Bottle Party

In the first week of October, 2010, on a small plot of land in Northern California, 144 pounds of pinot noir grapes were picked from their vines and loaded into 4 plastic lugs to be stacked and loaded into a refrigerated truck for their long passage to the east.  Yesterday, almost 15 months later, the journey of those grapes came to an end, in the bottling of my 2010 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. 

Winemakers like to turn every occasion that requires significant amounts of manual labor as an excuse to invite their friends over for a “party,” and last night’s bottling was no exception.  Two generations of three families accomplished the task in just over an hour, allowing for plenty of time to enjoy the remnants literally strained from the bottom of the barrel. 

Drew and Hal on the new
corking machine.

This is my first pinot noir made 100% at the home winery, and it’s already drawing favorable reviews to the 2009 release, which to date had been the star performer in the cellar.  I’ve often read that one of the biggest flaws of homemade wine is that it’s simply served before it’s ready, and to prove the point, if you go to your local wine shop this evening you’ll struggle to find many 2010 red wine releases to choose from.  Nonetheless, with a 35 bottle production and 35 days left in the year, the symmetry may be difficult to resist.

  

Good to the very last drop.

Reynaldo and Me

In 1968, at the age of 16, Reynaldo Robledo came to the United State as a Mexican migrant farm worker earning $1.10 per hour.  After years of toiling in the vineyards, Reynaldo ultimately saved enough money to become a vineyard land owner himself, and now owns and operates Robledo Family Winery in Sonoma, California, where each of his nine children work for the family business. 

Soaking bottles.

My thoughts turned to Reynaldo recently as I completed the tedious task of washing, scraping, rinsing and drying the 38 bottles I needed to release my 2010 Russian River Pinot Noir in the coming weeks.  In sorting through the cases of empty bottles I’ve saved, it was no surprise to find almost three cases of Robledo on hand, making the task of aggregating a matching set for my own bottling much easier.  As the bottles lay soaking in my 44 gallon tub, I was reminded that his label was perhaps as influential as any in the design of my own, and his Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are the standard to which I aspire. 

Drying bottles.

I haven’t met Reynaldo, but I’ve met and spoken to several of his children in my visits and calls to the winery.  The tasting room and winery are on the residence estate and there’s always a family member there to greet you. While our life journeys are obviously quite different, I’d like to think our destinations might meet in the end.  Where your work is your passion, where you enjoy the fruits of your labor, and where you marvel at your own realization of the American Dream.

Back on the Horse

So let’s review the lessons I’ve learned during the last year and a half of winemaking without a mentor.  You can, and will, lose your grapes to black rot, birds and bees, so get comfortable with it.  The wrong kind of oak will make your wine taste like a tree.  Bottling too early will make your wine too cloudy.  Exposing your wine to oxygen will allow bacteria to turn it into vinegar.  And the wrong acidity will make your wine taste flat out bad. 

Each of those lessons have been learned the hard way, and I can pour you the wine/vinegar to prove it.  It’s with that backdrop in mind that I recently laid down $300 for 180 pounds of grapes from Russian River Valley.  It’s the largest production I’ve attempted on my own at once, and, of the 80 or so grape varietals available for purchase, literally the most expensive choice.  I’m a glutton for punishment, I realize, but if all goes absolutely perfectly, I could end up with three plus cases of pinot noir from arguably the best producing AVA (American Viticultural Area) in the country at an average cost of less than $10 per bottle (not including my equipment costs, of course).  I had to at least give it a try.

Macy on the hand crank with Jeff.

With assists from Jeff and Macy, the grapes were crushed in the driveway without issue with my fancy new crusher/destemmer.  After 11 days fermenting in the dining room in my new 45 gallon tub, Drew and I pressed the must in the garage, producing just under nine gallons of newly minted wine.  Malolactic fermentation is now well under way, as the wine ages in the basement beside my other three varietals in progress.  I now have a record 23 gallons of wine in production, a total of over 10 cases.  Surely, somehow, somewhere in that collection, is a glass I can be proud of, and validation of the greatest lesson of all:  practice makes perfect.

Inside the crusher.



180 pounds of must.

From left to right: 2010 Pinot Noir,

2011 Chardonnay, 2011 Corot Noir,
2011 Pinot Noir.



Drew on the press.

You Win Some You Lose Some

Congratulations to Michelle Tucker Day, of Boise, Idaho, winner of the first annual Dry Run Winery Free Wine Giveaway! 

