Sunday, December 2, 2007

Rough Pruning

For the past few weeks I've been 'rough pruning' the vines - I'm taking it slowly doing a row at a time, cutting them in kindling-size chunks and putting the rest in our yard waste bin (reason: if the vines do have some time of infection we don't want it propogated through our compost!)

We're also hand-raking all of the dry leaves that have fallen on the ground.

Here's a before & after shot.

I should be done this week, then I can look into a dormant spray program before the holidays.

That's all for now!

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Monday, November 19, 2007

Tasting Notes

While racking the other day, Bruce and I snuck a bit out of each 'batch', to see how they are doing. Keep in mind we have no idea what we're tasting for, but you gotta start somewhere!

In age order:
2006 Cab Blend:
Hmm, tastes like wine . . . kinda acidic, guess we'll let it continue to age in big glass jug for awhile, maybe those tanins will resolve.

2007 Estate Cabernet:
OMG did we ferment lemon juice? The 2006 now tastes totally smooth. I think we'll try to precipitate some of that out with potassium carbonate.

2007 Blends (one roughly 50/50, the other 40/40 with about 20 '06):
Wow, they're not bad, pretty smooth and fruity tasting. Especially after that 2007 Estate!

2007 Leach Cabernet:
Did somebody sneak some real wine in here? It's actually really good! Hard to tell if the acid balance is a bit low, or is just right and we're still getting over the other batches. Let it age and we'll do the actual test next racking.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

First Racking

Today we racked all of our '07 batches for the first time. "Racking" is a fancy way of saying transferring wine from one vessel to another, filtering out gunk you don't want.

You'll see that as the contents of the carboys settle, there's a gross layer at the bottom, called lees (spent yeast, grape particles, etc.) The first two images show the difference in amount of lees - the first shot is of the "free run" from Don's vineyard. The second sho is pressed-out wine from our vineyard. In either case, you need to get this sentiment out of the wine, so you very carefully move the jug full of wine (eg careful not to stir that gunk up), then siphon off wine from *above* that level of lees. So that's what we did!

Some notes:
-> 1st Carboy: Filled with "2007 Leach", which appears to have completed malo-lactic fermentation (MLF) during primary fermentation. In an ideal world we would have racked earlier, but instead we kept stirring the lees into the wine and opted to rack all batches at once. This one only had about 25 ppm of sulfite in it, so we added another 1/8t potassium metabisulfate ("meta") to the 6 gallon carboy while racking, which is roughly another 25 ppm.

-> 2nd & 3rd Carboys: roughly 50% 2007 Leach and 50% 2007 Estate. We blended the two because we really wanted our estate to go through MLF, but it either had too much alcohol or too high sulfite levels. By blending the two, the hope was that the MLF culture still alive in the 2007 Leach would transfer over to the other wine. It did! After about 5-7 days from blending, along with being kept at 70 degree temperature and stirring the lees about twice a week, we heard the snap, crackle, pop of MLF converting that malic acid into lactic acid. No meta added this time.

-> 4th carboy: 2007 Estate only. Because of the alcohol, acidity, and sulfite level we're pretty sure there's no hope of this one going through MLF. But because it's super acidic we want to try to reduce acid anyway, so we racked & added Potassium Carbonate at just over 1/2 teaspoon / 3 grams per gallon. We diluted the potassium carbonate in water before adding, and now the goal is to get that carboy as cold as possible, so the potassium carbonate will slowly precipitate through the wine, bind with extra acids, and end up as crystals in the bottom that you remove in next racking.

Now we keep that 4th carboy very cold (leaving it outside, hanging re-freezable cold packs over its shoulder to try to keep it colder than the air). The rest will sit in the cellar and age away.
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Saturday, November 10, 2007

Cutting back

Our vines have dropped almost all their leaves. Between now and next spring, we'll need to prune the vines such that we get fruit, and that fruit is easy to get at. Question is - when to prune?

Seems like the gist is this: you can prune at any time during dormancy, however your biggest enemy is springtime freezes - if you've pruned, and the shoots start growing, they run the risk of being frozen off if the temperatures dip too low. A good thing about being in NorCal is that while we have frost sometimes, an actual freeze is pretty rare. I do remember snow recently as late as March here (a rare occurence, but it *could* happen) - so we've opted to take D'Augustine Vineyard's recommendation with regards to pruning: basically, get rid of lots of the old vines now, before the rains, then actually prune before budbreak in March/April.

