A Virginia Doctor's Novel Nouveau

A Virginia Doctor's Novel Nouveau

When the first air-freighted bottles of 2006 Beaujolais nouveau arrived from France last week, Scott Twentyman of Falls Church wasn't at his local wine shop to greet them. An avid home winemaker, Twentyman will be toasting the harvest with his own 2006 "nouveau," made from grapes he picked, crushed and fermented himself. Twentyman plans to uncork his first-ever nouveau on Thanksgiving day at his family's farm in the Northern Neck region of Virginia.

"A nouveau is the perfect Thanksgiving wine," said Twentyman, 50, a psychoanalyst who makes wine in the basement, the back yard and occasionally the living room of his three-bedroom home a few hundred yards from busy Route 7. "It's a harvest wine, and Thanksgiving celebrates the bounty of the harvest."

Unlike Beaujolais nouveau, made in southern Burgundy by Georges Duboeuf and dozens of other French producers eager to cash in on the world's craving for an effusively grapy, if somewhat alcoholically raw wine made from grapes of the new harvest, Twentyman's nouveau is not made from the gamay grape. In fact, it's not even red. It's a rosé, made from cabernet franc, a sturdy red grape.

Although making a rosé from cabernet franc is nothing new, Twentyman's notion of turning it into a nouveau is unusual at the very least. Commercially made rosés normally are aged for several months after fermentation, the process in which yeasts turn grape juice into wine by converting sugar into alcohol. Even though most rosés are consumed quite young, they are considered standard vintage-dated wines because, unlike nouveaus, they are not bottled and sold until the following year, in the spring.

Twentyman's rosé is nothing if not nouveau. The grapes were picked Oct. 9 with the help of his wife, Sallie, a gourmet cooking teacher and cookbook author, at a 2.6-acre vineyard in western Maryland owned by grape grower Richard Penna. The vineyard, which also supplies grapes to several nearby commercial wineries, is known for the quality of its cabernet franc, a freeze-resistant vine that thrives in the frost-prone vineyards of Maryland and nearby Virginia.

For the 10 gallons of wine he planned to make, Twentyman needed to pick almost 200 pounds of grapes, which he carefully placed into several plastic bins called grape lugs. The lugs keep the grape skins from being bruised, which would harm the flavor.

Next, he loaded them into a hand-cranked crusher-destemmer, which ingests grape bunches at the top and spits out bitter seeds and stems at the bottom. The foamy, reddish-purple grape juice and skins, which dribble from a spout into a small bucket, were collected in a standard Rubbermaid trash can for the trip back to the home winery.

The creation of the nouveau commenced the next day by means of a traditional French winemaking technique called saignee, in which some of the pink grape juice is siphoned off and the rest is left to mature. Yeasts are then added to both to start fermentation. "You get a more deeply flavored red wine, and you get to make a tasty rosé with what you siphon off," he said. Of a total of 10 gallons, three will become nouveau, and the rest will mature into red cabernet franc.

With Thanksgiving approaching, however, a potential snafu arose. Would the wine be ready in time for the gobbler? Although the color was an alluring pink, the wine was cloudy -- looking more like milky cran-apple juice than Provence rosé -- because the yeast had not had time to settle. At most commercial wineries, that common occurrence would be vanquished by a quick trip through filters, but Twentyman opposes such methods as interventionist. "Filtration doesn't just remove the haze," he says. "It strips out the flavor, too." He has chosen to let the wine settle naturally and is confident it will be ready to bottle by Thanksgiving.

Although Twentyman knows a lot about winemaking, he has been doing it for just three years. His involvement began when his interest in Bordeaux led him to join the Virginia chapter of the American Wine Society, a club devoted primarily to tasting wine, not to making it. However, one of its longtime members, Wes Kriebel, an award-winning home winemaker, took Twentyman under his wing. "I learned almost everything I know from Wes, and I still go to him constantly for advice," Twentyman said. Kriebel refuses to take credit. "Scott is serious about his winemaking," he said, "which is the big reason his wines turn out so well."

Twentyman and Kriebel appear to be part of a growing legion of Washington area winemakers. According to Brad Ring, publisher of WineMaker Magazine in Manchester, Vt., the leading publication devoted solely to the hobby, more than 750,000 home winemakers are active across the country. "The boom in the Virginia wine industry, with so much government encouragement and support, has really stimulated interest in home winemaking in the entire mid-Atlantic region," which encompasses Maryland, Virginia and the District, Ring said.

However, he said, "as you might imagine, the quality varies tremendously, with some wines almost undrinkable and others approaching the quality of the very best commercially available wines."

For Twentyman, it's not about matching anybody else's best, commercial or otherwise. While winemaking certainly isn't his religion or even his philosophy, it's not just winemaking, either. In a nod to his profession and to the fact that he finds the process therapeutic, he calls his wine "Insight."

"Making wine reconnects me with the ancient cycle of growth and harvest, something we've lost in our technological society," he said. "And especially during the holidays, it's a way of sharing something that I love with the people I care so much about."

Have a question for wine columnist Ben Giliberti? Email him atfood@washpost.com.