Day Trip: Sterling Vineyards

I often spend my days off at work, this past Friday was no exception.  Except that I went tasting with friends instead of nerding out over the production facilities, so this is low on technical information, high on beauty shots of the Napa Valley.

Sterling is located up valley in Calistoga.  Not only is it quite a drive north of Napa, but once you get there you have to take a tram up to the winery.  Fine by me.

 It's a little gimmicky but it's quite fun.  I had to put my wine snob in my back pocket because my friends showed up in a group of 7 with no itinerary and no reservations to anywhere in the valley.  Bunch of carefree hippies.

 Sterling was a great place to go with a large, unprepared, (semi) rowdy group of young folk.  I am glad the valley has places like this too.

This was an opportunity to see the winery from the consumer's point of view, instead of my usual production approach.  It's lovely to be a tourist in Napa, I quite liked it.  Although I did wish there was someone I could ask about case production, coopers, tank capacities, fermentation styles, bottling regime, acreage, rootstocks, etc. . . . .

But I settled for tasting with lovely ladies on the terrace.  Once you get off the tram, you walk around the winery in a self guided tour and stop at 5 locations to taste a different wine.

It's been raining an unseasonable amount in California recently, it's still very green for June.  I'm wondering how much this will delay the growing season.

And if 5 stops of wine wasn't enough, at the end of the walking tour we sat at a table for another 4 wines and a breadstick smoke.

Sterling was a good amount of wine for a decent price and a tram ride!
Visiting is recommended.

-L

"Guy Ritchie, isn't he a dancer?"

This week, Guy Ritchie and his crazy gorgeous girlfriend Jacqui Ainsley stopped by the lab.  Notice, Jacqui is not pictured because I embarrassed myself by paying attention to him exclusively.  You'd think I learned from the last time someone cool visited my lab, but I did not.  Although I did manage to ask him film advice "one director to another".

Since I enjoy his movies, I was surprised to learn that none of my coworkers were as big a fan as I.   When I tried to brag to my winemaker about who stopped by, he asked if Guy Ritchie was a dancer, and a tour guide asked if he was related to Lionel Ritchie.  Sometimes I feel so alone.

Also this week, I ran out of chemicals for the Auto-Titrator and had to send wine samples to be analyzed by a different lab.  This gave me an opportunity to visit Think Tank, a new wine service lab in Saint Helena.  Very cool facility.  Not only do they run wine analysis and sell fermentation products (yeast, nutrients etc.) but . . . 

 They also sell wine antiques.  Its odd for a wine lab to do, but they have very lovely things.

Also there was a party and a lot of champagne was drunk.

And even though my smile is deceptive, this shows that winemaking is not all glamorous.  It takes a lot of paperwork to make wine.  This is a stack that I need to go through soon and either file away, or shred.  I'm leaning towards shred.

-L

Fining Part Two: Stabilizing Red Wine

Firstly, allergies in Napa are at an all time high.  Napa is traditionally horrendous for allergy sufferers but this season even non allergy sufferers are miserable.  Myself included.   This is mustard growing between the vines, I don't know if that's whats causing my allergies, but it illustrates Napa's fecundity.  Everything is in full bloom and it has been very windy.  And did I mention miserable?

This installment of the Fining Chronicles covers Egg White Fining.  We separate the yokes from the egg whites.  The yokes are discarded and the whites are added to the wine.  This picture was from a barrel fining where the eggs white of two eggs were added directly to each barrel.  

This is a video of Yeast Nutrient Additions to white wine barrels (Sauvignon blanc) but the egg whites are added in the same way to barrels for fining.  This was taken around October during Harvest, but it still helps illustrate the point.

 This time around, we are fining two tanks that total over 12,2000 gallons, instead of a 60 gallon barrel.  So we needed a lot more eggs. We are doing this in May so that the wine (vintage 2009) will have about 6 weeks to settle before it is bottled in July.

 Here I am cracking the eggs and separating the whites from the yokes.  The whites go into the bucket  to be slowly introduced into a stainless steel tank.  We take about 30 minutes to introduce about a gallon of egg whites to a tank.  If you add them too quickly they clump up and you get poor distribution.

For 12,200gallons we cracked about 150 eggs.  We slowly mix in the egg whites into the tanks and then let the egg protein bind the wine proteins and as the molecules attract each other they become larger, less soluble and therefore sink to the bottom of the tank.  However this process tankes time, the amount of time varies but in this case, the wine will have at least 6 weeks to settle before it is racked off the solids and bottled.

May in Napa means allergies, fining and preparing for bottling.

