Monthly Archives: November 2011

A Little Love for Dirt (but just a little)

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So it stands to reason that if half of a vine is underground, that ground will probably have some sort of influence on the wine: does it not?  It especially makes sense when you consider how much one vineyard site can vary from the next.  I personally work at a winery where we make a series of wines from specific vineyards, often right next to each other and they often have a flavor that is totally different from one another.  So what gives?  You can’t blame the climate, the vineyards are one hill away from each other.  It has to be the soil, right?

Well, maybe it is.  But for what it’s worth, they’re not teaching us that’s the reason at winemaking school nowadays.  This mystical power of soils that I had heard that wine “experts” talk about is exactly what I expected to learn about when I began a class called “Soils 101”.  I walked in with open eyes, waiting for the professor to start telling me about how clay will give you more cherry in Pinot Noir and limestone gives you more minerality in whites.  But alas, my dreams did not come true.

Instead, they taught us about the make-up of soil, the build-up of soils and the polar charges of the soil particles.  I’m sure this is where your mouse is starting to slowly rove towards the “minimize” button in the corner, but stop it!  Don’t let it get away!  Everything I learned in that class boiled down to one simple fact about soil as it pertains to wine.  One fact that defines how soil impacts the eventual fruit the vine produces.

(Drumroll)

(I’m gunna let this build up a little bit more)

(Ready yet?)

Soil is a water and nutrient reservoir for the vines.  As a vineyard manager, it’s your job to make sure you react to the soil, so you don’t get too much or two little of water or any nutrient so the vine grows ok.  Each nutrient is like a box that needs to be checked so that your vines grow correctly.  Magnesium?  Check.  Phosphorous?  Check.  And so on.  I don’t know about you, but I found this to be one of the most disappointing lessons the Enology (winemaking) program had to offer.  It pretty much smashed all my preconceptions of wine being an expression of the soil with a steel hammer.

So there you have it.  In enology school, it is not taught that soil affects flavor.  Of course, when I thought about it, I couldn’t help but deconstruct that argument a little bit.  If it were true that soil’s primary involvement in the vine’s growth and the fruit’s development was as a pantry where the vine could go and source sustenance when it needed it, it would stand to reason that climate, canopy management, fruit load and clonal material would be the only factors to determine wine quality.  However, a fact that most wine professionals accept as a given is that within every vineyard there is fruit of varying qualities.

So soil has to do something.  What does it do exactly, though?  One of my professors, Dr. Jim Kennedy did a study on this.  He took a look at a vineyard in Oregon and picked two blocks (sections) that produced very different quality fruit.  Then he took a look at the soil underneath.  What did he find?  The soil in the higher quality block retained less water.

So is water the smoking gun of soil science?  I’m starting to think so.  Dr. Kennedy’s work wasn’t the only piece of evidence I’d seen, I had read in a different wine textbook a similar finding by a researcher in France.  It makes sense.  If the soil retains less water than you get less growth in the vine, and as a general rule, that tends to develop better concentration in the fruit.  In one of our viticulture classes we were shown a process called RDI- Regulated Deficit Irrigation, in which the vineyard manager carefully restricts the amount of the water the vineyard gets to increase fruit quality, and it seems to have been working for a long time.  Do soils with low water availability have the ability to do this naturally?  So it seems.

But before we mark this case closed, I have one observation.  In soils and viticulture class, we talked about all the different nutrients the vine requires in the wine-making process: Iron, Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorous, Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc… …the list is almost as long as the list of nutrients our human body needs.  Like the human body, the vine’s soil cannot be deficient in any of these, nor can it be taken in toxic levels.  However, in the case of the vine, wouldn’t it stand to reason that a vineyard with a slightly higher iron content in the soil have a slightly different flavor than a similar vineyard with a lower iron content?

It’s an idea.  I hope it’s a good one.

Winemaker Profile- Me!- Chris Albin

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So for those of you who may not know me, my name is Chris Albin and I am a young winemaker.  My passion is wine and my goal is to share that with you.  In my opinion wine is a beautiful thing; it’s a form of art that can paint pictures of different scents and flavors unlike any other craft we know of.  However, unlike art that is produced with paint, stone, steel, film or sound, there is an undying mystery to wine.  Not only is wine an art form that engages our senses, wine-making is a science that is not and probably will not ever be fully understood.  And that pursuit of knowledge and that constant challenge of understanding the wine-maker’s paintbrush is my passion; hopefully I can include you in that pursuit of knowledge through this blog.

