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Time to make room for new Northwest white, pink wines

By Great Northwest Wine on December 2, 2017

White wine grapes showed well in the third annual Great Northwest Wine Competition.

The time from when white wine grapes are harvested to when the become wine can take as little as a few weeks. (Photo by Andy Perdue/Great Northwest Wine)

The 2017 harvest has all but wrapped up. Walk into any winery in the Pacific Northwest and in the cellar there will be red and white wines happily bubbling away, with yeast happily converting the sugar to alcohol.

It takes up to a few weeks for white wine grape juice to complete the magical process of becoming wine. That typically happens in stainless steel tanks, vessels that can be used over and over for years, seriously cutting the cost of winemaking vs. using oak barrels, which sometimes can rob white wines of the clean freshness.

By spring, winemakers will be thinking about bottling their new white and pink wines. Unlike reds, they don’t gain a lot of complexity by aging, except in the rare cases of Riesling, Sèmillon and whites blends from Bordeaux and the spectacular Chardonnays of Chablis.

Still have a few bottles of white and pink wines hanging around? Time to drink up and make room for new wines in a few months. Here are a few white and pink wines, all priced at $15 and under that we’ve tasted. Look for them at you’re favorite wine merchant or directly from the wineries.

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About Great Northwest Wine

Articles authored by Great Northwest Wine are co-authored by Eric Degerman and Andy Perdue. In most cases, these are wine reviews that are judged blind by the Great Northwest Wine tasting panel.