The Blending Factory

You open a bottle of wine. Is it just a bunch of homogeneous grape juice thrown together and fermented or is it a blend? Chances are, if you like it, it's a blend, but maybe not in the way you are thinking.

To understand this, let's go to the blending factory. Unlike many of the places we have gone to, it's not a real place. It's just a made-up description of a made-up place to talk about blending. But, that said, let's take a trip to get there. After all, it's 2020, and most of us who travel have missed out on most of that travel. So let's go somewhere.

To get to our blending factory, let's go to a private airport -- our own private airport. We don't want to deal with TSA today or boarding lines or exhibits that we don't care about that were paid for by our tax dollars. And, we want the plane the way we want it. We're taking Wine Force One.

The flight is amazing -- turbulence freeand not a cloud in the sky. And, since we left from a private airport, we're landing at one as well. We'll be the only plane traveling in or out of here today.

Greeted by our wine country driver, we are whisked out to our private trasnportation. Riding past the vineyards, some relatively flat, some hilly, some mature, and some relatively newly planted, planted with dozens of different types of grapes. 

We're here now; we've made it to the Blending Factory. We're going to experience great wine, not ordinary wine and we have samples to choose from. We're going to make red blends and white blends, and blends of single varietals. That's right. We're going to make blends of things like 100% Cabernet Sauvignon and and 100% Chardonnay. How does that work?

On one of our very early trips in this adventure, we visited a winery where we got to taste samples of wine made from different plots in the same winery. These plots were not far from each other, but mere feet. But, in some cases, the grapes had received more sun or less, or weer grown on a slope or on the flat, or in well-tilled soil or gravelly soil. The differences were striking. 

So, what might happen here at the Blemding Factory is that contrasting, yet complementary grapes get blended together. Yes, they might be the same varietal as each other, but one might have more acidity and another denser tannins. When they are blended together, and when they are blended together well, we, as the drinkers get the best of both worlds. We get the benefits of the hot afternoon sun in one set of grapes and the stresses of having grown in the nearly barren, gravelly soil from another. When combined perfectly, we get all of the best combinations.

But, it doesn't stop there. You see the most grown varietals have many different clones. Let's consider Pinot Noir, for example. There are dozens of different clones of Pinot Noir that are registered with whomever it is that is the registrar of such things (I'm sure I could Google it, but as regular readers know, I am pretty committed to writing off the top of my head).

Cloning of grapes or clonal selection came about because of the phylloxera outbreak in the middle of the 19th century. Eager to find ways in Europe to fight the spread of this horrible mite that largely wiped out many of the vineyards of Europe, grape growers in much of Europe found that by grafting European vines onto American rootstock that the vines were phylloxera-resistant. This was known as massal selection. Having achieved a level of success with this process, groweers and researchers took the process further by grafting cuttings with specific tratits they were looking for and observing them sometimes over decades. This process is referred to as clonal selection.

Why have these clones? To understand, let's return to Pinot Noir and examine a few clones. 

The initial registered clones of Pinot Noir were approved in France -- Burgundy to be specific. As a group, they were known as Dijon clones and each was given a number, often as part of a grouping. The first group were in the 110 series (my name for clone numbers 11x) that are appreciated for the perfumey characteristics. Later, other clones that became particularly popular were the powerful clone 777, the highly aromatic but with aromas unlike other Pinot Noir clones 943, and the balanced 843. 

Here at the Blending Factory, we have access to all of these and more. So, as we test out our juices to make wine, we experiment by blending juice from different clones of the same varietal. After days and days of suffering through endless tasting (someone has to do it), we develop a wine with all the characteristics we love. This becomes the base, so to speak of Chateau Grapeoftheday. 

And, this is part of what distinguishes a winemkar from someone who just throws together some juice in a bottle.