Tri-City Herald
December 5, 2017
The 2017 harvest has all but wrapped up. Walk into any winery in the Pacific Northwest and in the cellar red and white wines are bubbling away, yeast happily converting the sugar to alcohol.
It takes a few weeks for white wine grape juice to complete the magical process of becoming wine. That typically happens in stainless steel tanks, vessels that can be used repeatedly for years, seriously cutting the cost of winemaking when using $1,000 oak barrels, which sometimes can rob white wines of the clean freshness.
By spring, winemakers will be thinking about bottling these new white and pink wines. Unlike reds, they don’t gain a lot of complexity by aging, except in the rare cases of Riesling, Sèmillon and whites blends from Bordeaux and the spectacular Chardonnays of Chablis.
Columbia Winery 2014 Chardonnay, Columbia Valley, $14: Sean Hails’ production facility for Columbia Winery sits in the heart of Washington’s Yakima Valley near Sunnyside, and the string of hot vintages prompted him to target the cooler portions of the Valley for this Chardonnay. Some oak and eight months of sur lie aging help create aromas of pear butter, light honeyed toast and lemon custard that transcend into a flavors hinting at a spoonful of Lemon Chiffon pie.
Read the entire article written by Eric Degerman and Andy Perdue at Great Northwest Wine for The Tri-City Herald