How you going?

Ok, does that sound grammatically incorrect to anyone else?  It sounds like you forgot a few words or something.  Syntax errors aside, however, this is the Australian version of “How’s it going?” in the good ol’ Red, White and Blue.  Australia has offered plenty of things to throw me off, like charging $4 for a 20oz soda, but all things considered, this is one of the most beautiful, remarkable, interesting and well-spirited countries I have ever been to.

The Riverina, Australia's volume wine producer, and my current home.

I have started work as a press monkey at the mega-winery Casella.  The biggest surprise was a completely un-related to wine: I was part of a wave of immigrant labor brought in to work the vintage, traveling great lengths for the sole purpose of earning more money than they receive at home to obtain their goals.  Only, these aren’t immigrants from economically distressed nations.  This tidal wave of migrant labor is composed of Germans, Brits, Frenchmen, Germans, Koreans, Estonians, Germans, Swedes, Italians and more Germans.  They are all back-packers, and they are here to earn money to fund their travels around the world.

This of course, has made for a very interesting work environment.  I also live with them in a hostel, which has been exciting because every day is a cultural exchange: I learn about customs and habits of their nations, as well as the foods, beers and politics, while I teach them about mine.  (I am the only American in the 150 people at the hostel, the owner said I’m only the third American the hostel has ever seen.  Nuts.)  It’s all been very cool, but the biggest thing I’ve learned from everyone is just how similar everyone is, both at home and abroad.

Fun Fact: I cannot catch a kangaroo.

The winery itself is probably visible from space.  It’s simply goliath.  The presses are in full “go” mode and right now we’re bouncing some 1,000 tonnes of grapes through every day, pushing through a lot of Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon through presses twice the size of my first apartment.  Things have been a lot of fun so far, as we have a lot of work to do to get all that wine done, and I have been promised that I will be kept abreast of the wine-making master plan once things start to calm down for the wine-makers.  I’m looking forward to this harvest: it will definitely be a very unique experience in my life.

More updates to follow.

Cheers.

So Chris the Traveling Winemaker is going to Australia!  To be honest, when I imagined my trip to Australia, I imagined myself making wine in some small fancy-schmancy place in the fancy-schmancy regions such as Coonwarra and Barossa, but alas, my offer came from else-where: it came from the Riverina of New South Wales.

Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that these Aussies are really good at naming things.  Riverina in New South Wales sounds pretty sweet, and I certainly hope it is.  I will be there to make Yellow Tail.  I could continue my search through some other people, but the honest truth is this is a great opportunity and I’m happy to have it.

So off I go to Griffith, New South Wales to work as the ______ specialist (as a “skilled worker” they plan on assigning me a specialty, I’m flattered to be in that category) when I get there.

A bit about Casella: (the company that makes Yellow Tail) the facility is huge.  Not like the burrito you order from your favorite Mexican hole in the wall huge, we’re talking like 40 pound cat huge.  The facility is a whopping 9 acres large, and produces around 11 million (let me make that numerical so you can marvel at the zeros: 11,000,000) cases a year.  Maybe more. 

So next time you pick up Yellow Tail Shiraz or watch one of those edgy advertisements on TV, think of me, because I’ll be there, making that wine in the summer sun of New South Wales, getting a whole new perspective on wine and getting to see a whole new corner of the world.

So in most wine-making schools, they’re quick to talk about the fact that acid and tannin are on the opposite side of the spectrum as alcohol, sugars and polysaccharides.  (Whoa, that was a lot of big words!  Ok, Tannin is mouth-drying and acid is the tingling on your mouth.  Together they make up the astringency of a wine.   Poly-saccharides, on the other hand, are super-huge sugar molecules that are not as sweet as other sugars, but still kinda sweet.  Don’t worry, this is the longest parenthesis in article)  However, I as a winemaker didn’t fully understand how huge, how colossal, how hulk after he got big and green because you wouldn’t share your In-and-Out detrimental and consequential the alcohol and acid balance of a wine is. 

I work at Mazzocco winery, which plies it lively-hood on high-alcohol wines that provide a massive mid-palate (more cork-head words?  This one is described at the bottom of the article)  It’s become pretty apparent to me that A) this amount of mid-palate is rare and B) that said mid-palate and body is very much the result of alcohol and more alcohol.  So what is the take-away here?  Manipulating the alcohol of the wine is crucial to the way the wine tastes on your palate.  Unfortunately, legally, most winemakers can’t manipulate the wine’s alcohol, but as a home-winemaker, I can do whatever I want.  So today we’re spiking the wine with vodka.  The question is how much?

Like any other major wine-making decision, I set up a bench-trial.  I kept it simple.  I kept a control and spiked my wine up to 13.5% and 14.0% alcohol.  Normally, I would tell you guys the play-by-play of what each wine tasted like, but I’ll just tell you the decision right now: the 13.5% was the easy favorite.  The 13.1% (control) was tart, but had great flavor.  The 14.0% had a hint of burn to it.  The 13.5% had a wonderful round-ness to it.  The wine was softer because it was more in balance (see balancing above) and it still had it’s characteristic flavor.  If you go back to my previous article Blending Time, the wine needs some oak, and well, the oak is working it’s way in, but it’s not quite there yet.  I’m giving it time.  Either way, the 13.5% is what I want.

