2010 Vintage Tasting

We just had the mother of all tastings.

In this business I've had to work on my endurance in consuming alcohol.  Which I know sounds like one of those luxury problems like 'the floor to ceiling windows in my giant mansion don't leave me any room to hang my Picassos (not my problem, but a true story).  But it's actually really exhausting and when you're doing it for hours, it really stops being fun.  It's also less fun when it happens to be 6:30am.  And even less fun when you're tasting young wines that are still sweet and very aggressive.

Now that it's January and most everything has finished primary and secondary fermentation and is out of tanks and barrels in our cave, my winemaker wanted to have a tasting to evaluate the vintage so far.  That meant a whole 8 hours of sample collecting for our 3 cellar guys and 4 hours of tasting for the production team (winemaker, cellar master, viticulturalist and enologist).  We tasted through 56 wines.  It was nuts.  It's by far the biggest and longest tasting I've ever participated in.  Spitting ensured that we were not completely hammered by the end of it, but still, some of the alcohol is absorbed in your mouth and some of the team got a little tipsy.  This was one day we might have needed the breathalyzer before leaving work.

The purpose of the tasting was to figure out which lots were showing well and which were not.  If a lot was particularly delicious or disappointing we want to answer a few questions.  Where was the fruit from?  How was it farmed?  Did we sort out the raisins or include them? How long did we macerate before beginning fermentation? What was the fermentation vessel (oak, stainless steel or concrete)? Was the fermentation native or inoculated? If it was inoculated what was the yeast? How long was the fermentation? How hot did it get? What nutrients were added?  Was the malolactic fermentation native or inoculated? How much new oak is in the lot?  What coopers made the barrels? Etc.

Answering those questions help us to figure out what works.  For example, we know that the Sauvignon blanc fruit we receive from Morgan Ranch does really well fermented with Vin13 yeast in stainless steel but not very well in oak.  The lots that we let mascerate taste better than the ones that were pressed right away.  And so on.

Eventually these 56 wines will be blended into our 8 core wines.

-L

Back to Work Folks!

Here we are, back from the break!


Even workaholics like me need a break every now and then, although I assure you I was very reluctant to take one (there is so much to do!).  Usually this time of year is slow, however because the year was late and because my job requires taking care of the malic fermentations, the lab is still incredibly busy.  Not to mention the piles and piles of paperwork for year end accounting and government reporting.  


But! I did take a break.  I spent a few days in sunny San Diego.  My brother and I took amtrak down there so that we could spend some quality time together and also because he is a scary driver and since I was not going to share the driving duties with him neither was I going to take them all on myself.  So we took amtrak, all 26 hours of the trip.  I only bring this up because this gave me some time to edit old videos.  


The following video is a project that T and I undertook.  We had a tiny sliver of an acre of Malbec on the property that we weren't sure what to do with.  Since it was such a small amount, T and I decided we could use it for our yeast start ups.  We harvested it (i.e. cut the clusters off the vine and collected them), processed it (hand destemmed using the red apparatus featured in the video) and fermented the resulting juice.  The juice we collected we put into kegs and inoculated with a favorite yeast of ours, Willams Selyem.  We like this yeast because it's hearty, has good alcohol tolerance and doesn't generally impart too many "yeasty" characters to the fermentation.  When the kegs were vigorously fermenting, we added them to much larger tanks of juice to start that fermentation.


If we hadn't collected juice from the property, we would have had to go to Safeway and buy 20 gallons of Welches grape juice to start the fermentations.  This is undesirable for several reasons.  First, it's embarrassing to need 20 gallons of grape juice, but also, Welches is made from Concord grapes.  Traditional wine grapes (Cabernet, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, etc) are from the species Vitis vinifera but Concord grapes are from the species Vitis labrusca, which is know for it's "foxy" characters.  And I promise you, no one who describes a wine as foxy is using it as a compliment.


The video is a quick diary of what we went through to harvest those few gallons of grapes.  The video was taken by interns (no longer with us) who did not know how to hold the camera so the field of vision is narrow instead of wide.  Anyway, it shows us stumbling through trying to get the maximum amount of juice from our harvest, very sticky business.





More new (old) videos to come.


Happy New Year.


