Glass House Winery
http://www.glasshousewinery.com/
On January 1, 2016 some friends, family, and I went to visit the Glass House Winery in Free Union, Virginia. Thought this was not my first time visiting the winery, it was my first time taking a tour of the wine making process. I'll start out by disclosing that I do have family connections and by no means was I offered anything to write this post.
The Start
Our visit began in a very warm tropical atmosphere inside the glass house that makes up most of the primary building. Banana trees full of fruit hung above our heads as we listen to a live band and enjoyed delicious Mexican food supplied through a food truck. The first wine I saw and smelled while at the winery was while eating lunch. A 2013/2014 Viognier produced from the winery. The glass felt cold and had a mild smell to it. I was told it had a flavorful mid-pallet and was very good.
Enough Rambling
Lunch aside, the tour was the meat of the visit. We began by seeing the collection bins. Large plastic pallets whose life was holding almost a ton of grapes, stems, and juices. Red wines will have the grapes sit in the bins for about a day to allow the juices to mix with the skins and stems. These bins would then be unloaded into the juice extractor. The pallets below are double walled to hold the wine and any large pressure buildup.
First though the grapes need to be removed from the vines. The machine here shows a tumblr where grapes are designed to pass through and be plucked off large vines from their stems to be fed into the large bins.
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| Destemmer |
Once they are removed from the stems they are crushed to allow the juices to be released from the grapes.
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| Crusher |
Five feet away we also saw some of the machinery that presses the juices out of the grape mixture. The machine below, expensive as it is (25k for the drum alone) has an air bladder that is filled to force pressure onto the remaining skins and stems that collect at the bottom of the drum. Out of this mixture all the juices flow through the small slits at the bottom and into a drip pan ready for collection and fermentation.
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| Juice Press |
The collected grape juice is now passed into large stainless steel holding tanks complete with cooling rings and yeast!
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| Fermentation/Settling Tanks |
The dimpled ring around the center of the drums is where a chilled glycol mixture is flowed to keep the temperature of the grape juice constant. Below is a photo of the glycol chiller.
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| Chiller |
Following the fermentation room in the basement we saw the holding room or maturation room, This room held both oak barrelled wines and a new plastic polymer based wine container. Though the oak barrels support micro-oxygentation diffused through the wood some of the newer plastic polymer based containers also support micro-oxygenation; though at a slightly reduced rate. Flavor can also be added to the wine to give it an oaky flavor by placing wood chips in the larger stainless steel tanks or in the plastic containers.
Next was the wine tasting portion, though I was only able to smell and look at the wines I did have the chance to see a white wine before any filtration or time to settle out the finer particulates. The wine looked much hazier than I had ever seen a white wine.
Glass House prefers the French style for creating a Pinot Grigio to make in more full bodied. To do this they use a souis reserve and freeze 5% of the juice, still sweet, and add it back the day before harvest. This adds sugar and full body to the wine, yet, keeps it as a dry wine because of the sugar content. Below 1%. Off dry would be between 1 and 3%. The wine itself is supposedly sweet even before adding the wine before bottling. Even though it's sugar content is 0%!
During the winter though, with extremely low temperatures, the wine is dormant, or asleep. The flavors are dormant and the wine is not what it would be come springtime. In the spring the wines wake up. Given this, there's still really good wines to drink in the late winter/early spring.
Up next was a Viognier, which matures like a red wine. Most white wines have a linear sugar content. Over time the sugar gradually increased. A Pinot Grigio or a Viognier both have non linear sugar responses. If you pick it too early the sugar content is nothing, pick it too late and it may be too high which would produce a very hot wine, or a wine with a high alcohol content. Above 23 brix would be a 12.5% white wine, in this case. Above 25 brix you reach a 14% alcohol content wine, above 12.5% you can taste the alcohol, leading to a hot wine, a wine most people dislike. Secondly, anything above 14% alcohol content is taxed differently. There's a large range in reporting the alcohol between 12% and 13.9%, but if you were to report a 14.01% wine as 13.8% you could get in a lot of trouble.
Because the Viognier has issues with it's sugar content vs fruitiness it can be very difficult to balance the flavor and the alcohol/brix content. Some years are better than others with finding a good harvest time!
Premium red wines are typically aged for at least 2 years before sale. Glass House produces a Meritage blend wine, a wine that means a Bordeaux blend. A Bordeaux blend can only be called a Bordeaux blend if it's been grown in a certain region of France. Because of this in the US they're called a Meritage blend if Bordeaux grapes are used. These grapes include Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec. This would be a wine with any of these grapes, a blend, or solo, but with nothing else.
