What is Late-Harvest Wine?

Question from Renee: Hi! I was at a friend’s house for dinner the other day and she served a really sweet wine from a small bottle called Dolce. I don’t usually like sweet wine, but this was delicious! She said it’s a late-harvest wine and I didn’t want to look like an idiot so I didn’t ask what that means. What is it? 

Reply: Hi, Renee. Thanks for writing! You have a very generous friend. That’s an expensive bottle of wine – I love it, too – I think of it as liquid gold…

Your friend was right – Dolce is in a category of wines referred to as late-harvest or botrytized wine. If you’ve ever heard of Sauternes, that was the model. This category also includes late-harvest, sweet German wines such as Beerenauslese (BA) and Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA). From Hungary, there’s the famous Tokaj. Ice wine (eiswein) isn’t usually botrytized, but it certainly qualifies as late harvest since the grapes are picked and pressed in a frozen state. 

The term is quite literal. The grapes are harvested much later than normal – so late that they’ve begun to dehydrate and, in fact, begun to rot. Botrytis cinerea is famous in the wine world (the French call it the “noble rot”) for compounding the dehydration which concentrates the sugar, acid and flavors. This is because the rot perforates the grape skins and the watery juice seeps out. Botrytized wines have an unforgettable honeyed character, which I’m sure you noticed in the Dolce.   

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Cabernet is a Grape?

Question from Mark: Sorry to bother you again, but from what you said it sounds like the names on the bottles are the names of the grape – is that right? 

Reply: Hi, Mark. You’re not bothering me – I love getting your questions! When you shop for new-world wine (not from Europe), most of the time it’s named for the grape variety that made it and the country or region set minimum requirements in terms of percentage. For, instance a bottle of American Chardonnay must be made from at least 75% Chardonnay grapes. 

So, yes, Chardonnay is a grape variety that’s different from Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec… There are thousands of grape varieties, but a relative handful make most of the world’s wine. They’re members of a family called vitis vinifera – vitis is the genus and vinifera is the species. Over centuries we’ve voted with our pocket books. Select varieties within the species make wine that tastes good to us! 

So, you can drink Pinot Noir from its homeland in France or enjoy one from New Zealand.

I’ve noticed that the concept of different varieties is confusing to a lot of people. I like to think of myself at the produce market, choosing apples. Do I want Pink Ladies or Granny Smith? Same deal with wine varieties – they’re all a little different and we all have our personal preferences. 

Wine grapes are good for eating, but they’re rarely sold that way. The reason today’s table grapes are so nice and juicy and don’t bother us with seeds is because they’re hybrids, such as Thompson Seedless. Hybrids for wine are available, but they have a tiny market niche. Most of them were developed in New York to tolerate the difficult climate. Since every single state makes wine now, those hybrids are valuable in places like Minnesota too!  

When you shop for European wines, you’ll occasionally run into examples that name the grape variety, but most of the time there’s a regional name instead, such as Burgundy or Chianti. Within those regions they regulate the approved varieties, methods and so forth. In some regions, they make varietal wine (wine with  a dominant grape variety). Red Burgundy is Pinot Noir; white Burgundy is Chardonnay. In others they blend. Traditionally, Chianti is a blend of several grapes, but today they also permit varietal wine production. 

If you think all this sounds confusing, you’re absolutely right! But, it’s the way it is. Enjoy the wines that taste good to you and please ask a question whenever you have one! Cheers!  

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What the Heck is a Clone?

Question from Mark: A friend gave me a bottle of red wine that says Clone 337. What is it? It sounds like some kind of genetic engineering.

Reply: Hi, Mark. Thanks for writing. The word “clone” is accurate but, unfortunately, scary sounding. There’s no Dolly the Sheep thing going on here or genetic modification. In fact, when it comes to wine, cloning is quite natural and has been going on, on an informal basis, for quite a long time. 

Science tells us that everything that lives, mutates (another scary word) which means that it’s subject to natural, genetic change. The freedictionary.com defines it as “A change of the DNA sequence within a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not found in the parental type.” 

As time passes, the likelihood of mutation increases, which explains why clonal selection of Pinot Noir is a hot topic – it’s one of the oldest varieties we know and mutates quite readily. If you had an eighty-year-old Pinot Noir vineyard that was all the same clone to begin with, chances are you’ve got a few different versions out there by now.

Long before we had Petri dishes or DNA analysis, farmers began taking plant material from the best vines in their vineyards and using them for propagation (new plantings need to be cuttings, not seeds). They looked for vines that demonstrated attributes such as disease resistance, drought resistance, large production or anything else you might think of, depending upon the situation.

Grape Flowering & Fruitset

Well, flowering is finally wrapping up over this last week or so. This being mid-June, it puts us a solid two to three weeks behind “normal” – whatever that is. 

As I wrote earlier, the growing season got off to a late start but the hope was that we’d have some nice, warm weather and get caught up, or at least most of the way. 

But, all you northern Californians know that it’s been an unseasonably wet, cold spring. If I determined my location by observing the weather, and nothing else, I would have thought I was having a long stay with my sister, up in the Willamette Valley.

Two to three weeks behind normal isn’t necessarily bad. It all depends upon what Mother Nature has in mind for the upcoming months. A late crop means a late harvest, which means a better chance of a rain during harvest, which isn’t a good thing at all. 

You might be interested to know that the grape flower is a self-pollinating hermaphrodite. The flower contains both the male stamen and the female ovary and, theoretically, could pollinate successfully in a brown paper bag – not very sexy…