Just under the wire!

So I wrote last month I would post once a month and I managed to bring this one down to the last day.  Not a a good start!  However, the month has been productive and educational.  A plus in my book (pun intended.)

I started off with filtering the white wines to get them ready for bottling.  I use a pressure leaf filter with diatomacous earth (DE) to get them from settled but still cloudy to sparkling.  The wines are not sterile at this point so I still need to maintain sulfur dioxide levels (SO2) which works as both an anti-oxidant and an anti-microbial.  It's great when one chemical will do two things.  I use a blend of grades of DE, hence the color differences.  It starts out as a very fine dust and forms a cake when it gets wet and is under pressure creating the filter.  The screens inside the filter housing are just there to catch the DE and to start the cake forming.  I find it fascinating that it works.

We had some great tartrate formation this year in the Gewurztraminer.  Here it is starting to lift off the door when I started cleaning.  It doesn't always come off this easily, usually it glues itself and only hot water and elbow grease get it off but sometimes you get lucky.  Transitional art and easy clean up.

I also attended a Riesling tasting this month with other Oregon winemakers.  I love it when I get the chance to sit down and taste what other people are doing and to hear how they are making it.  I tasted a few beauties that I will definitely be looking for in a few months.  We were tasting unbottled samples and many were still not filtered as well which does mean the wine will change before it is on the shelf but regardless there are some great 2012 Rieslings on the way.  The feedback from my piers is invaluable as well as seeing/tasting how my own wine compares to others: is it drier, sweeter, bigger, more acidic, more delicate?  What about fruit flavors or floral aromas?  Some of the things I am looking at when I taste Riesling.  Thanks to Penner-Ash Cellars for the lovely facility.

In the vineyard the crew has finished pruning and done most of the tying down.   It looks like we might have pinot blanc this year too which would be exciting.  Look at those happy grafts!  I always like how tidy the vineyard looks after pruning and Riley thinks it's great for running.  As my dad would say, the vines are all potential.  Here's to a great growing year.

Inspiration?

I've been waiting for inspiration to strike so I really have something to talk about.  To encourage that process I've been out taking pictures.  I still don't have anything I want to write about but I do have some great pictures so enjoy the show.

There have been several great walks in the vineyard.  I love watching all the new growth right now.  The young vines are starting to look like real plants and buds are popping out every where and getting ready to burst into bloom, well ahead of last year.  Let's hope we keep on this trend.

I caught three hatchings of garden spiders.  This one I actually had my camera near by to snap a few pictures.  The weather cooled off right after they hatched and it took about three days for them to all move off the loveseat.  Can you believe how many there are!? (Click on the picture for a larger image.)

It appears all of our grafts are taking.  I haven't found any with no growth.  I caught this one the other day, it's just over the moon, there are even two future pinot blanc clusters at the top of the shoot.  And in the right hand picture you can see the Marechal Foch trying to put out it's own leaves.  Those were promptly removed after snapping this picture.

Sebastian has been out spraying and mowing the vineyard while Rosario and Guadalupe have been suckering the vines, see below, and are about to start cleaning the heads.  You can also see some of the lingering frost damage where a second or third bud has not pushed out yet in the fourth picture.

We had our Memorial Weekend Celebration and released four new wines all sporting the new label design and two with wax dipped tops! I got to spend the day with the printers watching our new labels being run.  I love seeing a project come together as well as watch someone very good at his job turn out a beautiful product.

On the wine making side I attended a conference on pinot gris and have several new ideas floating around in my head for next year.  I also have been tasting through the barrels every two weeks and am happy with what I have, this picture was taken one of the times I took the wines home.  The wines smell different and my focus differs depending on where I am tasting.  I don't know yet if we will make a reserve wine this year but that's due to quantity not quality.  We only have 23 barrels of pinot noir and I think we will need that for the Willamette Valley Pinot noir but we shall see as the wine progresses.

On the home front I finished a stitching project that I plan to give to a friend after it comes back from the framers and my cats tried to build either a fort or a bunk bed I could quite decide but either way they were quite comfortable.  And while Ferb is pretending to look squished he sat there for a quite a while longer after I took the picture.  I think he was enjoying the warmth personally.

Not Entirely Unscathed.

Unfortunately we didn't make it through last week's frost entirely unscathed and while walking the vineyard I can certainly see where the fans and burn pile didn't quite reach.  It's interesting to note how more often than not it's the buds on the top of the cane which got burned while the underside ones are okay.

Ah well, though it puts me in mind of that well known quote "This was supposed to be 'The summer of George'! The summer of George."  Fingers crossed that the rest of our growing season is perfect and I'll still be happy come fall.  Though they are predicting low temperatures again tonight and Friday night.  Hopefully it will stay well above freezing.

On a more upbeat note I am off to Rose City Label tomorrow to be on the press run for our new labels.  Get your smart phones ready!

Look at this great shot from this morning.  The Foch is on the right, shoots are already 4-8" long and the empty trellises on the left are the new pinot blanc grafts and a few of them are starting to push buds.  We are going to have pinot blanc (imagine me wiggling in my seat).

Bottling and Grafting are Done!

Yes, it has been another 2 weeks since I wrote but we really were busy around here.  And to add to the mayhem the bottler didn't run like a perfect dream the whole time which I really needed it to because we were supposed to have 4 jam packed bottling days.  Instead we had 4 full days complete with plenty of stoppages, a few broken bottles and lots of brainstorming.  Then after grafting we had to take on one more day to finish the pinot gris and rosé. Throw in a little sunburn and a bad head cold and the hall bath that just won't finish and you have the last two weeks of my life.  And we are still working on those new labels, closer, closer . . . I must admit a little quiet time would be appreciated!