But what’s my story?  Every wine-maker has a story that leads them to wine-making and I am no different.  I decided I liked wine when a girl I had a crush on told me it was sexy when a guy knew a lot about wine.  Overnight, wine was my new thing.  However, I didn’t know how much this was going to snowball- my entire life I had always found food and flavors interesting and had always appreciated the art of good food and drink, so when I was exposed to this, a new passion exploded.  That passion quickly became a love for all artisanal beverages and that love has always been with me since.

Oh, in case you were wondering.  Nothing ever happened with the girl.  (Disappointing, right?)

When I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in International Studies and Marketing, I decided I wanted to import wine.  It simply seemed to make sense, I had always loved to travel and I loved wine, so importing seemed like the right move.  I met with importers in St. Louis, asked them about their jobs and found out wine importing is/was as one importer put it, a “balls to the wall sales job”, so I quickly made the decision to try to become a salesman.

The salesman experiment lasted about 3 months.  After WashU (the nickname of my Alma Mater) I packed up all my stuff and headed out to the wonderful town of Chicago to work sales for Careerbuilder.com.  The city of Chicago was amazing, there were street festivals, celebrations in Grant Park, public concerts, culture at every corner, great food, great bars, clubs and a beautifully unique rustic urban architecture.  However, working sales in Chicago was a different matter.  Salesmen for careerbuilder.com had the delightful opportunity to be cooped up in a sales floor in a flood of cubicles in which each sales representative would have to cold call businesses up to 150 times a day trying to round up new clients for the company.  The work was emotionally challenging and grueling.  Rejection became a daily part of life and the few people I could get to listen to me, I felt like I had to lie to in order to meet the expectations that were placed on me.  I immediately began looking for a way out, and eventually I found CAEP- Communicated for Agriculture- Education Programs, a program that would help me land my first winery job.  (Ironically, I found the program on careerbuilder.com)

My first winery job was not glamorous.  Somehow I got the idea that I would be sitting on a hillside swirling a glass, tasting it to see if it was ready, kneading the wines and playing with barrels all the time.  If only.  I drove down to Stone Hill Winery in Missouri because all the California placements had been taken and quickly became Tank Cleaning Monkey #2.  For those of you not familiar with the art of cleaning tanks, it’s not terribly exciting.  You spray item X, then probably scrub and then spray item Y, rinse, and if you did a bad job, repeat.  However, as far short of my expectations the romance of the job was, it was probably one of the best experiences of my life.  I was inspired that by hard work and a little of bit of know-how, we could make delicious art.  I decided that while I may not want to sell wine, I could definitely see myself making it.

However, I wanted a faster way out.  I found that by working in the cellar I was picking up wine-making quite slowly.  I still remember the winemakers walking around the big blue machine that filled up with cake-like stuff complaining about how a protein had gotten caught in the membrane.  I had no idea what that meant, and I knew I was a long way from finding out, so I decided I had to go back and do the whole wine-maker education.  It was then that I finally made my way to California and my life as a winemaker and not just an intern truly began.  (And by the way, today, I know what the big blue thing was and what was wrong)

Fresno State is where I was educated as a winemaker and I feel very blessed by the education that I received there.  I made it a point to learn every last thing I could there.  I was never willing to be anything short of great and walked out of the school, proud, excited and cocky, thinking that I had learned enough to set me up to become part of the upper echelon of wine-makers.  But of course, I was dead wrong.  As much as I felt I had learned, there was infinitely more left to learn and the California landscape was littered with talented wine-makers who had truly honed their craft.  I found that once I was in the field I was slowly re-educating, modifying, supplementing and building off of my base of knowledge I had learned at Fresno State.

And that’s where we are today.  I’m not silly enough to think that my knowledge is complete.  It never will be and the field is filled with geniuses who will always have something new to share.  So now my life’s goal is to pursue those lessons that the fruit, the vineyards, and my colleauges have to teach me.  However, I don’t want to keep these lessons to myself.  That’s the purpose of this blog.  Every lesson learned will be common knowledge and everything I have learned over my internships, my wine-making, my education and my independent study are all here for the common wine consumer, so that the common drinker, can be just as bit as educated in winemaking as myself, someone who’s devoted his life to the craft.  Read along friends, and together, hopefully will unlock many of this treasure’s hidden secrets.

2011 Harvest Report

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2011 was cool.  It was very cool.  I first realized this as early as April while I lived in Fresno, when the temperatures would normally stretch high into the 90’s, scorching residents in the area way before we were ready for the summer heat.  However, this year, it didn’t.  This year, the weather, all the way until June, was cool and in the 70’s and low 80’s.

