I saw the sun!

The sun came out this week.  It really did.  There was a fiery yellow ball in the sky that hurt my eyes!  Did you see it too?  Okay maybe I'm being overly enthusiastic but we did have one glorious day and one pretty nice day.  And that was enough to push the buds out, make the madrona tree bloom and bring out the honey bees in force.  Now to make sure we don't get a frost though I don't think we are in much danger of that.  The nights seem to be staying in the 40's.  Today however is cold and gray again.  Ugh.  I want my sunshine back.  I am installing a screen door on the back door of our house and I want to be able to use it by golly!  In fact finishing it up is tomorrow's project.  It is one of the roll up kind and I'm curious to see what the cats do.  More torture devices for them!  Ha ha ha! (evil laugh)
We tasted the white wines again today, more tweaking, and that went well.  I'll taste them again tonight with dinner and make sure I still like the same wines and that my husband agrees with our choices.  He is my secret weapon!  At this point though I am pretty happy with the final wines and hopefully we will bottle next week or the week after.  Finally!  For such a small amount of wine it has taken us longer than normal to get ready.  We also tasted the Marechal Foch today.  We wouldn't normally taste that wine this early but I have been playing around with some blending ideas and wanted to get some feedback from Mary and Barry.  It was a good tasting, very enlightening and we are no closer to making a decision.  That's okay, I have a few more months.

Here's to hoping the sun will come out this weekend so I can get some weeding done and remember to call your mother on Sunday and tell her what a great job she did.  And yes we finished the floors, I did this room in about 5 hours from start to finish.  Now for the trim.

The sun is shinning and I've been busy

Like Us!

First I want to say thank you to everyone who responded, it made my decision on what to do much easier and briefly the blog will stay here and you can click on the pictures if you like.  I have also added the blog to our Facebook page if that is easier for you, it will show up on Airlie's Facebook Page and an excerpt will be on the Airlie Winery website that will lead you here.  Be sure to check out our new website and thank you again.  Now back to what else I have been doing.  The last few days have been beautiful.  I love the longer days and I even find getting up in the morning easier.  The downside to these clear days is the cold nights but so far no hard frost and the buds are just barely showing so they should be safe for a little while longer.  Our trusty Chard vine is ready to go and you can see the buds swelling on the closeup.

I am sorry I didn't write last week but I was actually quite busy.  I attended a very good seminar on sulfide production in wine up in Portland on the same day that the wine was loaded onto the container for Japan.  I left my camera with Mary so you get to see how full the container was in the end.

Madrona Tree

On Friday Mary and I attended the annual LIVE meeting.  The meeting is a great chance to catch up with peers, learn about various problems or new processes and enjoy a nice lunch.  This year the meeting was held at the NW Viticulture Center in Salem, what a great venue and very apt for a group of grape growers to get together and share information.  The only comment I have to add is that I am ashamed more of my fellow winemakers were not in attendance.  I'll have to get on them next year.  For those of you unfamiliar with LIVE it stands for Low Input Viticulture and Enology and is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing vineyards and wineries with both education and certification of sustainable practices.  The vineyard and the winery are certified separately and in our case only the vineyard is certified though we wouldn't have any problem passing the winery.  If you would like to read more about LIVE, click here.
So this week on Monday Mary and I received a Facebook lesson, ergo all the recent activity if you are a Facebook follower, be sure to like us if you are not!  This morning I linked this blog to the account so as I said you can also catch up with me there.  Have to try and keep up with the social media stuff you know.  So the reason the blog will not be moving is that I found the new web design program too frustrating to work with so while I will post an excerpt at www.airliewinery.com the main article will still be here.  I know you are relieved Wade, remember to keep clicking on the pictures!

