Welcome back to Wednesdays with the Winemaker. This week's feature is Part 1 of 2 featuring Wine Blending: The Art of Winemaking. Check back next week for part 2. As always, feel free to leave comments and/or questions!Blending – The Art of Winemaking
Blending is a process of combining different wines to make the final wine better. The goal is to enhance the complexity, improve the balance, or to correct deficiencies in the wine, such as acidity or astringency. Winemakers often use blending to develop a signature blend having a distinctive and unique character.
Blending can be also a way to minimize the effect of vintage variability on the quality of wine. Often times blending is used to minimize vintage to vintage variability and thus maintain the consistency in the tasting profile of the same wines produced in consecutive years.
Chatham Hill Winery is known for its intense and complex varietal wines, wines that express the varietal character and the growing conditions of our region and a particular year. We do not attempt to recreate the previous year’s vintage by all means. We consider vintage to vintage variability as an interesting, educational and fun aspect of wine experience.
There are several approaches to blending that have been used traditionally either singularly or in combination. Grapes from different varieties, growing regions or vintages may be used. Wines may also be blended that have been created using different vinification methods, such as stainless steel fermented and aged wines and wines fermented and aged in oak barrels of differing toast levels and years in use.
The “very” Old World approach to blending involved so called inter-planting. Several different kinds of grapes were grown and harvested together and then fermented together as a blend. Nowadays blending is done a few weeks before bottling using wines that have already been aged. This assures that blending trials will produce results that are very close to the final product.
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