A Red Wine that’s White! I was intrigued recently when a friend brought a bottle of wine back from a trip to Germany labelled Spätburgunder. Nothing unusual in itself; Spätburgunder is quite widely grown there – it’s the German name for Pinot Noir, the grape that makes red Burgundy. What surprised me was the fact that the wine in the bottle appeared white and not red as I might have expected. Of course, you can make a white wine from red wine grapes - White Zinfandel is an example - and Pinot Noir and another dark skinned grape, Pinot Meunier, are used alongside Chardonnay to make Champagne. It’s just that you don’t find that many still white wines made from black grapes – and I can’t ever remember coming across one using Pinot Noir, hence my interest. The explanation for being able to white wine from red grapes is that the juice and flesh of almost all wine grapes is colourless. So, if you’re a winemaker who wants to make a white wine, you take your grapes (light or dark skinned) and simply press them and ferment the juice. Well, actually, it isn’t that simple if you want to make something good, but the process itself is relatively straightforward. It’s actually a little more complicated if you’re looking to make a red or rosé. Then you have to use something to colour your juice – and that something is the grape skins. Which means you have to select dark skinned grapes and leave the skins in contact with the juice to stain it; 24 hours is usually long enough for a rosé, a few days or even weeks for a red. But Pinot Noir has quite a thin skin, so the red wines it produces are rarely very deeply coloured, so, I suppose, if you are going to make a white wine from a red grape, this is the one to choose. And what about the wine that prompted this blog? It was made by Gleichenstein in the Baden region of southern Germany (not available in the UK as far as I can tell) and, in the glass, had a vague pink tinge – not really a rosé, but certainly not completely colourless. It had the attractive nose of red fruits, which is typical of young Pinot Noir, and the same followed through on the palate. Not completely dry, but with enough pleasing crispness to perfectly cut any oiliness in a herb-crusted baked mackerel. Not just an intriguing wine, but a delicious one, too.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 07:49:13 +0000
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