Moving on.  Tuesday I drove down to Sweet Cheeks Winery which is just southwest of Eugene.  What a beautiful day for a drive and a lovely winery.  I'll just tantalize you with a shot of the gate.  I went down to pick Mark Nicholl's brain, he is the winemaker there, about how to make sparkling wine and I'm glad I did.  Not only did he have some great ideas but he has gotten me motivated to work on it.  I think I was feeling a bit intimidated and overwhelmed.  Mark pointed out a few experiments which would be easy since I am using encapsulated yeast.  Encapsulated yeast is what it sounds like, instead of being loose the yeast is trapped in 2mm alginate beads which allow the wine to flow through but not the yeast particlaes.  This type of yeast takes out both the growing up the yeast culture step, the beads are a direct innoculum, and the riddling step, where all the yeast is worked down into the neck of the bottle prior to disgorging.  So yesterday I put a few bottles in the freezer/fridge to cold stabilize them and next week I'll make up a few bottles of bubbles varying the amount of yeast and sugar in order to see how much of each I need to create the perfect amount of fizz.  More details to follow.  (After I figure them out myself!)
So this brings me to today.  We were able to obtain the necessary glass for bottling so that should show up any day now and then I can get the other white wines out of tank in to bottle.  I always feel much better when bottling is over.  So I need to run lab work on all the whites, make sure I am happy that they are the best they can be and maybe next week get them in bottle.  Provided of course the glass shows up.

And in case you thought I hadn't been quite busy enough to get out of writing we have been painting at home, the office got painted three more times and is on the docket for tonight.  Please let this be the right color!  The front room got painted three times and that is now the right color.  We went from nursery yellow, very cheerful but didn't suit the house to Dijon mustard jar yellow, the walls were closing in - let me out! - to a very subtle gray green that is going to make my mother's artwork pop on the walls, after we get the rest of the flooring in.  Yes we finally started laying the kitchen floor over the weekend and it looks great!  Last night we put in another three hours, no updated picture but we are past the fridge and to the pantry door and now need to rip up carpet.  So you know what I'll be doing this weekend, ripping up carpet and laying more floor.  Feel free to stop by and provide entertainment, Advil or alcohol depending on your temperament.  We'll be home!

On the Road Again - almost

Our Reflecting Pool

I think I spent most of the week hunched over my computer trying to finalize travel plans and I know I spent one whole day on computer things which included arguing with someone in India that we aren't getting the download speed we are paying for and learning how to update our new website.  Their argument is that if we don't fail their speed test they can't help us regardless of what an external speed test reports.  Of course we don't fail their speed test.  Our website is getting closer to being ready for public consumption and if you would like to see it shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you a link.  Ryan is supposed to be making a few big changes and after those are done Mary and I would be glad for any feedback.

I also got caught up on my lab work, something I always get motivated to do when I am about to leave my wine for 2+ weeks.  Everything is in good shape though after tasting all the whites yesterday I think I will need to work on some de-acidification trials when I get home.  Cold stabilizing the wines certainly helped, the Riesling is beautiful but the Pinot gris and the sparkling base in particular are still a little sour.  Sometimes a touch of sugar works better than de-acidifying but we'll see when I get home.  I checked my four remaining barrels of pinot to see if ML is complete after I thought maybe it was after tasting last week but no.  I still think the barrels are moving but just not done.  Maybe when I get home.

On the weather front the snow is all gone but the rain sure did move in.  I think we have gotten close to 3" in the last three or four days and the pond is brimming again.  Barry snapped the snowy picture two weeks ago but it is so dramatic I thought you might enjoy it.  One advantage of the warmer weather is that the crew has been able to get back into the vineyard and finish up the 'twist and tie' on each plant.  As you can see our sturdy Chardonnay vine is all cleaned up and ready for spring.  Isn't the moss growing on the Foch a great color?  If I don't get a chance to write I'll talk to you all in two weeks when I get back to Oregon but I will try to write from Cincinnati next week and tell you about the Cincinnati International Wine Festival.  It looks like it should be a crush, we'll see.

Winter in Oregon

I'm not sure what to write about this week.  I must admit that this is not my favorite time of year.  Short, dark days tend to make me sleepy and desirous of curling up in a ball on the couch and reading or stitching.  I do realize that we are well past the shortest day of winter and that the evenings are certainly staying light longer which does inspire me to do more about the house.  This week I cooked two very good meals, if I do say so myself.  Tuesday night we had a some beef and barley soup that I cobbled together from three recipes.  I still will have to work on that one but combined with my fresh rolls it was definitely effective at combating the cold outside.  Last night I made Chicken Cacciatore from Cooks Illustrated.  It came out well though I think it might have benefited from some kalamata olives.  I love hitting the little salty spots that olives create.  Tonight is leftovers so will see if either dish benefited from some melding in the fridge.  I might throw some olives in the Cacciatore just to see.

