” After you put any liquid into a vacuum state you depress its boiling point. The stronger vacuum value you could achieve, the lower the boiling point,” says Wright. The vacuum values produced in his machine approach -997 bar. ” It can pull the eyeballs out of your head,” he laughs.

After harvesting the ” bloated” juice, a small percentage of the whole vintage is placed within the vacuum evaporator.

” We will boil that juice at fifty degrees Fahrenheit-cooler than the ambient temperature of the room the machine is in. The enemies of juice and wine are two: oxygen and heat. Inside that chamber, neither exists.”

Even boiling at any such low temperature, a single batch of juice can lose up to 21 gallons of water-an hour. When the ” concentrated” juice is added back to the remaining of the harvest, the sugar content matches that of a year without late season rains.

Wright could jack up the sugars beyond that that’s possible in nature itself. In truth he experimented making a port-like concoction when he first took delivery of the machine a couple of years ago-” pretty fabulous stuff” -that was fermented using only natural grape sugar and an aggressive yeast, reaching 18% ABV without the addition of a single drop of ” white spirits” that normally are added to port wines. But for the pinot that’s the Cellar’s calling card, the goal is just to restore the grapes back to something that resembles a more ideal state.

The evaporators aren’t cheap, but after Wright and another grower imported the first two machines into the u. s. from Milan, other vineyards were quick to follow. Now at the very least half-a-dozen Oregon vineyards have their own vacuum evaporator.

” We spend a year of our life farming. It kind of feels really silly to just accept something sub-standard after you can make a difference, after you can do something to heal the difficulty.”

That’s good news. This year’s crop is already off to a late start, not nearly at the ripeness Wright want.

And this year, it feels like the rains are coming early.

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This post is tagged: boiling point, delicate flavors, northern willamette valley, pinot noir grape, sensible choice, town of carlton, van duzer corridor