-L

The Monday Morning After Friday Night's Holiday Party: Priceless

Before I begin I must first admit that I am a nerd.  Ok, now that that's been said I can tell you how I spent my Friday.

It's common in the wine industry to work 4/10s.  Ten hours a day for four days a week instead of the traditional eight hours for five days.  This means three day weekends every weekend, which is a welcome change from the 'no weekends ever' schedule we were following during Harvest.  Last week was the first week on the new schedule.  And I spent my First Free Friday at UC Davis for 8 hours in a winemaking seminar:

It was very much like being in school again, in an all day lecture taking notes.  The topic was fermentation tains, like rose taint and sulfur taint, and we tasted 16 wines spiked with some terrible defects like "rotten egg" and "fecal".  And I loved it.  About 150 wine professionals from all over California gathered at UC Davis to brush up on our ester and sulfur knowledge.  Davis holds about 3 winemaking seminars a year and I have yet to miss one.  I would like to post about ester taints but that's for another time.

That same Friday night we had our Holiday party.  As an industry, we work hard but we also party hard.  Harvest parties and Holiday parties are no joke.  I know everyone has the capacity to party hard, but I think we have an edge because we get to practice so much.  We gathered at the bosses's house where there was plenty of wine, beer and japanese whiskey.  I took some great footage of a speed quarters game, T doing magic tricks and Intern J forcing his elbows to touch (each other!) and I wish so mightily that I could post it.  But alas I am afraid of being fired and/or beat up.

During and after speed quarters we played another fun game: "Guess My Blood Alcohol Content".  The boss man surprised and amused us with a breathalyzer that we all took turns blowing into.  We each had our own tip that connected to it and as the night went on, T and I became acutely aware of how much we were enjoying ourselves.  We enjoyed ourselves a lot.

This is the first party I've been to where this has happened, and it was awkward and silly, but unfortunately necessary.  We party and drink and then drive home.  All the time.  Especially in this industry I think we are desensitized because it's so common.  People absolutely drink and drive home.

Anyway, although the breathalyzer helped us get home safely it could not prevent some of us from giving the rest of us some great stories to tell Monday morning around the water cooler.


-L


P.S. If anyone is braver than I am, I would enjoy some of your holiday party stories.  And if we see each other in person, I will absolutely share the footage I can't post.

It's Your Birthday Everyday Napa! We Got You Some Balloons.

The following footage has been patiently waiting in my hard drive since October for new editing software.


Even though Harvest is an exhausting time of the year and driving to work after only a few hours of sleep is everyone's least favorite thing to do, I enjoy the early morning drive for one reason only: the hot air balloons.  Every clear morning during the fall in Napa, there are at least 15 hot air balloons taking off from several spots in the valley.  I like to think that it looks like we are throwing Napa Valley a birthday party everyday.


One Saturday morning (6:45am) back in October as I was driving to work and admiring the balloons (as usual), I decided to pull over and film them.   I pulled over at the golf course where a group of 4 balloons were taking off.  Every morning for months and months those same 4 balloons take off from this one spot.  But steering capabilities for large balloons are poor, so they land wherever they find a clearing.  Sometimes this ends up being in T's front yard and as a thanks they leave a bottle of Sparkling wine at the front door.



I had 16 minutes of footage which I sped up and condensed into 2 minutes, which unfortunately makes my shaky camera work very obvious.  Tripod for Christmas?


-L

Is everyone here from Napa? A trip to SFMOMA

This past weekend was my first opportunity to enjoy a two day weekend since August and I was eager to get out of Napa.  Part of the weekend was spent celebrating the success of good friends of mine.  

 {This space is reserved for when they are allowed to disclose the good news}.

Nothing says celebrating success like sparkling wine.  A sparkling rosé of Malbec from Argentina to be specific.  Sparkling is great for celebrations and inconspicuous early morning drinking but I try to have it as often as possible.  I want sparkling to become more of an everyday wine instead of a special occasion wine.  I hope you will all help me. 

Since I was already in the bay, I spent Sunday in San Francisco checking out SFMOMA's new wine exhibit "How Wine Became Modern, Design + Wine, 1976 to Now"

 I thought the exhibit was very comprehensive, educational material in addition to gorgeous portraits of the Napa Valley.  It covered soil types and weather in different winemaking regions like Europe, South America, California, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.  On display was even a vine they had dug out of the ground to demonstrate where the rootstock and grafted plant come together.  This is called the scion and it's the little round notch seen in the picture.

