The miracle sight today!
Two little brown eggs signified that all our work with the chickens this spring is coming home to roost, so to speak. Funny what a magical feeling it is to see suddenly an egg sitting in the nest box. Once a few more are collected, the big first omelette of harvest will be created.
We also pressed out our first Syrah fermentation today. So I guess it is time to continue my series of press photos. We pressed some Grenache Blanc before this but for some reason clear juice makes for a much more boring photo! Anyway, here is the creative outlet of our Block 6 Syrah:
One thing interesting to notice is the incresed amount of solid material streaked with the wine as compared to the pinot photo below. The Syrah spent over 20 days on skins and macerated at negative brix which means a high ethanol percentage in the must. This ethanolic maceration is much rougher on the grape material. The pinot on the other hand was pressed out at 6 brix and only spent 12 days on skins. There was obviously a lot less breakdown of the skin in the pinot which indicates a less heavy extraction.
Sep 27, 2012 at 3:33 PM
Permalink
I don't know why, but one of the most beautiful sights of harvest for me are the streaks left on the press after a full cycle:
It's probably just the fact it is right in my aesthetic wheelhouse. Simple image of two colors, wine and stainless steel, all produced by random chance. But I also love how each press load produces a unique image. Each varietal really shows itself off. This is our Carver Vineyard Pinot Noir, and the bright yet deep pink tint is as unmistakable as the spicy earthy aroma from the drip pan. I'll try to capture all the different varietals during harvest so you can see all this for yourself.
To celebrate our first red wine completing primary fermentation, I was saving some refreshies in the back of the fridge:
Anchor has only been making this beer for a few years. I got initially excited about this because a friend of mine bought me the Arion Press printing of Moby Dick, or The Whale (the trade edition, I'm no fat cat yet!) and it made me obsessed with everything Melville. Seriously, that book is really really good. It was something you were "supposed" to read, so my contrarian spirit forced me to avoid it until my schooling days were over. I guess sometimes those English professors know of what they speak. Wait, where am I going with this. Oh, yeah, Humming Ale is one of those anitquated beer styles that has a chapter in a classic Melville biography named after it. So life came all full circle for me as my favorite brewery made a beer connecting to my favorite author of the time, and it lived up to expectation.
Things have been just beautiful here at the vineyard. Warm days and the nights now getting that little sting of real cold. Things could not be going better harvest wise. So to top off the cheers, here is a beautiful little jam.
The grapes keep rolling in, and I conitnue to be amazed at how well everything is handling this unrelenting heat. Since the start of August it seems like it has been at least 95 every day. I keep looking at forecasts and feeling doomed as the high temps slam shut the ever narrowing windows of optimal ripening. But so far the worrying has been for naught. Everytime we run the numbers after cold soaks and settlings, we get beautiful balanced sugars and acids. So far a magical harvest and the Block 6 Syrah that is going to press tomorrow is probably the best tasting Syrah we've ever made here. Full of richness, depth and power without even the slightest hint of over ripe jam. Simply amazing.
In honor of our first red ferment coming to completion, cracked open a bottle of ESB:
During a summer trip this year, I stopped by Woodinville Washington to check out what was happening there. I was pretty ingnorant of the scene but lucked out on reccomendation from my cousin in Seattle to check out Januik Winery. An extremely impressive line up. Right in the neighborhood, and I mean right in the neighborhood as in next door were Chateau Ste. Michelle, Coumbia and lo and behold the Red Hook Brewery. Not a bad place to put a bunch of wineries. Stopped by the brewery and was reminded how much I enjoy their ESB. A good, rich, tasty brew that usually comes a real reasonable price. I wish more brewers would produce a lower priced session beer like that. A perfect way to toast some Syrah that I'm feeling is sky's the limit right now.
For that, here's a song with the word sky in it.
Sep 17, 2012 at 3:53 PM
Permalink
Contest Alert! First person to answer in the comments what classic ag logo inspired the hat designed by the band from whom I stole today's title from wins a free bottle of unreleased 2009 Tres Violet. Sorry for the complicated nature of that sentence, I never realized how dificult it is to make a question that is not simply answered with a single google search.
Anyway, harvest keeps marching along here and the last of our Carver Vineyard Pinot Noir came in. I tend to get a bit tired of all the talk about how beautiful and graceful Pinot is. I always think to myself, "You know, there are a ton of varietals that can produce beautiful wines if farmed and cellared properly." But while working with the fruit on the sorting table I realized that there IS something unique about Pinot's grace. The cluster itself just might be my favorite. The Rhones like Syrah, Mourvedre, and especially Grenache can be these huge footballs of grapes. The Bordeauxs are a bit thin and lacy looking, a lot of empty space. Pinot on the other hand just looks perfect.
