![]() The Great China Restaurant has been around for generations, and James Yu, the current owner, has a passion for wine and transformed the restaurant into one of the Bay Area's greatest hidden gems for wine - especially wine from his favorite region, Burgundy. What I’m reading James Yu, left, and sommelier, Mark Yatabe, left, at the bar at the Great China Restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., on Tuesday, January 31, 2017. ![]() More than anything, though, “I’ve always wished people could taste fresh grape juice,” Stoumen says. As a new mother - in this week’s piece, Stoumen opens up about the bizarre circumstances of her son’s birth - the winemaker says she has a new appreciation for low-alcohol options. What distinguishes Navarro’s products from Jus Jus, other than the natural-wine angle, are that its juices aren’t sparkling and don’t undergo any fermentation at all.Īt 3.4% abv, the Jus Jus is barely any boozier than kombucha. Navarro identifies most of these products as grape juice, but distinguishes one as “verjus” specifically - the difference being that the Pinot Noir verjus is picked much earlier, at around 13 brix, than the other juices, which clock in around 21 brix. The bracing texture (around 5 atmospheres of pressure, similar to what you’d find in Champagne) helps counter the sweetness, too.īy the way, a shout-out is due here to Navarro Vineyards, which for many years has bottled juice from grapes like Gewurztraminer, a hit with child visitors to its Anderson Valley tasting room. It’s quite sweet - obviously, since very little of the grape juice sugar was fermented - but tastes balanced, with plenty of pert acidity. The Jus Jus smells like wildflower honey and fresh lilies, and tastes like the juicy drippings of orchard fruit. Muscat was a wise choice here, with its sweet aromatics and expressive flavors. Just trust me, it’s one of the great tastes available in this life. The result, 2019 Jus Jus (3.4%, $32/750ml), is an irresistibly delicious snapshot of wine grape juice, which, if you’ve never tried it fresh off the vine, bears zero resemblance to Welch’s. She was able to get away without adding any sulfur, but did have to filter the juice in order to halt fermentation. They picked the grapes - Chardonnay and Muscat - on the early side of the season, pressed them into juice, put them in a tank and then closed it “as soon as fermentation started prickling,” Stoumen says. Instead of producing pressure in individual bottles, as in the Champagne method, the charmat method has you pressurize entire tanks full of liquid. Last year, Stoumen decided to try a different approach: charmat, the method used to make Prosecco. But her 2018 efforts with the Champagne-method verjus didn’t work out. One of the books suggested that sufficient pressure - as in, the sort of pressure that’s found in bottles of highly bubbly Champagne - would prevent yeast from metabolizing. “So I found a bunch of old textbooks,” Stoumen said. But Stoumen and Sherman, committed to a minimal-intervention regime, wanted to avoid that. The normal way to halt a fermentation would be to add a bunch of sulfur to a wine, killing off the yeast. As long as there’s sugar, yeast will want to keep eating it, bringing fermentation to its natural endpoint of dryness. “We wanted to make it naturally, but I didn’t know how to do that if the wine was sweet,” she says. Stoumen loved the idea but, as a self-identified natural winemaker, sensed one big problem. Sherman asked Stoumen if they could make some together, on purpose. It was lightly fizzy (fermentation will do that) and, apparently, tasted amazing. The author of the cookbook “Salad for President,” Sherman had been cooking with verjus and noticed the liquid had begun to re-ferment in the bottle. ![]() But why not make some to drink? That idea came to Stoumen, who makes her Martha Stoumen Wines label in Sebastopol, via her friend Julia Sherman. ![]()
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