 Fun Fact: this particular vine came from Opus's vineyards.

They also had a wall that catalogued the different types of wine labels.  The bottles were grouped according to the type of label they had. 

Categories included : family owned, animals, good vs evil, understated, sex, cheeky and my personal favorite:

Also for our viewing pleasure were all kinds of wine paraphernalia like crazy decanters modeled after the human heart.

 And single serving glasses of wine packaged like pudding cups.  Yes please.

  

I did a poor job of photographing the models they had on display of wineries.  Last post I talked about two of my favorite wineries in the valley, but I have three.  The third is Dominus.  Below is a scaled model of the Dominus building.

  

It looks like a boring dark rectangle but I love the non-intrusive architectural philosophy behind the design.  The walls are made from stones stacked in a wire cage.  

When you look at the building from afar it blends into the mountains and is barely visible.

Lastly, there was a Smell Wall with glass bowls filled with wine and a particular odor: "jammy", "floral", "citrus", "cat pee", etc.

I was thinking to myself that is was nice to see how well attended the exhibit was.  I was feeling glad that all these people came and paid money to see an exhibit about wine.  It made me feel validated about my work and I was feeling pretty cool when I ran into a friend from Napa in the industry.  And then 5 minutes later into another.  And then another.  In the short time that I was at the exhibit I ran into 3 different groups of people I know from Napa in the wine industry.  I went to the city hoping to see a different audience but ended up running into my same homies from Napa, who were in the city trying to do the same thing.

Oh well.

Guess next time I'll have to go a bit further to get away.

If anyone has time to swing by SFMOMA to check out the exhibit I highly recommend it, and if that's not what you're in to, on the opposite side of the floor they have an exhibit on Voyerism.  It gets really creepy really fast.  Otherwise, swing by Napa and I can show you some dirt and vines and pudding cups.

-L

Day Trips: Opus and Quintessa

Despite a continually busy schedule I managed to visit two of my favorite wineries in the valley this week. 

First stop: Opus One 

I was at Opus One for the 2008 Harvest and have nothing but fond memories.  During the off season I go back to visit the lab, or lunch there but it has been several months since my last visit.  

On Tuesday I took T over to get to know the winery and try Opus's latest release.  We tried the 2005 and the 2007, which were both fantastic wines, however I felt the 2007 is currently too young and I am interested in trying it again in a year or two.  The 2005 is a very well balanced and complex wine, but I'm not terribly fond of that vintage anywhere in Napa.  2005 was a cool year, similar to this year and the flavor profile is very different than the fruit forward 2007 or 2008.  It's not a question of good vs bad, just a personal preference.  

Below is the blue Napa sky taken from the entrance to the winery,  it was unseasonably warm in the beginning of the week, high 70s.

I didn't take too many pictures since I used to work there and it felt weird to do so, but I did want to show off their barrel room because it is so different from ours.  Similarly to us, Opus keep their barrels one high (a most covetous luxury) but they have a large semi circular display room instead of a cave.

 

Working with barrels that are only one high is a luxury because they are a pleasure to work with, all the barrels are easily accessible for taking samples, or topping or adding sulfur.  

Over the 20 or so months that the wine ages in barrel the water and/or alcohol slowly evaporate through the pores in the wood.  As some wine evaporates out of the barrel it creates a head space where the remaining volume is exposed to oxygen.  Having a partially full barrel is undesirable because it leaves the wine vulnerable to spoilage through oxidation and microbial attack. 

Oxygen loving bacteria like acetobacter can infect unprotected wine and are responsible for turning a wine into vinegar.  To prevent this from occurring whenever the wine level starts to get low, we breakdown a barrel (empty it) and use the wine to fill all the other partial barrels.  Every 3 to 4 weeks the crew has to top every single barrel (for a winery our size, a single vintage can have on average 1000 barrels).  Which is very labor intensive.  Another protective measure is adding small amounts of liquid sulfur dioxide as an antimicrobial agent.  This is also done every 3 to 4 weeks for 18 to 20 months.

So when I said that we also keep our barrels on a single level, it was a mostly true statement.  It has been true every year since 2005, however this year since most of the fruit came in at the same time we have had some space issues.  About 85% of our barrels are in the cool cave (55F) stacked one high.  The rest are not quite done with primary fermentation so to encourage the end of fermentation we have to keep them warm.  We have a warm room (75F) but it is small and we have had to stack 4 barrels high.  

Which is still pretty good.  

Another winery I worked at used to stack them 6 high and that was terrifying.

Having barrels one high is a luxury because otherwise we are climbing around like monkeys to get our samples (as T is seen in the above pictures).  One would think there is a more sophisticated way of doing this, but climbing like monkeys is still the most effective technique.

T and I get our climb on every 2 or 3 days to monitor the dropping sugar levels.  Once these barrels are below 1g/L of residual sugar they can be moved to the cool cave and resume a single level life.

Next stop: Quintessa

Quintessa is high end winery not unlike Opus.  I am not a former employee, but it's one of my favorite places to bring out of town guests, so I often find myself there.  

This is really what it looks like.   They have a lake.  Yeah.

But no one has visited lately and on Friday I found myself there for work.  

Quintessa has a similar Sauvignon blanc program to ours so we took 5 of our 2010 wines for an educational comparison.  By "similar program" I mean that they make their SB in a similar way.  They have a single Sauvignon blanc that is made from several different vineyard sources and fermented in several vessels: concrete eggs, new oak barrels, neutral oak barrels and stainless steel barrels.  We ferment in all of those vessels too, but we also ferment in stainless steel tanks, which they do not.

Currently not too many wineries have concrete eggs in the valley but that is going to change.  Our main focus of the tasting was the eggs.

We got through 19 wines in about an hour an a half.  

I appreciated tasting their egg fermentation side by side with ours.  After the tasting we got to ask each other questions about the vineyards the fruit came from, about fermentation temperatures and preferred yeasts, anything we wanted to ask each other.  These types of tastings are fairly common and mutually beneficial for the wineries that participate.  

However, I sometimes forget how rare an opportunity it is.  I don't know of other industries who invite their competitors into their offices and offer up their product for questions and review.  

We were tasting only 2010 wines, stuff that barely finished fermentation.  We get an exclusive glimpse into the starting components of a wine that will not be released for several months.  

And  a large point of these meetings is to learn from each other and apply the knowledge.  We collect information about the quality and price points we are competing against directly from our competitors. 

I say competitors in a very loose sense.  I do not mean competitors as in rivals.  But we do compete for a similar market share.  They are a winery in Napa Valley that produce Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon and we are a winery in Napa Valley that produce Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon at similar price points.

Its as if Apple invited Microsoft over to their campus and said hey, bring your latest smart phone** and we'll bring our latest iphone and we will sit around a table and we will ask you how you made your phone and you can ask us anything about how we made ours and we will use that knowledge to improve our initial product, and if you want to take some home we'll sell them to you at a discount. 

It's kinda like that.

Except that wouldn't happen in tech land and it happens all the time in the wine industry.

And why it's so commonplace is a topic for another day.

-L

Up Next: "How I spent my first 2 day weekend in 14 weeks"

** I have no idea what their smart phone is called =/

Dave Grohl Visits the Lab! OMG

This is what the lab sink looks like almost everyday now.

Harvest is officially over, but the workload has yet to reflect this fact.  Harvest is the busiest time of year for a winery but I've found that the lab's busiest time of year is post harvest.  We still have several tanks that are fermenting, which necessitates daily checking.  We also have several tanks that have finished fermenting and therefore we need to confirm dryness (residual sugar levels).  The yeast consume the sugar in the juice and create alcohol as a byproduct, but sometimes they can be too efficient and the alcohol levels get too high and create a toxic environment for the yeast so that they die before they finish consuming all the sugar.  This creates a stuck fermentation, when there is still sugar to be consumed, but dead or sluggish yeast cannot finish the job.  

A stuck fermentation is a problem because even if it is a small amount of sugar, this creates an opportunity for undesirable microbes to feed on the sugar and create off odors or flavors or unpleasant mouth feel.  Usually 2g/L is considered dry, but we feel more comfortable calling a lot dry at 1g/L.  

