Kim McPherson

What do you do when one of the best winemakers in the state invites you to make wine with him and his daughter? You say, yes! Which is exactly what I did when Kim McPherson of McPherson Cellars suggested I join him and his daughter, Kassandra for a his first ever attempt at bottling a dry Chenin Blanc.

Truth be told, Chenin Blanc is more of a cool climate grape. World class wines are made with it in the Loire Valley of France. (You’ll also find beautiful examples of it from South Africa.) And while it’s origin in the rather cool, Maritime/Continental climate of the Loire Valley would make it an odd fit for Texas—particularly in the dry, red clays of the High Plains—for some strange reason, it grows almost like a weed here.

“It’s been like this since the first day Chenin was planted in Texas soil,” says McPherson. “It’s never failed.”

Chenin Blanc wines are more commonly associated as being slightly sweet with aromas of ripe pear, apricot and sometimes honey as is common with Vouvray wines from the Loire Valley of France. But the grape can also make beautiful, crisp, dry wines as you’ll find in Savennières wines from the Loire. And if you’re looking for a demi-sec (sweet) Texas version of Chenin Blanc, you’ll find a great example from Fall Creek Vineyards (~$7). But McPherson had his mind set on making a dry Chenin, one that would stack up well against his other award-winning lineup of white wines including the Les Copains white blend, Roussanne, Viognier and Albariño, which won a coveted double gold medal from the San Francisco International Wine Competition this year.

Kassandra McPherson

“The unfortunate thing is that Chenin has a bad rap,” says McPherson. “Somehow the public just doesn’t really like it. Which is sad because it just makes really nice white wine. Everyone makes it sweet, but in Texas, I think it should be more like a Provence-style white wine that’s dry and refreshing and BOOM—great!”

McPherson knows a grape grower in the High Plains, Joe Vasquez, who has a small plot of 28 year-old Chenin Blanc vines. In the past McPherson has used these grapes for blending with some of this other wines including his white sparkling wine made from 85 percent Chenin Blanc and 15 percent Muscat Canelli for a scoach of sweetness on the finish. But McPherson has always wanted to make a dry Chenin, and this year, the time was right.

So, I trekked up to Lubbock a couple of weeks ago to check out some of the madness that is grape harvest season in the High Plains and to try my hand at making wine. (Don’t worry, the reality is, I just watched and asked a lot of questions. Kim and Kassandra—a recent masters grad of the esteemed oenology program at University of California at Davis to match her father’s—did all the real work.)

I soon found that making wine is a lot more of a “hurry up and wait” process than you might think. First of all, you have to wait for the grapes to get to their optimum sugar levels, or “degrees brix,” the measurement commonly used in America. Once the grapes are ready to pick, you’ve got to line up a harvester and delivery time. In our case, the grapes were ready to pick, but the actual picking and delivery time changed three times over the course of three days for these grapes.

Chenin Blanc grapes after harvest

To put it mildly, it was a mess. In fact, we didn’t actually get the grapes in the tank until my final day. McPherson sped me to the nearby airport to catch my plane with just minutes to spare.

It was nearly 3 p.m. by the time the grapes hit the crush pad, and boy did they look baked and toasty in that hot metal bin that had been trucked more than half an hour from their vineyard in the hot August sun. But McPherson wasn’t worried. After more than 30 years in as a winemaker, most of which has been in Texas, he’s seen his fair share of ups and downs in harvesting. And despite the setbacks with the more than 6.4 tons this year’s Chenin Blanc harvest yielded, he was ready to roll his sleeves up and do what he does best: make really good wine.

Without getting into the piddly details, here’s how the process went. The grapes were all poured into a large outdoor tank and fed up a conveyor belt into the “crusher/destemmer,” which does exactly what you might think: crush the grapes, take out the stems and leaves. The grapes are then pressed to separate the juice from the grape skins and voila, you have wine!

Well, not exactly. First, you have to let it has to ferment. And before that can happen, we had to separate any left over solids in the juice that weren’t caught in the pressing process. To do this, usually winemakers have to let the juice sit in a cold tank to let the solids separate.

Grapes in the crusher

Imagine a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. When you let it sit for a few minutes, you notice a foam start to separate and rise to the top of the glass. Or when a pint of Irish Guinness is poured, you watch as the creamy head begins to rise to the top. That’s what happens during the “cold soak” of grape juice for winemaking.

This process usually takes a few days. But not for McPherson. This year, he let technology do the work for him with an Italian designed “Ecoflot” from Della Toffola. This little pump enables the solids to clarify from the juice very rapidly. Like in less than an hour rather than a few days. With this year’s massive harvest, the Ecoflot allowed McPherson to save days of time in pressing and racking his wines to allow for more tank space with each new delivery of grapes. In short, he maximized his efficiency.

After using the handy little Ecoflot, a few adjustments had to be made to the juice including acidification and a little sulphur dioxide.

“I try to minimize these additions, but they’re just necessary to making wine,” says McPherson.

Note: Despite what some people may realize, the addition of sulphur dioxide and certain acids, such as tartaric acid, which is a naturally occurring acid in grapes, is a common practice in winemaking all over the world and has been for centuries. Sulphur Dioxide is actually a bi-product of fermentation from added yeasts. (Up to 5-7 parts per million.) It’s a topic to be discussed later down the line, but the big takeaway is, if you’ve been drinking any wine from your average grocery store shelf, it’s been adjusted with sulphur dioxide and some form or naturally-occurring acid.

Small beaker example of Ecoflot before the solids have separated

Five minutes after juice has been through the Ecoflot process

McPherson also added a few yeast nutrients to help spark fermentation with the addition of yeast. In this case, he added “Alchemy II,” a yeast blend from Scott Laboratories to formulated to work well with Chenin Blanc fermentation. From then, we just had to let the yeast and the juice do it’s work.

It’s been about three weeks since we set up our dry Chenin Blanc. After checking with McPherson yesterday, it turns out the fermentation is almost complete. From that point, he says he’ll probably let the yeasts “settle out” on their own and fall to the bottom of the tank. Over the next month he’ll stir these spent yeasts or “lees” to add a little creaminess and complexity to the wine before racking the wine, removing the yeast and fining the wine for clarity. By December, we’ll be ready to bottle and I’ll be back up to Lubbock to help make it happen.

To date, we’ve selected the bottle—a dead leaf green color like the kind you see with most Chardonnay wines—and we’ve decided to use the more efficient screw cap instead of a cork. We’ve even been able to determine a general $12/bottle price for the 400 cases we’ll be able to yield of this wine. The only thing left is to figure out a name for this Texas dry Chenin Blanc.

Any ideas?

We’ll continue with the final result in December…

- Jessica Dupuy

Tagged: Chenin Blanc, Ecoflot, Jessica Dupuy, Kim McPherson, McPherson Cellars, texas wine