Botrytis 101
The Story of the Noble Rot
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Botrytis-affected
grapes at Dolce |
The
holidays are a time of celebration, when many take the opportunity
to open special bottles of wine for family and friends.
Champagne is an easy choice with which to start the festivities.
Bringing an evening to a close is another matter: Consider
finishing your holiday meal with a slice of creamy, heavily-spiced
pumpkin pie paired elegantly with a rare and magical glass
of late-harvest dessert wine tasting of honeysuckle, caramel,
and crème brûlée.
What
makes a dessert wine so special? In the wine world, there
are basically two kinds of sweet wines, sometimes also called
"stickies," because picking the grapes makes the
workers’ hands sticky. Of the two, port is the most
famous and widely consumed dessert wine and is produced
by adding brandy or a neutral spirit to a wine and stopping
its fermentation before all the sugars are converted to
alcohol. The other, "late-harvest" wines, are
exactly what their name implies: a winemaker lets the clusters
hang on the vines until the grapes start to turn into raisins,
which increases the sugar levels, making a sweeter wine.
Aside
from the methods used to make Vin Santo, an Italian dessert
wine originally from Tuscany, and Vin de Paille from France,
there is another—far more complicated and mysterious—way
of producing dessert wine. Botrytis cinerea, roughly
translated as "noble rot," is a fungus that infects
the grapes. It eats its way below the skin, attacking the
fruit inside, turning it into horrible looking, moldy clusters,
but also concentrating the sugars and solids. One of the
most famous dessert wines in the world (Château d'Yquem)
is made from these rotted grapes and hails from Bordeaux,
France.
Such
Sauterne wines are produced from moldy Semillon and Sauvignon
Blanc grapes, and new vintages can easily command $200 and
$300 price tags. Well-preserved vintage bottles have been
known to sell
for tens of thousands of dollars. But few know that the
same style of wine is produced all over the world and that
botrytis-affected wines from California are beginning to
rival their European cousins in quality and price.
DOLCE
Dolce,
possibly the most distributed botrytis-affected wine coming
out of the New World, was inspired by Sauterne. In 1986,
Dirk Hampson, Director of Winemaking, was looking to supplement
the Far Niente line of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon
offerings and wasn’t sure how to get started. He was
trying to create something seemingly impossible, because
you can't ensure that the grapes get infected with the spores
and become rotten.
The
bottom line is that Mother Nature is always in charge and
there is no guarantee that the wine can even be made every
year. In the beginning, they experimented with spraying
the vines with water in hopes of getting the grapes to rot.
At one point, they isolated botrytis in the lab and re-applied
it to the grapes while they were still hanging in the vineyard.
That particular year, the botrytis was sprayed on one entire
block while the block next to it was left alone. The block
that had no botrytis applied to it ultimately had more and
better rot. In the vineyard, 95% of the fruit can be eaten
by wasps and only 5% of what is grown actually makes the
ultimate wine. This explains much of the wine’s rarity.
 |
| Greg
Allen |
Specially-trained
vineyard crews are taught the difference in mold colors;
good molds are pink, purple, gray and blue while bad molds
are red and green. The vineyard crews have to very slowly
pick the clusters and then, using needle nose pliers, separate
the grapes by the rot color. A worker can spend a full minute
on each cluster and still be left with nothing of value.
Unlike
the rainy Bordeaux region where Sauterne is made, California
typically gets much more sunshine, which can actually make
it harder to get the grapes to rot. The noble rot grows
better in damp, cloudy areas, and because California is
so sunny, there are only a handful of vineyards that are
geographically desirable to help the grapes produce the
mold. Fortunately for Dolce, there is no longer the need
to experiment with spores. Hampson has successfully been
able to create a wine exceptional enough for almost twenty
years, and Dolce now has a winemaker, Greg Allen, devoted
solely to the project.
BERINGER
Pioneered
by Alice and Myron Nightingale in the 1950s, Beringer’s
offering is a proprietary process of producing a botrytis-affected
wine entirely in the laboratory. Myron passed away in 1988,
but Alice, wanting the process to continue, taught it to
Roger Harrison in 1990. She kept an eye on the process,
and Beringer has continued to make this wine ever since,
honoring the Nightingales by the naming the wine after Myron
and Alice.
 |
| Beringer
vineyard |
During
the spring and summer months, while the grapes are growing
on the vines, Harrison is in his laboratory, creating mold
spores. When the grapes are picked in the fall, they are
placed on trays, sprayed with the mold and placed in a specially-constructed
50’x50’ building where the temperature and humidity
are controlled to 68 degrees.
They
start with 100% humidity, misting the grapes for 33 hours.
Then they remove the tarps and the botrytis attacks the
fruit. It sends out the mycilla, feeding on the sugar and
acids in the grapes, piercing the fruit. Fans are turned
on to get air flow between the stacked trays of grapes and
the grapes begin to dehydrate. The fourteen-day process
shrivels up the grapes and concentrates the juice turning
ten tons of harvested grapes into six tons of wine-worthy
grapes. The subsequent wine will spend several years in
oak barrels, mellowing and aging before its release.