It's also apparently very important not to cut your vines in the rain, or within a day or two of rain, or in heavy fog. This is to reduce the chance of Eutypa. Apparently an effective, but non-EPA registered, preventative measure is to apply a diluted solution of Dreft, a laundry detergent for babies.

Row by row, I'll get these vines cleaned up. Sadly it looks like it might rain later today, so I stopped at one row and will plug away through the next month or two during the dry spells.
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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Press Time

We've kept the juice on the skins for long enough - we think (about a month). Now it's time to press - basically separating the juice from all the other gunk in there (skins, seeds, a few stems, and all that spent yeast.

Last year, I figured we had a small enough batch, I'd just use a kitchen collander and cheesecloth. I mean how long could it take? After 2 hours, I wondered how I was going to get all of that juice off the skins. After 4 hours, I was getting a decent workout pressing through cheesecloth. After 8 hours I didn't think my hands would ever recover from being dyed purple - but at least I was done. Next day I couldn't move after all that pressing, squeezing - but we got some wine out of it!

In any case, it turns out they have equipment to let gravity and leverage help you - a wine press! We rented one from our local supply store and gave it a whirl.

First, we got everything washed, sanitized, and put the press together.

Next, we brought out our "primary fermenter" (=garbage can full of wine), and scooped the must (=grape juice, skins, seeds) into the top of the press. At that time juice starts flowing out the bottom. Wine snoots call this the 'free run' juice I believe; it's supposed to be good stuff; but I wonder if it has enough of the sludgey stuff that gives a red its tannins and other good stuff.

Anyway, once you fill it, you put a round circular wood piece on top, such that the grapes are pressed down evenly. Then you crank down as the juice stops flowing, getting all the juice off those skins.

I think actual winemakers know how much force to apply to the pressing process; we found that our 5-gallon carboy (=glass jug) was around half to one gallon low, so cranked as hard as we could to get that last half gallon to top off the jug - er, carboy.

Once it's pressed, you can do other stuff to it depending on what your wine to taste like. We want ours to taste like wine, so not sure what we'll do next. Actually I lie, I'll write something else about that soon.



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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Fermenting!

So we now have grapes! Well, grape slurry; the official term is 'must', basically it's juice, skins, seeds, and a few stems.

With this batch, we put the must directly into our garbage pail - er, "primary fermenter", in addition to a few extra food-grade paint buckets that we will eventually dump into the primary fermenter - for ease-of-transport reasons.

After picking & crushing the grapes, there's actually not a lot to do. First, we put all in one food-grade Brute garbage pail (ours is 20 gal, so holds around 17 gallons of must).

Then we are sure to kill anything that will get in the way of fermentation by adding sulfites.

Yes - these are what have been considered bad, evil, unhappy elements to add to wine. Basically, sulfites exist naturally in grapes; a bit supplemental helps make sure the right yeast converts juice to alcohol, prevents nasties from growing in your juice/wine, and a variety of other things. I'm as much an all-natural gal as next (probably moreso), but a bit of sulfite to prevent disaster over so much juice/wine seems worth it until I get more experienced and experiment with letting the *natural* yeasts of the grape skins ferment the wine.

In any case, after getting the juice in nice clean Brute, and adding sulfite (25 ppm, which for our 18 gallons meant about 1/2 tsp), we wait for a day and then add yeast - the culture that converts sugar to alcohol.

Last year, we used a yeast called Premiere Cuvee, made by Red Star (they make lots of yeasts, and one of the more common bread yeasts even). Premiere Cuvee is basically indestructible - converts sugar to alcohol quickly, violently, and good for grapes with the relatively high sugar content we have.

For our earlier batches, we used Premiere Cuvee. As always, it worked like a charm.

This, our third batch (second of 2007 season), we decided to try something new: we have pretty high acid in our grapes, so we like doing something called malo-lactic fermentation (MLF in winemaker terms). This is a process that converts malic acid (harsh, acidic-tasting) to lactic acid (cream, butter, yum!). Overall acidity decreases a little, but the acid taste decreases a LOT. And it makes your wine smoother. The extreme / easy to identify taste is that buttery taste in those thick CA Chardonnays, recently underrated in my opinion but that's another topic I'd rather not take on right now.

In any case, MLF cultures are sensitive to
(a) alcohol (they don't like >15% alcohol wines we tend to get with our grapes)
(b) sulfites (they don't like >50 ppm sulfites, either active or total, which is the rate most winemakers add even before fermentation)
(c) acid - strangely enough, while they lower the acid of wine, too high an acid count makes them not work. Again, here in CA our grapes are pretty acidic, so we tend to be on the high end of this scale too.

