Rack and Roll

News flash:  Making wine while hungover is less enjoyable than it otherwise might be.  I can confirm this from my experience the other morning.  I’m not talking “let’s do another tequila shot” hungover.  It’s just that the prior night I enjoyed more in one sitting of the Nicholas Ranch 2006 Chardonnay than is generally recommended.  But it’s just so tasty.  Nonetheless, I fought through the pain, and by lunchtime the new Pinot Noir had been racked into two 5-gallon glass carboys.

The act of racking is really a test to determine your level of greed.  The idea is to siphon the wine from one container to another, while leaving whatever sediment has settled in the bottom behind.  Of course, that sediment is sitting in wine, and the more wine you leave, the less wine you have to drink later.  And there’s the rub - do I try to retain every last drop of wine that I can, knowing that I risk transferring some of the sediment into the new container at the same time, or do I act like a reasonable human, and be willing to spare the cloudy stuff at the bottom for the betterment of the finished product.  I usually fall somewhere in between, and in this case that meant pouring a gallon and a half of mush down the storm drain in the back alley.  I swear there was a decent glass in there somewhere.  After that, I inoculated the wine with malolactic bacteria and stored it in the garage to do its business.  And with that, the aging season has begun.

Pulp Friction

Busy weekend for our winemaking heroes.  On Friday we hosted our first ever winery tour for our friendly neighbors the Geller family.  Plus, since we’re not an officially licensed established, we were even able to let them participate in the process.  Not long after the punchdown shown here, the “cap” on the pinot noir officially dropped.  It took me two years to figure out that when winemakers say that, it means the skins are no longer being pushed to the top by the off-gassing of the fermentation process.  Translation:  It’s time to press!

Yesterday’s pressing was the usual difficult mess.  We were dealing with a higher volume then we had in the past which presented a whole new set of challenges, given that we own the smallest basket press available on the market.  By the end though, we ended up with about 12 gallons of wine in two buckets and a basket full of pressed skins and seeds.  In the past, we’ve added the skins to our compost pile and felt very good about ourselves, but then it finally hit us that this could help explain our growing fruit-fly problem.  As a result, there’s an 80 pound bag of grape pulp in the alley behind our house that we’re offering free to a good home.  You haul.

Hazy Shade of Vintner

As my Chardonnay completes its malolactic fermentation, I’m struggling with what to do about the cloudiness of the wine.  Generally speaking, hazy wines can be either filtered (which is not unlike straining your cooked pasta but with much, much smaller holes) or fined (which involves putting some ingredient into your wine which will bond with the floating particles and pull them to the bottom.)  In my case, filtering is not on the table because I don’t have the right equipment, but fining agents only cost a couple bucks. 

Fining - Putting junk in your wine so that it will pull out the other junk.

The question therefore becomes if and when.  Of course, I’ve never made a white wine before, and have no one I can ask.  In typical fashion, the books don’t help at all.  Some say to fine all whites during fermentation, some say to do it at the first racking, and some say to wait until the very end because you probably won’t need to do it at all.  As a general rule, I’d rather not add anything to the wine, but the longer I wait to see if it clears up on its own, the more risk I run that a late addition could alter the wine’s character without leaving it much time to recover.  Here’s an example why trying to teach yourself a skill may not be all that efficient, particularly when at best you get two tries at it a year.  For the moment, I’ve decided not to do anything.  If I serve you a cloudy homemade wine in the future, however, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your snickering to a minimum.

Call Me Knight Rider

According to the Blogspot Stats page, I now have over 300 pageviews internationally on this website.  I say “internationally,” because in addition to the two hits I’ve received from Canada, I purportedly have received 11 hits from the Bavarian region.  It appears that, like David Hasselhoff, this blog is huge in Germany.  I’m inclined to assume there’s a flaw in the data collection here.  After all, this website is free.  But in the unlikely event that there are actual people in Germany reviewing this blog, I say “guten tag”, and thank you for making my humble efforts trans-Atlantic.

To celebrate my milestone, and mostly because we were thirsty, I opened one of the gems of our cellar last night – a 1996 Clos de la Roche Grand Cru from Burgundy – a gift I received from Charlie a few years back.  After all those years in the bottle, it remained soft, fruity and balanced.  Just as I imagine the 2009 Dry Run Pinot Noir will taste 13 years from now.

