Great Northwest Wine
December 2, 2017
The 2017 harvest has all but wrapped up. Walk into any winery in the Pacific Northwest and in the cellar there will be red and white wines happily bubbling away, with yeast happily converting the sugar to alcohol.
It takes up to 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 over and over for years, seriously cutting the cost of winemaking vs. using oak barrels, which sometimes can rob white wines of the clean freshness.
By spring, winemakers will be thinking about bottling their 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>>>Read the entire article featuring Airfield Estates and Columbia Winery on Great Northwest Wine