SO, because of this, our friends at Fermentation Settlement recommended that we try running MLF at the same time as we ferment. Crazy I thought!

But, I read up on the topic, considered (a) through (c) above, discussed with my husband / partner in crime, and decided why not, let's give it a shot.

To do this, we needed to re-think our indestructible yeast strategy - finding something that would take a bit longer to convert sugar to alcohol, such that the bacteria would have more time to convert that malic acid to lactic acid before the alcohol climbed to too high territory. So, we decided the yeast in the image here - and with it, added "Fermaid" and "DAP" (both elements that help the yeast along). And added

After all of that, we let that sugar convert to alcohol! To do so, after adding the yeast the gunk in the Brute gets warm, and starts bubbling. And it sends all those skins & seeds to the surface. But to leave them there is no good, they need to be surrounded by the liquid to fully convert, and not develop their own funk.

So, twice a day I sterilize my hand, and arm up to the elbow, and push those skins back down into the juice that's bubbling away. Like everything else in winemaking there's a technical term for this - it's called punching down the "cap". I call it getting your arm saturated in wine, often I go to bed with that sweet yeastey grapey smell that's hard to get out of your skin. Not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination.

You do this for awhile, in fact if you're gone for a weekend you need to convince your neighbor it's a good idea to do this twice a day. Luckily our neighbor likes wine, and appreciates the hokey-ness of our operation. Yeay!

And you keep doing this - in our case until the cap "falls". More on that when it happens . . . probably in a couple of weeks.

APPENDIX: Winemaking stats
Leach 2007 Cab Sauvignon Harvested Septmeber 29, 2007
Measurements:
- Must: 24.7 Brix- TA 6.0 via titration method; 8.5 via Accuvin; 8.0 per Don Leach (grower)
- pH 3.8 via our crappy test strips; 3.3 per Don
- Added 0.5 tsp Potassium Metabisulfate, 25 ppm (half dosage, since we plan to run MLF during fermentation
- Added yeast AND Viniflora Oenos on September 30
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Harvest & Crush

Probably the most frequent question I get about growing my own grapes is "Wow, how do you harvest all those grapes?!?" And it always bugs me a little bit . . . harvest is THE easiest part of keeping up a vineyard. And it's fun, especially when you get lots involved in picking.

I should add: it's fun when you have a small vineyard like ours. I've seen those commercial guys and gals work non-stop during the crunch time here in Northern California - long tedious hours!

Here we are at Don's place, our neighbor that has been growing Cab Sauvignon grapes a LOT longer than we have. We showed up in the morning with those 5-gallon paint buckets that you can get at any hardware store. Then you pick - snip the clusters, hear them 'thunk' as you gracefully drop them in the bucket, and repeat until you get the 200 lbs or so you want.

From there, if you're from olden times you mash up the grapes with your feet - 'crushing' them such that the juice will come in contact with yeasts and they'll start to ferment. Nowadays, the guys at UC Davis say that all you need to do is puncture the skin of a grape, and in fact the wine comes out better if you don't do all that stomping (sad, I know) - so most use a device called a crusher de-stemmer. Grape clusters go in the top hopper, you turn a crank and grape slurry comes out the bottom. By slurry I mean the grapes, their skins, juice, seeds, and maybe 5-10% of the stems. The other 90-95% of the stems get pushed out through another part of the machine. Amazing! Especially after doing this by hand in our own backyard.

We then packed the grape goo back into those clean/sterilized paint buckets, loaded them in the Matrix and brought them back to our garage to turn into wine!



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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Surprise, you're at 25 Brix!

We've been taking care of grapes, making sure they are getting the sun, nutrients, protectants they need. All's going pretty well.

Mid-August we leave for a business trip abroad. This is while the grapes were growing and doing fine. I gave them a final spray of organic Kaligreen, covered them in bird netting just in case the juiciness of the grapes attracted the birds, and left for 1.5 weeks. They aren't expected to be ripe until mid-late Septebmer.

We returned on August 26, and I noticed some of the grapes looked a bit rasin-ey. They couldn't be ripe, could they? I mean I was leaving town for a family reunion the next day. SURELY they can wait until I get back, right?

After sleeping on it, jetlagged from a trans-Atlantic flight mind you, I decided to test the Brix of the grape juice (Brix = fancy term for sugar content). Brix was at 25, which is a nice, even over-ripe sugar level to be harvesting at.