Punchdown

The yeast starter has done its job on the Pinot Noir, and I can confirm from the aroma emanating from the basement that fermentation is now in full throttle.  When fermenting red wines, we leave the juice on the skins in order to impart the color, tannins and flavors that characterize these varietals.  The carbon dioxide and other gasses produced by the sugar conversion process causes the skins to rise to the top of the bucket, forming what’s called a “cap.”  The home-winemaker’s job during this period is to punchdown the cap two or three times a day to ensure that the skins remain in contact with the juice. 

My technique involves a stainless steel potato masher I bought on Amazon.com for just this purpose.  I’m not sure how real wineries do this step in mass production, but since my tool will also have handy Thanksgiving dinner related applications, it’s one of the rare occasions where I think producing wine in small quantities might actually be more cost effective than the alternative.   

Before

After

Attack of the Fruit-Flies

You know you’re arrived as a home winemaker when the fruit-flies become an everyday part of your life.  Last night I went to pour the last bit of the 2009 Dry Run Pinot Noir we were drinking (which is mellowing-out quiet nicely in the bottle I might add) and ended up with five fruit flies in my glass.  Since I won’t be giving up my hobby anytime soon and I’m told there’s no real way to get rid of them, I took that as a sign that we need to be drinking faster. 

Having had 24 hours to recover from the trauma of adding water to my latest production, I was back in high spirits and ready to launch fermentation.  Every variety prefers a slightly different strand of yeast starter, and for this year’s Pinot Noir I chose Lalvin’s Bourgovin RC212.  I combined 3 small packets with 6 ounces of warm water, let stand for 15 minutes to create a milkshake looking mush, then added to the buckets of must.  And with that, our wine will be born.  We hope.

Water Log

My Russian River Pinot Noir grapes just arrived from California and were available for pick-up at Harford Vineyard yesterday.  I had a meeting to go to in DC that morning, however, and since Harford is an hour north of my house, that meant a total of 5 hours in the car.  It sure will be easier when I have my own vineyard.  Ok, maybe easier isn’t the right word.  How about more convenient.

  

Once again I was using the Harford crusher/de-stemmer to crush my grapes, only this time Roxanne gave me a hard time about combing through my 144 pounds one bunch at a time to pick out the bad grapes.  “If you take an hour do this again I’m going to have to charge you double.”  Then she started ridiculing me for removing all the dried-up raisins from my bunches.  “You’re crazy to take those raisins out, there’s good sugar in there.”  Finally she started hovering over me and telling me to hurry up, so in a panic I just ended up dumping the entire 4 lugs in. 

Well, when I returned home I confirmed that I know more about winemaking than Roxanne, as I found this kernel of knowledge in Jon Iverson’s book:  “If a cluster is raisined and hard, discard it and proceed using only fruit that is of sound quality.”  Seems kind of obvious.  Being smarter than Roxanne gave me little solace, however, since I immediately learned that my must now had too much sugar.  At 27 brix, the must would ferment to an alcohol content greater than 15%, excessive even for the least discerning of palates. 

Brix – A measure of sugar content in grape must.  The presence of raisins in your must will effect its reading.

So how does one reduce the sugar content of their newly crushed grapes?  By adding water.  Pouring water into your beautiful Pinot Noir must feels a little bit like getting punched in the gut.  The books say that if you have high sugar then that’s just what you do and there’s nothing to be ashamed of, but that rings like the kind of thing you might say to the one kid in your high school who couldn’t get a date to the prom.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but you’re glad it’s not you.  Nonetheless, it was me, and sense there was math involved in the project, I focused on at least doing that part right.

I've never seen a must with 27 brix before.  I’m pretty sure I could have avoided it if I had stood up to Roxanne and made sure to pick out every raisin one at a time.  On the other hand, I’m sure when those grapes were picked sometime last week they weren’t shriveled.  Funny how a trip across country in a refrigerated truck could effect their quality.  Did I mention I want my own vineyard?

