A Wallflower Punch Talks to Judy

An inevitability of making red wine is cap management.

 Cap management is accomplished with punch downs and/or pump overs.  

At this winery the clusters get destemmed to separate the berries from the rachis.  This process already breaks up the berries a bit, but some go further and crush the berries to let the juice out.  This is why a lot of place refer to this time of the year as Crush, as in Crush 2010.
But with white wine we press (not crush) the grapes and for our reds we just destem, so I call this time of year Harvest.

The mostly intact berries go into a tank to ferment and eventually become wine.  As the fermentation progresses and the berries are further broken up and they release their juice.  In the tank the skins and the juice separate and the skins and seeds float to the top of the tank, where they create a cap.  Since this cap floats on top of the liquid, it dries out.  The skins and seeds are where the majority flavor and texture of wine come from.  Our goal is to extract color and flavor from the skins, so we are constantly battling to keep the cap submerged and in contact with the fermenting juice.  One way is to pump the wine from the bottom of the tank over to the top.  This breaks up the cap by getting it wet and the skins mix back into the juice.  Another way to accomplish this is to physically punch the cap back down into the liquid.  

So far in the season we've only gotten small amounts of red grapes, too small to go into a tank, so we've put them into puncheons.  Puncheons are donkey kong sized barrels.  A regular barrel holds 60 gallons, a puncheons holds 132 gallons.  

Oh yeah.

We use them to ferment small lots by taking the heads off, plugging the bung hole (yes that's the technical name) and standing them upright.  Then, twice a day they get punched down until the fermentation is over.  Every day (including Sundays, for about 2 weeks.  This is actually pretty tough work in the beginning because the berries are not broken up and it's one solid mass.  Here we only punch down a fermenting vessel twice a day, but at a previous winery T did punch downs 5 times a day.  He got pretty yoked that Harvest.  Or so he says.  I wasn't there, so we'll have to take his word on it.

Here are T and A demonstrating the art of the punch down:

Today's Tunes: Flaming Lip's Embryonic (in preparation for tomorrow night's concert).

Up Next: T's Harvest Workout Plan

-L

When I Caught A Glimpse of Rita

Let me take a moment to introduce Rita.  
Rita is a project T and I began when we started feeling badly about all the premium napa valley juice we were dumping down the drain at the end of the days when we sampled vineyards.  

To help the winemaker know when to harvest the grapes, we lab people go out to collect random clusters to represent the vineyard.  We bring the clusters back to the winery, count them, weigh them and then squeeze the berries for the juice.

We then test the juice for the sugar and acid content (most important), as well as some nitrogen or potassium levels which help us determine what nutrients we will want to add to help the fermentation.  

Over the sampling season (August - October) we want the sugar in the fruit to rise and the acid to drop, however, if we wait too long, the sugar will rise too much and the acid will drop too far and we will have poor conditions for making wine.  So our job is to find a sweet spot in the middle where we have enough sugar for the yeast to ferment, and enough acid left to keep the wine from becoming flabby.  Along with chemistry numbers and taste, the winemaker decides when the grapes have hit that spot and we harvest them.
 

To get there, we sample each vineyard several times to track the changes, and that leaves us with plenty of juice at the end of the day.
Instead of dumping them, we collected all the juice samples we run for analysis into a glass carboy.  We added some yeast and now we are going to let her ferment and eventually dare each other to drink the results.  

Here is the above process:


 

Rita is a mix between white grapes and red grapes, which really, no one advises.  
We thought she would be a rose, but unfortunately she looks more like watery tomato juice.

Even though she comes from scraps and has been largely neglected by us with all the current harvest turmoil, we continue to have high hopes for her.


You go girl.


-L

It's Your Birthday

It's been a birthday extravaganza the past few days at the winery.  

Well, just two**.  

The boss's birthday and the boss's boss's birthday.  And unfortunately the winery troubadour was nowhere in sight to score the events.

The boss's boss's birthday was first.  Last Friday T and I had the honor of preparing the wine for the pre party.  We opened each of the 30 bottles, removed the wine from the sediment and poured them back into the original bottles.  And of course performed some necessary (and delicious) quality control.