With a year of blogging and my first successful wine competition under my belt, there might be an expectation that I can now rest on my laurels, the learning process complete.  But be assured, I still have no idea what I am doing. 

Future vinegar.

Case in point, you know that Corot Noir estate wine I’ve been working on for the last six months and anticipating for the last three years?  Well, I’m pretty sure that’s ruined.  For the last three weeks a nasty aerobic bacteria film has been forming on the top of the carboys, beginning the slow and steady process of converting my young wine to your standard table vinegar.  Ironic, I realize, since much of that wine is aging in a liter bottle that originally contained store-bought balsamic vinegar, but it’s not so much the charming, funny kind of irony, as the gut-wrenching, tear-inducing kind that makes you fall to your knees, look up to the sky and scream out loud “what have I done to deserve this.”

The problem started when I inoculated the must with yeast to launch the fermentation.  I only had two gallons of must, and the yeast comes in packets suitable for five gallon carboys, but I added the whole packet anyway, thinking the more the merrier.  As a result, a process that usually takes one to two weeks was finished in two days.  But two days isn’t enough time to leave the wine on the skins and impart the desired flavors, so I decided to let it sit in extended maceration for another week or so.  When doing so, however, I didn’t realize the importance of completing the maceration in an air-tight environment with the excess oxygen removed.  Net result – the excess oxygen created the ideal environment for bacteria, that bacteria began to grow, and now that it’s in the wine there’s nothing I can do to remove it (including pressing, inoculating malolactic fermentation, or adding heavy doses of sulfites).

Desperate press.

So here I am, left to witness the gradual conversion of my wine to vinegar, but too heartbroken to put it out of its misery and pour it down the drain already.  Then suddenly, a new idea hit me – check back next year for the first annual Dry Run Winery Free Vinegar Giveaway!

Bacteria - bad.

Free Wine!

It’s the one-year anniversary of the launch of this blog and I decided to celebrate it with a new look, new content, and most importantly, my first annual Dry Run Winery giveaway.  So here’s what you have to do to enter:

1)      Make a comment on this blog

2)      Subscribe to or become a follower of this blog

3)      Become a follower of mine on Twitter

4)      Mention me in a tweet with a link to the blog

5)      Retweet my most recent tweet

6)      Comment on my most recent posting on Facebook

7)      Mention me on your Facebook status with a link to the blog

You can earn one entry per category for the random drawing, which means if you do all seven you will have seven entries and improved chances to win!  And don’t worry about your efforts attracting more competitors to the blog, the more entries I receive the more wine I will give away.  Does all this sound like a shameless attempt at self-promotion?  That’s because it is.  After a year of writing this stuff, it’s time to expand my audience.  Now get busy!

Results will be posted sometime in the next two weeks, so if you are someone entering that I don’t know how to get ahold of, make sure you check back later to see if you’ve won.  Good luck!

2011 Maryland Wine Festival

As any red-blooded, alpha-male jock can tell you, while it’s nice to develop a skill for the sake of self-improvement, if you’re not using that skill to crush the hopes and dreams of another, then it has clearly gone wasted.  Such is the logic behind the amateur wine competition I entered last week at the 28^th annual Maryland Wine Festival. 

This occasion - a two-day event which sports thousands of attendees, hundreds of wines to taste from dozens of wineries, live music, food and craft vendors and a genuine party atmosphere - also acts as the premier opportunity for amateur winemakers from the state to pit their homemade wines against each other mano a mano.  (And that’s including next month’s state fair, which offers the chance to compare your wine to Aunt May’s peach jam in the prestigious “fruit product” category.)

The judging is conducted by members of the American Wine Society using the widely accepted 20-point scale developed by University of California-Davis, which aggregates ratings in the categories of Appearance, Aroma and Bouquet, Taste, Aftertaste and Overall Impression.  Including my 2010 Chardonnay and Malbec, there were 31 wines entered from eight different winemakers.  (Yes eight, in the entire state of Maryland.  See why I need to move to Oregon?)