Grapevines don’t really think too hard when it comes to weather.  Generally speaking, unless it reaches dramatic extremes that shut down the vine and its natural processes, it’s a pretty simple formula for them: hot weather promotes and accelerates ripening, while cool weather slows ripening.   So this year, the ripening slowed, because it was cool, and the fruit was generally two or three weeks behind an average vintage in its ripening process.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with these types of things, the 2010 vintage did not go well.  It had been equally cool, maybe a little less so, and California wine-makers had gotten burned, literally.  You see, in any cool vintage, there is always concern about rain and rot.  California tends to be dry in the summer and early fall, but late fall and winter are usually accompanied by rain, and if fruit is on the vine, well, it usually will rot, which is, well, bad.  Fermenting wine with rot (specifically botrytis cinerea) is usually a bad thing.  Unless you’re trying to make a sweet white wine, rot makes the wine oxidize easily, reduces color and is a hotbed for unwanted microbial activity, all of which can ruin the quality of wine overnight.

So in 2010, many California growers tried to speed up their fruit’s ripening by cutting out leaves and exposing clusters more to the sun.  The idea being that more sun would increase the ripening of the fruit.  However, this plan ended up backfiring on California, and thousands of tons of fruit were scorched and shriveled into raisins when massive heat waves hit California before the fruit was ready.

Turn the page to 2011 and now wine-makers are praying for late rains and brushing up on their techniques for fighting under-ripeness and rot.  However, this year we were not going to be trying to shed too much leaf area trying to get things in as fast as possible.  We learned our lesson the first time.  If we were going to have a strategy, it was going to be to be more patient.  So the winemakers hunkered in and waited for whatever mother nature was going to serve up this year.

The problem was, in order for a cool year to work with normal vineyard practices, essentially, it needed to rain late.  If we didn’t get any rain until November, it may have been a fantastic vintage.  However, our prayers didn’t come true.  By the time early October rolled around, most of the fruit (especially reds) in Napa and Sonoma was still on the vine, and it was time to face the music.  It was going to rain.  At the time, a lot of the fruit was almost ripe.  The question for every winemaker became: do I pick a tad early?  Or do I try to ride it out?  Most winemakers picked as much as they could, and lots of fruit beat the rains, but the majority of the fruit was forced to stick around on the vine.

The result of course, was rot.  At our winery, we brought in one lot of Pinot Noir just before the rain (as a matter of fact, the rain hit as we were working on the sorting table) and the fruit was beautiful, the flavors were rich, the tannins were dense for the varietal and the wine was showing immense potential.  But the fruit that didn’t make it wasn’t so lucky.  A lot of Pinot Noir came in two weeks later and showed so much rot that on the sorting table our head winemaker said not to take out everything with rot, or there would be nothing left, and promptly upped the sulfur.  That being said, the fruit was already under-ripe.  It was still tart and the red apple and medicinal flavors of the fruit had yet to convert to cherry and blackberry like one would hope.

But that was the story of 2011 and I guess that is the nature of every cool year.  There were some batches that came in and beat the rain, but there were also many lots that simply did not.  What I noticed was that the fruit for the other winery where I work, Mazzocco, weathered the storm much better than for Gallo.  Mazzocco, selling at a more premium point, had the luxury of farming lower yields, which not only concentrates flavor but coupled with talented management, also reduces the fruit’s vulnerability to rot.  I also heard similar stories about premium wineries doing just fine in the rain.  Friends at Tablas Creek in Paso Robles and Preston of Dry Creek described fruit that survived the rains just fine.   It was vineyards that were gunning for higher yields that were struck first.

However, before I let you go and believe that 2011 was a bad vintage and it’s a number on a bottle that you should try to avoid, the truth of the matter for this vintage, as well as every vintage is that there was lots of good and bad wine made.  Vintage 2011 was a great year for many wineries that were able to get their fruit in before the rains, so it may be a terrific year for some whites and premium wineries like Mazzocco.  However, reds at the medium price point in regions where it was cool enough for quality but with higher yields most likely faced some of the biggest challenges.  But at the end of the day, they are only that: challenges.  It means the fruit doesn’t naturally lend itself to a higher quality of wine, so the adept winemaker has to do more.  I think one winemaker summed it up best when she said, “Great wine is made in the vineyard; but when it rains we make it in the winery!”