But in talking to the friend, I realized that the blog, is in fact, pretty cool, assuming don’t mind my sense of humor and have a capacity for intense wine nerdiness.  This blog does, in fact, provide a unique voice on the internet, and it may not be for everyone, but I like to imagine that the internet is a slightly more interesting place thanks to this blog’s existence, so here we go:

Before I get into my nerdy rants, it’s time I tell you a bit about what’s going on in my life.  My days of nomadic traveling from town to town, harvest to harvest and country to country are for better or worse, over.  I thought briefly about renaming the blog “Learnings of a Winemaker who is indefinitely stationed in Southern Sonoma County” but that didn’t have quite the same ring to it, so I guess I’ll just tell you that I’m now working as the Sales Manager and Assistant Winemaker at a new project called Azari Vineyards.

Azari Vineyards, I have to say, is awesome.  The focus of the winery is the best fruit off a 10-acre vineyard on a South-facing hillside in the Petaluma Gap, a very cool region close to the San Pablo Bay, that makes some very interesting wines.  The climate is not totally unlike the Santa Rita Hills, but for one reason or another, makes wines that are dark and concentrated rather than the bright strawberry that the Hills seem to be known for.  The next several blogs will have to be about what I learn as the seasons evolve at Azari.

The Obsidian Vineyard, one of Donelan’s best sites.

For those of you that have a winemaker or two who’s close in your life, you may have been hearing a decent amount of moaning and groaning the past couple years.  The last couple of years have felt like something akin to growing pineapples in Canada.  (No offense Canadians, we love you and you’re cute Mountie outfits)  The fruit hasn’t really come in the way we hoped and we’ve pretty much been in “just deal with it” mode.
Well, this year is different, 2010 and 2011 were cold, this year has been warm.  It rained early those years, and this year, it seems like the weather gods have just decided to skip a year in the rain department, which is great for the fruit.  (My rain dances must be working)  Simply put, this has been the best vintage I’ve ever been a part of.  The fruit is dense and concentrated, there is next to no botrytis (rot, it’s a fancy way to say rot) and the flavors in the juices, the ferments and the wines are consistently awesome.

How awesome?

Think batman in an F-16 delivering donuts to starving babies in Africa.  That awesome.

The other exciting part is the winemakers here at Donelan.  Tyler and Joe have a very clear idea of what they’re doing and they know how to execute making the wines they want to make.  The wines are developing rich and full flavors with lots of cool and exciting aromatics.  However, more than anything, Tyler and Joe are letting the wine make itself.  They do some whole-cluster ferments, they add acid and nutrients and they’ll do an extended maceration when necessary, but after that, the wines pretty much are dumped in a tank and left to make themselves, which, -especially when you have fruit like this- makes some pretty killer juice.

It’s a good vintage.  I’ll have to continue my rain-dances, the wine community can thank me later.  If any community members would like to help out, here’s an instructional video.

Balance is a wonderful wine-snob word, it’s up there with the scary words like “complexity” and “nuance”.  It does however, have a very important and real meaning: it means that the astringent and the sweet characteristics of the wine are such that neither over-whelms the other.  Think of soda: ever have flat coke?  Nasty, no?  The carbonation is astringent and it provides balance for the sugar, so without it, the drink just tastes “out of balance”, which I guess is a fancy way of saying it’s gross.  Ever think of sparkling water as hard to drink?  That’s because the astringency from the carbonation has nothing to smooth it out.

Ok, so that’s balance.  Now we have to balance a wine.  So what are the sweet elements and what are the astringent elements?

To the Graph!!!

Sweet Elements                                                           Astringent Elements

Sugar (surprise!)                                                           Acidity

Alcohol                                                                         Tannin

Oak

Polysaccharides (ahhh!  Big word!

Just think of it as fruit flavor from the skins.)

Polyhydric alcohols (I’m not even going to try)

Perfect balance. The fat kid is the sugar, polysaccharides, oak, alcohol and polyhydric alcohols, while the dog is tannin and acid.

Thank you Graph!  So basically, we need to make sure that we have enough sweet elements to make sure the acidity and tannins don’t make the wine harsh, but we need enough astringent elements to add some kick and keep the wine from tasting like flat soda.  Of course, every palate is going to perceive this differently, but that’s the basic idea.

