Pinot Noir is one of a few wine grapes that can make each style of wine including white, red, rosé and sparkling wine. The reason a red grape can make white has everything to do with process of how the wine is made. Let’s take a look at how different winemaking methods change the resulting wine–all with one grape: Pinot Noir!
White Pinot Noir
If you were to cut open a Pinot Noir grape, you’d see that the flesh is actually a pale greenish yellow color. So, if you want to produce a white wine with red grapes, you need to remove the skins before they dye the wine red. This is the secret to white Pinot Noir (aka “Vin Gris”)
Of course, the red skins of grapes start dying the juice really quickly so winemakers work extra fast harvesting grapes on a cool morning to get them to the cellar and pressed. The wine press used to make white Pinot Noir is a special pneumatic press (this style of press is used for white wine making) which crushes the grapes but filters off the skins and seeds. The remaining juice typically has a lovely deep golden color.
Red Pinot Noir
Red Pinot Noir uses the red winemaking process.
Grapes are collected and put into grape crushers which drop the entire contents of the crusher into a tank (skins, seeds and all!). Because Pinot Noir is such a thin-skinned variety, it often get extended time on these skins (before and after wine making) to soak up as much of the red pigment as possible. In case you were wondering, these two processes are cold-soaking (before fermentation) and extended maceration (after fermentation). Some winemakers will even add the Pinot Noir stems into the fermentation to increase color extraction (it adds some bitterness but you get a whole lot more color and age-worthiness too!). After this whole process is done, you have a wine with a pale to medium ruby red color.
Rosé Pinot Noir
Making Rosé is all about timing. The longer the skins are in the juice, the more they dye the wine.
For Pinot Noir, this process looks a little like a combination of red and white winemaking. The grapes get crushed into a tank with the skins and seeds. Then the juice is monitored by the winemaker who takes samples every hour or so to check the color. The moment she thinks the color is perfect, the winemaker strains the juice from the skins into clean tanks where the wine completes the fermentation. I’ve spoken with winemakers in both California and Oregon who say they’ve made rosé wines with less than 7 hours of “skin contact” time!
Sparkling Pinot Noir aka Blanc de Noirs
Start with white Pinot Noir and then ferment it again to make blanc de noirs.
This is the specialty of Champagne including Jay-Z’s brand, Armand de Brignac, who’s “tete de cuvée” is a special edition bottling of 100% Pinot Noir in a Blanc de Noirs style. To make sparkling wine, you essentially take a specially formulated wine (using perfectly underripe grapes that produce more acidity) and ferment it again in bottles so that the carbon dioxide can’t escape and it pressurizes the bottle, carbonating the wine. You can find Blanc de Noirs made all over the world, and almost always, Pinot Noir is the grape used for this wine (the other is a Pinot variant called Pinot Meunier).
By: Madeline Puckette
***Grabbed from: http://winefolly.com/tutorial/how-one-red-grape-makes-red-rose-white-and-sparkling-wine/