Tasting selected wines of Barboursville Vineyards (Barboursville, VA)

The white wines we tasted at during our visit to Barboursville Vineyards were brought to our table as a single flight, each wine identified by a marking on the base of the glass. Luca (Paschina, GM-Winemaker) arrived shortly after the wines did and we delved into an hour-long conversation. It was only at the end of that conversation that I had the chance to sample these wines briefly before we turned to the reds.

Luca and Frank and my (to this point untouched) white wines

The Pinot Grigio showed a nice brightness with no flab; the Sauvignon Blanc showed green bark, nice acidity, and great weight on the palate; the Chardonnay showed sweet fruit and tropical notes, and a disconnect between elements; the Vermentino was unfocused with salinity and salted sour cherry on the palate. But the star of the whites, I felt, was the Viognier.

In my previous post on Barboursville, I related the fact that the winery had switched from the traditional Northern Rhone production for this variety to:

• Fermentation in stainless steel
• Avoidance/suppression of malolactic fermentation
• 9 - 12 months aging in stainless steel
• Lees stirring in the SS tanks.

This approach has paid off "bigly." The Viognier Reserve 2015 has perfect weight on the palate (as opposed to the weightiness associated with traditional Viognier), perfect balance, and a rich, creamy mouthfeel and finish (the result of the lees-stirring).

Switching to reds, we tasted the 2015 and 2010 vintages of the Cabernet Franc. The 2015 showed red fruit and some green bean. On the palate, ripe, bright fruit, salinity, and a lengthy finish. The 2010 showed smoke, tar, green bean, and red fruit. Sweet red fruit, salinity, savoriness on the palate.

Of the 2014, 2011, and 2009 Nebbiolo Reserves, I preferred the '09. It showed olives and a bit of tar on both the nose and palate and with a bright acidity on the latter. I felt that this vintage also showed the best concentration of the three.

We tasted the 2012 (50% Petit Verdot, 50% Merlot), 2010 (60+% Merlot, 15% Cabernet Sauvignon, with the remainder Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot) and 2004 (70+% Merlot) Octagons.

The 2012 showed coffee, berries, cedar, and baking spices on the nose. Medium-bodied on the palate with a medium-length finish. The 2010 was elegant. Berries, cassis, mocha, and baking spices on the nose. Medium-bodied with a long, creamy finish. The 2004 was phenomenal. Red fruit, tar, chocolate, and baking spices on the nose. Balanced with a lengthy finish.

Barboursville Vineyards produces an extensive portfolio of wines, with both current year and library wines available for purchase to visitors as well as on its website. The signature wines for me, though, are the Viognier and Octagon.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

Barboursville Vineyards (Barboursville, Virginia): The marriage of Italian expertise, international varieties, and the Monticello AVA terroir

Barboursville Vineyards sits in the Monticello AVA -- Virginia's oldest (1984) -- which is named after, and includes, the location where Thomas Jefferson first sought to make a domestic quality wine.

Monticello AVA shown bordering the Shenandoah Valley AVA
in the picture above

The current iteration of the estate was founded by Gianni Zonin -- of the 7-generation, Northern Italian winemaking family of the same name (The Zonin holdings are shown in the picture below.) -- who acquired the 18th-century Barbour Family estate and planted it to Cabernet Franc and Merlot in 1976. In 1990 Gianni brought Luca Paschina from his Piemonte home to be the General Manager-Winemaker at the estate with the mandate to "renew those vineyards and restore them to the path of producing the fine wines of great stature which Jefferson and he (ed.: Gianni) envisioned ..."

The Zonin portfolio (Source: http://www.zoninusa.com/)

Monticello AVA
The Monticello AVA extends over 1,250 sq. miles in the Upper Piedmont between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and the Southwest Mountains to the east and includes most of Greene, Albermarle, and Nelson counties. The climate is characterized as humid subtropical/maritime and its summer warmth is effective in ripening most of the major international cultivars. The soil is complex, medium- to well-drained, and is well-endowed with granite-based red Virginia clay. Vineyard exposures have great diversity.

Vineyards and Vines
Frank Morgan and I were scheduled to meet with Luca, the GM-Winemaker, during the course of our morning visit to the estate. We arrived earlier than scheduled so took a detour to visit the ruins of the old Barbour estate which sits on the winery grounds and can be visited free-of-charge during winery-open hours.