Sugar Free

With my fermenting Chardonnay settling to stillness over the weekend, it was time to conduct a simple experiment to determine whether primary fermentation was complete.  A Clinitest table is deposited into a test tube of .5 ml of wine, which will immediately boil and change color.  The shade of the color, which can range from blue, to green, to orange to brown, tells you what percentage sugar content remains.  In my case, the sample turned a dark green, suggesting only 0.2% residual sugar and marking fermentation as all but complete.  As with each step in the winemaking process, I also tasted my wine for the first time.  Author Jeff Cox correctly points out that you should taste this newly formed wine like you would castor oil, which while sound advice, is still a bit harsh on the castor oil, because at least it has other applications.

I combined the wine into one 5-gallon and two 1-gallon carboys to eliminate the extra space at the top.  From this point on any excess exposure to oxygen should be avoided.  Most reds and full-bodied whites now undergo a step called malolactic (or secondary) fermentation (“MLF”).  The procedure is similar to the primary fermentation, in that a powdered bacteria is added to the wine, but in this case rather than converting sugar to alcohol, the process converts malic acid to lactic acid, while ultimately reducing the wine’s TA and lessening the palate’s perceived strength of the acidity.  To explain this further would require a working knowledge of the characteristics of acid, which I do not possess.  Nonetheless, all the books say that if you want a buttery Chardonnay you should put your wine through MLF, so Land O’Lakes here I come. 

Intro to Black Rot

As I’m waiting for my Chardonnay to ferment and my Pinot Noir to arrive from California, I’m reminded of the much more extreme waiting period that goes with planting your own vineyard.  While the 2009 growing season produced a decent display of leaves and vines, it was the novelty of it all that was most exciting.  For the 2010 season, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a handful of grape bunches starting to form in late Spring.  There were about 20 in all - not enough to make wine out of, but enough to learn how they would hold up in the humid Maryland Summer.

From the books I’ve read about viticulture, I’ve learned that there are basically two primary functions that go into producing a successful vineyard:  managing the canopy through the appropriate pruning, shaping and thinning of the vines; and protecting them from pests and disease through frequent and assorted spraying.  For those of us who shop at Whole Foods, it’s natural to have a romantic notion about growing an organic, spray free vineyard.  I quickly learned that what’s realistic is much different, particularly when you’re in the unfortunate position of only being able to check on your vines once a week or so.

By midway through the Summer, about half of my aspiring grapes had shriveled up and rotted.  By the end of August, there wasn’t a single salvageable grape in the entire row of vines.  While I never intended to make a world class wine from the pound and a half of grapes I might have otherwise collected from two year old vines, I was more than a little disappointed to turn out with nothing.  It was time to reintroduce myself to the wonder of chemicals, and resign myself to waiting yet another year before I would be able to taste a mature grape of my very own.

Black Rot –  A fungus disease common in vineyards east of the Rockies, known to attack both grapes and leaves.  It blows.

The Smell of Yeast

For the home winemaker, there is no finer aroma then the smell of wine during fermentation.  For everyone else, it is a rank stench indeed.  Opening the door to the downstairs basement releases vapors that by all accounts I should never have expected my gracious wife to allow me to bring into the house, yet there it is nonetheless, and with only the smallest of complaints. 

As the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol it off-puts carbon dioxide and other gases.  To allow these gases to be released from the carboy, while keeping out oxygen which could ruin the wine, we cork the carboys with airlocks.  The airlocks I use have three plastic pieces, one of which holds a small amount of water.  The released gases move up the carboy through a hole in the cork and into the water, lifting up a second piece of plastic as the pressure builds, and finally exits the carboy through small holes in the plastic cap on top.  In addition to the hideous (I mean lovely) smell, the airlocks provide a great way to confirm that the fermentation is in process, because at full steam the middle plastic piece will bob up and down on a regular basis as it releases the gas.  Mine is currently popping at about once a second, which means at this rate I should have fully fermented wine in a matter of days.  In the meantime, the two glass carboys look like a lifetime supply of the muddiest, fizziest Sprite you’ve ever seen.  Yummy!