-L

Ripping Out A Vineyard, Feeling Tiny

This is what a healthy vineyard looks like.  These vines were planted 4 years ago, so this is a very very young vineyard that will be bearing useful fruit for the first time this year.  The first year you plant the rootstock (develop a root system), the next year you graft the varietal (cab, pinot, zin, etc and let the wound heal), the next year you work on vegetative growth (shoots and leaves) and if there is fruit it is basically useless.  The fourth year is when you start to get useable fruit from the vine but it is not usually considered high quality, yet.  

 If you rip out a vineyard, it takes many many years to get quality wine grapes from a replant.  So it is serious business and only done when absolutely necessary.  This vineyard is in the process of being ripped out.  It was planted in 1985, which makes the vines pretty old.

But often age alone is not enough of a factor to rip out a vineyard.  Usually it is age combined with disease.  The first step was to remove all the wire trellising from the vineyard.  That is why you see all the free standing vines.

After the wires are removed, the vines are cut down and ripped out and sometimes the land is left fallow for a while, or fumigated if it needs to be replanted quickly.  It is very expensive to have land in Napa Valley that is not producing fruit.

 This is a close up of the vine from the SFMOMA exhibit from a while back.  Is shows an exaggerated graft union between the rootstock (bottom) and cutting (top), in this case Cabernet Sauvignon.

Normally the cut, which here is in the shape of Omega is done on wood that is the thickness of a pencil.  This vine was only used as a model.

 This is the top part of the Omega graft.

This vine was used because it was originally planted in 1985 and it was time for it to retire.  Unfortunately, as you can tell, it no longer resides in the magnificent SFMOMA.

Quick side note before we move on about another favorite thing of mine that was on display at SFMOMA.

This wine (and it's super cool label) were made by my former boss and it's finally available from her equally super cool website.  

Also,

Ah the curse of not being able to be in the picture and take it at the same time!  I'm including the blurry picture because I want to show how gigantic this over the row tractor is.

I didn't get to drive it out of the shop this time, but soon!

This doesn't give a good idea of it, but inside it looks like a helicopter cockpit.  Lots of buttons, pedals, levers and blinking lights.

It's a nice time of the year to be out in the vineyards, except this year has been exceptionally miserable for allergy sufferers.  Miserable.

-L 

Fining Part One: Stabilizing White Wine and Being a Hero

White wine usually starts out looking like this, yummy, I know.  The grape solids usually sink (white layer at the bottom of carboy) but often this is not enough to make the wine clear enough to be acceptable to consumers.  To clarify the wine it is necessary to fine and/or filter it.  Fining agents usually include proteins like eggs, casein or milk.  As an intern I was asked to add 6 gallons of whole milk to a tank of white wine and I thought I was being punked.  Turns out I wasn't.  Since then I've frequently (on purpose) added egg whites to barrels (red wine too).

Fining and filtering not only serves the purpose of getting the wine clear, but also stable.  Many wine proteins are soluble at room temperature but if the wine gets too hot (like from leaving it in your car) the proteins precipitate out and float around the wine.  It looks like fine wisps of cotton gently floating around.  Since the proteins were denatured, cooling the wine back down does not make them go back into solution, forever changing the mouthfeel of the wine.  No bueno.

 

To avoid this unpleasant situation we heat stabilize the wine by adding Bentonite (a clay from volcanic ash) to the wine in tank (before bottling) to bind of the proteins and remove them from the wine in the first place.  When Bentonite is mixed with water (pic) it can absorb more than 7 times its original dry weight and expand to 18 times it's volume (!)

The dry stuff gets everywhere, so you need to wear a mask when mixing.  Here I am using a mixer to dissolve the Bentonite into hot water, the Bento is negatively charged and when mixed into the wine will attract the positively charged protein particles.  The weight of the combined molecules causes them to precipitate out of solution and fall to the bottom of the tank.  Then we rack the clean wine off the top and discard the sludge at the bottom.

We must also cold stabilize white wine not for protein precipitates but for tartrates.  While very pretty they are undesirable in wine.  This happens when tartrates (salts) from tartaric acid (the most abundant acid in wine) bind to lees, tannins or grape solids.  If exposed to low temperatures, the tartrates crystalize.

To prevent the crystals from forming in the bottle, we cool the tanks to almost freezing to crystalize and precipitate out any potential problems.  We do not use this method for protein stabilizations (heating up the tank to car-on-a-hot-summer-day temperatures) because cooling the wine does not negatively impact the wine they way cooking it would.  Bentonite is a much better option than cooking the wine to precipitate out the proteins and waiting for them to fall to the bottom of the tank.

This is totally unrelated to wine stabilization but while working in the cellar today I looked at the floor and it looked like I either worked at a winery, or an O.R. and a patient was bleeding out nearby.   I don't save lives but I think my work is pretty important too ;)

Saving good wine from going bad.

-L