In contrast to the light, refreshing Pinot Grigio profile of the stainless steel-fermented Estate line, Creekside Reserve shifts gears into a larger-framed, fuller-bodied Pinot Gris style.  Vineyard lots showing strong varietal character and balance were earmarked for the Reserve barrel program and vinified in oak. Five of eight French oak barrels came together in a blend that exhibits both the boosted palate structure of a ferment in oak and the complexity produced by a proportion of carefully monitored spontaneous ‘wild’ fermentations.

With the Grigio we choose to vinify in stainless steel to show off the freshness and vibrancy that this variety can possess, and with our Reserve Gris, we barrel ferment and age our best batches, adding layers of complexity and creating a sense of weight and depth.

Marketing Propaganda Link (aka Official Wine Info)

Look, we’ll be honest…we wish we had tales of struggling ferments, crazy blending trials, and other tidbits of insider information, but this wine all but made itself.  Clean fruit, clean careful ferment, clean filtration…just plain clean, crisp, varietally correct aromatics and a really refreshing palate.  In a difficult, rainy vintage, our gris was like a glowing beacon of comfort amid panic about later-ripening varieties.  It was a delight and we love it not only because it happens to be quite smashing (biased? us?), but also because it was like a happy, healthy baby: a joy to be around, well-behaved, and lacking in poopy diapers of all descriptions.    It’s all grown up and left the tank now, spouting egotistical slogans about its party prowess, but we like to remember it fondly as unfermented juice fresh off the press and so full of (now realized) potential.

One would think that the path from juice to wine wouldn’t differ much from vintage to vintage, winery to winery, but here at Creekside we do something just a little crazy: we name our equipment.  Cellar jobs that read like “rack T0-01 to T0-07″ are like nails on a chalkboard to our production staff. We’d rather have a root canal than say crusher/destemmer thirty times a day during harvest.  Why not make operations easy to remember and actually (*gasp*) entertaining?

Take this 2008 Pinot Grigio for example…its literal path to you, the consumer, was very different from the 2007, despite the fact that the vinification process was identical.  Whereas one may have been touched by great philosophers, the other may have been blessed by stellar musicians.  Where one may have conversed with great political minds, the other might have hung out with the great characters of fictions past and present. To demonstrate, here’s what the 2008 Pinot Grigio’s workflow would have looked like through the eyes of the production team.  If anyone can figure out that diagram without explanation, we’re not sure whether to be ecstatic or concerned for your mental well-being.  Click the thumbnail below and the image will open in a new window.  Buckle up and follow along, this is The Story of Creekside’s 2008 Pinot Grigio.

In The Making: 2008 Pinot Grigio

It started with two main batches of fruit from the Niagara Lakeshore appellation that came in two weeks apart in the fall of 2008 (note the cool colour of the grapes in the picture, a great identifier for gris).  The fruit was then dumped from the picking bins into Mad Max (the fruit hopper), whose giant auger moves the delicate bunches into Beverly (the crusher/destemmer), who spits out all the stems and gets everything ready for Barney (so named for being a giant purple must pump, slow moving but still somehow creepy).  Barney passes the fruit along to Paparazzi, or Papa for short (the press), who squeezes the fruit to yield the juice that will eventually become our Grigio.  Papa’s pressing are pumped into tanks, left to cold settle, and then racked off gross less to fermentation tanks.  In this case, Simon (Paul Simon, a 156hL tank) and Winston (Winston Churchill, a 256hL tank) were chosen for ferment duty and inoculated.  The juice fermented to dryness pretty smoothly, with no major alarms, and when a trial blend of roughly half of Simon + 100hL of Winston was decided on, the two batches were filtered and blended to Buddha (a rotund 315hL tank) before bottling and release to you (that’s you at the bottom, a very excited Grigio fan).

No oak, no lees stirring, no muss, no pretension.  This wine proudly wears its heart on its sleeve and expresses the best that a crisply styled Grigio has to offer, unfettered and unadorned.

