More and more people are becoming attached to fragrant, fruit centered wines. You can have fruit and some “neutral” oak infusion in the wine, but a real expression of the fruit is something that is produced purely in stainless steel, concrete or other vessels. Hence INOX. What is INOX, it comes from a French term known as inoxydable. It essentially means stainless steel. Temperature controlled stainless steel vessels are what often produce the purest of wines. You can control things, and that’s important. After all yeast is a living thing and it needs the right environment to produce its thing, fermented juice or wine.
Vessels in the old world, Europe as far east as Georgia (the country let’s say not the US state) often used lots of different vessels to ferment their wine. It is kind of sad that concrete is not that often used in the USA, I think it has a special place, but maybe if you want that, you’d have to make a foray to France to see it and experience concrete fermentation tanks, big things like little old house huts sitting inside of a cooled building. In the USA we just lost a Sonoma builder of artisan concrete vessels. Here on the left coast stainless is the champion for now and maybe forever. Some wine makers of course also use the plastic tubs, that you may see stacked up outside of the winery’s production zone, especially right now as veraison is on here. Most important is the cleanliness, there is a lot of cleaning work in wine making, just as in beer making.
Accessibility of the wines that make a certain variety express itself is a little difficult these days as the market re-trenches and finds its new footing in a world where the wine experts are still buying the best wines out there, but many others are simply cutting back on alcohol altogether. Let us consider the Chardonnay variety. It is one where “unoaked” found winemaker roots some years (even decades) ago but never got that entrenched in the mass market. Smaller winemakers, always the more interesting ones did stick with it. Unoaked Chardonnay may be popping up on the West Coast and the fact that this word “unoaked” often shows up on the label makes it easier to seek out. You could find some of this and compare it to Chablis, okay, the same genetics and DNA, French Chardonnay grape, that produces a limestone minerality and will fool most palates into thinking this can’t even be the same variety, but that variety style is also quite impressive. I actually recommend you try the 2 Chablis’s that Kirkland produces to get the proper introduction, there you might like them both?
Lots of interesting tropical notes here and clean and crisp.
https://shop.klwines.com/products/details/1984771