15 bottles were 1996 Chateau Mouton Rothchild:

The Other 15 were the 1994:

A single bottle averages $400, so that was $12,000 in wine (I was trying to think of a metaphor for how much money that is, but it was just depressing).  T preferred the '96 and I the '94, but we'll probably never drink that wine again, so it doesn't really matter.  The "Does wine that is $400/bottle taste 10 times better than a $40 bottle" discussion will be left for another time.

For the boss's birthday today, we brought him a cake on a forklift in the shape of a fancy wine bottle:  

It's 7:30pm and T is still doing dishes.  By the way, seems like 60% of what we do in the lab is clean up after the 40% of work we do.  Time to help him so we can all go home.

Today's Tunes:  Visit down memory lane with Tool.  T and I used to be very different people.  Everyone has their own journey.

Up Next: It's been balls hot in Napa, tomorrow we see what else has melted.

-T & L

**Actually 3!  Happy 12th Birthday to Google.

Harvest Beard Championship Part One

I'm realizing that due to complaints from significant others and "itchiness", the Harvest Beard Championship may come to an end drastically sooner than anticipated.  I am sad to report this news however, I resolve to prevent a let down like this in the future by conducting more strict intern interviews and adding a beard growing clause in the hiring contract.

I don't know how much longer they will last, so I would like to share where the boys are so far in the beard-off:


In one corner is C Bear who stands at 6'1", loves romantic comedies, world war one history novels, prince and cougars.

9/9                                           9/13                                        9/20

In the second corner is T weighing in at sturdy 165 pounds, he's been getting yoked by doing punchdowns twice daily and driving his responsible family car to the golf course to practice his swing.

9/9                                           9/13                                        9/20

They are competing for this deluxe shaving set:

Take your ladies on a date night and ask them for their patience in your endeavor to be crowned Harvest Beard Champion.

Good luck gentlemen.  

Oh Bear, oh RowBear

At morning meeting today T and I decided that RowBear will hence forth be called CareBear.

See what we're talking about?

In sadder news, I need to report on the great crash of 2010.  While transferring some files from my camera to the computer something got bunged up and not only did the files not transfer but they were deleted from the camera.  I mostly lost the Harvest Beard dailies.  

It's been tough to get any work done today with all the tears and mourning.   Also, T and I are particularly sleep deprived and running on fumes.  

We have definitely brought our B games to work.

We barely managed to squeeze out some barrel inoculations, nutrient additions and data entry.  T checked the fermentations we started the past few days, did some punch downs, filled out his time sheet. Blah, blah.

Beard Update:

Grand (cellar) Master J shaved his face, and is therefore out of the Harvest Beard Championship.  The rules are no shaving for as long as you can stand it.  And the prize is yet to be determined (but it will be awesome, promise).  But the boys are dropping like flies (despite all the beard motivation I've been pushing - see 9/17 post).  

Only 2 warriors are left, C. Bear and T.  

My money was on T, until he said his money was on C. Bear.  Ultimately though, it will come down to their significant others.  So really, this should be a Harvest Beard Patience Championship for their ladies.

Ok, new contest.  

Prize: yet to be determined (but it will be more awesome than the Harvest Beard Championship prize, promise).

Today's Tunes: Interpol jam sesh.

Up Next: Everyone is a cartoon!

-L

The Hess Collection

This fruit-less Monday brought a much appreciated reprieve

for the crew and with it, an opportunity to travel.  We packed ourselves into cars and took the show on the road to Hess Collection in Napa.   

Something that I have found unique to the wine industry is that we take trips to visit other wineries.  Every winery I have worked at, and that my friends have worked at, make it a point to take the crew to visit other wineries and see how they do things.  And every winery that I have worked at has received visitors from other wineries.  