]]> http://www.creeksidewine.com/blog/wine-profile-2008-pinot-grigio/feed/ 2 http://www.creeksidewine.com/blog/2008-single-vineyard-whites-in-bottle/ http://www.creeksidewine.com/blog/2008-single-vineyard-whites-in-bottle/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:18:47 +0000 admin http://www.creeksidewine.com/blog/?p=92 The first bottling run of 2008 vintage wine might have gone to Pinot Grigio (now available for sale at the winery!), but May 7th and 8th saw the bottling of two equally as exciting products: the 2008 Butler’s Grant Riesling and the 2008 Queenston Road Vineyard Chardonnay.

The 2008 BG Riesling marks the return of an annual favourite, this is now the fourth vintage of Creekside Riesling to be made from fruit sourced solely from that vineyard and every year, it’s following seems to grow. Keep an eye out for a wine profile, with all the behind the scenes gossip, coming soon to The Cellared Life.

Just as nifty, the 2008 QRV Chardonnay makes history as the first single vineyard chardonnay to come out of our prized vineyard on the St. David’s Bench. It seems bound and determined to show up our reds with it’s energetic stainless steel fermented character and high-toned personality. Wine profile to come on this quirky guy as well.

How do we get these lively whites from tank to bottle as quickly and gently as possible? Why with a high speed bottling line of course. Visitors are always fascinated by how the line works, so we thought we would share a glimpse of the process online. Generally speaking we can do 1500-1700 cases per day, or an astounding 18,000-20,000 bottles. For reference, our standard old line could manage 1100 cases per day on a perfect day. Needless to say we much prefer speed and consistency!

With the arrival of three brand new demi-muids this year we had the opportunity to go outside our comfort zone (shiraz/viognier co-ferments for Broken Press Shiraz) and try something a little different. We mulled and pondered and debated, but finally, during a particularly busy time, the decision was made to take the majority of the winemaking staff to our Queenston Road Vineyard on the St. David’s Bench to speed pick some bushels of Clone 100 Vertical Shoot Position (VSP) Shiraz. This small section of vines, trained using the VSP system, is a micro-batch within the larger Clone 100 rows that seemed to be doing phenomenally.

We had just received our annual batch of Malbec grapes, and winemakers Rob and Craig were interested in co-fermenting Malbec with premium Shiraz in a new French oak barrel to see, essentially, what sort of intriguing things might happen. So on the 31st of October off went Rob, Asst. Winemaker Erin, as well as cellar hands Wes & Yvonne in the middle of a busy day to grab some VSP Shiraz. The pick went well, the co-ferment went well, and the resulting wine is now aging beautifully in “Salma”, the same demi-muid in which it was fermented. If you’re ever at Creekside for a tour of the cellar (2pm daily or by appointment), ask to see Salma and her compadres; we’ll do our best to keep you updated on her progress.

At Creekside we’re fantastically luck to have a great Pinot Noir site on the St. David’s Bench, in between St. Catharines and Niagara-on-the-Lake. Year in and year out, it produces ripe, clean, incredibly structured Pinot that invariably comprises nearly 100% of our Reserve Pinot Noir blends. 2008 was a difficult year for a lot of Pinot growers, with Mother Nature and the finicky nature of the grape combining to create the perfect conditions for rot and difficulty ripening. Once again, however, and much to our delight, the St. David’s Vineyard (SDV) has thus far surpassed expectations and is sitting cozily in barrel at Creekside.

Below are some highlights from the SDV fruit harvest, fermentation, and pressing. If you want to get up close and personal with the barrels, there is a cellar tour every day (even in winter) at 2pm. Ask the tour leader to show you the SDV Pinot and get an early glimpse at what is likely the 2008 Reserve.

Below are some photos of the grapes coming in off the vine. The pressed juice will be selectively fermented in both stainless steel tanks and French oak barrels, for use in our Estate Sauvignon Blanc and Reserve Sauvignon Blanc. Last year’s (2007) Reserve Sauv Blanc was 100% from these on site vineyards; will 2008 be the same? We’ll keep you updated on how these homegrown favourites are progressing, in the meantime however, have a peek at their beginnings: