It's About Time

I am pleased to show my good friend Meredith's first winemaking venture: Meredith Love Riesling.  She and I studied winemaking at UC Davis and she has since moved to Oregon and was back in California last week for her release party.  I admire her and this wine for many reasons.  The packing is beautiful, the wine is delicious and she did it all on her own.

This was taken a few moments after my first taste of her wine.  She made 125 cases of Riesling and inspired me to make my own wine this year.  Meredith and I talked about making wine together several years ago but we couldn't get it together and now she lives in Oregon.

2012 will be my 6th harvest and I'm finally ready to take the plunge.
I'm not worried about the "making wine" part, that's easy, if left alone grapes will ferment themselves.  But buying fruit and finding a place to make it and buying barrels and storage is very expensive.  The more you buy and the higher up you scale you can get bulk discounts, but at the small volumes I'm looking at it's going to be even more expensive.

So my first step is to figure out where to make the wine.  Some wineries let their employees make small quantities at their facility, but my winery is not such a place.  So I've been shopping around for Custom Crush Facilities in Napa.

Judd's Hill has a micro crush program that works with people who want to make as little as 1 barrel.  Each bottle on the wall represents a different client's wine.Typically 1 barrel will give you 25 cases.  I would like to make 3 barrels.  Correction, I would like to make a hundred barrels but I think I can currently afford to make 3.

Here is some equipment for Judd's Hill.  It's all piled together because it's the off season.  Nothing too fancy, just the bare bones to get the job done.  

The tanks are all open top fermenters, about 4 tons.

Still looking at a few other places.  But I'm going to have to decide soon because they require a deposit and places fill up with other clients.

Another important decision is where to source the fruit.  So I'll be interviewing vineyards soon.

I'm excited for 2012, it's going to be a very different Harvest for me.

-Lucia

Suckering!

This is my cork lady's baby Ted.  It was a nice change of pace to have baby-smell in the lab instead of corks.

This time in May the vineyard Crew is done with the first pass of Suckering.

Suckering is necessary because after budbreak, when the buds start pushing and shoots start growing, they grow from everywhere.  This kind of uncontrolled growth is not good for fruit quality.  The goal is to concentrate the vine's resources to ripen fruit, not to grow as much vegetation as possible.

The vineyard crew strategically removes all shoots that are not coming directly out of the buds left from pruning.  All the green from the trunk and cordon gets stripped out and only 2 (or 1 for weak spurs) shoot is left per spur.

The cordons on these vines have 4 spurs on each side for a total of 8 spur positions.  This is a strong spur, so 2 shoots were left during suckering.  Each shoot usually has 2 cluster.  Typically 1 vine = (8 spurs) *( 2 shoots per spur) * (2 clusters per shoot) = 32 clusters

This spur position is thinner than the previous and therefore slightly weaker and only 1 shoot was left even though 2 were originally growing.  If you leave too many shoots on a weak position it's called Over Cropping and the vine will over extend it's resources and have trouble ripening all the fruit and the fruit will be lower quality.

The shoot on the left is strong, green and healthy.  The shoot coming out of the right spur position is weak yellow and diseased.  This has a wood rooting disease called Eutypa.  Fortunately it moves very slowly through the wood (a few inches a year), so during suckering if the guys see a diseased spur they mark it with tape and then it will be cut off later.

This is what the vines looks like when they are all suckered.  During this time of year with all the sun and warm weather they grow quickly, so a second pass of suckering will begin toward the end of May to further focus the vine's photosynthetic energy away from creating more green leaves and further towards ripening fruit.

-Lucia

Springtime Up In Here

At the beginning of April many vines were still dormant.  The only green was the weeds growing between the rows.


By the end of April, all the buds have broken and the shoot are developing leaves.  Also, the rows have been cultivated (weeds and grasses removed) and the only green in the vineyard is coming from the vines.  It's important to remove the cover crop (intentional plantings that give nutrients and enrich the soil during the dormant season) and weeds (unintentional plants that grow) to minimize competition for water and soil nutrients to the young developing vines.


It finally looks like spring in Napa.  It also feels like spring because it is warm and allergies are fierce.


Back in the lab I am still soaking corks.  These are the large format corks for the 3L, 6L and 9L bottles.  Because we bottle significantly fewer bottles of that size (and because they are a significant financial investment) I hand select all the corks we use before I soak them and guarantee they are both beautiful and TCA-free.

The first cork is 45mm long, used in 375ml bottles.  The second is 49mm long, the typical size for 750ml bottles.  The third one is 54mm for Magnum (1.5L bottles).  The 4th is fatter to fit 3L bottles and the last one fits 6L and 9L bottles.  High quality, top grade cork for 750ml bottles can easily cost about $1 per cork.  For the larger sizes (6L and 9L) you're looking at $2.50 per cork. 

Hand selecting means pouring them all out on to my table, standing them all on end and examining all of them from all angles for defects.

These corks have mineral staining that is a natural consequence of the washing process.  There is nothing functionally wrong with them, but they are not very pretty.  The second one kinda looks like mold.

Even if the body of the cork is low on pitting and free of mineral stains, I still look at the heads of the corks before accepting it.  The cork on the left looks like it has crevices along the top, sometimes wine can travel up or through channels in the cork and leak.  The one on the right is almost a perfect "mirror head".  Ideally all corks would look like that but the larger the cork gets, the harder it is to make it look pretty.

I look at every single cork and the rejected ones get sent back to the cork supplier.  I separate the visually accepted corks into groups of 10 to easily count how many I have.

This is what $1,000 in corks looks like.  I wish my landlord would accept cork as payment.

Only after the sorting and selection process can I begin to soak the corks and screen for TCA.

-Lucia