Wine to remind me why I like Pinot!

Posted on by
Reply

So if you don’t know, I spend the off-seasons with the fabulous winery team of the Wilson Group.  For those not familiar with the group, they own Mazzocco, Matrix, Wilson, Soda Rock, deLormier, Jaxon Keys and Pezzi King wineries.  So whenever I declare the wonderful-ness of a wine outside of my employers’ realm, I feel like I’m cheating on Wilson a little bit.  But today, I found a wine worth cheating for:

So I couldn’t find a picture of Ivywood, sorry. This is VML’s traditional Pinot label. It’s pretty delicious as well. Another highly recommended wine.

It’s the V.M.L. 2010 Ivywood Vineyard Pinot Noir.  I went a to a little shin-dig at the winery, and got to taste the whole line-up.  I’ll be honest with you, like any winery, some wines were good, some were not so much, and although on the whole, the line-up was a hefty ways above average, this particular Pinot jumped out.

The color was really interesting, it was a super-dark red with a touch of brown, but the best part about it was the nose.  (Uh oh, wine nerd term: means smell)  It was rich and aromatic with lots of aromas of clove, black pepper, a touch of dark chocolate and hints of currant and black cherry.  For those fluent in wine, trust me, it’s a beautiful perfume.  For those not: just imagine all those things I just described made into some sort of crumble, now imagine that being delicious, now imagine said delicious thing in your mouth, o yeah.  It’s that good.

After the nose, the great part about was it’s taste.  So many Pinots are silky smooth, which is wonderful, but I’ve always felt all that uncountered richness gives them something of a Hawaiian Punch character.  This wine has some grit, some tannin (read: mouth-drying) to balance out the sweeter elements of the wine.  And it still shoes that mixed crumble deliciousness.  Oh, I recommend this wine so highly.  It’s available at www.vmlwine.com.  Get it soon, guys.

Knowing Who’s Boss

Posted on by
Reply

So it’s fruit finding time!  I am normally something of a fruit vulture, hanging around vineyards, hoping that something gets dropped or doesn’t get sold, but this year I’m going to try to find something ahead of time.  As much fun as the “set up for harvest in 24 hours” game is, I’m going to go about things in hopefully a more professional manner this year.  So as I start hunting for Zinfandel and Pinot Noir lots for fall, I find myself thinking about last year’s harvest.

Stop me if you’ve ever heard this one before: to make great wine you need great fruit.  Not exactly a revolutionary concept, is it?  It’s kinda up there with “the most important part of a steak is the meat”.  (I’m waiting to hear that in a steakhouse someday)  Well, as a winemaking/enology student, you kinda lose track of this sometimes, because as a winemaker, you have so many tools at your disposal to alter how the wine tastes, many of which I’ve discussed here, that you begin to forget the importance of fruit in the first place.

So let’s flash back to September 2011, shall we?  My buddy Alex calls me up to tell me he’s getting married right before I bring in a lot of under-ripe, light-bodied Pinot.  (for the non-nerds: light-bodied means thin and soft, like comparing skim milk to full-cream)  I decide to make the wine for his wedding, and I ask him what type of wines he likes.  The answer: bold, smooth wines, in other words, the opposite of what I have. (for the non-nerds- he likes that full cream I mentioned earlier)

Thinking myself an other-worldly wine-wizard, I began to under-take turning apples into oranges.  I take my under-ripe, light-bodied Pinot fruit and nuke it with every extractive method I can think of.  I oak it heavily during fermentation with toasted and untoasted oak.  I add sulfur mid-fermentation to create the silky compound glycerol.  I drain juice from the wine to get more skin contact.  I punch down as much as I can.  I add extracting enzymes.  What did all of this do?  My under-ripe light Pinot came out tasting like…

(We’re doing that suspense thing again)

…an under-ripe light Pinot.

Well…  Dammit.