The Barboursville Vineyards property covers 900 acres, 185 of which are planted to vine. The humid subtropical climate, according to Luca, is associated with cold winters, warm summers, and wet springs. Luca sees severe dry conditions in two of ten vintages while another two of ten vintages are too wet. In general, he can make very high quality wines in eight of ten vintages. After all, not that different from his native Italian Piemonte, he claims.

Frank Morgan, one of the most stylish vineyard visitors I have
ever encountered

The soil is comprised of Davidson red clay, loam, and ideal levels of organic matter. Estate vineyards are planted at elevations ranging between 550 and 800 feet.

Vineyard operations are a mix of manual labor and automation: pruning and cluster-thinning are done by hand while leaf-pulling, hedging, and harvesting are done by machine. The company has invested heavily in improving its pruning operation in order to combat Esca in the vineyards.

The table below shows the cultivars currently planted at Barboursville.

White	Red
Sauvignon Blanc	Cabernet Franc
Ottonell	Merlot
Moscato	Petit Verdot
Falanghina	Nebbiolo
Fiano	Sangiovese
Viognier	Barbera
Chardonnay*

*Some purchased fruit

The Merlot and Cabernet Franc were the first vines planted back in 1976-77 and Cabernet Franc remains the estate's most important variety. The number of whites planted reflects the estate's search for a white Italian variety to stand alongside its Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc wines. The future focus will be on Vermentino, Fiano, and Falanghina, to the detriment of Chardonnay.

Five acres of Sauvignon Blanc were planted in 1984 but, over time, it became apparent that the clones employed were not well suited to the Virginia environment. In 2009 the viticulturist Fernando Franco was dispatched to Marlborough (NZ), a climatically similar environment, to seek out clones that performed well there. Three distinct specimens were identified and secured and a total of 7.5 acres of these new vines were planted between 2009 and 2010.

Winemaking
In assessing his winemaking practices, Luca notes that he is not very concerned about keeping first- and second-press juice apart; he is not afraid of some astringency. With the exception of the passito wine, all wines are fermented using selected yeasts.

Luca Paschina, GM-Winemaker

White wines are made in a reductive style with malolactic fermentation suppressed in order to preserve acidity. In the case of the Viognier, they had started out making it in the traditional N. Rhone manner with barrel-fermentation and aging. This style, however, did not seem to fit the fruit that was being produced on the estate. This observation caused Luca to shift to a style for this wine which includes: fermentation in stainless steel; no malolactic fermentation; aging in stainless steel for 9 to 12 months; and stirring on the lees. This style has yielded a wine much more in tune with the fruit.

Red wines are driven by the location of each vineyard block and the wine style. Early-drinking wines do not undergo extended maceration, are fermented with high-vigor yeast, and are aged in used barrels. Wines intended for extended aging are treated as follows:

• Lower vineyard yields
• Traditional/extended fermentation
• Automated pumpovers
• Two-week post-fermentation macerations
• The use of some press wine
• Racked twice before being placed into barrels and then again 6 months later.

Gamba French oak barrels are used for all red wines. Extended-aging wines spend 1 year in oak and then 6 months back in stainless steel tanks before bottling. Wines are never cold-stabilized or fined. I have covered the estate's use of cross-flow filtration in an earlier post.

The flagship red wine is Octagon, first produced in 1991. The wine is a blend of Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. The composition of the components is determined after repeated blind barrel tastings conducted between December and March and the final blend is barrel-aged until the following December. The wines that do not make it into the final blend are declassified and bottled as varietals.

I will cover the wines we tasted in a follow-up post.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

Crossflow filtration and the Barboursville Vineyards (Barboursville, VA) experience: A conversation with Luca Paschina, General Manager-Winemaker

Winemakers are largely divided between those who filter their wines and those who do not. Those who eschew filtration are concerned that the practice can strip out aroma and flavor molecules, thus rendering the finished product less-than-optimal. In his argument against traditional filtration, Clark Smith, author of postmodern winemaking, states thusly:

The focus of postmodern philosophy is the creation and preservation of beneficial macromolecular structure. This structure manifests in wine as colloidal particles sometimes nearly as large as a bacterial cell. The benefits of good structure -- profundity, aromatic integration, and graceful longevity -- appear to be lost in sterile filtration, despite the fact that no tannin material may be retained by the filter. While this lack of residue has convinced some of my colleagues that filtration cannot be harmful to wine structure, I do not concur. My hypothesis is that the action of tight filtration somehow disrupts rather than removes structure.