It is part of the lab's job to confirm dryness and I do this by pulling a sample from the tank and analyzing the sample with a spectrophotometer (time consuming).  Additionally, after the wine is dry, we initiate a secondary fermentation called Malolactic fermentation.  In ML fermentation, lactic acid bacteria convert malic acid into lactic acid, and this fermentation needs to be monitored as well.  On the spectrophotometer.  

This means that during this time of year the lab is monitoring the wines at three different stages.  So T and I spend all day collecting the samples, analyzing them, and then cleaning up after ourselves.

So I hope I will not sound too unreasonable when I say that I was not be in the mood to celebrate the End of Harvest with the annual Harvest Party on Friday.

Harvest parties are usually a fantastic tradition.  An opportunity to relax after the difficult season, have some beers with coworkers and meet each others families and forget about work.  However, since this season was so particular and late, we haven't had much of a break.  Usually there is a longer period of time between the end of harvest when things start to slow down and when we can let loose.  But we haven't slowed down. Friday was a hectic day and most of us had to work early Saturday.

The party was set up at the winery, and the crew scrambled to finish early so that they could go home and change our of their work clothes and pick up their families.  I fortunately keep a spare closet in the lab, so I stayed at work until the party started.

And then, a fantastic thing happened.

For the half hour that everyone went home and I stayed, the winery had a visitor.

I can safely claim that this is the only time in my life that being a workaholic has paid off.

Dave Grohl was getting a private tour of the place and I didn't know about it until I walked out into the cellar and nearly ran into him.  Oh I wanted to play it cool, I really did.  

Like this happened all the time.  But I was so not cool.

We shook hands outside and introductions were made (like I didn't know who he was).  We made small talk about the winery and how much he was enjoying the tour.  He said he thought the caves were the coolest place in the winery and I countered with "then I can't let you leave without seeing the lab, it's way cooler".  Which isn't actually true, our caves are pretty impressive, but I had to say something.  

He laughed and followed me in, I explained some instruments and bless his heart his eyes didn't glaze over.  His time was almost up so I asked if it wouldn't be too tacky to ask for a picture.    He said of course not but that he wanted to wear some "science glasses".  

" You mean goggles?" I asked.

"Yeah, those." he said.

"I got those."

Then I handed my camera over to the tour guide, and as always when I hand my camera over, the picture comes back blurry and poorly framed.  That was my one chance, before I could ask to take a million more he had to go!

So my only picture is this one, where I am beaming like a nerd, so not playing it cool.

Dave Grohl came into my lab.

He listened to me talk about science.

He wore my goggles.

He hugged me.

He posed for a picture.

And no one else was there!

A few minutes after he left, everyone started to arrive for the party.

Which meant that I got to re-live the moment by repeating the story and busting out the picture every 10 minutes.  But I was a few beers in and being obnoxious was the last thing on my mind.

The Party*

We had a mobile pizza oven park at the winery and make pizzas for dinner.  Which was way classier than when the taco truck came.  Classier, since no one turned it into a taco eating contest that lest several people feeling sick.**

Inside the winery there were tables set up where we could eat, drink, schmooze and if the mood struck, embarrass ourselves.

While sitting at a table I noticed a classy lady in her Alexander McQueen scarf sitting at a nearby table.  Fortunately I had my emergency McQueen scarf in my lab closet for such an occasion.  I went to grab it and we bonded over silk skulls.

Also in attendance was a face-painting clown.  Since I kept my drinking moderate, I did not succumb to the urge to pass for a child and get my face painted.

However, since I was moderately drinking I did spend a portion of the evening sneaking pictures of painted faces, unbeknownst to the kids.

Which I maintain is only a little bit creepy.

 

Since I had to work the next morning, the night ended for me pretty early, (though I know a few continued to party on).

I went straight to bed when I got home and then straight back to work Saturday morning bright and early.

Most of the party had already been cleaned up, but there was still plenty of cold pizza left for breakfast.

Delicious.

-L

* A most excellent movie starring Peter Sellers.

** I have Taco Truck footage still on the camera.  I never got a chance to post it and since it's been a while, I wasn't going to, but maybe, just maybe, it needs to be shared.