Styles of wine

To make a light red wine, I select a pale red grape variety or mix compatible white and red grape varieties at the time of harvest to create a must with very low color potential.  Fermentation proceeds like a red wine for 5-10 days, but at a cool temperature to slow extraction and retain aroma.  Near the middle of fermentation I press the must and let the fermentation finish in neutral barrels.  The Marginalia light red wines look like a darker rose, but present on the palate with the structure of a lighter-bodied red wine.  The light red wine especially is made with a bare minimum of sulfur dioxide, and is meant to be consumed young and cool, not laid down to age.

Amber wines—sometimes known as orange wines—are made from white grapes, but handled much more like a red wine than a white wine. Rather than pressing out the juice prior to fermentation, as is standard in white wine making, I leave the skins, seeds, and stems together with the juice for most of the fermentation.  The result is aromatically and especially texturally very different from most white wines.  These wines have long precedent in the Caucasus region (e.g., the modern-day Republic of Georgia) and likely resemble many of the white-grape wines of the Mediterranean world before the development of modern wine press technology.  Amber wines have tannic structure, sometimes intense, unexpected aromas, and settle into points of balance that don’t exist within confines of the big red/crisp white paradigm. These points of balance may be more familiar to beer drinkers who will recognize the balance between fruit, tartness and bitterness from drier IPAs or lambics.  These are refreshing and interesting wines that defy most drinkers’ expectations regarding white grape varieties.  Amber wine isn’t for everyone, but for those who find themselves in its thrall, it is easy to forget that you can, technically, make white grape wines without any skin contact…

I also make more recognizable red wines, though often making use of old-timey practices like field blending, cofermentation, whole cluster fermentation, or aging with woods other than French oak.  These practices, which were common until the late 20th century, went by the wayside with a wave of new stainless steel equipment and the spread of oenological expertise developed with red Bordeaux-type wines firmly in mind.  My red wines are conscious attempts to peer into the (perhaps sometimes imaginary) oenological past.

If any of this piqued your interest, click through to the scholium on wine styles: