Memorial Weekend is here!

I had a good week I must admit.  We bottled on Wednesday and it went very well.  Maybe one of the best days ever.  I am sure it helped that it was a relatively light day as far as cases bottled but the fact that nothing went wrong was great.  For some reason that seems to be the rarity rather than the normal.  Due in part probably to the fact that we only bottle twice a year and what worked or didn't work for the previous vintage may not hold true for the current one but regardless this time things went well.  Neither filter plugged, we didn't break anything on the bottler, the glass was dust free and the corks went in cleanly.  I even had an intern helping out which meant I didn't have to be on the line the whole day.  Another plus for me.  And in case you were wondering we bottled Pinot gris and the Riesling.  As I mentioned before we decided to hold off on the Gewürztraminer and the sparkling wine will be a entire day by itself.  As far as when for the sparkling wine I am hoping to bottle it in the next two weeks.  Next week I am going to open the sample bottles and finger crossed they have fermented to dry, so I will be able to decide how much sugar to add for the ideal amount of bubbles/pressure in the finished wine.  Then I'll set up for that.  I think I will have to borrow a filler as the bottles will not fit on our machine but more on that when it happens.

As for the rest of the week I attended an interesting lecture in McMinnville on some new products and if any one has $32K laying around there is this beautiful piece of lab equipment that would make my life sooooo easy.  The salesman was trying to justify the price to us and how quickly it would pay for itself.  I tried not to laugh out loud.  I don't think anyone in the room thought they could justify the money in two years like he was trying to show.  But it was cool anyway and it would allow me to run some tests that I don't run or have to send out for but that's okay I probably could use a second press more.  We also got set up for the Memorial Day Weekend Festivities.  The winery and grounds are cleaned up and ready for your arrival.  We have some great bands coming in and hopefully the weather will cooperate.  The schedule is on our website www.airliewinery.com.   I should be out there Sunday afternoon so if you see me feel free to come up and tell me how much you enjoy my blog! ;-)  Otherwise have a great weekend and I'll write again next week.





PS I've been meaning to ask.  Does anyone have any experience pruning climbing roses?  This one has been in the ground just over a year and I'm not sure how much I should shape it or where the best place to prune it might be.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Wonderful weather and work in the winery.

I know it sounds like an excuse but I didn't write last week because the blogger site was down when I was ready but both of us are back now.  I don't actually have to much to report so enjoy the pictures.  Last week I racked the Gewürztraminer to stainless steel drums.  We decided that it wasn't ready to bottle on its own and maybe more time will help or maybe some of it will help the 2011 Seven blend.  Not sure what will happen but since at the moment it seems weak we decided to wait on it.  We did finish tweaking the Pinot gris and Riesling and will be bottling them next week.  I can't wait.  Tomorrow's program is to finish the lab work on the wines checking sugar, pH, and TA (titratable acidity).  Also I will recheck SO2 levels and CO2 levels though with bottling so late in the spring I don't think that will be a factor.  If there is too much CO2 in the wine then it foams up during bottling and makes bottling harder and creates under filled bottles so I like to be forewarned.

This week the guys started cleaning the barrels for me that are sitting empty for the year.  Guadalupe and Rosario have to move each barrel outside, empty out the old solution, rinse the barrel and then refill it with the new solution.  We don't fill the barrels full, that would be a wasteful amount of water but just put in four gallons mixed with SO2 and tartaric acid.  The SO2 is more effective in an acidic environment and the small amount of water keeps the chemicals in solution as well as helping to keep the barrels hydrated so they don't dry out and leak this fall when I will fill them wine because this summer is going to be one of the nicest on record!

I had to get out in the sun today, the start of that aforementioned summer, and so took a nice walk in the vineyard.  Some of the vines are starting to show their leaves, especially the young ones, and the chardonnay vines near the concrete driveway.  The reflected heat and light make a big difference.  Of course the dogs came with me, they had to break in their new summer cuts they received yesterday.  Besides, what self respecting farm dog wants to smell like floral shampoo?!

My brother came to visit this weekend and while we didn't get a lot of sun there wasn't any rain so we took the canoe out on the Willamette.  It's only about 2 or 3 feet longer than his 1972 BMW 2002 and besides he has a roof rack.  And, even better, he let me drive.  What fun!  He's planning to drive it from Seattle to Connecticut this summer and wanted to take it on a test spin so I lucked out by getting to see him.  For the curious, it's a cedar stripper canoe that our parents built about 15 years ago.

Riesling in filtered!

