It's cold.

It is really cold.  I just want to get that off my chest.  This morning it was 23F as I was driving in to work.  I did talk to a friend today who said it was 16F in Montana but that's Montana.  I don't live in Montana!  I live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and if I want cold and snow I drive to it!  I don't want it coming to me.  I have to admit that it has been pretty though.  A few mornings ago I was making my coffee and enjoying the sun streaming in the window and saw glitter falling from the sky.  That is the best way I have to describe it.  I think it was either very fine snow or some sort of freezing fog and it looked like tiny pieces of glitter.  I tried to capture it on camera but the sparkle was too fine and the moment was so magical that I wasn't really trying that hard.  I just wanted to enjoy the beauty.   Okay I'm done discussing the cold . . . maybe.  By the way, just for comparison, September to December.

 

So what does a winemaker do when it's this cold, why turn into a mad scientist of course.  The warmth of the lab being a driving factor, that and I had to grow up yeast.  Yeast!  In December!  In the freezing cold!  (Oh yeah, no more cold complaints.)  Unfortunately I think the aforementioned cold aggravated a difficult fermentation and it was slowly grinding to a halt with too much sugar left in the wine.  So rather than put it off any longer I spent yesterday growing yeast and very carefully adding about a third of the sluggish wine to the yeast.  I let that sit overnight and when it seemed to be going well today I added it back to the remaining two-thirds.  Not quite the way I am supposed to do it but tank space is at a premium right now.  So fingers crossed the new yeast will get the job done and the wine will go dry in the next week or two.  And as soon as I get this sluggish ferment to finish I will start blending trials for the seven and then we can think about bottling.  Maybe it won't be so cold!

Otherwise things are quiet.  The chardonnay and rose in barrel are poking along nicely though I finally had to put a heater in the barrel room.  Yes, it's cold there too!  Even with the barrel room half underground.  They are getting close to the point where they might decide to stick if the yeast gets too cold.  (Kind of like me.)  I am excited about the rose and am going shopping to buy all the roses I can find to compare to what I have.  Let me know if there are any you particularly like.

Treat please!

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.

Happy Dance and mournful dirge!

All the pinot noir is out of barrel and in tank! Yeah, happy dance!

Just starting!

3800 gallons to the top.

Let me be slightly more accurate:  the 2009 Willamette Valley is blended and in tank and the 2009 reserve pinot noir has been racked into neutral oak barrels to age another year and be bottled in September 2011.  I was able to rack 80 barrels in 2 days which was a lot of staring at the racking wand and waiting on the pump.  I like to use a pump to get the wine out of barrel because I think that it does a cleaner job and is easier on the barrels.  I have used a piece of equipment called a bulldog's pup which allows me to pressurize the barrel with nitrogen gas and force the wine out with no moving parts.  While I think that is the gentlest way to move the wine I don't think it as good at separating the settled wine from the lees and it is much harder on the barrels.  The pressurization of the barrels and then sudden release, especially if the seal fails on the bulldog, tends to warp the heads and make the barrels more likely to leak in the future.  That combined with the lack of control made me switch back to using a pump a few years ago.

I must admit that I ended up fining some of the pinot barrels with copper in order to remove some reductive aromas.  I consider reduction a flaw and one that can usually be addressed by the winemaker, so while I don't like having to make additions to my wines I will when necessary.  I consider fixing flaws when possible an essential part of good wine making.  I am trying to put the best wine I can on the market not the wine that has been handled the least.  If the two happen to agree that is wonderful but as I have mentioned before they don't always.  So after fining the barrels with copper to clean them up I then wanted to remove some of the copper, I would love to remove all if the copper but I'm not sure that is even possible and doing would be hard on the wine.  Removing the copper will not cause the reductive aromas to come back and I prefer to bottle a wine with minimal residual copper.  This means that after using the copper to treat the reduction I added yeast to the treated barrels to remove the copper.  This leads to yet another step, the yeast needed to be filtered out of the wine before mixing those barrels into the main blend.  The advantage of doing it this way is that only about 10% of the wine is filtered rather than 100% which goes back to my point that I like to be hands off when I can.  I spent Thursday morning filtering the treated barrels through a pad filter.  I'm sorry I forgot to take a picture when it was loaded but I will when we are bottling so you can see the filter in action.  The pads are 40cm square and go between the black plastic plates on the machines.  It is just like it sounds, the wine is pumped through the paper pads which trap the sediment and comes out clean on the other side.  The pads are available with different pore sizes so I can filter out only what is necessary and not any more.  I then sent a sample of the filtered wine off to a lab to be tested for residual copper and if I am happy with the number I'll mix the treated wine back into the main lot. 

