Wine Profile: 2008 Pinot Grigio

Appellation: VQA Niagara Peninsula
Blend: 100% Pinot Gris
Alcohol: 12.2%
Closure: Screwcap
Price: $13.95 (CDN)

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.