Roessler 2008 Bluejay Pinot Noir Two - Pack

Oy…making it really hard to stay on the SIWBM! This wine has been talked about over and over, especially when any other pinot offer came up. I’m sorely tempted, but I have no space for any more wine, what with 2 cases on the floor and 2 more recent deliveries on a chair. Going to have to wait for the rats on this one, and see if they push me into spending over $25/bottle…that’s going to be tough…

Hi Everyone. I’m Scott Shapley, the winemaker, and I figured I ought to jump in right away and talk about the Smoke Taint issue. But first, to answer the second tech question, the vineyards are Savoy, Hein, and Londer, and the clones are Pommard, Wadenswil, Martini, 115, 777, 667, and 114.

Now back to Wild Fires and Smoke taint… While a lot of the wooters out there are quite savvy about all of this, I’ll give a quick summary of what the smoke taint issue is (sorry to bore those of you who know, but this is just a terrific chance to educate those who don’t know). When fires burn close enough to vines, smoke particles can be taken up by the leaves (along with CO2 and other air that the plants get this way). What happens is that these particulate chemicals from the smoke are incorporated into the fundamental structure of the grapes as the vines put their energy into fruit growth. Some people have asked if we could just wash off the grapes, but the big problem is that it is IN the grapes. They’ve dealt with this in Australia for years and at much worse levels, but it was new to a lot of us here in California.

What I decided to do was to vinify the wines the same way I normally would, and then filter after malolactic fermentation was complete. I didn’t want to be too gentle with extraction and then have wines that could not stand up to filtration, so I pumped and punched as usual to make sure there was enough weight there.

I did not want to filter the juice at Harvest, both because filtering Juice can be a big, slow, sticky mess, and I had heard that the compounds that cause the taint can be bound up with sugar, and so I didn’t want to filter some and then have more released later. I don’t know if this last part is completely acurate, but I heard it at the time, and I already didn’t want to filter the juice anyway.

So once the affected lots were stable after malolactic, I filtered the wines to remove the offending compounds. When we talk about smoke in wine, it often is a good thing - think light, toasty, oak, smoked meats, foresty, woody aromas, even seared portabella mushrooms. So “Smoke” as used to describe the Bluejay is nice. “Smoke taint” is not nice. More like an old wet ashtray.

The good news is that the filtration works. It gets out the compounds (Hurray!). The bad news is that you have to filter it through multiple passes, and it can also strip out other nuanced flavors. When people talk about the smoke taint “coming back” it is actually not that it is coming back, but that the wine was not filtered enough to get it all out to begin with. Stopping the filtration by taste I think got some folks into trouble, because it starts to taste a lot better compared to the original, untreated wine, even when there’s still some taint left, and then you get worried about over stripping the wine and stop too early.

After I filtered, I kept lots separate, got them back in barrel, and then didn’t taste them again for about 4 months so I wouldn’t go crazy.

When Roger and I tasted through again just before the 2009 Harvest, we were very pleased at how the lots were tasting, and we were excited that there was a great Bluejay to be made. I had decided to over-vintage in any case so the wines would have more time to recover from filtration and condense a little more through the usual evaporation and topping regime, and we ended up bottling the Bluejay in December, just after Harvest 2009.

In selecting barrels for the blend, I was really looking to make sure that nothing I selected had been beaten back too hard by the filtration and that there was good expression of complexity and flavor (I guess that part is just like every year!). The smoke taint qualities were gone, and we’ve been able to put out a great Bluejay. I can attest to it personally in that it’s my wife’s favorite right now, so we’ve been enjoying a lot of it!

I apologize for such a long response, but I figured that it was an important enough issue that I ought to clear the air as much as possible. Feel free to fire any follow-up questions at me (or really any questions at all).

I’ll answer a couple of other posts I saw here in a minute, and I’ll keep checking in with the blog in and amongst my cellarly duties tomorrow as well.

More soon,

Scott

Hey there, there are a lot of crazy things that can be used in wine to clarify, reduce astringency, draw out tannins, etc. I really don’t know how anyone decided to try any of them (oh, gee, maybe I’ll just pop a swim-bladder in my barrel, and then the wine’ll taste great!) In any case, there are a lot of these techniques that have been around for a long, long time.

We didn’t use any fining here,and from what I have heard, fining has not been as successful as filtration, although some folks may have had mor esuccess than others. I certainly have been happy with my decision to filter. I guess we all learned a lot in 2008, and while I hope we never have to use what we learned again, if we do, I won’t hesitate to filter right after malolactic, and I won’t lose sleep over it this time! :slight_smile:

I think that you will be very happy with the 2008 Bluejay. We got enough extraction to hold up to the filtration, and we let it rest long enough before blending and bottling. Most importantly, it will not be like smoking and drinking at the same time (although it was like that in for the untreated wine).