I just finished cleaning up from filtering the Riesling!  Let me clarify, finished cleaning up the equipment, not myself.  I'm feeling a little gritty and damp but otherwise happy to have the cold stabilizing done.  The last wine left to deal with in the sparkling base but I'm trying to coordinate with another winemaker on that wine so it gets own schedule.  I also tasted through the barrel room this week and am pretty happy with everything.  I even think two of my four lagging ML barrels are almost done.  They are starting to taste a little less tart and better balanced.  I'm interested in watching the pinot develop this year.

The only other exciting thing to happen this week is that we got snow!  And I got a snow day and what you may ask did I do on my snow.  Why paint the laundry room of course.  Isn't that what most people do?  Actually it was one of those jobs hanging over my head and now it is done except behind the washer and dryer and I'll get there when we pull them out to put down the new flooring.  Fun projects in the Clark household.  Today at the winery the sun is shining full force and it is beautiful, almost like a post card.

Soil Nutrition and Bentonite Trials

So as the title suggested I learned about soil nutrition and the use of fertilizer at a workshop on Wednesday I attended with Mary.  It was very interesting and I certainly learned a lot though I was distinctly reminded of sitting in High School Chemistry a few times.  I couldn't tell you the last time I looked at a Periodic Table and asking me to remember what cations versus anions are or even divalent ions!  Fortunately our lecturers were prepared for our lack of knowledge and we all got a brief chemistry lecture along with the soil science.  One of the most interesting things I learned, though it was by no means startling, is how badly humans have stripped the soil of life and thus productivity.  We are able to make it work with the use of chemicals but it doesn't work as efficiently nor is it as healthy for the rest of the environment.  We also learned about what different minerals do in the soil and some ways of improving the health of our soil not only for ourselves but also ways that won't show up for another 40 years.  Helping not ourselves but rather future generations.  By the way the answers are positive ions, negative ions and ions with a double charge.

In the winery I have been checking the wines for cold stability, everything failed, and protein stability, only Pinot gris and Gewurztraminer failed.  I was a little surprised that the Riesling failed the cold stability trial because it spent several weeks as juice kept at about freezing and I thought that would have caused most the tartaric acid to precipitate out but I guess not.  I don't know if the process of fermentation freed more tartaric acid or if there was more in the juice than could precipitate out in the time given earlier.
After the Pinot gris and Gewurztraminer failed I set up Bentonite trials.  I dosed samples of each wine with varying amounts of Bentonite, a clay, allowed the wines to settle overnight and today filtered a small amount of each dosed wine through a syringe filter.  I put all the filtered samples in a water bath where they will sit for the next 6 hours at 176 F/80 C.  After that I will let the samples cool and see if any protein settles out.  If I am lucky I will have bracketed the ideal dose and next week will run fine tuned trials so that I can add just enough to get the job done.  Bentonite, like all fining agents, takes other things from the wine besides protein so I try to use the minimum necessary for each wine.  And yes, I am working at home today, there is no club chair at work.




Back at the winery we have had lots of rain!  The bottom of the dock is at the surface of the pond which means the pond is very full! But we haven't had a lot of cold weather which means the vines haven't shut down enough for pruning.  We are still waiting for the sap to finish running back into the roots.  Hopefully next month we'll get a cold snap and be able to start.  A cold snap would help me with cold stabilizing the wine as well.  We'll see what nature brings us.

Double, double toil and trouble

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
      Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10–11

Ahh, who knew that winemakers would get to quote Shakespeare while going about their work.  Today I inoculated the Riesling, it has warmed up to 48F which should be fine.  I will turn the chilling system on to keep it from going over 55F during fermentation, especially a concern early on when the yeast is gearing up and both the food source, i.e. sugar, and nutrients are plentiful.   I'll probably have to add nutrients in a few days after the yeast have eaten everything the grapes supplied.  If the yeast don't have enough nutrients to build healthy cells then they scavenge from either themselves or other yeast cells which can lead to reductive aromas in the wine.  Not pleasant and a problem I would then need to treat.  Right now the juice smells almost like a glass of fresh sweet tea.  I'm looking forward to seeing what develops. 

Today is a good day

I have no idea what happened to last week, somehow it just slipped away from me.  It was a good week and the white ferments are going well, the ML is bubbling away in the barrels, I did build them a fort to help them stay a little warmer and I got in a little cooking; French Pork Stew courtesy of Cooks Illustrated.  Pretty good if I do say so myself though it needs a little tweaking.  The fennel was a little too soft for me and my husband it turns out isn't much of a fan of prunes and Mary thought it was a little pasty.  Critics all!  However it was excellent with a bottle of Airlie 2002 Two Vineyard Old Vines Pinot noir, just the right amount of structure and sweetness in both the wine and the food.  I also checked the progress of the ML fermentation over the weekend and all the barrels seem to be progressing.  And before you ask, all the barrels not in the fort would normally be full and I would be heating the whole room.

