Cabernet Franc is the most dynamic, alluring, sexy, and delicious grape around. It can be grown in many places well (we are finding that the Livermore Valley may, indeed, be at the top of the list in California) and in a number of different styles (though, if you have been reading Wine Saves Lives! you’ll know our preference for wines of fruit purity and no new oak).
Winemakers love to make wine, and often they need to be rescued from making too much of those wines that seem like good ideas on the crush pad but that, in reality, have no genuine reason for being. A white wine made from Cab Franc is a distillation of the purity of fruit that the best Cab Francs display, showcasing the grape's versatility, and an example of our desire to explore every facet of our favorite variety.
By the time the wine was dry it was gorgeously un-colored - no pinking - and tasted absolutely beautiful (think electric nectarine and peach)!
One of our friends and Cab Franc geniuses, Leah Jørgensen, made a white Cabernet Franc that my love, Em, and I got to taste a year or so ago at her place in Oregon. The wine was brilliant…great acidity, and unique (and wholly appropriate) flavors. We decided then that we would try to make one ourselves this year.
If you’ve ever had a Blanc de Noir-style Champagne then you’ve had a white wine made from red grapes (Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir doing the honors). Making this style of wine is a bit tricky, but the challenge of managing the picking decision, running the press at the right pressure for the right amount of time, and fermenting in a way that leaves you a beautifully white wine at the end of the process is fun!
We started with less than fully-ripe fruit (picked at about 20 Brix) so that the skins had not developed full color. Less pigment in the skins gives us more flexibility at the press in terms of pressure and time.
The color of Cabernet Franc juice is the same as that of Chardonnay, but depending upon how you press the fruit, you’ll get more or less color from the skins imbuing the wine. We dropped whole cluster bunches into the press and used gentle pressure over the course of a short press cycle (about 1 hour instead of the normal 2) to get lightly-pinked juice.
We fermented the juice in a stainless-steel tank at 49 degrees for about three weeks (normal fermentation only takes 7-10 days or so) so that the solids (including color molecules) would fall to the bottom of the tank more readily.
By the time the wine was dry it was gorgeously un-colored - no pinking - and tasted absolutely beautiful (think electric nectarine and peach!). Sometimes it is small triumphs like this that redeem a tough year and illuminate, again, the reasons why I love this fucking work.
We will have about 100 cases of L’Autre Côte Blanc in Spring 2023.