Mike Dunne's Wine of the Week Pick: 09/02/09
Amador Foothill Winery 2008 Amador County Rosato of Sangiovese ($11.50)
The French have a colorful if not especially appetizing term for an old winemaking practice. It's "saignee," pronounced "son-yay," and it is translated variously as "bleeding," "bloodletting" and "heavy loss."
Grim as that may sound, winemakers see saignee as a good thing. Basically, the practice involves drawing from a fermentation tank a portion of fresh juice before it picks up much color, flavor and tannin from the dark skins of the macerated grapes.
The benefits are twofold: For one, it intensifies the ratio of color and flavor compounds in the skins to the juice remaining in the fermentation tank, thereby potentially heightening those attributes of the eventual wine. Secondly, the lightly colored juice that is bled from the tank provides winemakers with the foundation for a second wine, a rose.
Vintners Ben Zeitman and Katie Quinn of Amador Foothill Winery in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley used this technique to help make their spirited 2008 Rosato of Sangiovese, a pink wine of unusual structure, richness and length. With or without food, it has all the festive color, beckoning smell and spunky fruit flavor you'd want for this Labor Day weekend's toast to the dwindling days of summer.
Just a small portion of the rosato - about 50 gallons of the total 750 gallons they made from the 2008 harvest - is saignee juice, but that was enough to bolster appreciably both the wine's purple-edged color and its strawberry and watermelon suggestiveness.
"We do it for the benefit of the red wine," says Quinn of the technique, but she acknowledges that the drawn-off juice also helps pump up the rosato.. The "red wine," incidentally, is their regular table-wine sangiovese, which could be Amador Foothill Winery's flagship release if only the winery weren't also highly regarded for its semillon, zinfandels and the Euro-styled "Katie's Cuvee," a lean and lively red blend made with grapes closely identified with France's Rhone Valley.
Aside from the impact of saignee on the rosato, the wine also reflects last year's marvelous crop, say Zeitman and Quinn. They make a "reserve" sangiovese only in years when the fruit is particularly expressive. They haven't made one since the 2004 vintage, but prospects are looking favorable that they will assemble a reserve from the best barrels of the sangiovese they harvested last fall. The release of that wine, however, will be a couple of years away. The rosato of 2008 can be enjoyed right now.
By the numbers: 13.5 percent alcohol, 345 cases, $11.50.
Context: Zeitman and Quinn like the rosato with salmon, stir-frys and spicy shrimp dishes, though they were surprised to discover recently that it also was amiable with slow-cooked carnitas, a recipe in The Bee this spring (http://www.sacbee.com/livinghere/story/1932473-p3.html). But it's also the wine they most likely will be savoring on their deck overlooking the Sacramento Valley at sunset.
Availability: The Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op and Taylors Market stock the rosato, which also is available at the winery.
More information: Visit Amador Foothill Winery, 12500 Steiner Road, Plymouth, open noon-5 p.m. Friday through Sunday.