Grapes drive wine character - but HOW? Size Matters…

Hey everyone, I'm taking you here into the vineyard in this mid-harvest day to show you the grapes in situ just before harvest. We'll take a look at these grapes side by side. We'll look at Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, Petit Verdot and Syrah and Riesling all from the same vineyard here so you can get a sense of what one season does across all these varieties at one location. I'll break down for you what this is going to mean in terms of structure and character of the wine. So what I'm looking for here the days before harvest is we know the grape size. I'm looking for any signs of stress. I'm looking for any green grapes and I'm looking for the overall final condition of the fruit. What I want to get across in this section of this video is that grape size is the leading factor in wine character. It and the aromas that are inherent in the variety combine to make the character that you'll find in any grape around the world. In the desert we have lower acidities. If we were to grow these same grapes by the ocean they would look similar and have higher acidities. But their inherent aromatics and by and large genetically the grape size will be the same around the world of the varieties. So grapes I like to say come in a basic range of pinky nail to thumbnail size. So this is called Petit Verdot, Little Verdot and it's petite because the grape sizes are often what I say about pinky nail size. It's a comparative measure and that's what matters because comparatively that size is going to drive wine character in red wines in a massive way in the structure of its tannin and color. And that is the heart of red wine. So we're here in the classic Cabernet Sauvignon bloc, the reigning king of wine sales around the world. Typically has a smaller cluster with smaller grapes and its architecture is a little bit more like Petit Verdot. Petit Verdot tends to have a slightly smaller grape and we'll take samples of Cabernet Sauvignon and show that off. Cabernet can have a range depending on the vineyard, the site, the season and particularly the single driver of water throughout the summertime in terms of the size of the grape that's going to be grown that year. That said Cabernet as a tendency is a smaller grape and we have more grapes that end up being pinky size on the cluster. This is a huge driver of the character of Cabernet Sauvignon no matter where you buy it from. So these as you can see are relatively old vine Syrah and a lot of the older roots are actually hiding down below. Now Syrah you can see by the cluster architecture is a little bit longer. This one's rather open and the grape's a little bit oval shaped almost like a football and it's a little bit, while it's slightly larger on average, more like Malbec, Syrah like Malbec has a tendency to pack a lot of color into its skins and so Syrah tends to be a very dark wine in places like Australia and dry places like eastern Washington and Central Valley California perhaps Sonoma included even where you get an enormous density of color in those wines vis-a-vis grapes of the same size. Come in here and this is a classic Phelps clone of Syrah which is used across the west and you can see it's been a dry year and we're starting to get grapes that are starting to what we call wither here where it looks like the grape's been sitting in the bathtub too long and starting to shrink and also a little bit of sun and raisining as well. It's a sign actually of Syrah when it is ripe if it starts to get a little wrinkly. This vintage is packed in an enormous amount of flavor I can tell this Syrah is going to be fantastic. It's got the right grape size, it's got the right ripeness conditions, it's got enormous dark color, it's consistent, stems are clean and ripe. I'm very excited about where this wine is going to go. Merlot in Washington has always been one of my favorites. I've made it every year I've been in business for 30 years and it's really a lovely wine particularly from our region. This year our Merlot has provided a relatively small cluster. Sometimes a Merlot cluster can spill out of your hand and almost the size of a bottle of wine and this year we've got small clusters and normal size grapes I would say maybe slightly smaller than average but even on but again even Merlot is going to have a genetic tendency to create a cluster size and grape size based on its genetics and these are relatively good examples especially in the same year from the same site of Merlot grape size versus Cabernet, Petit Bordeaux and Malbec and Syrah. I've come into the Malbec block and this I'm purposefully protecting the leaves in this desert environment in eastern Washington from the sun. We're going to pull off some Malbec here and we are a day away from harvest. I just dropped it. Look at this cluster. So here's Malbec and we're a day away from harvest so these are perfect examples of what we're seeking and what's going to go right in the tank at the end of this little bit larger grape size you can see immediately from the Petit Bordeaux. There is variation in the grape size but most of the grapes are larger than the prior type which is a characteristic of Malbec. One of the other characteristics of Malbec is as it gets very ripe it will start to show a few raisins and that's a classic example in our environment and the desert