Sebastian cleaned the barrels for me this time, the only reason I could do the job in 2 days instead of 4 and why the barrel room looks so nice and tidy.  He also reset the barrels for me so I was able to burn the sulfur wicks today like I did for the foch and chardonnay barrels protecting the barrels until we start cleaning them for the 2010 vintage.  Speaking of which . . . you all need to start sending us your sunny and warm weather!  We are still very behind and while today is warm, pushing 90F, earlier in the week it was definitely not warm.  We did get about 1/2" of rain on Monday which was a nice drink of water but what we really need is warmth.  The foch is starting to change color, a process called veraison, but is not nearly far enough along and there is no color any where else in our vineyard.  We are still about 2 weeks behind and I'm getting a little nervous!  Okay so maybe the mournful dirge is a slight exaggeration but still more ripening weather would be good.

On a happier note I am off on vacation next week to Victoria BC with my husband to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary so Mary has kindly agreed to write next week's blog.  I can't wait to see what she decides to share with you.

My apologies . . .

 . . . for not posting last week but somehow I just couldn't get inspired.  I didn't have any nice stories and my husband is gone right now on a 10 day trip and somehow I get more lethargic when he is away.  Plus the Netflix disk came in for our Wii and I got to spend far more time than normal watching movies.  Geez, doesn't that sounds pathetic!  However, just so you don't think I didn't do anything I did get a large patch of dying hebe ripped out in my own yard and replanted with plenty of flowers and a few grasses, now I am impatient for everything to grow.  Which reminds me, I do have a story.

Our property backs a creek and so we have a fair collection of wildlife that wanders through,  in fact, planting is always risky because it might well end up being a deer snack but that's for another time.  So this weekend we had a wild turkey wander through while the cats were outside.  Talk about close encounters of the third kind!  Phineas and Ferb had no idea what to do with this comparatively giant creature and the turkey clearly knew it was in no danger so there was a lot of circling, investigating, quiet observing and maybe even a little posturing, on the part of the turkey of course, but no problems and eventually the turkey strolled on to eat someone else's grass.  It was quite entertaining for me to watch as well.  By the way you can see the afore mentioned hebe in the background.
We did finish bottling the whites last week, that was a great accomplishment.  A full day of Pinot gris and another full one of Seven, and now the bottler gets to rest until fall.  Not however the bottling crew.  The guys are outside replanting a section of bank that the December freeze killed off in a rather strange pattern while trying to dodge the rain and soak up the sun, ahh spring.  The dogs are running around getting gloriously dirty and I need to slink off to the barrel room.  I need to taste all the Chardonnay barrels, only 17 of them so it should go quickly, as well as check the individual pHs.  I also will be pulling samples of all the BeckenRidge Pinot noir barrels to sit down and taste tomorrow morning at home.

As far as the vineyard goes, bud swelling has started and even a few future leaves are starting to distinguish themselves.  So no more FROST!  If we have a frost now we could lose part of this fall's potential crop in a few short hours.  So everyone keep your fingers crossed, especially during the next full moon in about two weeks.

