And I have an esoteric, perhaps in some eyes a stupid question, for the winemakers as well: Is there anything to the idea that keeping the whole clusters together and not de-steming provides more of an energetic benefit by keeping more of the whole together instead of separating and deleting the parts?
Short answer is simply yes. I find the wines more dynamic and vibrant. However it is still highly vineyard based. A middling vineyard is not miraculously made great by stem inclusion.
I agree with Jim wholeheartedly. As I’ve stated above, stem inclusion to me is an important aspect of what I’m trying to achieve with my wines. The idea of ‘lignification’ sounds great in an article or an interview, but the reality is that green stems do not necessarily lead to any more ‘greenness’ in a wine than ‘lignified’ stems. Period. Can they? Certainly. But that can be said of ‘any variable’ that is used during the process. Can too much oak be ‘noticed’? Of course . . .
As far as Blake’s question goes - I think it’s more of a ‘philosophical’ answer than one that can be answered objectively. I dig the fact that what I get from the vineyard is what I work with in its entirety - heck, I don’t even sort the fruit. I work with growers who do a great job in the vineyard. Do I end up with some MOG in my ferments? Perhaps - and every vintage, I yank a leaf out mid-ferment, take a picture, and put it back in 
Not that I’m a ‘terroirist’, but there could be an argument here . . .
Cheers.
Thanks Larry and Jim for your responses. Larry, you may know where I’m coming from to ask such a question as I think you know 1`ve been involved in wholistic health care for 45 years.
I think stem ripeness is misleading. Whole clusters in cold, less ripe years is an age old way of natural de-acidification. Whole clusters in warmer years where stems are “ripe” defeats that purpose. I’ve never really seen brown stems all the way down into the clusters, expect on really overripe stuff that makes me feel like I do when someone overcooks a nice steak. The char in that case is NOT a good thing. I recall a winemaker friend tellings me what another producer does - lets the grapes sit overnight before processing, so that cut at the top of the stem has time to seal, and you don’t have near the leeching of green elements into the wine. Allegedly.
I don’t do a lot of whole cluster because of volatile acidity. People I learned from in one way or another seem to have taught me → more WC = more VA. When I do WC, I foot tread with the intent of squeezing out air pockets amid the clusters themselves, to squeeze in some juice to minimize places where acetobacter can thrive. Sometimes it really seems to work, sometimes not. So I mostly destem, looking for more purity (less VA).
For what it’s worth, I also don’t look to add any acid to my wines so whole cluster is tough. The potassium in the stems can really kick the pH up, so my trade off is mostly to all destemming, no adding acid.
Excellent and informative discussion Vincent. Thank you so much for adding on.
Vincent,
Good points indeed. One must be careful during fermentation to alleviate VA pressure - caps tend to act differently with whole cluster than with destemmed fruit, and, for the most part, I find ferments kick off faster, at least with the varieties that I work with.
I tend to pick a bit earlier, so I tend to have pretty good acidity and pHs that range from 3.4-3.6 as starting material. This certainly ‘helps’ but I still need to remain diligent.
Cheers.
Charles Rousseau ain’t sleeping all that peacefully either.
It never made much sense for us to use much, if any, wc on PN and then some of the other varieties we delved into. That’s changed. 0-15% then is 0-100% now. It’s always a judgment call. There are wines we never want to have any wc in. Others we’d love to in a perfect world. We have prior knowledge of our repeat sources to go on, but with new sites and varieties there’s a lot of research. An original idea can be altered prior to harvest. When the grapes come in, we examine them, which could tell us we shouldn’t do any wc, or we should carefully sort out specific clusters to do it with, or maybe we’ll decide to do some when we hadn’t planned. Our fun-time tool box has increased, so we can do carbonic maceration, we can do a very light foot stomp in a t-bin or macro (just enough juice to cover the fruit), a still gentle, but moderate stomp and ferment in concrete, we can toss of percentage of whole clusters into any fermenter before covering them with must, etc.
You can chomp into stems and get an idea what’s there. Some stems seem mostly solid, with a little green astringency there, but it doesn’t seem like much would leak out. I’ve had thick stems that crunched like celery and burst out massive nasty green horror. Other times there’s a lot of fluid, but it’s like a pleasant fresh hay. As the OP and various responses have noted, you can have stems with nasty fluid in your wc ferm and be careful so it doesn’t leech out. Of course, you can have that in the stem, use a not-so-gentle destemmer and end up with a huge mess of horrid green in your wine with zero stem inclusion. So, the real goal would to be gentle at all points from harvest to press, which could mean the best choice to avoid greenie meanies with some fruit is 100% whole cluster.
What is it about whole cluster that would encourage VA?
As a consumer, I think whole cluster is incredibly interesting when done well. We recently did an Oregon 90’s pinot tasting and you could tell on some of the wines that had done whole cluster. The aromatics were so complex and interesting. Old Cristom, Brickhouse, McKinley compared to a Beaux Freres was really interesting to see how the wines evolved.
I am a huge fan of Cristom and think Steve always does a great job with stem inclusion but I’ve come across a few vintages where the wines go through what I hope is, a dumb phase.
