"Working by Hand" (Winemaking)
Winemaking: Marsanne At-A-Glance
- Most common styles
- Still, sparkling, sweet
- Winemaker choices and options
- For dry wines, virtually all winemakers keep intervention to a minimum, preferring resulting wines to be all about purity of the fruit. For sparkling and rarer dessert styles, managing harvest timing is a driver. In drier styles, lees stirring may be utilized to enhance texture
- Aging
- Stainless steel, concrete, large oak (vats, foudres), small oak (combination of newer and older, for dry but especially the rarer sweet interpretations)
- Aging potential
- 2-10 years, pedigree-dependent; the best can live even longer
- Presented solo or frequently blended with
- Both but more often in white blends, in tandem with Viognier, Roussanne, and at times, Grenache Blanc. Single variety wines are more common in Australia, California, and a couple of other New World locations.
For more on Marsanne, see “Your Complete Marsanne Wine Guide” by WinePros.
Blending with other grapes:
- What it does: When classically mixed with its historic cousins, Roussanne and Viognier, Marsanne is chiefly responsible for contributing acidity and added complexity.
- Comment: When Marsanne plays the leading role, as in white wine blends from the Northern Rhône appellations of Hermitage, Crozes-Hermitage, Saint-Joseph and Saint-Péray, its contributions are naturally understood. There are great blended examples made of Marsanne in white Rhône style blends in other spots, due to the aforementioned freshness (acidity) it adds, along with body (from being later ripening/higher in sugar-alcohol). Noteworthy stand-alone varietal Marsannes can be found in New World spots, including California (Tablas Creek and Qupé), and Australia, where Tahbilk’s Marsanne vineyard on the banks of the Goulburn River has a storied history, dating back to the 1860s.