As the results show here, I was unable to take down Greg Sliviak from Sykesville, who won the competition for the third year running with one of his popular raspberry wine entries, earning an 18.0 score.  Both of my wines earned a score of 14.0, enough to place them in the top third of the competitors.  Considering these were my first attempts at home winemaking, and I know what I would do differently to improve them both, I view it as a pretty good result overall.  However, being the math nerd that I am, a couple simple calculations revealed that when analyzing the overall results by winemaker, my average score would actually put me in a tie for second among the eight competitors, and let’s face it, I would never have dreamed of beating Mr. Sliviak and his golden raspberries from heaven.

All in all, it was a great experience, and needless to say, the two Certificates of Merit I earned have been proudly framed and mounted in the house, garnering a prominent place on the living room wall.

My First Time

They say you never forget your first time.  The nervous pit in your stomach.  The fear of messing up.  The desire to make it last, but the realization that it’s over all too quickly.  I’m speaking, of course, about your first harvest, and true to form I ran the full gamut of emotions as I brought my own grapes in this weekend, though not before dealing with one final crisis along the way.

When I went to check on the vineyard to take my weekly sugar measurement, it was immediately apparent that the grapes had been overrun by swarms of bees, wasps and yellow jackets.  What last week had been the one-off flying pest and morphed into hundreds of creatures feasting on my fruit.  The Brix (sugar content) measured at 20.1, short of the 22 I was targeting, but the books say 20 to 24 will do, so fearing that there would be nothing left to pick in a week, we quickly shifted to emergency harvest mode. 

A light drizzle set the mood, and with Mom, Dad, Macy and I hard at work, first to untie the bird netting, then to delicately remove the bunches one at a time as the stinging creatures circled desperate for one last meal, we were done within 15 minutes.  All in, we filled one large lug with about 36lbs of grapes, enough to yield maybe half a case of wine.  If I can learn from this year’s mistakes and the vines continue to mature, it’s fair to expect twice that output next year, but at this point anything will do.

With late night help from Drew and my neighbor Cliff, my new crusher/destemmer admirably performed the job I asked of it, and the must is now quietly fermenting in a bucket in my kitchen. 

Years of anticipation over in a matter of moments.  Not unlike another first I remember those many years ago.

 

Shopping Spree

In anticipation of my pending first harvest, I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and acquire the final and most expensive piece of winemaking equipment that I didn’t yet own:  the crusher/destemmer.  I bought the cheapest one available, a hand-cranked model for $600, but compared to the rental rate of $20 per usage I’ve been paying, I’ve basically just committed myself to maintaining this hobby for at least the next ten years in order to justify the three times a year I expect to use the machine.  Either that, or the wine I’m making will amortize out to a cost per bottle to rival some of the greatest wines in the world.

And since I was headed to the winemaking store anyway, it seemed only appropriate to prepare a thorough list of equipment and supplies that will come in handy as the busiest time of the winemaker’s year approaches.  So, in addition to the crusher/destemmer, which itself takes up every remaining available square inch of my winemaking laboratory (aka the garage), I also came home with a much needed one-man floor corker and a giant, 44-gallon fermentation tub which literally doesn’t fit through my front door.  Needless to say, I won’t be giving myself a Christmas present this year.

44-gal fermentation tub next to
a 6-gal bucket for scale

Meanwhile, the date of my first harvest fast approaches.  Last weekend’s brix reading was 19.2, slightly less than predicted, so I’m now expecting to pick sometime in the next 10 days.  If I was a professional winemaker, I would be miserable right now about how a week straight of torrential downpour will have diluted the overall quality of my wine, but at this point I’m so excited about my new toys that I’m not going to let a little rain (or twenty inches of it, actually) bring me down. 

Rising Brix

With this year’s black rot causing only limited damage and the birds seemingly accepting that they’ve eaten every possible grape they can reach without being caught in the protective net, it’s finally starting to feel like I might actually be harvesting my first crop this year. 

I’ve never picked grapes before, much less ones I’ve spent three years nurturing, so the prospect is a little nerve racking.  And, like most first attempts in my winemaking education, I’m relying on my books to show me how it’s done.  For the past several weeks the ripening grapes have been undergoing a chemical metamorphosis as the intense acidity level slowly dissipates and the sweet sugar content slowly increases.  The trick then, is to harvest your grapes at the precise moment when the sugar and acidity have reached that perfect equilibrium leading to the ideal balanced wine. 

