#65 "Houston, We Have a Problem"

But, we also have a solution; in German, it is called "Auslese Trocken."

We leave Riesling out every year under nets to de-hydrate and freeze prior to harvesting it for Ice Wine (see Substack #62.) Last year, the deer were so hungry, they tore through the netting and ate all the grapes before we could harvest them. That was the first time in eight years of netting the fruit that the deer breeched the nets.

So, for this year, we selected a different section of the vineyard (further from the woods), purchased new, denser netting and closed up the nets with longer wooden skewers. Wooden skewers are the same closure that we have always used, and for this year, we also doubled the number of skewers.

Prior to the Christmas break this year, we saw no meaningful damage to the grapes. Returning after the Christmas break, we found that 40% of the netted fruit had been eaten by deer. Yikes!

So, immediately, we began harvesting the remaining fruit and brought it to the press. After pressing, we measured the chemistry on the resulting juice.

Normally, the sugar content of sufficiently de-hydrated and frozen Ice Wine juice is about 38 Brix. The sugar content of the juice that we normally aim for in our dry and medium-dry Rieslings is the range 21-22.5 Brix.

The sugar content for the fruit that we brought in this week was 25 Brix.

That is nowhere near concentrated enough for a Late Harvest or Ice Wine. It is also higher than what we normally want for our traditional styles of Riesling.

Fortunately, we have seen this before. Back in 2016, due to inexperience, we harvested fruit that we thought would make a Late Harvest Riesling. When we pressed the fruit and measured the chemistry on the juice, it was only 26 Brix. About the same as the fruit we just harvested, and not high enough for a dessert wine.

In 2016 we then decided to make a wine which, in Germany, is known as a Riesling Auslese Trocken. That is a wine picked “late in the season” (Auslese) and then fermented “dry” (Trocken). We fermented this juice to a nearly-dry style. The wine had some late-harvest flavors with a relatively high alcohol content—14.5 percent. It was very unusual.

We made only 100 cases of that wine in 2016, and it turned out to be one of the most distinctive wines we have ever made. As of today, we have only seven bottles left of that wine, which we labelled as “Riesling #110 Grand (2016).”

Having had that experience of 2016, we decided that we will make a similar wine this year. We will take this year’s juice that was meant for Ice Wine and make a different style of wine: the “Riesling #110 Grand (2024).”

Take note: the 2016 #110 Grand Riesling was a special wine. So, watch this space for updates on the 2024 version as it progresses through fermentation.