Fun with Chemistry

With the Chardonnay juice off the skins, there was one last step to take before beginning the fermentation.  The perfect glass of wine will reach the ideal combination between alcohol level and acidity to provide a refreshing, thirst-quenching balance.  The amount of alcohol level in the wine is dependent upon the amount of sugar in the grapes, since as we know fermentation is the act of turning that sugar into alcohol.  You can measure the sugar level with a refractometer, which I did, and got a reading of 23 brix.  This equates to an alcohol content of approximately 13.0%.  If your brix are low, then the only thing to do is literally add sugar to your juice, but fortunately I’m right where I need to be, so we managed to avoid that strange act this time.

We also need to use a pH Meter and acid testing kit to measure the TA, or titratable acid, and pH of our juice.  The TA refers to the amount of acid in the juice, and the pH refers to the strength of the acidity.  I don’t frankly understand what that means, but I’m reading verbatim in this book right here, so it must be true.  Our TA of .69 and pH of 3.52 are just within the desired range, although a little towards the low side, so for now we’ve avoided the even more disturbing act of mixing powdered acid into our juice, although I’ll need to continue to track it to make sure it doesn’t fall too much during malolactic fermentation.

TA – Titratable (or Total) Acid.  Not to be confused with "T and A".

With those measures in the book, Drew and I racked the wine into two 5-gallon glass carboys, leaving plenty of room for the rising foam that will be brought on by fermentation.  The final, most important step of the day is actually the easiest.  We dissolved two packets of powdered yeast in a half-cup of lukewarm water, poured it into the carboys, and our work was done.  Done, that is, except for the hour of washing and clean-up that seems to accompany every time you even look at the juice.

Full Chard Press

The books generally agree that if you want to make a rich, full bodied Chardonnay, which I do, then you should let the juice sit on the skins for 8 to 16 hours before pressing.  Thing is, I crushed the grapes at 11:00 am, and it was date night in the Goldberg house, an event more anticipated than Christmas.  If I wanted to hit the 8 to 16 hour window, my only chance was to press the juice after my date, around 11:00 pm, half drunk and by myself.  Well, that’s a recipe for disaster, so the juice got 6 hours on the skins instead, and I resigned myself to a middle-class, medium bodied Chardonnay instead.

Basket pressing is the messiest, most physically demanding step in the home winemaking process.  You scoop the juice and skins from the bucket one pitcher at a time and pour it inside the wooden basket.  Most of the juice will flow right out into a fresh bucket waiting below.  Once you’ve filled up the press, however, you’ll want to apply pressure to the skins to ring out the balance of the delicious juice.  Applying the pressure is the trick, and the press has a ratchet system in place that allows you to crank a long metal pole back and forth, thereby lowering a wooden plate down the basket.  Ultimately, the ratchet becomes difficult to crank, and it’s not unusual to feel like you’re about to pull the entire basket off the table and onto the floor, before catching it at the last minute.  It helps to have a person stabilizing the basket for you to avoid a catastrophe.  You can see why I didn’t want to do it half-drunk by myself.

Anyway, we got it done, and by the end we had 7 gallons of beautiful, muddy, Chardonnay juice, awaiting further instruction.

My First Crush

I’d say it’s a clear indication of my stage in life when the word “crush” connotes a step in winemaking as opposed to any matter of the heart.  But given that I missed the crush for my Chilean Malbec, my heart was indeed aflutter when I got word that my Chardonnay grapes were in from California this weekend.  While record levels of rain and flash flooding meant that I had to delay my pick-up for a day, I resolved not to take that as a biblical sign to find a new hobby. 

My 3 lugs of grapes, totaling 108 pounds, were indeed waiting for me at Harford when I arrived.  While that seems like a lot of grapes, it’s fortunately not so many that I wasn’t able to examine the bunches one at a time, removing any mushy or moldy grapes as I went. 

The crusher/de-stemmer, the one piece of hardware that I’ve avoided investing in so far, is elegant in it’s simplicity.  A massive corkscrew spins inside a metal trough and crushes the grapes into a giant bucket below, with the stems magically rolling down a conveyor belt and accumulating in a separate container to the side.  The only way to mess this up is to jam your hand down into the corkscrew, which would have the effect of ruining a perfectly good batch of grape must, not to mention an otherwise functioning hand.

