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