So if there’s a lesson to learn here: it’s pretty obvious.  Learn who’s boss.  The fruit is going to taste the way it is going to taste.  All you winemakers just have to deal with it.  That’s not to say I didn’t find ways to beef it up, blending with Zinfandel did wonders for it, as did a little post-fermentation oak.  However, I think it’s important for me to share with anyone who reads my little blurbs about how wine-makers make wines taste different ways understand one thing:

We winemakers can alter in subtle ways how a wine tastes, and there are even occasions when the wine-maker can make a big affect on the flavor of the wine, but at the end of the day, it’s the fruit who’s boss.

Vintage 2012 is official!

Posted on by
Reply

I will be working for Donelan Wines, a boutique Rhone producer in the Russian River Valley who also produces some Burgundian varietals.  I am super excited, the winemaking team is going to be super-small and we’re going to be working with some world-class fruit.  Can’t wait to start.

Check them out: http://www.donelanwines.com/thewines.html

Closing time 2.0- big winery work

Posted on by
Reply

Ok, so here I am, sitting in a train station in Cootamundra, (why don’t we have names in the U.S. like Cootamundra?  I love these people!) thinking about everything.  Thinking about home, what makes home home, what I want home to be, thinking about Australia, thinking about the future and thinking about wine.  I also am thinking that I haven’t written in this blog for a while.  Suffice to say things have been eventful on this side of the world, with a  trip to Melbourne, closing in on making a decision as to where I will be next vintage, (either going to be working in Russian River Valley, Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley) and being en route to a trip to Sydney, Osaka, Bangkok and Singapore.  However, if you want to hear about that, you’ll have to give me a ring or something.

 

So I guess this is a good time to tell you about Casella wines: the real dirt of the issue.  Casella wines makes wines in a dramatic and factory-like manner.  Some of the things they do seem down-right alien, and through-out the process, the chain of command is long enough that by the time it reaches the worker at the bottom the wine itself, the wine seems like just red stuff that it’s our job to process as if it were oil in a refinery.  The fact of the matter is because of the sheer volume of wine and the gross size of the winery, it doesn’t make sense to make wine the same way we do in another winery.  You can’t drain a tank, then hop in and shovel out the tank when there’s 200 tons of grapes in the tank.  So what we do is we hop on top and shoot down wine like firemen with powerful hoses to make a muck we can pump out.  It seems ridiculous, but it’s just the reality of this volume.  Even transferring a tank is a day-long operation, setting up lines that stretch some ½ mile long to get from one 1,100,000 (look at all the pretty zero’s!) liter tank to another.

 

It was definitely a positive learning experience nonetheless, however.  I’m learning that every winery in the world is going to do things differently, and I’m learning to roll with it.  Stone Hill made wine one way, Fresno State another, and now, Casella another.  It makes sense, as it allows them to make wine cheaply, and spend more money on grape quality (or not, depending on the product), but it’s not for me.  The wine-makers here have their hands somewhat tied.  You can’t take a risk with a million liter tank, you have to play it safe, and being careful and gentle isn’t really an option here, the processes here are not of the wine-maker’s design, rather, they are pre-set to handle large quantities of wine quickly and efficiently. 

 

That’s not to say that there aren’t good wines being made here, there most certainly are, especially the wines that came from the Riverina before the rains in March, but the biggest reason things here aren’t for me is the lack connection with the wine.  I think one of the romantic and fun things about wine is the intimacy: the experience of watching a wine grow into something beautiful.  The feeling of making something gorgeous is what drives any creative person to create, but here the watching is casual, and the beauty, well, let’s be honest, this is bulk wine…

Closing Time

Posted on by
Reply

So as crazy as it may seem this early in the year, the vintage at Casella Wines is wrapping up.  A large percentage of the seasonal workers are going to be cut this Thursday and it’s time to start looking forward to what comes next.

This isn’t really relevant, but it’s pretty. Enjoy!