environment which is very dry of Malbec. Here in our Riesling block Washington's history is quite long with Riesling. Starts from the beginning over 50 years ago. This year is a particularly fun vintage of Riesling because we get again the special event in Riesling where we get the hen and chicks the various grape size and we get small grapes intermixed with regular size grapes and that and each of these little grapes is equally as ripe and it's fully ripe like the others but that's going to give us a lot more grape skin per gallon of Riesling and it's in the skin that the flavor is all hiding so we'll have flavor control at a maximum extent in these wines in this vintage that's special. So whenever you find a Riesling that has a particular intensity and vibrancy and richness it's not just sugar it's probably enlargedly driven by the combination of being ripe in a warm year and having really small grape size. All right we've come in from the vineyard with our samples and they're all out here in front of you to show off the difference side by side of Petit Verdot with Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and obviously Riesling. What you can see are a couple factors a they're all blue hidden inside of Syrah Malbec is slightly higher amount of anthocyanin the color factor varietally they tend to have a higher color factor so they are very dark wines but the big driver of red wine character around the globe the reason why Cabernet Sauvignon is more intense and drying and tannic a powerful say than Merlot or Malbec is grape size and it doesn't matter if it's by the ocean like Bordeaux or here in the desert like we are eastern Washington the size of these grapes is what's driving that character and that's driven by plant DNA it simply is going to yield different size grapes Merlot is generally going to be a bit larger and Cabernet is going to be smaller that's what the plant makes as growers we actually can influence that with the way water plays now if we're in an environment where we're not irrigating and it's more rain than we can handle it's hard to influence grape size but in regions where around the world where you can influence irrigation you can influence grape size in the summertime that said grape size of Malbec for instance is a little bit larger and it's a dark wine because it compensates for the fact that this grape has a very high index of color in its skins Petit Verdeux the little Verdeux it looks a lot more like Cabernet and it's very intense and often used simply as a blender because it's so tannic and so intense that it's hard to drink straight so when we come to Seurat we come to a grape size that's more like Merlot and a little bit larger this grape is thick skin though so it's going to have a intense in the desert an intense dense powerful flavor because it has a lot of skin thickness and then as I mentioned in the vineyard you can see by contrast especially against the Seurat on purpose here just how small those grapes really are these are really common Seurat grapes and these are uncommonly small Riesling grapes the Riesling this year is going to be spectacular and we're going to have different opportunities to make amazing wine because we have very small grapes yielding a lot of skin flavor per gallon that's really exciting so here's Petit Verdeux and Petit Verdeux has this classic architecture of very small grapes and is going to yield an intense highly tannic wine with a lot of color and really lovely vintages and a very high tannin if we don't watch out in the winemaking style Malbec by contrast has larger grapes some of them quite large and it's a very interesting wine because it has a high index of color in its skins even though it's a relatively large grape this is Merlot and one of my favorites Washington makes some of the greatest Merlot in the world this cluster is a small cluster for the year but the grape size is average there's slightly variation in in this Merlot clusters but generally Merlot is a larger grape versus Cabernet Sauvignon here which is a classic and the Cabernet grapes are simply smaller than most grapes most red grapes we've got smaller architecture smaller size on average high skin to juice ratio the Syrah ready for harvest for sure you're seeing a little bit of raising a little bit of withering that's classic Syrah at the far end of ripeness ready for picking tomorrow and it's got a high concentration of skin to juice because it's got thick skin and high color in these grapes but tannin wise it's very suave and for white grapes where we have Riesling here this is beautifully ripe Riesling different size grapes and all the grapes are ripening at the same time so even the small grapes are equally as sweet as the large ones this yields an amazing wine with an opportunity for very high concentration when all the grapes are good and the skins are good to have an amazingly powerful rich white wine so that's the fundamental lesson in grape size is you have more skin per gallon raising the color and raising the intensity and the tannin opportunity and you have less wine per ton of grapes as the grapes get smaller and that wine is more concentrated because there's more skin material in those wines the smaller the grapes thanks for watching for special offers to youtube watchers and for more go to our website link below and if i can serve you more please leave a comment below