November 11th – After 4 years in production Bacigalupi Vineyards is thrilled to release the 2017 Brillante Sparkling Blanc de Noir. This is one of the first documented US made sparkling where raw honey has been used for the dosage in substitution for white sugar.
In preparing to disgorge and release our 2017 Blanc de Noir, we knew we wanted to go in a slightly different and new direction. We wanted to beautiful flavors of the vineyards and of each varietal (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir) to taste even more pronounced. The question was: how do we best accomplish that? Finding the answer to this proved to be quite the journey!
We started with blind tasting French grower champagnes. Grower champagnes refer to estate grown and produced wines, which we felt was the best comparison to what we were trying to do here with our estate grown sparkling wine! The blind tasting was not only delicious (and very fun) but a great way to determine what we liked and didn’t like from each wine and helped to pinpoint what we thought we could do to add nuance to our own wine. We ended up finding many gems in this tasting but one in particular caught our eye. Lelarge Pugeot “Les Bises” Champagne was super unique and compelling. After a bit of research, we realized they added honey to their dosage to balance out the acidity instead of the typical white cane sugar.
The next step involved trials. Because of the very high acidity in the grapes at time of picking, we knew we needed to add a bit of dosage to balance that out. We decided to do trials with a range of white sugar dosage and honey dosage. Hands down, we absolutely loved the honey. It didn’t need very much at all and we landed on adding only 3 g/L, making it an “extra-brut,” in Champagne terms. We still felt the wine needed something to help it fully express its character. After many more trials, we decided to add a bit of still wine to the dosage as well. We added 1% each of our 2019 Bacigalupi Vineyards Pinot Noir and our 2019 Bacigalupi Vineyards Chardonnay. This was finally the terroir driven Bacigalupi Vineyards Blanc de Noir that we had dreamed of!
Our honey comes from a local producer only 4 miles from our vineyards. Using a sugar source that is hyper-local fits with our philosophy about expressing our terroir and minimal intervention in the winemaking. We can’t wait to share this with you!
