Sunset Hills Vineyard 2011 Chardonnay

Our 2011 Chardonnay comes from the oldest estate vineyard, in Purcellville, VA.  Due to the inclement weather (an understatement) of the 2011 harvest, fruit was first sorted in the vineyard, then sorted as it was picked, then chilled and, when we were satisfied that no rot was present, pressed.  Winemaking followed much the same style that we’ve utilized in the past, with a few small changes: the wine was fermented cold in stainless steel (and a few barrels), then racked from its lees and left to settle out naturally.  Our standard Chardonnay is meant to be a reflection of the vineyard, and so we try not to intervene in the cellar unless absolutely necessary.

With regard to the 2011 season (a difficult year to say the least) I feel we’re putting a very strong foot forward with this Chardonnay.  The wine is highly aromatic, with the usual banana, pear, and peach qualities we’ve come to expect from these vines.  What’s great about the 2011 whites is their acidity and length.  Relative to the previous two years, these wines have more texture and staying power, more of a depth than the broad palate we saw in some of the 2010 whites.  This wine is 100% single vineyard, 100% Chardonnay.

Sunset Hills Vineyard Estate Club Select 2010 Syrah

 Our first Syrah!  You don’t encounter many Virginia Syrahs, which is a bummer, because many of the wines are quite wonderful.  I became interested in doing a Syrah here after having a number of good Virginia examples that illustrated a number of different ways the wine could be made here: Horton, Tarara, Delaplane, and Doukenie all make wonderful Syrahs, as do many others. 

 The 2010 season was a red wine paradise all throughout Virginia.  It was as close to an ideal year for red wines as we can hope to have.  The Syrah fruit came from Berry Hill Vineyard, in Orange, VA, which is one of the older Virginia vineyards and certainly one of the oldest Syrah vineyards in the state.  We’ve used fruit from this vineyard as blending components of many of our wines, and I was very excited to have the opportunity to use their Syrah.  The vineyard produces consistently pretty fruit with a nice granular tannin quality, and very strong aromatics – some very unique wines within Virginia.

This Syrah also includes a bit of Merlot, from our vineyards, to round out the tannins and add depth.  The blend saw about 20% new French oak for 12 months.  This is not an Aussie Shiraz – it’s brightly fruity, warm, open, delicate, very pretty, and very unique in comparison to many of our other red wines.  The 2011 Syrah will be an Estate Club only wine, and will not be available publicly after this shipment.

Whites

Reds

Will there be snow?

• 2008: harvest of 53.66 tons
• 2009: harvest of 69.86 tons
• 2010: harvest of 74.5 tons
• 2011: harvest of 93 tons

These increases are based on the maturation of Sunset Hills’ vineyards rather than any drastic changes in yields per acre – each year since 2008 our yielding acreage has increased, as vineyards and blocks within vineyards have reached fruit-producing ages.  Our vineyards will theoretically continue to produce more fruit until 2013, when things should level off for a year, after which we’ll get a bump when Vineyard 4 produces a crop. 

There are, of course, vintage variations which play a significant role in total tonnage produced – we’ve had frosts, pruning variations, bird activity, and seasonal variations in the past three years, all of which have altered the total yield per vineyard.  But the primary cause of our steady increase in fruit and wine produced is the maturation of the vineyards.

2011 was a heavy crop for us.  It’s easy to blame this on rain, but I think it had more to do with great fruit set in the early spring, and increased fruitfulness of vines relative to the light load they held last year – we got very small yields in 2010, which can result in heavier yields the following year as the vines attempt to balance themselves out.  What the rains did give us was better yield out of the press than in previous years – when there’s a higher ratio of liquid to skins in each grape, you see more juice in the press pan, which means more gallons or hectoliters per ton.   Consider:

• 2009 V1 Viognier: average of 598 liters per ton
• 2010 V1 Viognier: average of 570 liters per ton
• 2011 V1 Viognier: average of 612 liters per ton

Throughout these three years our pressing method has remained constant for Viognier – the fruit is whole cluster pressed to a maximum pressure of 1.7 bar, after which we either stop pressing or separate the harder pressed juice (in which case it is not included in the numbers above).  So the difference in liters per ton is indicative of variations in juice per berry, strength of berry, and berry per cluster.

The only loss in crop we saw this year was due to birds, who took roughly 1-2 tons, and fruit we dropped due to mildew, which, despite the heavy pressures of the vintage, did not end up being all that much.

2011's final pomace, awaiting a ride to the compost heap

Today’s final press is bittersweet.  It’s wonderful to be done with the heavy workload, but for me it’s kind of sad to know that another vintage of grape-growing and winemaking is over.  (Today is also bittersweet because we’re ripping out vines infected with yellows, which nobody wants to have to do.)  The next few weeks will find us scrubbing the cellar from floor to ceiling, installing the trellis in Vineyard 4, and preparing two Estate Club Select wines for bottling.  Next thing you know we’ll be pruning.