Racking Barrels

This week was spent racking barrels.  I must be getting more comfortable doing it and I had a very good helper so it all went much smoother than I had feared.  Feared might be too strong of a word but I do feel a certain amount of dread, even that is too strong of a word.  Let's put it this way, it tends to be a job that I put off rather than just get on and do.  So this week I finally got on it, after tasting last week I knew I could procrastinate no longer and with Sebastian's help we whipped through it.

I start the process by racking three barrels to a small tank.  Let me back up, racking is the process of taking the clear wine away from the settled lees in a barrel.  I do this with a pump, a stainless steel pipe hooked to a hose hooked to the pump and a flashlight.  The pipe is a called a racking wand and has a clear tube of glass inline so that I can see the wine as is passes by.  Holding a flashlight up to the glass I slowly lower the wand till I just start to see cloudy wine, then I raise it about 1/4" and set the height.  Using the pump, it takes about 7 minutes to empty the barrel into second barrel.  After the barrel is emptied Sebastian rolls the barrel and collects the lees as it drains out of the bottom.  This is put into a small tank where it settles again and I will be able to rack off the clean wine and throw away the settled lees.  The barrel is then cleaned and returned to the rack to be filled with wine from another barrel and the cycle continues. There aren't too many pictures as we both have to stay pretty focused but hopefully you get the idea. 
On a more personal note my husband and I had dinner last night a new restaurant, well, new for us, called Old Europe Inn across from the Vista Roth's in South Salem.  Our waitress was charming and made us feel very welcome, the food was delicious and the presentation lovely.  We started with a crab crepe that was loaded with fresh crab, spinach and tomatoes.  I could give you a blow by blow but instead I think I'll let that tempt you.  As for wine, we had a bottle of the 2007 Domain Serene Yamhill Cuvee Pinot noir, it was lovely.  Supple and soft with a nice backbone and complemented the food beautifully.  Anyone who tells you to avoid 2007 Oregon Pinots probably doesn't know what he is talking about.  They tend to be delicate, medium alcohol, food friendly delights.  I highly recommend them, generally finding them much more classic in style than the overblown fruit bombs of 2006.  But of course that's just my opinion, go buy a few and decide for yourself.

Quiet Time

I had a very difficult time writing this week after all the excitement of last week. I kept waiting and waiting, hoping something might come along that was fun to talk about. And now here it is Friday evening and I figure reading about my doing data entry for a day has to be as bad as me writing about doing it and even worse than the actual data entry. No more on the subject and no more run on sentences.
Yesterday we got the newsletter out and that took most of the day. I am sorry that you couldn't see the pictures in the letter, I should have checked that first. It has something to do with the mailing program we use. I'll get it right for next time.
On a winemaking note I did do ML's early on in the week, see below if you want more information, and excitingly, for me at least, things are moving! About a 1/3 of my sample barrels are done and that is great for mid-December. Today I spent topping all the barrels (pinot, foch, chard) and stirring the chard. Things are looking and smelling good.
On the weather front, our ice is long gone, how sad, and we have had several days of fog, which has made it feel cold and damp and dark though admittedly it isn't particularly cold. I am however very ready for the short days to be getting longer, winter solstice isn't too far away. Yeah! I hope you all have a great weekend and enjoying getting ready for Christmas.

Lovely Riesling

Yesterday I was busy topping all day. The first time after barreling everything down is very slow. This year I have about 90 barrels of pinot, 40 barrels of marechal foch and 18 barrels of chardonnay. Everything looks beautiful and as I love to think about it: the wines are all potential. It's also just a great time to be in the barrel room because I am warming it to about 62F. Cozy compared to the winery which is about 50F.

What number?

Returning the sample

Riesling Tank

Today I had paperwork, getting labels approved by the TTB and checking on my lovely Riesling. I love riesling while it is fermenting, gorgeous smells and great flavors. It should be done in another 3 weeks. Can you believe the rain that came down last night? I had 0.7" at my house last night. I think the vineyard got about the same. Soggy!