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| Fio “Piu Piu” pét-nat Mosel NV Lardot “Kontakt” Mosel 2023 less than a day Schätzel “Naturweiss” Rheinhessen 2022 less than a week Schätzel “Steiner” Rheinhessen (solera 2017-2022) less than a week Vignoble du Rêveur “Singulier” Alsace 2022 less than a month |
| We are focusing on short-macerated wines for this week’s tasting, or the technique of leaving the grape skins in contact with the fermenting juice for a limited time. Maceration may be short, a matter of just a few hours or weeks, or sometimes extended, with some Georgian wines seeing up to a year of maceration. Orange wines are indeed macerated wines, but I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the use of the term “orange wine” because it has been abused and increasingly enshitified, with some folks forever turned off of macerated wines because they’ve had one or two not to their liking, and from that extrapolate that the entire category is a menagerie of the grotesque. That’s too bad, as there are macerated wines that are empirically delicious. Before the modern era of pneumatic bladder presses capable of quick and efficient juice extraction, all white wine underwent some level of maceration. Winemakers using mechanical screw presses could take many hours to finish the job of squeezing juice from the berries, during which the skins of the grapes would spend some time in contact with the juice. Grape skins add layers of flavor to wine, and I wonder what we’ve left behind with modern, technical winemaking in which efficiency is all-important and maceration is the exception rather than the rule.
We’re starting with a fresh, non-vintage pét-nat from the Mosel; dry, crisp, zippy, and refreshing, but without any maceration. Then another Mosel wine from the brilliant Philippe Lardot, with less than a day of maceration. Followed by two wines from the Rheinhessen, each of which sees less than a week of maceration, and one of which undergoes biological aging, in which flor (or voile, as the French refer to it) naturally develops in the barrel, metabolizing some of the wine and creating a unique flavor reminiscent of nuts and fresh chamomile, and finally a wine from Alsace that sees less than a month of maceration. |