2009 Tannat (Estate Club Select)

Here’s a wonderfully obscure wine for you: a Virginia Tannat.  Tannat has been historically grown in Southwest France, in the Madiran, which is an interesting wine region because, legally, they only allow red wines to be grown and made.  And the most widely planted red grape in the Madiran is Tannat, a highly-concentrated, deep red, highly tannic (the similarity between “tannin” and “tannat” is not coincidental) wine.  More recently Tannat has traveled to Uruguay, where it is the “national grape,” much like the Cardinal is our “state bird.”  Tannat plantings are splattered around other regions in South America, Italy, and the United States, but in fairly small quantities, which is why, unfortunately, many wine drinkers have never heard of it.

But it does well in Virginia, and has been doing so for over ten years.  There are some great Tannats coming from Horton, Hillsborough, Chrysalis, Chateau O’Brien and many others, but these wines are, for the most part, in short supply, and not well-known.  I love these wines.  They’re inky dark with a concentrated perfume and often wild, untamed tannins that should age well over time, most likely better than many other Virginia reds.

We made a bit of Tannat in the 2009 season, as an experiment, and after the first winter in barrel it became clear that the 2009 would be our first red Estate Club Select.  The wine is dark dark, aromatically full of dark red fruit, bramble, a slight earthiness, and vanilla.  It’s medium-bodied, and packing some serious tannins, as well as an intense, long finish.  This is a wine that morphs over time.  I’ve had a bottle at my desk open all week and each day it’s changed in aromatics and mouthfeel, gradually mellowing and opening up into something quite wonderful.

Our 2009 Tannat Estate Club Select is only available to Estate Club members through the December, 2011 wine shipment, and will not be available after the shipment.  I am excited to offer this wine.

Blend: 75% Tannat, 25% Merlot

Cases Produced: 104

2010 Nettare di Tramonte

This late harvest Vidal Blanc is by far the most exotic, expressive dessert wine we’ve made at Sunset Hills, and with good reason: the 2010 season was practically begging us to make late harvest wines.  With so much heat and so little water, we had to fight not to get sugar levels up in the unfermentable range.  The lone acre of Vidal Blanc we secure for our Nettare was ideal: some dessicated fruit, some botrytis, some super-ripe berries – all hanging from the same clusters. 

This wine is still in infancy, and I’ll be begging our Estate Club members to cellar this for a few years – these wines get so much more interesting and wonderful as time passes.  Right now, it’s full of fermentation esters, mint, honey, citrus, orange peel, and an almost bubblegum-like fruitiness.  The mouthfeel is wide, lush, and the finish is long and spicy.  A memorable wine.

Harvest: 10.20.10

Brix at harvest: 30

Residual sugar: 9%

Two things to note with this shipment: (1) these wines will be better if given time to age.  I would recommend up to five years if you’ve got the patience.  (2) these wines are both in limited supply, and more or less will not be available after this shipment.  We simply did not have much fruit for either of these wines.

Har vest – noun – the season when ripened crops are gathered (Origin Old English haerfest)

The 2011 season will of course be remembered as that one really rainy year in Virginia, much like 2003 will now be remembered as that other really rainy year in Virginia, the one like 2011.  Across the state winegrowers had difficulties starting in August, when it rained roughly 3 inches more than normal, heading into September, when much of the state was drenched by a hurricane, and continuing into October, when the sun just didn’t want to shine and the winds just didn’t want to blow.  Different sections of the Old Dominion were, of course, hit in varying degrees by this poor ripening weather, but everybody was struggling to one degree or another.

Why do winegrowers freak out when it rains during ripening season?  Many reasons.  Fruit doesn’t ripen when water is continually injected into it; the sun doesn’t generally shine when it’s raining (meaning fruit doesn’t ripen); many of the mildew problems Virginia always has the potential for become exacerbated by wet, cloudy weather; color is affected; concentration is affected; the vines are confused; and nobody likes working in the rain.  With all this wetness comes the risk of rotten fruit (which doesn’t make good wine), unconcentrated fruit (which doesn’t make good wine), and unripe fruit (which, you guessed it, doesn’t make good wine).

Virginia had all of these problems in 2011.  Sunset Hills had all of these problems as well.  However, when I retrospectively consider our vineyard actions during the worsening part of the season, I am grateful for (nearly) all of the vineyard decisions we made: we cropped low, we obsessively pulled leaves, we maintained healthy canopy, we dropped unwanted fruit throughout the poor weather, and we did not pick early.  We picked very late, and very slow.  We picked every single vineyard block considerably later than we’d ever picked it before - our last viognier block came in five weeks later than the same block last year – and we picked at 30%-40% of our normal speed, to ensure that no poor fruit entered the winery. 

