10-23 Harvest Season 08 begins with a Crush!

Who wants to crush some grapes?

I'm in my 5th vintage of making wine with the Bacchus Winemaking Club in San Carlos. I can't exactly call myself a winemaker, since the wine is made by a professional, Dominick Chirichillo, but I do get a chance to take part in all the major steps and most of the major decisions that go into the wine. However, before I get involved, the grapes must be harvested (picked), sorted and delivered to the winery (Bacchus). I think I'm only missing out on some dirty work and getting scraped up by grapevines, however it did look pretty glamorous in the movie "A Walk in the Clouds".

So by the time I see the grapes they have been nicely sorted into bins (either the bins they are picked into, which are small 30 lb bins, or large, 1-2 ton bins), placed on a palett (wooden platform that can be picked up by a forklift for easy moving), and they are ready to be crushed. Each year when I've asked friends to help me out with the crush, there is at least two giddy people who ask if they get to stomp on them with their bare feet. YUCK! Would you want to drink a wine that you knew was stomped on with anyone's feet? I know Lucy did it that way in the TV show and all, but I don't think you saw her drink that wine later (whoever has time to look this up on Youtube to confirm, let me know). Crushing involves dumping the bins of grapes into a big machine called a crusher/destemmer, which then removes the stems and any remaining leaves from the grapes and breaks the skins releasing some of the juice. We crushed about 10 bins of Syrah, 8 bins of Mouvedre, and 16 bins of Grenache. The result of crushing about 1000 pounds, or 1/2 ton of grapes is approximately 60 gallons of wine (1 Barrel). My crushing buddy (the budding photographer who took these photos) and I were tired.

After the last bin has been dumped into the crusher, we make sure all the juice has left the machine and then shut the noisy contraption off. The product of the crush has been pumped from the crusher through a big red hose into a large plastic vat. The vat now contains juice, skins and seeds from the grapes. Next we test the sugar content of the wine to see what adjustments need to be made, if any. The tool that we used for testing the sugar was a refractometer, but you can also use a hydrometer; both are measuring the density of your solution (the juice) to tell you how much sugar is dissolved in it. Grapes are generally picked so that their measure of sugar in degrees, called the brix, is below 24 degrees (which results in about 14% alcohol, since the sugar converts to alcohol at a ratio of .58*brix). Today our wine measured at about 26 degrees. The high sugar content is typical in the region that we get our grapes from(Amador County), because the temperatures there are much warmer than in Napa. This usually means that you end up with a wine that is slightly sweet, or a wine that is high in alcohol, but you can alter this by adding water before the wine goes through fermentation. We had the experience in our third vintage, a wine my husband and I served at our wedding, that when 27 degrees brix converts to 15.8% alcohol, the resulting wine is little tough to drink and stay standing. Lesson learned, we added about 4 gallons of water and brought the brix down to about 25 degrees, which is slightly high, but I couldn't bear to add anymore water to the yummy juice. I hope we didn't stop too soon!

The final step in this part of the process is to add sulfer dioxide (a preservative), yeast (which causes fermentation as the yeast feeds on the sugar), and sometimes acid (called acidulating). The grapes have some naturally occuring yeast on their skins, however, winemakers generally like to add a preferred strain of yeast to have more control over the process. The yeast Dominick likes to use is called Pasteur Red. As for acidulating, I have an aversion to acidulating that developed from some snobby wine folks in Napa, so I won't let Dominick do it. This, in additon to the hesitation to add more water, is a choice I'm hoping doesn't come back to haunt me in the form of 24 cases of really sweet wine, but so far all of our vintages have been delicious and we've never added any acid.

Just to quest your thirst for knowledge, the opposite of adding water would be adding sugar. This is called chaptilization and is generally done in cooler climates (like Germany), but is illegal in California.

Next step...PRESS. We will press the grapes next Wednesday!