So this makes our case of the Casella adding oodles of acid to the incoming wines pretty self-explanatory.  How did they avoid the wines getting too acidic?  They added plenty of oak, added a small touch of sugar just before bottling, and everything was hunky dorey.  Pretty simple, actually.

Uh-oh, here comes a tangent!

What was especially interesting was the way they treated the higher end wines.  They came in with higher tannin levels and got the same acid treatment.  So I one day was talking to a wine-maker and asked him how they compensated for the acid- sugar?  Not sugar, they just let the “fruit quality” balance it out.

What does that mean?

To me, it has to be the polysaccharides.  In the grape, the pulp is made primarily from water, and the skins, you guessed it, polysaccharides.  If you have a larger skin presence, you have more of said compounds, and it makes sense that they would provide some sweetness elements, giving you a softer, richer wine.  (If you want to hear me REALLY nerd out on this, I’ve got more to the theory, hit me up, I’ve got evidence!)

So that’s it.  That’s acidity and balance in a nutshell.  There’s still a lot to acid, however, for instance, how it affects EVERYTHING!  Stay tuned!

Acid just sounds scary, doesn’t it?  Tartaric acid just sounds like something you would pour down the drain to unclog it.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s in your wine.

Woah Woah Woah!  Hold it!  Don’t throw your wine collection into the trash.  Ok, that one you already threw in there you can leave in there.  Nobody likes Blackstone anyway.  The thing is grapes naturally have acids in them, namely, Malic acid and Tartaric acid.  Tartaric acid is a natural acid that integrates as seamlessly with your body’s chemistry as does a granny smith apple.  As you may already know, acid in general is a huge part of a wine’s flavor.  It’s the tingling sensation that the wine has on your tongue when you drink it.  It’s an important part of the balance and texture of a wine.  There are many parts of wine that provide subtle sensations of sweetness, so the duty of acid is to differentiate the wine from something like syrup that is just pure sweetness.

When I arrived in Australia, I already knew this.  What I also knew is that acid makes it difficult for microbes to survive.   What I didn’t know was just how effective it was at said goal.

Enter Casella wines.  Unfortunately, I can’t claim that Casella is a particularly clean winery.  The winery moves through thousands of tons of grapes every day and there’s not always time to do a thorough cleaning between every lot.  There is a lot of grime and junk that ends up in the tanks and well, let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly, err… sterile.

I can tell you this was something of a shock to me, because well, everywhere I’ve been before, they’ve been pretty adamant about sanitation.  Sanitation is your first defense against microbial instability, and protecting against all sorts of spoilage flavors in your wine.  However, after tasting through the lots with the wine-makers, I can tell you there was never any sign of microbial spoilage, which I thought was weird, because I definitely saw hoses that if I touched, I wouldn’t eat with my hands later.

So why is Casella wine so stable when it goes through the muck like this?  Well, it’s that stuff you were about to pour down the drain- acid.  The wine-makers make it a point to keep the acids very low, (pH of 3.5 and lower for the hard-core nerds in the audience) they add very large doses of Tartaric acid when the fruit comes in, so much so they have a tank full of the stuff automatically dosing our Drain-O into the transport lines and apparently, that coupled with normal SO2 levels, makes this stuff super-wine.  In wine-making school they teach you that acid is a microbial deterrent, a kind of microbiological crime-fighter and they even talk about it in some consumer-oriented wine books, but not until I had seen it here did I really appreciate how strong it is.  This is simply amazing: the wine here protects itself, unlike every American winery I’ve been to, where the wine-makers protect the wine.

Ok, ok, so you guys are probably wondering the same thing I did: doesn’t all that acid make the wine tart?  Of course it can, but it’s more a question of balancing it with other elements of the wine, which we’ll get to another day.

So there you have it.  Acidity.  If you made it this far, congrats!  I probably shouldn’t have chosen one of the most important topics in the wine world for an article subject, but here you are, you made it.  So kudos to you!  If I didn’t bore you enough just now and you want to hear more self-important diatribes, stay tuned!

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.

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.

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

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…

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.

The pump-over has been completed, Lord Vader.

If I ever establish a winery of my own.  I will require all employees to dress as storm-troopers.