I’m looking through my cellar book now and am very excited about the wines we’ve made, and are still making.  We brought in (nearly) all of our blocks at a full ripeness, and flavors during fermentation and slightly post-fermentation are promising.   We have our first port-style wine, our first Albarino, some exotic Petit Manseng, some wonderful barrel fermented Merlot rosé, some extraordinarily dark and powerful Merlot, loads of Petit Verdot, slatey, fruit-driven Cabernet Franc, and all kinds of other goodies.

It’s too early to say anything definitive about the wines, or how the blends will shuffle out, other than that I am sincerely proud of what we’ve done with our vineyards and fermentations for the 2011 season.  There could have been (and probably was) a lot of bad wine made in Virginia this year, but I can confidently say none of it will come from us (unless I accidentally drop my boot in Tank 4) and that, in fact, we’ll have a lot of bottlings to contradict the season.  We’ll be opening our cellar and barrels to the public this winter for barrel tastings, and I will be proud to showcase the wines.  In the meantime, I leave you with some inky Cab Franc . . .

Vineyard #2, the day after picking Cab Sauv

Today (Oct 20th) finds us with a mere 10-15 tons of fruit still hanging on the vines – specifically two blocks of Cab Franc, and one of Petit Verdot.  All our whites, Merlot, Cab Sauv, and most of our Cab Franc and others are in and fermenting, or already barreled down for the winter.  We’ve processed roughly 70 tons so far.

A pro

 Despite the rains, many of our vineyards have hung in there for quite a long season, and we’ve had some great fruit enter the winery.  Much of the wine we’ve already fermented is showing great promise, and I’m excited for what we’re bringing in this week, and the next.  We still have a few weeks of fermenting and pressing, so things aren’t over yet.

Can you crack the code?

With all the rain we’ve gotten over the past two months, it’s been a difficult year in terms of allowing ideal hangtime.  We’ve had too many rainy days to count, which, when there isn’t enough sunlight to dry things off, creates conditions for the growth of a number of grape mildews or rots.  Many growers have had to make tough decisions – some fruit has been dropped due to overwhelming rot, some left on the vine for the same reason, and some picked early to avoid potential problems.  While I generally assume the grass is greener for everybody else, I know we’ve been fortunate in our vineyards this year, partly due to getting the crew out pulling leaves when the rains started, partly due to our already low yields and favorable cluster spacing, and partly due, I think, to luck.  As it stands, we’ve been picking everything much later than usual, and at about 40% of our normal picking speed, so that we get the fruit cleaned up in the vineyard (meaning we simply don’t pick what won’t make good wine), making our pressing and winemaking decisions much easier.  Also, we’ve broken sections of the vineyards into even smaller lots, and we’ve been treating each lot differently based upon parameters of ripeness.  It’s been a fun year to problem solve and push hard to get in fruit in as ripe as possible.

Big purchase for the 2011 Harvest: new coffeemaker. Now we can whole cluster press all night!

 Despite the wet weather, I’m very excited about the fruit we’ve brought in: the Chardonnay lots are full of pineapple and spice, Albariño is crisp and exotic, Petit Manseng floats in another galaxy, and the Viogniers span quite a pleasant expanse of green melon, ripe melon, and broad spice.  It’s a testament to the vineyard crew that settling and fermentations have been so clean and problem free – things would be a lot different if the fruit didn’t look so good.  It’s a bit early to say anything about the reds this year, but I’m always optimistic.  Tomorrow we pick V1 Viognier and Merlot.  Saturday we pick Malick Viognier.  Monday we pick V3 Merlot.  Tuesday we begin looking closely at Cab Franc blocks.  And on it goes.

One of these is actually Welch's

 Across the board, the 2011 harvest has potential to be somewhat polarizing for each individual winery, because while there will certainly be many good and sometimes great wines made this year, it is also possible, because of the disease pressure in nearly all Virginia vineyards, for some pretty bad juice.  This is a year for winegrowers and winemakers to really show what they’re made of, in terms of keeping their vineyards clean and, if necessary, adjusting their winemaking to fix potential issues in the cellar.  Once the wines are bottled, consumers will choose whose work they prefer to drink with dinner, and nobody wants to be left with a warehouse full of unsold wine.

Today is sunny, which makes me happy.  We’ve got guys out in our Viognier cleaning the clusters, dropping fruit we don’t want, and getting things ready for picking tomorrow.  I’m excited about getting this fruit into the cellar, and looking toward adjusting our sights for some serious red winemaking, which will come in the next three weeks.   As always, we’re always happy to see visitors during harvest, so don’t hesitate to come by to check out our operations!

Those bins don't fill themselves