Last Night's Tipple

The regular, old Gruet NV Brut sparkling wine ends my recent tour of the sparkling offerings of this New Mexico winery. They make others -- a vintage Blanc de Blancs (made exclusively from Chardonnay grapes), a vintage rosé, and a tête de cuvee bottling that Gruet named after its founder Gilbert Gruet -- but those others don't have a wide distribution, and I haven't been able to find them except on the Gruet website. I'd love to try them, but for now, I will have to content myself with the four non-vintage offerings that I can find.

Where the Gruet Blanc de Noirs is mostly Pinot Noir with a smattering of Chardonnay, the Gruet Brut is mostly Chardonnay with a smattering of Pinot Noir (75% to 25%, according to the label). One would consequently expect this wine to have more citrus and sour apple flavors and aromas (both associated with Chardonnay when used in sparkling wine) and fewer raspberry and strawberry aromas and flavors associated with Pinot Noir. And so it is. But here's the key: it is sour, but pleasantly so. There is still fruit, so it's not just acidic nastiness. Gruet's Blanc de Noirs gets all the press, and that's probably appropriate. I like it better than I like this because I like raspberries and strawberries and fuller-bodied sparkling wines than I do apples and citrus and lighter-bodied ones. But this is still very enjoyable, and it is a raging bargain for the price it commands.

Last Night's Tipple

I have been contemplating the Gruet NV Demi-Sec sparkling wine that I opened on Monday and finished last night. In my post yesterday, I was decidedly unenthusiastic about this wine: I didn't think that it was sweet enough or rich enough or unctuous enough. I was expected carbonated Sauternes, and that wasn't really fair. Demi-sec sparkling wine made from the traditional Champagne grapes just isn't ever going to be like that, and the drinker of demi-sec sparkling wine needs to realize that.

So, after purging myself of unrealistic expectations, what can I say about this wine? Well, even if it can't be carbonated Sauternes, I do wish that it had been more fruit-focused. This wine didn't have the explosive berry aromas and flavors that the Gruet Blanc de Noirs and Rosé sparkling wines, and this is a shame. Sugar calls out for fruit to make it interesting instead of just cloying, and I just didn't experience enough of fruit in this wine. I can't say that I didn't enjoy it, just that I would rather spend my money on other Gruets.

Last Night's Tipple

Continuing on my tour of Gruet sparkling wines, we come to the NV Demi-Sec. You will recall that the last step in Champagne and méthode Champenoise sparkling wine production is to add a small amount of sugar and base wine called the dosage to the wine. The amount of sugar added determines the labeling of the sparkling wine. The most common sweetness level is brut. Brut sparkling wine is not completely dry, although it may seem like that when it is being drunk. Acidity and coldness both dull the tongue's perception of sweetness, and sparkling wine is both highly acidic (from all the carbonation) and meant to be served well-chilled. If you warmed brut sparkling wine up and let the carbonation escape, it would taste much sweeter. Slightly sweeter than brut is extra dry (the sweetness level of Moët et Chandon's White Star, the best-selling Champagne in the world), and a couple of notches sweeter than extra dry is demi-sec.

I've never had demi-sec sparkling wine, partly because it's not the most common thing in the world and partly because a lingering anti-sweet prejudice born of an ill-informed snobbery. But in theory it should work well because sparkling wine has more than enough acidity to balance the sweetness. And what the heck? Since I'm trying all of the Gruet sparkling wines available to me, why not this one, too? I expected something with honeyed, unctuous sweetness, but that's not what I got. Demi-sec is really, well, off-dry rather than sweet. The label doesn't lie. There is perceptible sweetness, but it's not overpowering. So I guess that you could call it balanced, but I would really rather have something either sweeter or something drier. This is really neither fish nor fowl.

Last Night's Tipple

Another day, another bottle of Gruet sparkling wine. This time, it's the NV Brut Rosé. Rosé sparkling wine is very similar to rosé still wine in that it is produced at least partially from red grapes. The winemaker allows the juice from the red grapes to sit on the skins for a short period of time -- typically seven days or less -- causing the juice to take a small amount of color from the skins. The resulting wine is either pink or salmon-orange. Here's the difference between sparking wine and still wine, though: whereas consumers and winemakers usually see a rosé still wine at best as a non-serious, fun wine and price it accordingly (ie, less than red or white wines from the same producer), rosé sparkling wine is rarer and usually more sought-after than white sparkling wine.