Each cluster fits perfectly in the hand, usually not much bigger than a pear. Each berry is tucked perfectly in place. It is one of those designs in nature where you start to think about what way you can steal the idea and apply it to some other field. Maybe all this love for the Pinot is just due to the fact that we got fruite that is simply much more beautiful than normal. We actually harvesed with reasonable sugar and acid levels this year as well. For an area not know for producing decent Pinot (or rarely even acceptable pinot at that), this vintage is looking spectacular.
In celebration of Paso Robles doing things right, we ended the day with the present we recieved from the tasting room:
While the Double Barrel Ale is the Firestone beer that is all over this town, this is my personal favorite from our local brew house. It's not an over the top California IPA where its all about maximum hops and power. This is a bit more restrained and appropriate for relaxing during these days where the heat just will not stop. In the spirit of relaxing and another hint towards today's contest, here is today's headphone special. Perhaps my favorite little protest song of all time, which helped lead me down the path to having an old timey job like making wine.
Today was a legitimate day of harvest. We run a small operation so when 8 tons of Chardonnay shows up in the morning, that's a big day for this crew. Add in one of our custom crush clients popping up with a ton of Viognier, and you've got your day's work cut out for you.
One exciting thing about those 8 tons of Chardonnay was that for the first time ever, Calcareous brought in some machine picked fruit. I've only worked at small artisanal wineries, so I've never gotten to work with machine fruit. It is always one of those things I get to say, "All our fruit is handpicked", which sounds cool but I didn't have actual experience of the difference. So just for fun, we decided to try our hand at it.
I'd heard horror stories from friends who worked at wine factories overseas about the "bonus" material that comes along with machine fruit, so I knew we weren't just going to go straight to the press like we do with our Estate Chardonnay. We hand sorted through all 8 tons, pulling out anything and everything that didn't belong. It was quite an eye opener. I won't go into the details here, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stomach a $3 bottle of wine quite as much ever again. In order to make that cheaply, you don't take the time and expense to hand sort all the fruit. At the end of the day, the fruit was quite beautiful. I'm excited to see how it turns out. There really wasn't much of a difference quality wise, just a matter of sorting out all the junk in the vineyard of in the winery.
So the press ran all day long, and the barrage of fruit was answered with a barrage of beers. We had some pizza delivered out into the country (by my wife, no pizza guy's coming way out here) and enjoyed these boys.
Some Dutch treats I picked up to test out:
Some German Pale
And the Hipster Pub Standard:
.jpg)
I think I'm gonna go with the kids on this one. Pabst just has a bit more flavor and slight "enjoyability", though the Oranjeboom was a close second. Beck's was pretty much Bud Light with lederhosen. Luckily, the tasting room showed mercy on me and all the rough stuff I've been drinking and deliverd a couple of six packs of higher caliber hops and malt. The future looks bright.
Also some new jams showed up in the mail yesterday, which always helps.
There is no better physical capacity then your sense of smell, I believe. It is definitely more powerful then most of us think and has the ability to notice the most acute differences. Our eyes seem to be the sense we rely on most but our noses are really underrated by most. When thinking about my dog Abigail, she can find the ball in complete darkness with only her nose, like a needle in a hundred haystacks. It almost seems that her entire world is interpreted and experienced through her nose, one sniff at a time.
So why am I going on and on about our sense of smell. Well for us winemakers there is no other tool, human or mechanical, which we use more. We are constantly smelling everything especially during harvest. Every fermentation is monitored daily by checking the sugar, temperature, and by smelling the odors that are being released. These smells are what give us the most useful information about the progress and condition the yeast are in and if there are any signs of stress. To me this is the most rewarding part of the job. The aromas these fungi (yeast) create by eating sugar is astounding and so many times it is almost impossible to detect any one flavor or fruit characteristic because of their complexity. They are constantly changing daily and show different things at different times. So here is to nosin’ around, Cheers!
An active Syrah ferment. Smells like blueberry cobbler.
Yeast and fresh malbec juice ready for the Rosado.
Last nights feast. Local crab and white burgundy. Why not?