We all open our doors to each other and get a behind the scenes look at the competition.  Usually the winemaker takes the time to show us around and gives a very different tour than the tourists get.  We get to see their cellars, laboratories and equipment, we ask questions about their styles and decision making, pick their brains, try their wines gratis, and then take the product home at a discount.  I can't imagine another industry that invites the competition in, gives them exclusive access to the people and facilities and then offers their product at a discount. 

Oh, there is so much to love about what we do.

The winery is located up Mt. Veeder, with beautiful views of the valley and gorgeous grounds:

They have tables behind the wheel and underneath the canopy.  

I want to go to there.

Behind the wooden doors is the entrance to the cellar.

The facilities were very astutely described by Dave (director of wine making at Hess) as reminiscent of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.  Expansive, labyrinthine and a little spooky in parts.  Some parts of the building are from the early 1900s and others are bran new, like the art gallery.  I stole some footage of the galley (before I knew it was frowned upon), but was not able to capture my favorite piece: the typewriter on fire.

  

Fortunately a quick google search pulled it up:

Someone else stole a picture so I didn't have to.  

The story behind the typewriter is pretty neat, you can read about here.

The tour was really interesting, and a part of the cellar has several tanks with their own dedicated pump, which means automatic pumpovers!  Which is exciting to anyone who ever has to do a pumpover.  Anyway, dedicated pumps to tanks are quite a luxury.  Our winery of roughly 40 tanks shares like 5 pumps.

There is footage of RowBear next to one of these tanks with built in pumps in the video:

The tour ended like all tours, in the tasting room.  Besides their cool facilities, and kickass art gallery, we really enjoyed the wine.  T and I found the price points surprising for a Napa, Mt. Veeder winery, fancy-smancy winery.  Great values.  RoBear and I both took home a 2009 Small Block Series Viognier ($28).  I want to smell like that wine, all the time.  

T and I also really enjoyed the 2008 Allomi Vineyard Petite Sirah, only $36.  I haven't found too many Petite Sirahs that can stand alone, and this one stands alone deliciously.  Lastly, the 2007 Artezin Dry Creek Zinfandel was impressive.  I tend to like my wines on the Pinot side, but this Zin was right up my alley.

Big ups to Dave at Hess Collection for sharing his time and knowledge.  I look forward to going back and having a picnic by the lily pond.

Today's Tunes: Phoenix.  Yes still.

Up Next: Hope we have another fruit-less day.

-L 

Before you're lost between the notes

Ah, nothing says Harvest Time like working on a Sunday.  

And sticky, fermenting clothes.  Also, sleep deprivation.  Also, poor nutrition and weight loss.  Also, sloppy hygiene.  

Also, beards. . . . 

So, ok, lots of things say Harvest.  But to me, living at the winery is at the top of the list.

Saturday T and I had several barrels and a tank to inoculate.  We had 5 puncheons with red fruit ( Malbec and Merlot), 14 barrels with Sauvignon blanc, and one big effing Sauvingnon blanc tank with 3,000 gallons of juice.

Here is some footage from Saturday:

Then Saturday night, the winery had an event to celebrate the release of something or other, so I spent Saturday night at work with some delicious pizza, wine and this dude:

All things considered, it was a pretty delicious Saturday night.

Woke up this morning, and headed back to work to climb the mountain of paper work that accumulated during the week.  Something they didn't prepare me for in wine making school was how much paper it takes to make wine.  

Weigh tags, crush reports, work orders, purchase orders, receipts, 702s (government reporting), data entry for all the analysis we generate.  Not to mentions the typical office stuff like emails and time sheets, etc.  

I can procrastinate with the best of them, but when it comes to work orders and data entry I like stay on top of it, otherwise things get lost, details are forgotten and someone gets yelled at and/or cries.  

However, the recent long days of bringing in fruit have made it difficult to keep up with all the paper work that seems to breed on my desk.  

It seems when I'm not looking the work orders and post its are getting it on and every time I glance near my computer they have birthed more paper babies.  

I need to have a talk with them about using protection, that, or I need to trick, I mean teach T to use the data base.

Today's Tunes: Silence, except the pitter patter of key strokes.

Up Next: Why it's so awesome that it didn't rain today.

-L