More soon…

Hi there,

Your questions aren’t stupid at all. I’ll try to answer them in rapid-fire this time:

  1. The smoke in the description at the blog intro refers more to the smokey characters one might normally get from a Pinot, so it isn’t really about the smoke-taint or anything unusual. The Savoy usually does impart a nice smoky quality, as does the 20-30% new oak we use

  2. I think the 2008 Bluejay will actually last nicely, but I think it’s tasting good, and I have a hard time cellaring things, because I drink them too fast! I guess I save on storage space, at least. :slight_smile:

  3. The 14 months on oak is actually a little deceptive because I just calculated that based on Harvest to Bottling, but in reality, the wine was in tank for a month or so around filtration, and then the barrels were very thouroughly rinsed and steamed to extract a little extra out of the pores. This would also take the barrels barrels down a notch from where they would have been if the wine had stayed in them.

4)Leaving the wine in barrel longer actually helps to soften the oak character and integrate it into the wine better, along with allowing the grape tanning to soften and the wine as a whole to mature a bit. In many ways it can make it easier to release more quickly after bottling because the wine has already evolved futher.

In most years, we bottle the Bluejay the August before the next Harvest and then release it in December just after, so going from the December 2009 bottling to April 2010 is actually getting you about the same bottle time before purchase. The main thing is that it is tasting good, and it will be fun to see the labrat comments once they are in.

Hope that helps, but let me know if Imissed anything…

To WAY over-simplify the differences, I’d say Peregrine has black fruit and sagebrushy, herbed notes, while Bluejay leans more to combined Blue and red fruit with mushrooms and earthiness. Both overlap as well, and it depends on my mod when I’m tasting them or what Imight be eating at the time, but that’s my very general call on them. Other Wooters might have more input on that score as well - it’s always nice to get a lot of opinions when it comes to taste (although your own palate is king!)

Hey there,

I’ve got to admit that we barely made any money on the 2007 Bluejay winewoot offer last year (no offense to WineWoot! - it was our call!), and so we needed to up the ante a little. I’d say it’s still a great 2-pack deal for the 2008’s.

The grapes we work with up in Anderson Valley (and everywhere else, really) are quite expensive, and we source them the same for our single-vineyard wines and our Bluejay and other appellation blends, so it’s always a bit tight on the appellation blends, but we still like to put them out at a lower price point.

Hope that helps!

Either way should be fine, but they’re tasting good right now. I guess the great thing about more than one bottle is that you can try one and decide if you want to lock the rest away for a while (mine somehow end up evading the cellar, most of the time…).

The Roessler Bluejay was my first heartbreak last year–heat killed the bottles on their way to my home in south Florida. And it was about this time of year, too. Guess I’m out again. :frowning:

The 2007 Bluejay was fantastic, I’m hoping for more of the same with this stuff :slight_smile:

How does the 2008 Bluejay compare with the 2007 Bluejay now that there was all of this filtration done to it?

Blue Jay was probably my favorite wine from last year. I have been saving the last bottle, hoping for some Roessler. Originally, I was using the Blue Jay to keep my hands off the single vineyard two-pack, though one of those I gave away as a Valentine’s gift to two (and unfortunately it won’t be consumed by the person I gave it to, since a good friend of hers passed away, and thus she now associates the bottle with her lost friend, and I’m not even close to being the a-hole who wantss it back), however I love the Blue Jay so damn much now that I’ve been whittling down my stores of the cheaper six-packs (Boss Monster zin, which knocks me out with its canned whipped cream finish) or abstaining from wine altogether.

This woot ain’t the deal the other one was, but winemakers gotta eat too!

Awh, screw it. Unemployment. Anyone hiring? I need to make back about $50 ASAP.

In for 2. I’m on a PN kick right meow.

I’m available to lose my rat virginity!! hint hint

I changed my shipment address to my place of employment specifically for this reason!!!

YES! Psyched to see the Bluejay finally back. The 2007 was my favorite Pinot Noir ever. Would LOVE to rat this one.

What will you do with those barrels? Will this vintage continue to affect following vintages as equipment, including barrels, are re-used for following vintages? For how long, and how much?

I may look like a horse, but I can taste like a rat… HINT HINT! :wink:

PS: What can we do to get a 2007 included, for those of us who weren’t smart enough to woot last time but would like to compare?

I have never been a Pinot lover. But, Bluejay is the one (last years offering) that got me to start a very diversified collection. I also went back and pulled up the comments on that past offer and some of the later reviews did not even sound like they were drinking the same wine I was. This is awesome juice and so glad to see it back again. Would be fun to compare this 2008 to the 2007. Rat available here!!

The 07 Bluejay was amazing, definitely my favorite woot wine last year. I should’ve got two last time. . .won’t make that mistake again!

This is a good one based on previous experience. I’ve ordered quite a few packs from Woot and some were quite disappointing. For example, I served a recent Woot Red Zeppelin to some guests for dinner and it was awful - the fruit was totally masked by a heavy oak chip taste, where this Cab. blend should have been great.

Excellent timing and very informative. Nice to see input this early. It shows me that you have cared and continue to care about the wooters on this site. I’ve always missed your previous offerings and heard many comparisons to your wine during Woot discussions. Once I talk to my son, I’ll be pressing the button.

It is always a good week when we start off with Roessler! For those that don’t know, Can’t Miss. By far my favorite winery. Go to roessler.com and join their wine club.