So, what else are you to do but get out there at 5:30AM (again, jetlagged) and start picking? We had to start by removing the bird netting we had put up, then picked and picked and picked. About 1/3 the way in I had to leave for aforementioned family reunion, but Bruce kept going. Until it was dark. So now we have wine from our own vines. Yeay! Hopefully Bruce's neck will return to normal after the somewhat gruelling day.

Geeky stats:
Overlook 2007 Cab Sauvignon - Harvested August 26, 2007
Measurements:
- Must: 25.0 Brix
- TA 9.5 via titration method; 11 via Accuvin (high, will run MLF to reduce)
- pH measured 3.6 (suspect actual pH is lower, we have crappy test strips)
- Added 2t Potassium MetaBisulfate, equals roughly 80 ppm (I later read that we could get away with less :-( bummer)
- Fermented from Aug 27 - Sept 13ish; room temperature 72 degrees
- Then put on CO2 tank for extended maceration, room temperature lowered to 65 degrees
- Pressed on Sept 23
- Innoculated with MLF culture on Oct 2 - Viniflora CH16
- Now we send positive MLF vibes its way!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Name That (Grape) Disease

So I'm in my first real season of growing these grapes, and I swear that EVERYTHING I see I assume is something terrible and horrible that's happening to the grapes. Budbreak I thought was a fungal infection. When the grape flowers formed I thought those little grapes would never grow. Here's a few more specific conditions that I may or may not have diagnosed:

1. RED LEAVES. It sure seems like they have a simple case of Autumn - however I started seeing this in June-July! We had some early heat, and I'm still figuring out water, so I'm going to guess this is water stress, or possibly a mineral deficiency, and not a more serious disease I've read about.

2. BLACK SPLOTCHES ON CANES. See the black splotches on the vines themselves (in this first picture)? Looks like a splatter of black watercolor. I've been told this is a variety of things; the one I trust the most says it's a sign of powdery mildew (a.k.a. "PM"). County Ag department disagreed, however, so I kept doing preventative measures but nothing to eradicate.

3. THIN CLUSTERS. Clusters are supposed to be think & bunchy & all that stuff, but some of mine looked half dried off, thin & scraggly. I'm pretty sure this is a result of my 'tough love' watering plan (watering infrequently, but long, such that they develop nice big tap root down into the ground). I've later heard, and read, that this watering plan rarely works on our side of the hill. Sigh - back to more water. Let's hope for lots of rain next year!


4. SPIDER WEBS OR POWDERY MILDEW? After all of the things that *could* indicate PM (powdery mildew), the major one is a 'white powdery or dusty appearance'. So this definitely defines webby, but I never saw anything powdery to go with it. And I saw a spider in one of these. Treated for PM with Kaligreen (potassium bicarbonate, like baking soda but bound with potassium instead of sodium), which is all the rage among backyard grape growers in our area.

I need to keep reminding myself that these are plants and they're pretty good at growing & reproducing on their own. So I can't mess them up too much, right? Right?

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Watching Grapes Grow

About a year ago, my husband and I found a very cute house, in the hills above Los Gatos. It was built back in the 1940's and has been added to continuously since (a room here, a deck there - you get the picture).

Adjacent to the house was a vineyard. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, which are pretty much only good for making wine.

We ended up buying the house, and then had a discussion on what to do with the vineyard.

We both really like wine - especially big red wines that go with a good steak. I was in 4-H growing up, so know something about agriculture. Bruce grew up near vineyards in Livermore, so he had seen all the work involved in keeping vineyards running.

So, we figured why not - le'ts keep on going with growing grapes and making our own wine.

Well the first year, 2006, was spent mostly fighting deer. There is a 8' fence all the way around the vineyard, but the deer were still able to jump in and eat the tasty goodness inside. We patched the fence and they still got in. We added two feet to the height of the fence and they STILL got in. Long story short, we had a very small harvest, because in the end one smart, crafty, hungry deer was still getting in there to eat the vines (and grapes).

This year, 2007, we won! I think a big part of it has to do with a neighborhood dog actually. The grapes grew as they should. Here's the time-lapse view over the course of about 4 months.

Understand that the grapes don't just magically grow this way by themselves - I'm out there about 4 hrs/week - pruning, training, weeding, managing cover crop, and spraying the vines. It's good exercise, and mostly mellow and a nice break from the hours I spent in front of a computer at work.

I realize that I need to start archiving some of what I'm experiencing and learning. What better way than to start an online diary! (c'mon, you know that's all most blogs really are). But you're welcome to follow along as I sporadically update with some the happenings here in our grape patch!





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