Champagne in Champagne

The first two weeks of March I was in Europe.  Business and pleasure.  The reason for my trip was to visit Portugal and learn about cork harvesting and production.  Since I was already most of the way to Paris (my favorite place in the world, it's a cliche but it's true) I decided to take a few days to visit France before I came home.  My trip to Portugal was crazy informative but all those pictures and videos are taking longer to organize, so I'll write first about my time in France.

These pictures of Paris were taken on the only nice day while I was there.  This day it was about 68F and then a day later it snowed.

Here I am with cheese, meats and wine.  It was this night that I decided I should visit Champagne.  I'd never been and it seemed pretty close.  Also, I wanted to drink Champagne in Champagne.

 The next morning I went to Gare de l'est and bought a ticked to Reims.  The lady looked at me a little funny when I asked for a return ticket for that same evening.  I waited here for half an hour until the train came.  Then 45 minutes later by TGV (train of great fastness) I was in Reims.

I stepped off the train and immediately realized that this was really stupid.  I had no plan.  I didn't know where anything was, I think I expected the wineries to be walking distance from the train station.  I was probably going to need to take a bus, or a shuttle or taxi maybe?  So I head over to the Tourist Info booth to make a plan to make the most of my few hours in Reims.  This was a Sunday, so it was closed.  Turns out a lot of things are closed on a Sunday.  Here are the completely empty streets.  Check out the sweet parking job of the black car on the left.  

 Fortunately all was not lost.  Turns out the wineries are walking distance from the train station and each other.  This is the opposite of Napa and everywhere else I know in Northern California.  I walked to Tattinger (which was closed).  But it only took 20 minutes!

Then I walked 10 mins down the block to Veuve (also closed).  Which was actually OK, because I was just excited to be in such an adorable town near all these great Champagne houses.  My plan at this point was to walk into a wine shop and at least drink the stuff that I was walking by.  I was going to buy a bottle and drink it in the park, hobo style.  

This wine shop even had adorable bottle carriers.  A sardine tin, an old school refrigerator and maybe a hand bag of some sort.

 So I kept walking to the next winery on the map.  Pommery.  Oh joy of joys, it was open! And they had a tour starting in 10 minutes!  What luck!

 The tour starts down the stairs into their caves where the wine is stored. 116 steps down.

I do have tiny hands, but those are also giant 12L bottles.  A whole freaking hallway of them.

This is part of their library collection.  They have 1 bottle from 1898 and 1 from 1874.  Eighteen seventy four!  That's nuts to me.  That bottle has been around for a lot of things.  The Pommery (and I'm sure other caves in Reims are similar) cave was one of the most impressive places I have every been inside of.  Unfortunately with the low light my pathetic iphone camera could not capture the amazingness, so I wont bother posting those pictures.  But believe me, it was unbelievable.

At the end of the tour I finally had Champagne in Champagne and I bought some to have in Napa too. I took the train back to Paris that evening and came home a day later.  I've been home for six days and I've been swamped trying to catch up on work.

I'm really looking forward to making some sense of the pictures from Portugal trip (the real reason for my transatlantic trip) and to share a lot of what I learned about cork.  It's the weekend soon, so that should give me time. . . .

-L

It's Spring Time!

 This is what it looks like in Napa this week.  It's spring and the flowers are starting to bloom in the vineyards.  However, it's still much colder than I am comfortable with.

By this time of the year the vines are pruned and tied down.  At this point we start counting the number of buds per vine to begin formulating an idea of how much fruit we could potentially get this season.

This is a nice juicy bud on a cane.  It's officially Budbreak in the vineyards.  Exciting stuff.

But what's even more exciting is that this past weekend Todd and I bottled our white wine.  Finally we have something to show for ourselves (besides a pile of receipts).  It didn't feel real until we held a corked bottle in our hands.  We still need to label and package the bottles, but at least they are bottled and available as proof.  I'll have to post that soon.

Happy Spring Everyone!

-L

Quixote

One of my resolutions this year was to go wine tasting two places a month, which to me is a whole lot of wine tasting. So last week I went to visit Quixote.

I know wine tasting is what a lot of people do for fun and on vacation but I really have to force myself to go out tasting because it usually feels like work.  I've worked in Napa since 2007 and have only visited a handful of wineries in the last 6 years.  It's a little embarrassing.

I chose Quixote this month because it's so whimsical and fun.  I knew nothing about the wine, but loved the building, I saw it in an architecture magazine a while ago.  It's hidden away in the Stag's Leap District in Napa, you can't see if from the road and it's appointment only so it's impossible to stumble upon.  If you are going here it is very much on purpose.