The entire process took less than 30 minutes, producing 11 gallons of must, and the best part was that because I was renting the thing at Harford I didn’t even have to clean it up.  I went inside to pay and as I walked through the door I heard the bookkeeper, Roxanne, at the counter speaking to another customer about Pinot Noir.  “Perfect timing,” she said to me. “Bill here had some questions about winemaking, and I told him you were the Pinot Noir expert around here.”  With the actual winemaker, Kevin, at his day job, here was my moment of truth.  After years of research, here was my chance to show off what I had learned.  I could also refer him to my new blog about winemaking, just the push in readership that this website could use.  Bill looked at me anxiously with his pen and paper in hand, ready to record my sage advice.  “Do you think I’ll need to add potassium sorbate to my Pinot Noir?” he asked.  My answer was clear and concise.  “I haven’t had to use it,” I said.  The unspoken reason:  I have no idea what that is. 

Potassium Sorbate – An ingredient not required for the making of Pinot Noir.

The Hilton Estate

Since I was convinced that I wouldn’t learn how to make good wine until I learned how to grow good grapes, in the Spring of 2009 I persuaded my sister to lend my a few feet of her nearby sunny property to plant my first, very own vineyard, by which I mean 6 vines.  Add to that the one I planted in the least shady spot in our city dwelling and I was feeling optimistic that I could someday harvest a crop yielding dozens of glasses.  Next thing you know, I’m a farmer.  I usually avoid yard work like the plague, so the fact that I was excited about renting a tiller was definitely new to me.  I bought the vines online from a specialized nursery and they literally arrived the next day in a FedEx tube.  They basically look like twigs, but the good news is they only cost $9 each.  Of course, once you throw in the tiller rental, posts, wires, grow tubes, and other necessities and I’m in for another $500.  The woman at the nursery talked me into planting Corot Noir.  It is a hybrid developed at Cornell University with intended characteristics of being particularly resilient and mold resistant for this climate.  Since my sister’s house is 40 minutes from mine, and I wouldn’t be able to check on the vines every day, that sounded like the right choice for me.  Plus I like the fact that it has “Noir” in the name.  

   

The first two growing seasons are focused on developing the roots and trellis system, and are not expected to yield any actual grapes.  That means if all goes perfectly, I should get my first small harvest in the Fall of 2011, meaning I could be enjoying my wine by Christmas…of 2013.

The Big Chile

Having exhausted what I could learn from my “apprenticeship,” I was finally ready to start the winemaking process from scratch on my own.  In May 2010, I took advantage of the fact that our planet has both a Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and therefore two harvest seasons per year, and took delivery of 108 pounds of Malbec grapes from Chile.  Actually, I was supposed to take delivery of the grapes, and then use the crusher/de-stemmer at Harford to turn them into must, but they did me the “favor” of crushing the grapes for me right before I arrived to pick them up, so I didn’t actually get to crush them myself.  Nonetheless, I was pretty close to starting from scratch.  I came home with 11 ½  gallons of must, and over the course of the next few months went through the process of testing, adjusting, fermenting, pressing, oaking, and racking my juice until I ended up with what I have today, just under 7 gallons of very young Malbec wine currently aging in my basement. 

I plan to go through the entire process on my blog in more detail when this year’s crush comes in from California, so I’ll use this opportunity to give you a flavor for the stuff I’ve had to accumulate to stock my fully operational winery in the garage.  The largest expense is the basket press, although buying the stainless steal work surface and shelves to store everything was also a big ticket.  Other key toys include a refractometer, a PH meter, various sized glass carboys, large plastic buckets, hoses for racking, air locks, funnels and several kits for measuring various chemical elements within the wine.  Those are just the fixed costs.  Each time you make wine you also need to be armed with cultured yeast, sulfer, tartaric acid, malolactic bacteria, yeast nutrients, oak chips, fining agents and several other chemicals, some or all of which you will need to use and replenish on a regular basis.  I figure all in I’ve invested over $1,000 to be ready for my first production, and that doesn’t count the most expensive piece of equipment – a crusher/destemmer, which runs over $1,000 on its own.  For now I’m resolved to rent the crusher they have at Harford for $20 each time, and hope that someday they’ll actually let me use it myself.