"Working by Hand" (Winemaking)
Winemaking: Pinot Blanc At-A-Glance
- Most common styles
- Still, sparkling (as a component in Alsace), rarely 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 dessert styles, which are rare, they are mostly made with Botrytis-affected fruit. In drier styles, lees stirring can be used to enhance texture
- Aging
- Stainless steel, concrete, large oak (vats, foudres), small oak (combination of newer and older, for some dry, but also those rare sweet interpretations)
- Aging potential
- 2-10 years, pedigree-dependent; the best can live even longer
- Presented solo or frequently blended with
- Both. Mostly monovarietal outside of France. In France, though labeled as Pinot Blanc, it is most often a white blend made with another white grape, Auxerrois (Alsace). Further as a blend, Pinot Blanc is often the dominant grape in sparkling Crémant d ’Alsace.
To read more on Pinot Blanc, read Wine Pros “Essential Guide to Pinot Blanc Wine.”