Right now, the '11 Sommers reserve bottling has this crazy delayed finish. This very astringent bitterness hits you seconds after you swallow the wine. It’s not tannin, I’m sure it’s stems. I’m hoping that will integrate over time like the '07s have (which are now beautiful). For those who’ve had Canary Island wines, the finish is similar where there’s this delayed attack of tannin/bitterness.
As the winemakers have mentioned, whole cluster seems to be another great tool, that when used appropriately greatly enhances the end product.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, in whole cluster ferments, the ‘cap’ tends to stay a bit more ‘tight’ and compacted, and there is a tendency for it to ‘dry out’ a bit. This can certainly lead to VA pressures early on in the process, and it’s important to keep on top of fermentation protocols to ensure timely punch downs to avoid this. It is also varietal and clone dependent.
There also has been talk of rising pH’s. The higher the pH, the more VA pressure there will be and one would need to be diligent with SO2 levels during elevate. If you are picking later with riper fruit, this certainly could be the case, especially if you are not doing any acid adjustments to bring the pH down prior to fermentation.
Cheers.
Brandon, as I have learned, whole clusters essentially have air pockets in the fermenter that allow acetobacter space to work. When you do partial whole cluster, you’ll typically put them in first, then destem the rest on top of the whole bunches, the idea being that some juice can penetrate those spaces, filling things into create one solid mass a la 100% destemmed fruit. When I pigeage whole cluster ferments I am essentially trying to pack things in to squeeze out all the air. Maybe like how people have our own obsessive ways of getting air out of a zip lock bag before sealing.
Another more basic issue is that rot tends to form in the middle of a cluster first, and you can’t always see it. So whole bunches may look clean, even smell clean (usually you can smell the rot before you see it), but still you may some some (more) rot going straight into the fermenter. In wine as in life, the issue isn’t so much the presence of sometime but the amount or concentration. Whole cluster ferments give chance for having more rot in a fermenter, even when the fruit looks clean.
Of course, I’ve acknowledged that I haven’t been as successful with whole cluster ferments as I’d like, so take accordingly.
This is what we have done. However, I read in one of the articles linked here (I actually read the article a while ago) that Dujac does it the other way around. I found that interesting. There was no explanation offered as to why that was. I am certainly not going to question them on what or what does not work. In fact, I am dedicating myself to have at least a couple experiments where we do one fermenter of fruit one way and fruit from the same block the other. I am not in any way certain what the results will be but I am curious to see how it goes.
Also, if there’s bird or insect damage you can be starting off with a huge acetobacter population in your must. (Later picked senescent grapes may have some, too.) If you don’t inoculate (common with wc from my limited experience) what comes in with the grapes gets a head start. VA is actually produced and reconsumed as part of the biochemical pathway during a ferm. If there’s some sort of stress on the yeast, they can have trouble reconsuming it. That’s a point where you might want to intervene. The cooler ferm conditions of wc must could work against the yeast being able to fully correct the problem. If you don’t know if it will resolve or not, and you do know an intervention will compromise the wine’s potential, what do you do? (Or, perhaps it’s a VA level you and your customers like or don’t mind? Eet eez zeh teh-WAH!)
Fascinating, I definitely want to follow up to see what you think of the experiments.
Something I LOVE about wine and wine making is when people doing the exact opposite of what you do make incredibly good wine. There’s no one way.
My first whole cluster ferment that I didn’t like ended up going into a bottling that, more than any other wine I’ve made, caused people to say, “now THAT’S classic Oregon Pinot Noir!” People love some VA, myself included sometimes. But when it’s too much…it’s too much. And that’s totally subjective.
This is by far, the most civil, educated, and informative thread I have recently had the pleasure of reading. Well done all!
Seconding Dylan’s comment; the discussion is fascinating to read
I’d point out Aubert de Villaine’s appearance on Levi Dalton’s podcast where he contradicts the popular wisdom that DRC defaults to 100% stem inclusion every year. From his point of view, there is differing capacity of the wine to absorb stem influence from year to year (my clumsy paraphrasing), and so this is a variable they are constantly tuning to find the right balance. I thought his rejection of an absolute position on stem inclusion in favor of balance was quite refreshing
As an aside wrt brown stems I think of Francois Mitjavile at Tertre Roteboeuf professing that one should wait till the stems and seeds are fully ripe prior to harvesting. I’m sure there’s a great deal of risk to doing so and it’s not for everyone / everywhere, but I’ve found that his wines demonstrate that the approach can work. The wines take on a lovely tea leaf-like “degraded” (Francois’ words) character. Of course that’s for merlot so who the hell knows if it works for pinot at all
One of Paul Draper’s stories is about (maybe the first) Monte Bello vintage he made with Dave Bennion. Elevated VA that both of them thought detracted from the wine. They’d always pick that one out in blind tastings and vote it last. Everyone else would pick it as their favorite.
That’s the sort of thing that sparks vitriolic debates, such as with natural wine. A guideline that works very well for a specific site can utterly fail to translate elsewhere. At that specific site it might be foolish to change from a time-proven metric. But, that doesn’t make it a universal rule.
Some Pinot growers with multiple clones and distinct blocks (soil, aspect) within a vineyard have found extreme different stem performance between the various lots. One clone or block may always suffer with any stem inclusion, while most thrive with 70-100%.