One of the classy grapes arrived today, Pinot Noir, so I felt it was time to step up the beer quality for at least one round. Things could not have looked better coming in from the vineyard. Not only did we answer last year's record low harvest yeild with a record high yeild, the quality of amazing. The free run juice was coming off at 24.5 brix with a 3.21 pH. You could not ask for beter pinot numbers from Paso Robles. When you combine ripe flavors and classic complex earth tannins in the skins, this is the most excited I've ever been about Pinot from our Carver Vineyard. So a proper day to toast with what is still hands down my favorite beer:
I'm sure it has something to do with my love of San Francisco that this is my favorite. But most of all, it stradles that boundry between full flavor and refreshing feel better than other beer for me. So even today, after a long hot day of bringing in the pinot and getting it safely to tank (This year's trial is doing 60%, 30%, and 0% whole cluster ferments. Should be interesting to determine what the mix of stem and intact berries brings to the table.), I can still enjoy and feel revived with my post work beverage.
The first week is always the toughest. Waking up at five in the morning gets you begging for a cup of coffee. However, once you walk in the door and see the tanks full of soon to be wine the excitement comes right back. That first whiff of CO2 coming from a tank is the first indication that the yeast you added the day before are happy and on their way to making wine. And there you are running around getting everything done before more fruit shows up so the whole process can begin again.
Carver Vineyard Pinot Noir, York Mountain.
This morning Jason handed me a bag of Pinot Noir grapes from our Carver vineyard on York Mountain to sample. There is nothing like squeezing cold fruit in the morning with your bare hands and drinking fresh grape juice, full of flavor, color, and acid. The fruit had the right chemistry so were off to pick first thing tomorrow morning.
The most crucial thing when thinking about when to pick, especially Pinot Noir, is the acid. The sugar really is almost irrelevant because it is the acid in the finished wine that gives Pinot its life, that which allows it to be so light on its feet and yet extend the depth of flavors that makes good Pinot. Being an assistant winemaker in Paso, it is almost ironic making Pinot Noir here because of our sun drenched landscape, (avoiding terroir purposely) but site, or place, is everything. With the correct elevation, proximity to the ocean, well drained soils, and viticulture, it is possible to produce a wine of correct typicity and overwhelming individuality. Tomorrow will be the first glance at 2012, cheers!
Tractor, check.... Bins, check..... Truck, check....Here we come!
An old but true adage. So much so that the good people up in Santa Rosa even produced a beer in it's honor. Well, actually they claim it takes "great beer" to make great wine. I hope that's not true, because Rory and Nacho brought in a twelver of these today:
This is the old standby of harvest. Mainly because you can buy it the same time you are filling propane tanks, getting tractor diesel, or grabbing some tri-tip sandwhiches down at Cregor's. I'm not a fan of this, actually I'm quite anti- this beer. Although I'll tip my hat to the Budweiser Don Draper types who thought up the "Superior Drinkability" tag line, I'd put "Marketing You Can Taste" myself. It did at least remind me of a wonderful aspect of harvest though, the time of year. The NFL logo tells you that harvest coincides with high school, college, and pro football kicking into gear. But best of all, the pennant races and playoffs (Are we in store for another epic harvest like 2010?) of America's pastime. This all helps create the context of the harvest. And so be it if I have to drink a few nasty BL's to realize fall is on the way.
Sep 6, 2012 at 10:22 AM
Permalink
After a day of fulfilling wine club we were back at it getting the first red fruit of the year. Today we harvested over five tons of Syrah from block 6 here on the estate. This block is one of the steepest slopes we have on the property making it really labor intensive to pick. The fruit tasted and looked great with very clean, oval shaped berries. This year the vines came into balance from the beginning with an even fruit set which led to us not having to green harvest after veraison. These homogenous clusters ripened rather early for us and came off the vine without any raisins. Usually we don’t pick this Syrah until after the Pinot Noir from York Mountain, but like anything in life there are no normality’s when it comes to vineyards. Each year, each block sings to its own tune so it’s imperative you stay on top of fruit sampling and don’t rely on previous year’s harvest dates.
The ever so awesome sorting table. Today was smooth sailing.
We destemmed all of the fruit we harvested today without the use of any crushing to be as gentle as possible. We like whole berries fermentations to maximize the fresh fruit characteristics achieved by keeping the berries intact. I will post more about this in the future as it mostly applies to our Pinot program. The fruit then went into various size tanks to undergo a cold-soak for up to three days before any yeast gets added. This allows several things; first it cools the fruit down so no unwanted native and/or wild yeast can begin fermenting within the must. Second it allows for the extraction process of colors and tannins to begin without the presence of alcohol and at a consistent temperature to stabilize the enzymes within the berries themselves. Lastly, and most basic, cold soaking extends the amount of time the must sits on the skins simply by delaying when we would inoculate.
Just another day in paradise for us in Paso Robles as we were blessed with an amazing Sunrise, Cheers!
Comments (2)