For red wines, textbooks say that moment arrives when your sugar content is in the range of 20 to 24 degrees brix and your total acidity is in the range of 6 to 7 grams per liter.  I have a kit that measures total acidity, but it’s a tad cumbersome, imprecise, and uses more of my precious juice than I would prefer, so so far I’ve been focusing my measurements on the sugar level, which can be easily calculated by applying a few drops of juice to my handy refractometer (shown here).  Over the last four weeks, the sugar content has steadily increased from an average brix calculation of 13.5, to 15.3 to 18.5 (the last big jump was because I was on vacation for a week and therefore not able to measure).  With a rate of increase of about 1.7 brix per week, my grapes should be right in the desired sugar range in about two weeks. 

The prudent thing at that point would be to check the acidity level before I harvest, but I know myself well enough to know that by that time, I’ll be too excited to do anything but pick those puppies and bring them home.  Besides, I can always adjust the acidity level in the winemaking process if I have to, and one of the few good things about having an imperfect palate is that you are less offended by an imperfectly balanced wine.

Judgment of LaFollette

When I was on vacation with several of my old high school friends a couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to conduct my first ever blind tasting of Dry Run wines interspersed with wines from commercial wineries.  The results were telling.  I randomly provided each of the 12 participating adults with blind tastes of the following seven wines:

2008 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2009 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2009 Francis Copolla Chadonnay

2009 Angeline Pinot Noir                                                                              

2010 Dry Run Chardonnay                                                                           

2010 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2010 Dry Run Malbec                                                                                   

I then asked each of the participants to rank the wines in order of preference, first through seventh.  The bottle with the lowest average ranking (i.e. the most preferred) was the Angeline Pinot Noir, with the Francis Copolla Chardonnay coming in second.  These are two wines you can find for $15 or less at most any local wine store.  Most of my wines averaged about the same score in the middle of the pack, with the 2008 Pinot Noir, which I’ve been bad mouthing for years, taking its deserved place in last. 

Interestingly, this year’s Malbec (which I’m disappointed with) actually scored better than this year’s Chardonnay (which I’m pretty pleased with).  While some of that can be credited to the fact that I had only one full bodied wine to offer several anti-white, cabernet drinkers, it does suggest that I might delay the writing of that acceptance speech I had planned for the Chardonnay I’m entering in next month’s amateur winemaking competition. 

More than one person told me afterwards that in hindsight they felt badly having chosen the commercial wines over my own, but I honestly wasn’t disappointed by the results.  For one thing, my grapes all had to travel thousands of miles to get to my house, which is never going to produce ideal results.  For another thing, this is my dry run after all.  If I already thought I was a great winemaker, then I would be trying to make wine for a living.  It’s like I told one of my friends.  Would you apologize to me if you told me you liked the shirt you bought for $15 at Old Navy better than the one I made you myself from home.  No.  Because I don’t know how to make shirts.  But if I practiced hard enough, someday I might.  And in the meantime, you’d better wear that sucker with pride.

Birds Attack!

I recently returned from a week vacation expecting to find that the grapes in my yard had turned from green to purple in my absence.  Instead, I found that I had no grapes at all, save four measly green grapes on an otherwise empty cluster.  I quickly called my sister to check on the six vines at her house, and with the flock of robins circling her backyard it didn’t take long to deduce that my vines were under attack. 

I had read about the threat of birds to vines over the years, but like my black rot the season before, apparently it took firsthand experience to cause me to act upon it.  Fortunately, since the vines at my sister’s house tend to be a few days later in their cycle, those grapes were still in the process of turning to a plump and delicious purple, and therefore might still be salvaged.

Tony, Assistant Bird-Netting Installer

My sister and brother-in-law promptly bought and installed a bird netting that covers and encloses the grapes and foliage, yet is barely visible from more than a few feet away.  After a few birds attempted kamikaze runs and entangled themselves in the netting, we finally got the net tight enough to keep the pests out and for the most part keep my harvest intact. 

As you’ll see from these pictures, just a couple days later the grapes had turned completely purple and are already sweet to eat.  But table grapes aren’t what I’m after, and baring another unforeseen attack, I might actually be just a few weeks away from harvesting my first crop.

A Wine is Born (Two Actually)

This weekend, with the help of my loyal winemaking crew, I completed the first ever bottling at the Dry Run home winery facility.  In my years of winemaking so far, I’d put it right up there with my first grape crush and the appearance of my first grape bunch in the home vineyard as the most exciting and rewarding winemaking events to date.