As a child of the 90’s, Semisonic got to bring all the periods of my life to their poetic conclusions.  This is no exception.  However, as I get ready to move forward from 3 and a half months of working in the massive wine factory that is Casella’s, I have to look back and reflect on what I learned.

Besides getting more comfortable in a winery environment after graduating from school, dreaming about hoses, pump-overs and various forms of heavy equipment; I’ve learned a lot about acid, alcohols, R-P, pressing methods/seeds, the Australian palate, the Italian palate, the flavor dramas of fermentation and also the nature of rot.  I’ve also had my nose buried in Fugelsang’s Wine Analysis and Production (which is about as an exciting a read as the Ohio state legal code, but probably the best educational text I’ve read in terms of amount and delivery of information) and have emerged from it with lots of fun facts about how to better make wine.  These things have all inspired new topics, of which you will get to see shortly.  In the meantime, I have some traveling to do.  As I leave Australia, I get to see the wonderful Margaret Mann in Japan, (hopefully) the musical Gregor Penczek and Martin Skutzik in Thailand and the existential Alwyn Loh in Singapore.  Can’t wait.  Talk to you soon.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Posted on by
3

It’s safe to say that rain is bad for wine-grapes.  Grape-growers fear it like I feared that big kid with anger issues in middle school.  That is why it’s been so wonderful that Australia has experienced an unexpected Monsoon season right in the middle of harvest.  The rain has been long and over-whelming, pouring heavily on us for days.  We’ve been missing work waiting on the rain and even though it finally ended Sunday, the dam in the local area is so loaded up with water it’s ruptured and today we had to be evacuated from the winery to avoid the incoming floods.  (I’d tell you more, but they didn’t tell us much in the first place, and there are no local news stations out here)

So it’s not actually raining this hard.

With all this drama over water, water and more water, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading deeper into what I know about rain. The issue with rain is very simple: it promotes rot and it promotes fruit bloating.  We’ll tackle those one at a time.

Rot.  Sounds pretty gnarly, doesn’t it?  The thing is when your apples at home go rotten, you throw them out.  However, if you are making wine in the Napa Valley and it rains, not making wine that year is not really an option, so what happens is the grapes arrive in the winery and the winemaker and the fruit begin to wage war.  Besides just being icky, the rot impacts almost every aspect of the wine- it releases a small army of enzymes that start processes the winemaker simply doesn’t want to see happen.  These enzymes negatively affect color, fruit aromas and also make the wine oxidize more easily.  The rot itself (which is really just mold) actually eats up much of the acid and the nutrients in the grape needed for yeast and to boot, it releases lots of vinegar producing microbes.  …wow, that was a long list of bad things.  This is why wine-makers hate rain, and the closer to harvest you are, the more damage it does.

They call it the Noble rot, but it’s usually not so noble…

Bloating.  No, we’re not talking about how you feel after a few too many hot-dogs.  This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the fruit fills up with water.  This means you lose sugar concentration as well as concentration in general.  During most of the season, growers will often intentionally with-hold water to increase concentration, so when the rain comes, it undoes a lot of the work the grower has been trying to do.

So here we are in Australia, picking up the scraps after Monsoon Season 2012.  Hopefully, we can salvage a vintage after this.  The weather after rains makes a big impact on what grows on the vine.  Unfortunately, it’s not our decision what happens from here on out, it’s just up to the weather.

*Hard-core wine nerd note- Rot does have one positive note- it promotes the metabolism of polyhydric alcohols or “sugar alcohols”, which is a terrifying name for equally scary-named glycerol, mannitol, erythritol (I’m hoping I never have to pronounce that one out loud), arabitol, sorbitol, xylitol and myo-inositol.  Although mannitol has a little of a bad rap, generally, these compounds (especially glycerol) are purported to provide a soft sweetness with a round-ness on the palate and fuller mouth-feel.

*Personal note- did anyone understand the hard-core wine nerd note?