I like well-made rosé wines for a number of reasons, including the beautiful color and the fact that the good ones typically will have strong aromas of strawberries and raspberries. Rosé sparkling wine has both of these benefits and a third one, too: it has a bit more heft and weight than white sparkling wines. The fact that Champagne and Champagne imitators use mostly Pinot Noir for their red grapes is an added benefit since Pinot Noir often has the berry flavors and aromas that I like in a rosé. I like sparkling wine; I love rosé sparkling wine. Just as the Gruet Blanc de Noirs is a nice white sparkling wine at a great price, the Gruet Rosé is a nice rosé sparkling wine at a great price. Nice carbonation, nice berry flavors and aromas, no nasty sourness. Just an excellent value.

Last Night's Tipple

I finished off the bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noirs sparkling wine from New Mexico. It was just as good the second night as it was the first night. It's a méthode Champenoise sparkling wine, meaning that it was made using the same method of production as is required in France to be able to label a sparkling wine Champagne (Champagne producers have succeeded in outlawing the term méthode Champenoise on wines not produced in Champagne in the Eurpoean Union on the grounds that it is misleading to consumers and unfair to the producers; the phrase méthode traditionnelle is used instead in the EU, and it means the same thing). Briefly, the following steps comprise the méthode Champenoise:

1. Grape juice is fermented, blended, aged, and bottled.
2. A solution/suspension of sugar water and yeast is introduced into the bottle of still wine. This solution/suspension is called the liqueur de tirage. Once it has been introduced, the bottle is capped, usually with a crown-style metal cap as is found on beer bottles.
3. The yeast ferments the sugar in the liqueur de tirage, producing more alcohol and carbon dioxide. Since the cap on the bottle prevents the carbon dioxide from escaping, it has to go into suspension with the wine, making it fizzy.
4. Eventually, the yeast will have fermented all of the remaining sugar in the wine. Having nothing more to consume, it will die. That's okay -- aging wine on the lees adds flavor and character to the wine.
5. As the wine is aging on its lees, its bottle is turned and tapped several times. Eventually, the neck of the bottle is facing down, and all of the lees have accumulated there against the cap. This process is called riddling.
   
6. When the wine has aged long enough, the neck of the bottle is frozen, and the cap is popped. The frozen wine/lees combination then is removed from the bottle.
7. A dosage consisting of base wine and sugar (how much sugar depends on how sweet the final wine is supposed to be) is then added to the bottle to top it off, and the bottle is corked. It is now ready for sale.

Generally speaking, all other things being equal, allowing the wine to remain on its lees for more time produces a better finished wine. The legal minimum for a non-vintage Champagne is 18 months and for a vintage Champagne is three years. This Gruet, and all of the non-vintage Gruets, spends at least two years on its lees. I can't say that I would know how to spot a wine with more lees time, but I can say that this production detail is reassuring.

Last Night's Tipple

Over the past thirty years or so, many of the big producers in Champagne have ventured across the Atlantic and the North American continent to California to buy up land, plant grapes, and build wineries capable of making first-rate Champagne-style sparkling wine. It's a natural strategy for expansion given the extremely limited vineyard acreage legally able to produce grapes that go into Champagne. Members of the Gruet family, Champagne producers since 1952, made this trip in the early 1980s and didn't like what they saw. The California vineyards that they toured were so different from those in Champagne that they didn't think that they were appropriate for making Champagne-style wines. And so they planted grapes in New Mexico instead. That's right. New Mexico, 170 miles south of Albuquerque in vineyards at an elevation of 4300 feet. Sure, it gets plenty hot there during the day, but the cold nights help keep the grapes' acidity up. And the low humidity retards the formation of rot, which increases yields, which makes the winery more economically viable. Gruet first produced wine in New Mexico in 1987, and since that time, they have developed a reputation for making excellent sparkling wine at bargain basement prices.

Although Gruet does make some vintage offerings, their only bottlings that are widely distributed are all non-vintage: Brut, Blanc de Noirs, Rosé, and Demi-Sec. All of these have good reputations, but the best-known one is the Blanc de Noirs. Blanc de Noirs is defined as a white wine made from the juice of red grapes, meaning that the wine is pressed off of its skins almost immediately after being crushed. A lot of Blanc de Noirs sparkling wine has a bit of copper or pink in it, but not this one. It's a deep gold. I believe that despite its name, it has a small amount of Chardonnay in it (the regulations for Champagne allow three grapes: the red grapes Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier and the white grape Chardonnay; Blanc de Noirs should be exclusively Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and Gruet doesn't grow any Pinot Meunier in New Mexico), but that's okay. It's really tasty. I get a lot of berries in this, and I like berries. It's pleasingly highly bubbly, and it doesn't have the nasty sourness that so many cheap sparkling wines have. Very good, and a real bargain at less than $13 a bottle.