Chambourcin Galore!

So today we are going to focus on the Chambourcin. When I went to talk to the boys about what they were working on today the answer was the Chambourcin! Frankly, I have never had a straight varietal Chambourcin, only blended into wines. The Chambourcin is in both our 2008 Norton and our 2008 Touriga, and I love the flavor it gives to those wines.

So I decided to learn a bit about the Chambourcin and I found out that the grape was not even available until the 60s! It grows really well in the region because it is able to withstand fairly cold winters and the grapes sit far apart from one another which makes them less prone to fruit rot. The one thing I found interesting is that I typically describe our wines with Chambourcin in them as spicy, not like spicy hot spicy, but more along the vain of dried spices. I found a description of Chambourcin and one of the words they used was herbaceous... which is a much better descriptor then my "spicy".

We pressed down the cap of the 2009 Chambourcin grapes which I found out does a few more things then just ward off rot. It also oxygenates the wine as well as homogenizes the temperature of the wine. Apparently, it creates a better environment for the yeast when all of the wine is at the same temperature. This insures even fermentation and a fantastic wine at the end of it all!

All of this hard work pays off in the end and I'll let you know how things turn out!