In a January 2003 article, Smith  described a class of filtration systems which he called the Tangential Flow Family of Filtration. This family is shown in the table below, classified based on the molecular weight of particles that pass through the pores.

Tangential Flow Filtration

Filtration System	Application	Molecular Weight Range (Daltons)
Crossflow Clarification		200,000 - 500,000
Ultrafiltration		1000 - 200,000
	Tannin and Browning Removal	10,000 - 200,000
	Protein Removal	10,000 - 40,000
	Decolorization	1,000 - 5,000
Nanofiltration		200 - 1000
Reverse Osmosis		50 - 200

Source: Clark Smith, The Crossflow Manifesto, Wine Business, January 2003.

According to Smith, the idea of tangential flow filters developed in the 1960s. One of the major problems with sterile filtration is the fouling of the membrane which occurs when tight pore sizes are used. This fouling prevents the passage of material through the pores. The effective limit of traditional filtration is 0.1µ. Tangential flow filters use the scrubbing action of the flow across the surface of the membrane to keep it clean thus allowing the utilization of ever-smaller pore sizes.

All of the systems mentioned in the table employ the strategy of pumping the wine across the membrane at high velocity. As the wine flows across the membrane it continually scrubs the surface, removing fouling material. The majority of the feed stream does not pass through the filter but is retained upstream and returned to the tank. This stream, called the retentate, contains all of the high-molecular-weight components. The low-molecular-weight material that passes through the filter is called the permeate. A comparison of traditional (dead-end) versus tangential filtration is shown in the figure below.

Dead-end versus tangential-flow filtration
(Source: cleanflowfilter.nl)

The Holy Grail of tangential filtrations, according to Smith, "is to be able to clarify wine without harming its structure, and crossflow clarification ... continues to gain steam." In his opinion, the technology works well for unstructured whites, "where a little tannin and color stripping is a good thing, but can prove disastrous for structured reds."

I now turn to my discussion of crossflow with Luca Paschina of Barboursville, a follow-up on a wide-ranging discussion of the estate and its wines. As stated above, Smith has some problem with crossflow filtration and I wanted to see whether his views were being validated at Barboursville.

Luca first became aware of crossflow technology around the year 2000 and was immediately impressed. Barboursville first employed the Bucher-produced system in 2004 in an attempt to clarify its wines in a one-step process. Prior to its implementation of crossflow, the winery was going through at least two levels of filtration and wasting a lot of time and product. The process employed for filtration prior to the acquisition of the crossflow technology was diatomaceous earth (DE) and different levels of pad porosity, staples of the dead-end approach. The issues associated with this approach are catalogued below.

In addition to the one-and-done aspect of crossflow, Barboursville also uses it to remove yeast and bacteria in white wines (thus avoiding the potential of malolactic or yeast fermentation of residual sugar in the bottle) and in reds to avoid Brett bloom in the bottle.

The technology is used on white wines after stainless steel aging on lees, allowing for filtering of the fine lees. These wines are filtered the day before bottling. Red wines are transferred from barrels to tank and then filtered the day after (or later if necessary). Crossflow filtration is applied to every wine once per week between mid-January and late July.

Barboursville purchased its crossflow equipment and paid it off over 5 years. The technology is easy to use but requires an operator with an attention to detail and the ability to follow procedures. The winery is very satisfied with the equipment and the associated process. Staff has adapted positively to the implementation of the product.

In terms of additional advantages, Luca can time his bottling schedule with more versatility (such as filtering today and bottling tomorrow), with no surprises arising from filtration difficulties.

In closing, Luca mentioned that he had initially been skeptical of the product but after seeing how the wines were aging gracefully, he is now a firm believer in the technology.

My conclusion: Luca is using crossflow in an effective and traditional manner (that is, replacement for a DE system) and is currently very satisfied. None of the Clark Smith concerns are evident here.


©Wine -- Mise en abyme