On a positive note we think we know what the problem with the bottler is and I spent this morning partially disassembling it to get to the part we want to get fixed.  Of course, along the way I had to fix and tighten everything else that I can now access.  Fingers crossed getting this one part straightened will solve all our problems.  You can stop laughing now and I only meant all our problems with the bottler.  Really, stop laughing.  Instead admire our beautiful rosé and dream about the beautiful summer weather coming perfect for enjoying it on the patio.

After bottling we all moved out to the vineyard and spent a whirlwind Monday and Tuesday last week grafting about two thirds of the the maréchal foch over to pinot blanc.  The advantage of grafting as opposed to replanting is that we will only lose one year of production.  The process was straightforward but multi stepped.  First we went through and cut off the upper part of the foch trunk, cleaned away all the brush and sawed a few cuts into the base of the trunk to bleed off the rising sap.  Then the grafting crew came through and did the delicate work of actually grafting two pinot blanc sticks onto a foch trunk and taping up the graft joints.  Next we went through again and hand painted every trunk, joint and fresh cut with grafting sealant, the black paint.  Just a note, there is no comfortable way of spending the day painting something two and half feet off the ground.  You either hunch over or get on your knees.  We did have beautiful weather to do it in, hence the sunburn, and it was neat to watch the process.

The crew has gone through and cut the trunks again to bleed the sap, apparently the rising sap can push the graft off the trunk and next we need to go through and repaint the sealant anywhere it may have cracked.  Keep your fingers crossed that every graft takes.  It won't happen but it doesn't hurt to wish.  I've included two videos of the grafting process, one is of the process on the trunk and the other of what happened to the pinot blanc stick.  The second video is short, the grafter is fast but what he is doing is shaving the stick, trimming the end and then adding a slice so the trunk and the stick slide together making several layers.

The bathroom is grouted and as of last night the toilet and sink are in, now to run some caulk, hang the mirror and cabinet and rehang the door and I think we will be done!  Yeah!

Trials and tribulations, well at least trials

I know, it's been another three weeks since I wrote but this time I've been busy, busy trialing in fact.  Trialing blends, trialing for cold stability and protein stability, trialing fining agents, trialing this, that and the other thing.  Actually things are going very well here and I've been making wine.  At least that's how I feel when I get to move it from tank to tank creating my blends and starting to think about filtering!  After some lab work of course to make sure it is ready to filter which leads to trialing when it's not.   I have all the usual suspects, pH, titratable acidity (TA), alcohol, residual sugar (RS), cold stability - don't want the wine throwing crystals if it lives in the fridge for a while, protein stability - don't want the protein coming out in strings if the wine gets a little too warm if someone forgets it in the car, of course none of you would do that, and this year I am checking for botrytis glucans.
If the fruit is affected with botrytis in the vineyard it can manifest in the wine as very long and strong glucan chains which among other problems can lead to filtering hell.  For the geeks, I think what happens is the botrytis feeds on the gluscose in the juice and produces the glucan chains as a by product but don't quote me on that.  Back to the winemaking side, what's even nastier is that it likes to sneak up on you, something like this.  I start filtering with the pressure leaf filter which uses diotomacious earth (DE), the wine basically pass straight through the medium and only a few of the chains get caught maybe slowing the filter down a little.  No big deal I think, user error, I'll be fine.  Then I get to the plate and frame filter, again the wine goes straight through the pads, a few chains might get caught but mostly it all looks good.  Then moments later it hits the membrane filter with its lovely accordion style interior, see picture of a cut open filter, and then little chains get caught and faster that you can say 'uhh, I think there might be a prob . . .' the filter crashes to halt, the bottling line goes down and I have a crew of 5 waiting for me to fix the situation.  So to avoid this situation I check the wines in potentially problem years and if necessary add an enzyme which will break the chains so they go through the filter.   Of course the chains are only broken temporarily so once I add the enzyme we have to bottle within a certain window of time before the chains reform.  And that is your chemistry lesson for the day.

Back to winemaking, last week we finally decided I had created the best pinot gris and seven blends in the lab and it was time to start implementing.   It took about three days and a fair bit of basic math to get the wine moved as all the 2011 Seven blend won't fit in a single tank this year so I have to do my best to create a proportional blend in two tanks and then during filtering I will mix them up creating a uniform wine.  I think the scariest part of blending for me every year is that there is no going back.  If I put something together wrong I can't take it apart.  That always makes me a little nervous and so I spend quite a bit of time laying out my plan of action before I start actually moving anything.  Everything went together without a hitch and now I am running lab work.  Once all the wines pass their tests I'll set up filtering.  Yeah!

We are still working on the rosé, haven't got that quite perfect yet.  After an intense tasting last week, as you can see we work very hard, we came up with some new things to try and we are tasting those this afternoon.  Hopefully I'm almost there.  I'm excited to get this wine in the bottle and out to you with the new label on it.  We are shooting for Memorial Weekend.

I also worked with the neck freezer a little more, my technique still needs some work I ended up wearing a little bit too much sparkling wine but I am hopeful.  Wish I had gotten a picture but you'll just have to wait until we start going into production mode.  Then there will be enough people around to get a few pictures of the process.

On the vineyard side, our Pinot blanc sticks have arrived, they are the pruned canes off a mature vine.  In April someone will be coming in to graft some of the Marechal Foch to Pinot blanc.  The advantage of grafting over replanting is you only lose one season of crop, the flip side is the parent plant will have an effect on the grafted plant but hopefully for us it will just help the Pinot blanc ripen a touch earlier.  After this is done we will have all seven varietals of our Seven blend planted here.

Just a home front update, bathroom floor is tiled, walls are next!  And spring appears to be on the way.