Per usual when I’ve done something for the first time, it didn’t go exactly according to plan, with the greatest difficulty stemming from my bottom of the line hand held corking device (a problem, like most, that can be resolved by another capital outlay), but all-in-all I couldn’t be happier with the day and the output, and that’s not just because I consumed at least a bottle of the product during the process.

The assembly line went something like thus:  I racked the wine from its carboy to a bucket with a spigot, and one by one filled the bottles up to the bottom of the neck.  Drew and Charlie manned the “one-man” corker, and eventually developed a strategy that avoided inserting every other cork only halfway in.  Brita and Lily used a specially designed (and purchased) plastic device to dip the bottle in boiling water and shrink the decorative foil into place.  Then Kim had that delicate task of adhereing each front and back label, one at a time, so they came out perfectly aligned and wrinkle-free.  Very impressive.

After about two and half hours of focused work, we came out with two cases each of Chardonnay and Malbec, ready to be shared at your next dinner party (hint, hint to all both you readers out there).





Drinking from the bottom of the barrel, literally.



Bottle Prep

If I amortize the capital expenditure costs I’ve incurred across the 4 cases of Chardonnay and Malbec I’m about to bottle, I could easily have purchased some of the finest wines in the world for a comparable cost.  Nonetheless, I decided to save a few cents a bottle by recycling used bottles from the house.  (Lord knows I generate enough of them.)  This means that each bottle to be used has to be washed and soaked, then scrubbed to remove the labels, then rinsed three times, then sanitized and rinsed another three times before they are ready for use.  Needless to say, by the end of the process my hands come out looking like raisins.  Better my hands then my grapes, I guess.

Speaking of, my vines have continued to mature nicely.  The berries have now swollen to a size where they actually look like delicious grape clusters, and I expect them to start turning from green to purple any day.  I hope to get one last fungicide spray in before that happens, but it won’t be long now until I learn whether I’ve successfully fought of black rot for the season.  If the grapes soon start looking like my picked hands, then I know I’ve lost another harvest.  Just in case, I figured I better get some good photos in while I can.

Production Values

A recent poll within the wine industry determined that when it comes to impulse buying at the wine store, 76% of consumers select wine based on the design of the label. 

Ok, I actually made that stat up, but I’m sure we can all agree that it’s probably true.  In fact, that really goes for all purchasing decisions consumers make and harks back to my econ days at Vanderbilt.  As the old adage goes, it’s best to have a brand, but if you can’t have a brand, then you better have a pretty label.  (I made that adage up also.)

This is why I’ve spent several weeks trying to design the perfect Dry Run label.  While I realize this wine will never be placed on a store shelf, I’d at least like it to pass for something that could - with matching labels, front and back, and the perfectly coordinated foil capsule at the top.  My goal is to bring it to a party, set it down on the bar next to everyone else’s store purchased contributions, and have it blend in so readily that anyone passing might choose to pick it up and pour it without ever realizing it is homemade.

Oh yeah, and I want it to taste good too.

Anyway, with the bottling of my 2010 Chardonnay and Malbec now just two weeks away, I’ve finally settled on a label I can live with.  Frequent readers here will note that I don’t claim to have any design skills whatsoever, but I did make a genuine effort to steal what ideas I could from those individuals who do.  And so, with that, I present the new official Dry Run Winery labels.  Do they make you thirsty?

  

The Bitch is Back

As of this posting, I’ve now given the Hilton Corot Noir vines five regularly spaced applications of Captan fungicide to avoid another black rot epidemic.  Nonetheless, over the weekend I discovered this season’s first presence of the disease in the vineyard.  Little brown circular spots with a black ring around the edge have formed on about half a dozen or so leaves, which if not addressed can quickly spread to the entire row of vines.  I removed and destroyed those leaves, and will continue to spray every week or so, but I won’t know until later in the summer if the still green, immature berries have been infected.  More photos of the row’s progress are shown here.

The new 2011 Chardonnay is on the right.

Meanwhile, the 2011 Chardonnay has continued to proceed on schedule.  After last year’s difficulty initiating malolactic fermentation, it was a relief to see this year’s version complete MLF in just two weeks, with the corresponding buttery characteristic immediately present.  As demonstrated in this side-by-side comparison of the 2010 and 2011 Chardonnays, the later version needs the benefit of several months of aging to allow all remaining settlement particles to settle, and I still have oak chips to add, but I already feel like my latest production is off to an excellent start.