The rains seem to have come to stay for winter though it hasn't been overly cold and the vines have been dropping their leaves.  Though in the time it took me to write this post and go out to get a few pictures the sun came out in spectacular fashion.  Our Chardonnay plant is starting to look a little bedraggled.  You can see some of the fruit that we left behind.  In a normal year there would be no grapes on the vine at this time of year.  The clusters with no fruit on them were eaten by the birds. Ugh, sort of depressing.  Any way, last week the vineyard was a spectacular gold color.  I wanted to get a picture but somehow the camera, the day and my energy level never came together.  So you'll have the settle for this lovely shot of the driveway below Mary's house looking west.  Our star Chardonnay plant is the first one in the Y were the driveway splits.

I also lost some time last week setting up our new office computer.  The hard drive on our old one up and died and true to form no one had backed up in forever so much information has been lost.  I must say though that not much very critical and we had a surprising amount of information in e-mails or on random disks so it hasn't been too bad and has actually provided some much needed housekeeping.  The scary day was when two days later Mary thought she had lost our contacts file, the backup of which was on the now dead office computer.  Ten years of customer information on about 3000 names just magically gone, that was a little nerve racking.  Fortunately my guru husband got me pointed in the right direction and we were able to recover the files after only a little blood, sweat and tears and now Mary might be more serious about backing up her own machine which is the only place all the company bookkeeping files are kept.  I guess that is one of the appeals of cloud computing, someone else is holding your information for you.  I also had to replace the ballast in one of our winery lights.  I had no idea what I was getting into when I lifted off the reflector!  I guess 4 bulbs need a lot of wires and then we have a motion detector on it as well.  It was a little uncertain at one point but with the help of the internet which provided schematics on both the light and the motion detector I was able to get it up and running.  Now it just needs to be rehung, I need the forklift for that.

So back to wine making and why today is a good day.  We bought some Riesling juice so I get to make Riesling.  I'm so happy!  I love Riesling and was very sad about not having any to play with let alone drink, slight exaggeration I know.  Fortunately Amity Vineyards decided that they had more then they wanted and were interested in selling.  The fun part is that I am getting a blend of 3 vineyard, all LIVE certified for those who are interested, and that will be the same blend that Darcy has at Amity.  She will be fermenting the pieces separately and leaving the finished wine a little bit sweeter than I but it will be fun to compare the two wines in a few months.  So the juice is arriving today and is ready to be inoculated unless it is still too cold.  I'll take its temperature after I pump it into one of my tanks and make a decision on the number.  If not today it will be tomorrow.  Turns out it's only 34F, I might be waiting a few days.

So other than that things are quiet.  I have to do some publication redesigning because of the lost files, not necessarily a bad thing and we are setting up a new website.  I don't quite know when it will be up but when it is I'll move the blog there.  Our web design people think it is for the best and apparently I shouldn't have it in two places so I hope you will all follow me.  I don't really know how fast it will happen but I will be sure to post a link here so that you can follow me with only one extra click.  I might even be able to put the 'follow me' link on the new page, I'll have to look into that.

Riesling Tasting and then a Pinot Tasting and then . . .

I didn't write about it last week but I did attend a Riesling tasting for winemakers in the midst of moving wine, it was a welcome break.  It is always interesting and educational to sit down with a group of winemakers and taste each others wines and comment on them.  We taste the wines blind and discuss them and then reveal the wines afterward.  This type of format helps keep people more honest in their evaluation of not only others wines but of his or her own.  Tasting the wines outside of the winery also make it easier to notice especially flaws that otherwise might have been missed.

This week I did the same thing again, for Pinot noir this time.  A smaller group, only 8 wines to taste, which allowed a lot more time for discussion.  This is an interesting time to taste Pinot because it may or may not have completed malo-lactic fermentation, might have had its sulfur added and may be showing some flaws that will be fixed with time or manipulation depending.  It is important to be gentle but honest and remember that it may be your own wine you are ripping to shreds.  At this stage in their development reds have a nasty habit of changing to something unrecognizable it their brief time in the bottle on the road trip to the hosting winery.

In the vineyard the guys are almost done with the twist and tie.  I've included a picture of the a fore pictured Chardonnay plant so you can see a finished plant.  Yesterday and today have been glorious weather though unseasonably warm.  It will be interesting to see how it effects the plants. 

I am off on vacation starting tomorrow for a week so enjoy yourselves and I'll update you when we get home.  Paradise is calling! 

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!