The winery was designed by the Austrian artist Hundertwasser, whose work I was unfamiliar with but reminded me of Guadi's mosaics in Spain.  Very colorful, no straight lines, no repetition. Unfortunately during this time of the year the vegetation is all cut back.

This is a picture I did not take but want to include because it shows how beautiful the building looks nestled into the hillside.

Excuse the glare.  I would not include this picture except for how much I enjoyed seeing the large printed canvas covering the tanks.  This is the eternal dilema of esthetics in a winery.  You can make the building and tasting room beautiful but the cellar has to be a functional cellar and those are much harder to make beautiful.

Decorating Tip #1: Cover the tanks with a canvas or stick a picture of Audrey Hepburn on there to beautify the tanks.

Decorating Tip #2: Paint barrel rings to add whimsy to any barrel room.  

Unfortunately the paint tends to chip easily and they only look amazing and fun for a short time.  Still, I'm a big fan.  In my dream winery all the barrels are painted like this.

This is the lab space.  It's a lot more sparse than my lab but it's one of the nicest I've seen at a winery.  You know, compared to the other 3 wineries I have visited in 6 years.

Actually, it almost looks like a kitchen that also happens to have instruments and glassware.

This is the tasting room where I tasted 7 Quixote wines.  Four were Cabs and three Petit Sirahs.  Due to the Stag's Leap appellation and the exclusivity of the winery, I was expecting the wines to be expensive.  They were not and they were delicious.  If the wines had been $90 to $150 I wouldn't have thought twice about it.  But that some were $40 or $60 was pretty amazing.

Also, all the wines were screw caps!  Two of the wines from the early 2000s, so they were early adopters of the method.  I am a big fan.  The winery was beautiful, the wines were very impressive and the packaging was innovative.  

I would like to bottle my wine with a screw top, but unfortunately the first vintage will have to be cork because it's being put together with a hodgepodge of materials.  I've been a fan of alternative closures for a while, but had not tasted much aged high-end red wine with a screw cap.  I am more convinced that this can be age-able without the drawback of cork (i.e TCA, high cost for good quality).  A good cork can cost over $1/cork.  A screw cap can be as low as $0.17/cap.

One down, one more winery to go this month.  Also, need to bottle the white wine in my garage this weekend.  

I've been putting that off for the last 3 weeks. . . . . 

-L

2013 Unified Symposium - Sacramento

January is cold and ultra busy with blending, but I also love it because I get to go to Unified.  Usually.  Last year was too busy, so I was extra pumped to go this year.  Unified gets all wine making things together under one roof and all winemaking people.  So you get to see all the new toys and products available and you run into everyone you know and haven't seen since the last Unified.

 The convention is 3 days long with seminars and a trade show going on simultaneously.  This year I only had 1 day available to spend in Sacramento so I only went to the trade show.  I took my intern Gilroy on Wednesday January 30th.  She took this picture of me with a ceramic wine bottle because I had never seen wine in a ceramic bottle.  When (most) everyone is worried about their carbon footprint and trying to reduce shipping weight (and cost) this winery chose to use an extra heavy bottle.  I think it is a bold choice.

 The trade show starts around 9am but in the early evening they start pouring wines from all over the US.  I saw at least 4 tables covered in glasses.  This puts my tastings to shame.

 I am super excited about this picture because it includes TB (far right), he was the co-creator of FPB blog back in 2010!  Without him, I doubt I would have come up with the idea to begin blogging and it was our mutual admiration of Radiohead that lead to the FPB name.  But I left that job 2 years ago and have barely since him since.  The only way my sweater could be more appropriate for this picture is if inside the heart were the words "I love CLV, but especially TB".  And them maybe an arrow pointing to the right.

 Ok, enough nostalgia, back to cool stuff.  I really liked this wooden wine carrier that turns into a wine rack.  So clever.

Close by there was another wood box maker.  Look at the tiny phone!  Or rather, look at the GIANT wine bottles that make that normal size phone look tiny.

Gilroy is standing by for a size comparison.  I think this wood box maker must also make coffins.

Then you turn a corner and there is a beautiful live owl hanging out.  I think this booth wanted to say something about using predator birds in the vineyard, I don't know, couldn't pay attention with that beautiful bird using his wise eyes to stare into my soul.

 But it turns out my intern Gilroy is a bigger fan of this nocturnal bird of prey than I am, and she had the earrings to prove it.

This system gasses the head space.  I find it hypnotic.

 We took a break for lunch and spotted this tall gentleman.  First I had to find someone taller than me to tap him on the shoulder so I could ask if he would take a picture with me.  He's 6'10!  Also, I'm wearing heels.

After lunch we wandered back to the closures section to look at corks and screw caps.

 I'm a fan of screw caps.

 I'm also a fan of this display.