Back at the winery things are quiet.  I have been trying to run the chilling to cold stabilize the white wines to get them ready for filtering but the system has been a little uncooperative.  I came in one morning to see glycol foaming out of the top of its storage barrel and at the price of glycol even losing a little is not a good thing.  Added to this problem is that I am trying to chill small amounts of wine.  It seems like this should be easier but instead what happens is that there is not enough wine in contact with the coils that wrap around the tank so actually extracting the cold from the glycol is difficult and I have to be careful that I don't damage the tanks by letting the steel get too cold.  The glycol can actually cause the metal to shrink and buckle if it is allowed to get too cold.  So Mary and I are trying to monitor the temperature on the tanks, the glycol level in the storage barrel and chill the wines.  Mother nature was helping, we even had a few snow flurries and then it warmed up to 50F for a few days and dumped lots of rain even in the mountains which distressed the skiers and now we are back down to 35F.  I am surprised more of us aren't sick!  As far as for the reds I am still waiting for the last four barrels of pinot to complete ML and I have been catching up on my lab work checking SO2 levels, pH, acid levels and alcohols.

In the vineyard the guys are pruning in the rain, snow and sun, kind of like postmen.  You can see last years canes between the rows on the right.  Later when the ground has firmed up they will be mulched into the soil with the tractor.

One of my current stitching projects.

After the Turkey

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.  I meant to let you know that I worked in the tasting room on Friday after Thanksgiving, which I don't normally do but as I didn't you'll have to come in during the week sometime to ask me your really gritty questions.  Thanksgiving was great, we had a little cold snap a few days before with a splash of snow which helped make it feel more like a holiday.   We have been eating leftovers ever since of course, last night was turkey and dumplings, with dropped biscuit dumplings loaded with fresh herbs instead of rolled ones and it can out very good if I do say so myself.  My husband said it was so pretty I should take a picture but I was ready to eat so you'll just have to imagine it.  Now we have leftovers of that so I am going to try freezing the liquid part with the thought that I'll make fresh dumplings when we thaw it out.  A great meal some cold winter evening.

As far as in the winery, things are going smoothly which is good as I have no space today as all the wine is still out from the Thanksgiving weekend, though Barry is fast taking care of it.  The Riesling needed a lot of food but it finally is smelling good and seems to be happy and chugging along nicely.  I think the Pinot gris and Gewurztraminer are almost done.  I'm going to spin them out with the centrifuge so that I can evaluate them better as well as get a more accurate sugar reading.  As the wine finishes up I use Clinitest tablets to check the sugar, same as doctors use to check sugar in urine.  I also need to check the progress of the ML on the pinot and the foch in the barrel room.  The cold snap definitely dropped the temperature in there, even in my little fort, so I think I am going to have to beef up the heater.  I have a better one here next to me in my office and I think I'll move that one out to the barrel room.  We'll see after I get the results back from the ML sheets tomorrow.

On a side note, Rocky and Riley went to the groomers last week, don't they look handsome and Riley's litter mate Cooper won the best of show at the National Dog Show in PA on Thursday.  Kind of fun, no?  And just to make you laugh, Ferb in his hammock.  We rolled up the area rug to do some cleaning and put it on the couch, he made himself at home.

Time for an Experiment

As I think I mentioned in my last post with less fruit coming in I should have more time to experiment and try out some new processes and this weekend I got to do the first of those.  In a normal year we drain the wine from the fermentation totes directly to the barrel, this is called going to barrel 'dirty' and there are two reasons we have done this in the past, one is because we can use gravity flow.  It is a gentler way to move the wine, and actually quite easy.  The other factor is space.  I like to keep each of the fermentations separate so that I can watch them develop in barrel and see which enzymes and yeasts I like for each vineyard in a particular vintage.  Trying to keep each ferment separate would mean that it needs to be moved to its own vessel, allowed to settle and then moved to barrel.  Time is another factor but a less important one.

So this year having plenty of both space and time I decided to try draining the fermentations to new totes and then pumping the wine to barrel.  I was able to use gravity to drain the fermentation bins and the press like normal but did have to pump the wine after the settling to the barrels.  Pumping is actually an easier way to fill barrels than with gravity because the flow is controlled by a remote and there are fewer overflow mistakes.  The reason for going to the hassle of settling the wine now before going to barrel is that the gross lees that I had to rack the 2009 pinot noir off of back in March never gets into the barrel.  There will still be some settling of lees as the wines are far from clear and I plan to rack the wines again after ML is complete but what I hope is that most of the reductive aromas that can become a problem will never get a chance to form in the wine and I won't be having the treat the wine later.  I think this is a good example of my hands on/hands off philosophy.  I can handle the wine less now but it may cause me to have to be harder on the wine later.   As it turned out I am really glad I settled the wine first because already in two of the totes the lees that had settled had some off aromas.
Sorry I forgot to take a picture so you could see the lees sitting in the bottom.  Look at the sides of the tote I am emptying, you can see both tartrates that have precipitated out and the lees that have gotten caught on them.The whole process will have to be modified for a normal year.  I settled the wine in the barrel room and there was barely enough space to work around the totes.  The trade off may be that I'll pump the wine out of the fermentors and the press and allow it to settle upstairs and then will be able to use gravity to fill the barrels downstairs.  The other thought is that I may have to make the decision to combine some fermentors upstairs beforehand so that I don't need quite so many totes to settle the wine before going to barrel.  I'll have to think on this some more.  So to sum it up the wines are done fermenting, have been allowed to settle after pressing, inoculated for ML, and racked to barrel.  They are now tucked into the barrel room and the little ML bugs are hard at work converting all that malic acid to lactic acid.  What fun!  ML sheets here I come.
As for the whites they are bubbling along at a very cool 54F and quite happily though it means I need a space heater in my office as I write this.  Unlike reds I want to whites to stay cool to preserve aromatics and to increase in complexity and mouthfeel.  At this point they are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through their sugar and will take about another month to finish to dry.  I think everything I have this year I will ferment to dry, I hope.  The yeast tend to start giving out sometime in December and I usually have to start cheering the ferments on at that point.  I am sure you will get to read about me complaining about them later.  But for now they are going at just the right speed and smelling great.  Isn't is great the different patterns the ferments make.

Finally Filtering

I am so sorry.  I wrote this last week, needed a picture from home and then didn't get it posted.  I am filtering Muller as I type and fingers crossed it is going well.  I really hope to be done today.  Then I can set up for bottling.  I also wanted to let you know that the tasting room is now open for business on the weekends.  Saturday and Sunday 12-5pm, if you are going to be early or late give Mary a call first and make sure she will be around: 503-838-6013.  As always we are open by appointment or by chance during the week.  Come out and taste what I have been working on!

Well paradise was wonderful and as always the geckos were fun, the snorkeling great and the hiking breathtaking.  The changes in the landscape on the big island of Hawaii are amazing.  On the walk to the green sand beach if you look left it could be the high dessert of eastern Oregon and then you look right and see the crashing blue-green surf of the Pacific with whales spouting in the the distance.  We didn't visit everywhere we had planned, it was my husband's first time to Hawaii, but instead got caught up in the local way and spent a few days doing nothing.  It was great to see my parents and spend some time with them in their almost complete new home.  My mother has taken cooking on a gas grill to a fine art though I think she might be ready for the kitchen to be finished.  Cabinets were in and counter tops on order so the end is in sight.
Being home is good as well and the kittens were very glad to see us, boy did they grow in a week.  I think they were purring the first 24hrs solid and not having to sleep in the garage, heaven!

Being at home means back to work and I have been in the thick of it.  Filtering has at last started and has been going very well.  I have a sneaking suspicion that vacation may be part of it.  Normally the wines don't get to settle for as long as they did this year and so they are quite clear before I even start. 
I use diatomaceous earth (DE) to filter the wine, the same as is used in swimming pool filters.  The DE builds on the screens inside the filter and eventually forms a cake through which the wine passes.  The particles in the wine get caught by the DE and brilliant (the technical term for very clear) wine comes out the other side.  The wine enters the machine, called a pressure leaf filter, on the right and exits on the left in the picture.  I can filter between 1100 and 2200 gallons on wine in a run which takes about 3-5 hours.  Yes, I agree that is a huge variance in the amount of wine but there are so many factors including I am almost chagrined to admit user error.  In my defense there are 12, yes 12, valves on the machine and failing to either open or close one of them at the correct time can cause the filter to break down and I am sad to admit I still mess something up at least twice a season.  On a positive note I haven't fired any wine onto the ceiling since we had it repainted three years ago.  By break down, so you don't think I am breaking the machine, I mean that the pressure changes enough inside the machine that the cake is cracked and stops collecting the particulates in the wine, ergo it stops being brilliant and starts being cloudy.  Arghh!!!!  The end is in sight though, I should be done Monday or Tuesday of next week.