ARROWOOD
 |
| Arrowood |
Richard
Arrowood learned to make late-harvest wines when he was
the winemaker at Chateau St. Jean, teaching the vineyard
workers that the rot found on the grapes was good and to
leave it alone. Also teaching them how to pick the grapes,
Arrowood went so far as to bring some wine into the vineyards
to explain to the pickers how the rot creates the sweet
wine. When he started his own winery in 1990, he took his
passion for botrytis-affected wines with him.
Unlike
the classic Sauterne-style, Arrowood’s botrytis offering
has German roots and is produced from White Riesling grapes
instead of the Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc blend. Despite harvesting
from two different vineyards, there are still only a few
hundred cases produced at Arrowood, and it does not happen
every year. Following the German designation of sugar levels,
Arrowood will have up to three dessert wines every year—a
late harvest, a select late harvest and a special select
late harvest—with only the latter being a fully botrytised
wine. These designations are based on brix, or the sugar
levels of the grapes when they are harvested.
TOPAZ
In
many ways, Topaz owner and winemaker Jeff Sowells is the
hidden angel of botrytised wines. Jeff got his start in
the Napa Valley back in the early ‘80s as a cellar
rat at Silverado Vineyards. A few winemaking classes later,
he and Jon Engelskirger (now winemaker at Robert Pepi) started
a partnership with an old mail truck as a makeshift bottling
line and mobile winery known as Zymurgy. Sowells started
to learn and experiment with making wines from infected
Sauvignon Blanc fruit in 1986 while helping at Macauley
Vineyards in Calistoga.
His
own Topaz label was created in 1988 when Ann Watson, owner
of Macauley Vineyards, was tragically killed in an auto
accident and no one knew what to do with the wineries rotten
grapes. Having created good wine for Macauley just a few
years earlier, Jeff purchased the grapes from the vineyard
and bottled it under his own label for the first time. The
name “topaz” has many meanings for Jeff. Yes,
it is the color of the wine and epitomizes the golden tincture
of the unctuous fluid, but it is also the birthstone for
November, the month of Jeff’s birthday, and the month
that the grapes are usually harvested.
Always
looking for potential rot, he often has had to convince
an owner to sell him rotten fruit. This gives him an advantage
of obtaining fruit that growers think is bad (but have yet
to just give away) and still be able to produce his wine.
He has a good, stable crew that knows what he is looking
for in rotten fruit. They will pick whole clusters and separate
out the rot later. He pays his workers double because it
is such laborious work. Sowells figures it evens out, considering
he is paying less for the actual fruit. "Almost spiritual
how it happened. There has to be a divine plan. I’m
a humble guy, yet through this bizarre amount of rotten
fruit, I can create this divine wine."
FOOD
PAIRINGS
Even for detractors of dessert wine who claim they are too
sweet, a botrytis-affected wine is a special treat as the
heightened acidity balances with the sugars, producing a
surprisingly clean sensation in the mouth without being
too syrupy sweet. It is that special combination of crispness
with opulent, heady flavors like orange and honey blossoms,
dried apricots, caramel, brown sugar and redolent spices
that makes botrytis wine complement rich foods like foie
gras and pâté: The acid and sweetness in the
wine perfectly balance the rich fattiness in those foods.
With that in mind, we did a little experimentation and discovered
that the rich creaminess and dark, earthy flavors of pumpkin
pie is another great pairing that will make your holidays
that much more special.
| BOTRYTISED
WINES FROM CALIFORNIA |
 |
Arger-Martucci |
Arger-Martucci
Vineyards
2004 Dulcinea; $45/375ml
Honey-laden apricots and peaches. Long, smooth and perfectly
elegant.
Arrowood
Vineyards & Winery
2003 Select Late Harvest;
$25/375ml
Clean with tones of light honey and bright, fresh orange
blossoms. Easy and not overtly sweet.
Beringer
2001 Napa Valley Nightingale; $35/375ml
Clean apricot, honeysuckle and hints of toasted nuts
play on the palate, finishing with surprising crispness.
Dolce
2001 Dolce; $80/375ml
Dried apricots and orange blossoms dominate the heady
aromas, anticipating the clean flavors that coat the mouth.
Round, opulent and crisp, pear and white stone fruit show
heightened acidity that entices.
Freemark
Abbey
2000 Edelwein Gold; $40/375ml
Stunning golden yellow color that produces a bouquet
of sweet honeysuckle with a tease towards ripe citrus. The
mouth entry is silky, showing peach and honey and a lingering
finish that is sweet but not saccharine.
Selby
Winery
2000 Sweet Cindy; $12/375ml
A blend of late-harvest Gewürztraminer and Sauvignon
Blanc with grapes that are fully botrysized. Intense, dark
gold-orange color, with hints of earthy, rustic honey and
a core of pear. While the wine is sweet, there is a heightened
acidity that provides perfect balance and clean flavor.
Topaz
707-252-2468
2002
Topaz ; $35/375ml
Golden yellow with crème caramel tones and a
pineapple core. Clean, pure and elegant.
Topaz
2002 DLX; $80/375ml
Engaging with a clean entry redolent of crème
caramel and crème brûlee. Honey and orange
blossoms in the nose with a whisper of nuttiness. Depth
and layers of dark, stewed apricot, peach, and plum tease
with brown sugar, caramel, and toffee. Heady, exotic musky
earth showing definite terroir.