 It took me way too long to realize that the trees around the convention center were painted blue.  I must have walked past them 4 or 5 times before it hit me.

 And it wasn't just a couple, all the trees surrounding the convention center were blue!

 After a long day of walking around, I got a chance to sit by a warm fire place.  It's hard to tell but I am affectionately clutching a dark and stormy.

The day started at 5am to get the dogs to "puppy day care" and have enough time to get to Sacramento by 8am.  Then a full day of walking and talking to people and then comes my new favorite tradition of Unified.  The sushi dinner with Scott Labs.  It's an intimate affair with some of my favorite people in the wine industry and all you can eat sushi.  

January Blending Sessions

I'm going to switch gears for a moment from my home winemaking adventures to what my lab has been up to all January.  Blending!  

The first step is to taste all the different lots from 2012, as seen here on the table.  This is an insane amount of wine to process in a day, but it's part of the job.  By the time January rolls around I am so out of practice it takes a while to get calibrated to tasting this much wine in a short period.  

Actually, tasting this much wine is not the issue, the problem is having useful things to say about this much wine.  After the first 20 I find myself just repeating the same descriptors, or writing down "red wine" on everything.  After a few days though I'm able to once again find and define the nuances.  And things go from being "fruity" to cherry or strawberry.

Each glass represents a different tank or lot that we fermented.  The winemaking team tastes every glass and we rank the lots in order of quality and then see which are similar enough to combine so that we have a more manageable number to work with.  It's only the first day that we have the table filled like this.  We went from 67 and combined down to 38.

 The next day we look at the 38 lots and from those make the best blend we can.  A single blend.  Which is a unique thing.  In my previous winery we made 9 different wines and the one before that upwards of 15.  However, making this one wine is a lot more intense than how we made the 9 at my previous winery.  Very few places make only one wine.

We do this process 3 to 4 days a week, which requires a lot of preparation, set and and clean up, so I have a lot of help from my interns.  Aaron is pouring the lots into the glasses and Gilroy is right behind him making a "Kitchen Sink" blend.  

The Kitchen Sink Blend is so called because we put in everything.  This gives us an idea of the entire vintage and is a good starting point.  Sometimes we can use it as a guideline, if the KS has some bitterness or herbal characters we can try to find the individual lots and remove them from the blend.

Then over the next several days and weeks we begin making blends of the lots in different combinations and quantities.  In this picture we are up to Blend 7.  Last year it took us 32 blends before we decided on #33 as the final blend for 2011.  As of this writing I have put together 11 Blends and we are still working on some for next week.  But 2012 is an exceptionally delicious year, so I doubt it will take very many.

Here is the lab set up with each color being a station for a member of the winemaking team.  This day we had 6 Blends to evaluate on one side of the lab bench and on the other side were 38 of the main lots for consideration.  This is what the lab looks like almost every day in January, and February will look similar but the focus will be the 2011 vintage.  We taste the blends, pick our favorite and then go to the other side to taste the individual lots to see what should stay in and what should be removed.

And this is what the lab looks like almost everyday at the end of the day.  I am so grateful for my interns who help put this together everyday.  Usually harvest interns start in August and leave by November or December but I'm keeping one until the end of this month and another until early March.

Let's hear it for Interns!

-L

Teroldego Drain and Press

Happy New Year.

For all the time that I didn't update you think I would have been off doing something cool.  Like last year I was in South Africa riding ostriches and petting cheetahs.  But no, nothing cool.  I was just having a very lazy stay-cation and trying to keep warm.  Napa has been freezing.  

And not actually freezing because it doesn't snow here but every morning my car has frost and being from a tropical country and growing up in the temperate bay area, that's considered freezing to me.

So back to last September . . . . . 

 Time to Drain and Press the Teroldego.  This is the blackest fruit I have ever worked with.  Like squid ink.

 The goal of this day was to move the wine from the macro bin to the barrel on the blue rack.

 It took about 2 hours -ish to move the half ton bucket by bucket to the press.

 The macro bin was so deeply stained Todd and I weren't sure we were going to be able to get it to be white again, but we were going to worry about that later.

Here Todd is dumping the buckets from the macrobin into the press.  Since we fermented in a macro bin, we couldn't open a valve and collect the free run (like we did with the tank).  

So all the wine first passed through the press so we could use the slats to screen out the skins and seeds, but we still collected free run to put in barrel.  This picture was taken before we started up the press.

The wine was pressed out through the wooden slats with about 1.6psi of pressure from the inflated bladder inside the basket.

And then of course follows the dreaded clean up.  

Although, I must admit I really like how the skins cake up and you can almost remove large solid pieces.

The last part was to drain and press the merlot in tank.  Looking forward to sharing our clever set up for that.

-L