So what did I do?  What do you think?  I dumped .4% worth of vodka into the wine.  (264 milliliters to be specific)  Hopefully the wine will be as in balance and as nuanced as the bench trial.  This wine is starting to look really really good.  I’m excited to see what happens next.  It’s funny, because as the wine-maker, you’d think the wine would be a product of what I wanted it to be, but in reality, every time I make an adjustment, it surprises me.  Something happens to the flavor that I didn’t quite expect.  The only thing that is constant is that the wine keeps on getting better.  I can’t wait to see where this goes.

(Mid-palate is exactly what it sounds like: some wines have more presence than others in the middle of the tongue when you taste them.)

This time of the year is barrel season in the winery.  All the wine has been fermented, the cellar workers get an opportunity to sleep and the wines are starting their slow accent to maturity.  The reason for this is simple: malo-lactic fermentation.   Now, “malo-lactic fermentation” sounds a little well, microbiological, so we’ll call this acid-eating.  Basically, now that fermentation has finished, it’s time for bacteria to eat all the harsh acids.  In addition, it’s time for the wines to start the aging process.  Both of these things happen with the help of big, 60 gallon oak barrels.

So that’s what we cellar rats are doing this time of year.  We dismount the barrels into a veritable ocean of wood and then walk from barrel to barrel, doing whatever today’s task may be: pumping wine out of barrels, pumping into barrels, inoculating barrels (with acid-eaters) or whatever the wine needs.  This is very much the last step of the process, all the wine-making has already been done in the fermentation process, and now we’re conducting the acid-eating process.

The problem is that before we put the barrels away for the long-haul, we have to add sulfur to the barrels to protect them from spoilage, however, unfortunately, sulfur will kill our acid-eaters, and we have to wait until their done before adding it, unless of course, we want the harsh acids in our final wine.  So we have to truck out the barrels for each step of these processes, and we spend a lot of time in the lab monitoring samples from the barrels.

It’s a refreshing change.  All harvest long, hours were long and work was intense, but unlike the fermenting wines, the barrels aren’t exactly the wild-childs that fermentations are.  So we just leave them to be worked on after harvest, and in terms of other things, such as barrel maintenance and wine monitoring, now is time when we can play a little catch-up.

When you’re making wine for your buddy’s wedding, it had better be good.  My buddy Alex is getting about 5 gallons of Pinot Noir for his big day and I want to make sure it’s top quality.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have control over the picking decisions and things came in a little less ripe than I would have liked, leaving me with a little less tannin, alcohol, color and body I would have liked.  I essentially nuked the fruit with extractive methods- draining off juice, adding all sorts of varieties of oak chips, punching down like a mad-man and letting the juice soak on the skins for more than a week before fermentation.

And the wine’s color and tannin are decent.  Acceptable, not much more.  The alcohol and the acids, on the other hand are way off, the acids are high and the alcohol is low.  That’s important because well, if the acid is high, the wine is un-reasonably tart and alcohol provides both a perception of sweetness to balance out the acid (think lemonade) and accounts for lots of the wine’s presence in your mouth.

So that brings us to today.  Today the wine has finished malo-lactic fermentation (the bacterial eating of bad acids) so it’s time to move it out of its current container to separate it from the sediment that has settled to the bottom of the container.  While I’m doing this, I’ll fill up the container to the brim with additional wine to limit the surface area where air can come in contact with the wine.  Normally, I’d use a like wine- another Pinot Noir, but today, I’m going to use a bigger, bolder wine to try to beef up the color and tannin to where I wanted it.  (what about the alcohol and acid, you ask?  We’ll get to that later, that will be a different entry)

So these were the candidates: Kokomo Syrah, Rancho Zabaco Zinfandel and Red Rock Malbec.  I did some trial blends with the Malbec and Zin to start things off: the Pinot already had a bright cherry nose with lots of bubble-gum and a touch of peanut.  The Zin naturally had the flavor of Fresh strawberries and orange marmalade, similar, and delicious.  The Malbec had the flavor of chocolate.  I tried the blends.  I found the Malbec added a round-ness to the wine (smoothness you can feel all over your tongue) and mellowed out the Pinot’s crazy fruit.  The Zin, well, the Pinot was already kinda crazy, now it was just more crazy, the wine equivalent of me sending Edward Scissorhands to try to talk some sense into Frankenstein’s monster.  It didn’t work.  I guess you could say it enhanced the wacky character of the wine.

But it seemed that oak did all the talking for the Malbec (oak can add chocolate flavor and roundness to a wine) and I was curious to see what happened when I added oak to the Pinot/Zin vs Pinot/Malbec.  I found quickly oak provided a sweet caramel straight jacket for the Pinot/Zin’s craziness and the Pinot/Malbec already influenced by the Malbec’s oak-tastic-ness, just started to drown in oak flavor.  The Pinot/Zin tasted amazing with the oak, and oak’s sweetness started to balance out the acid a little.

Decision made.  Pinot/Zin it was, and the racking (wine transfer) commenced.  I found I had under-estimated the amount of Zin I needed for topping (filling to the brim) and did another trial of topping wines, this time incorporating the Syrah.  Zin won again.  (Oak was used in the trial again)  Sounds like Alex will be getting a wine that is 90% Pinot Noir and 10% Zinfandel.  I hope he doesn’t mind, because it tastes delicious.  One decision down, just a few left to go.  This wine is starting to get good.

I’ll keep this short, but I think all cork-heads need to know this: one of the lead critics for Wine Advocate has been accused of selling his critiques and is stepping down.  (even though he claims he isn’t stepping down due to allegations)  If you read wine magazines or even use their ratings, I think as responsible consumers, we need to know about this.