9-21 Wine tasting in parts Unknown- NC

I find it a unfortunate that some people remain closed minded about new wine producing regions. A few years ago, when I was in Houston for Thanksgiving, I asked my family if we to take a day trip to the Texas wine country with me. Everyone was happy to tag along except my dad and my youngest sister. My sister had a great excuse, A&M (her school) was playing Texas that day. That was HUGE! I'm pretty sure they lost, but at least my sister didn't feel like she wasn't supporting her team. My dad claimed to also have serious ties to the outcome of the game, but while he was investing quite a bit of money in A&M at the time, it was pretty evident when it came time to tasting what we brought back with us from our tasting trip that my dad had some ulterior motives for staying home. While we also sipped on our Texan juice, he decided to pop open a Silver Oak (aka serious Napa Cabernet). To be fair to dad, he's a lot more open now, but I'd like to claim credit (Dad, you can agree by commenting below). By the way, the winery we visited that day was Messina Hof. The winemaker there had worked at BV in his past, which was the reason for my interest. They have a nice restaurant and a fun, cozy tasting room. The wine we liked enough to bring home was called Paulo (eponymous of winemaker Paul Bonariggo). Now that was quite a few years ago (like maybe 6), but they still make that wine and its still winning awards in Texas.

So when I recently found myself in North Carolina, which happens to be one of the first wine producing regions in America - stunted by Prohibition, I was ecstatic when it was suggested that we visit one of the local wineries. We were staying in Winston-Salem (better known for a vice of a different sort), but nearby Lexington, NC had one of Wine Enthusiast's top 25 wineries in America, Childress Winery. Childress is owned by race car driver Richard Childress. Now before you go on making any comments about a winery owned by a race car driver, I will remind you that in Napa the Andretti family has a winery and in Sonoma we've got serious race car traffic at Sear's Point. And besides, I also know of a few veterinarians and dentists that own wineries, which is just as strange.

My friend Kelly and I were accompanied to the winery by her husband and mine, along with their son. All of us newcomers walked up to the winery a bit amazed at how beautiful the place was. They'd had a Tuscan-inspired architect from Georgia (the only non-local part of the whole establishment) design an appropriately themed estate. Kelly had given about 100 (or maybe 1000) disclaimers on how the wine probably wouldn't be very good, but I still had an open mind, and if nothing else the setting was gorgeous. The estate was surrouned by rolling hills and vineyards, live music was playing outside, and the sound of laugther and clanking glasses was everywhere. This ambience is something I will give much more credit to non-Napa wineries for. There is a bit of glory in not being the premier wine region in the country, something enjoyable and laid back about just being good to drink.

And the wines (at least most of them) were good to drink. We tasted two of the three categories of wines Childress makes, the Classic and the Varietal. While none of us had much of a liking for the Classic wines (the least expensive), we found just about every one of the Varietal wines to be tasty, and of good quality (I was really the only one judging that). The Varietals were all very reasonable priced as well, between $9.99 and $19.99 at the wineries price (which is often the most expensive you will find a wine). I had a special taste for the Sauvignon Blanc and the Sangiovese. Both wines were dry, which is usually the first fault of any young (newer) wine region, the wines often having a bit of residual sugar (the wine word for sweetness). The Sauvignon Blanc was also light and zippy with lots of citrus and melon and a hint of herbs. The Sangiovese was smooth with a nice black cherry flavor and a good finish (meaning it lingered a bit). We decided to skip the Signature tasting, but were assured by a very knowledgable host that they were the best (well of course...). I was very impressed by the education and enthusiasm of all of the staff, from the tasting room to the tour guide. The woman who poured for us had just returned from 2 weeks of career development in Napa where she visited something like 40 wineries. The woman who guided our tour answered a few of the tougher questions I asked (like how does sugar % in grapes compare with brix-which is the term I am most familiar with to describe the level of sugar in grapes). The tour guide was also genuinely excited to have someone from Northern California on the tour, and introduced me to the winemaker to further my dialogue. I was also very impressed by the wineries focus on being "green", which they pushed during the tour. I learned how bad synthetic corks are for the environment compared to screw caps (who knew!). They claimed cork was 50/50, good and bad, better for recycling, but not necessarily good for the trees it comes from.

We took two bottles home. We'd only brought enough packing materials (a two bottle styrofoam box) for that many (and have no room in our apartment for any more). We bought one of the Classic wines that we liked just enough, the white, because of the race car themed label and capsule (the metal foil on the top of the bottle) and a bottle of the Varietal Sauvignon Blanc.

I've been to tasting rooms in almost as many states as I've been to: Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New York, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and of course California. While I wouldn't say that I've had anything better than the wines of California, Oregon and Washington, I will say that I've had some good wines in all of them, some very interesting wines at some of them, and a great experience every time (and I spit!)

If you're in NC, you have to try some wine made from Scuppernog or Muscadine. They are two regionally native grapes that are wild throughout the area we visited. The wine isn't good, but it's wierd enough to be interesting. By the way, Napa doesn't have any native grapes that they make wine from...