I love punchies!

Once fermentation is underway, we punch down the cap twice a day. Our little friends, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, are chomping away on grape sugars and turning it into ethanol, CO₂ and heat. The CO₂ that is released pushes the grape skins to the surface and the heat "bakes" the skins into a soft cake that we call the cap. Above you can see that half the tank is punched (look at all that creamy goodness bubbling up - thats CO₂ coming up) and the other half is still caked.

The problem with a cap is that the skins are where all the flavor, color and tannins are so we need to push the skins back under the juice occasionally. It also has the effect of helping the fermentation lose some excess heat which it especially important in these wooden tanks since the staves hold their temperature well. At Kosta Browne we punch down twice a day during fermentation.

I love doing punch downs. The smells and the exercise remind you that wine is a living thing and keeps you close to the wild side of nature. Because at the end of the day, wine is just rotten grapes!

2005 Yering Station Reserve Pinot Noir (Yarra Valley, Australia)

I was very much looking forward to this bottle which I brought back from my recent visit to Australia. We had it at the winery yesterday with lunch (one of the great perks of working at a winery - wine for lunch!).

Unusually "brickish" and light in color - if I had to go on color alone I would have said a 2002 or so Pinot Noir. Refreshing acidity and with a "juicy" mouth feel, silky tannins with tart red cherry and baking spice.

Overall, I found it flat and one dimensional which was disappointing considering the huge wraps Winewise gave it.

Maybe we had an oxidized bottle?

Score: 87
Price: $34.99 (Fine Wine House)

Microbiology of wine

Smack bang in the middle of harvest I needed to fly back to Australia as part of my Wine Science degree to stare at microbes under a microscope for four days.

Microbes are a very important part of a winery. Of course, wine is made through the action of our favorite friend, Saccharomyces cerevisiae or wine yeast, which converts sugar in the berries into ethanol (alcohol) and CO₂. There are also other friendly microbes like Oenococcus oeni that help give red wines and many Chardonnays their soft mouth-feel.

However there are also many nasty bacteria and yeasts that if given a chance would love to screw up your wine. The most well known is a family of bacteria called Acetobacter that converts ethanol into acetic acid - more commonly known as vinegar! Not only is this a major wine fault but it is also very noticeable since acetic acid is what we call volatile - in other words it likes to leave the wine as a gas and thus is picked up by our nose very easily. Acetic acid is also often converted through some other chemical reactions into Ethyl acetate which smells of nail polish. Tasty! So next time you have a glass of wine that you think might not quite be "right", stick your nose in and see if it is because of a vinegar or nail polish taint. If it is you can say damn those nasty Acetobacters!

So what can a winemaker do? Luckily, for us Acetobacters need O₂ to survive and once fermentation by our wine yeast (you remember our friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is underway enough CO₂ is given off to kill any Acetobacters. But before and after fermentation we need to be very careful. This means after crushing the grapes, the must (winemaker term for the juice and skins) needs to be covered with a blanket of CO₂ at all times until fermentation is happily chugging along. After fermentation it means keeping all the barrels topped up with wine and during bottling it means that we need to flush the bottles with an inert gas like Nitrogen or Argon so there is no O₂ in the ullage (winemaker term for space between the wine and the cork/screwcap) that can let Acetobacters get a foothold when your wine is happily sleeping in the cellar.

All of these nasties mean that we spend a lot of time keeping things clean in the winery. In fact, for each hour of what you might term "romantic winemaking" there are three hours of washing up. Its all worthwhile though to ensure that your next glass of vino doesn't smell like yesterday's salad dressing or your overly made up Aunt Ethel!

A great pinot tasting at university

One of my fellow students at Charles Sturt University brought a couple of very interesting barrel samples to the bar last night. Like Kosta Browne, he likes to ferment small lots, treat them in different ways (always with love) and then use interesting oak barrels for maturation.

Last night we had two 2007 barrel samples - both came from the same upper block of their estate vineyard (his winery is in Tasmania), both were barreled from the same fermenter. Both had spent six months in a 2006 François Frères oak barrel - since it is 2006 barrel it has been once-filled with 2006 wine, this is the second fill (normally this tones the oak influence down as compared to a new barrel). The only difference? One barrel was made with oak from the Allier forest and one from the Tronçais forest (he had brought a third bottle whose oak came from the Vosges forest but he dropped that in the driveway?!).

Both bottles were raw and primary, typical of most barrel samples, with a bit of H₂S aroma (H₂S usually blows off the wine over time in barrel, maybe a subject of a post in the future perhaps). There were marked differences between the two. The Allier was much more feminine, with elegant and elevated oak notes while the Tronçais had a more powerful and primary oakiness. On this occasion I did enjoy Tronçais barrel the most - in the past, with Californian barrel samples primarily, I have had a preference for the Allier but it just worked with this particular block of fruit.

What I took away from this was the influence of where the wood in a wine barrel comes from. A lot of the time we spend so much time talking about the advantages and characteristics of one cooper over another, maybe we should look at the forest a bit more. Food for thought and maybe for tasting when I am back in the winery.

First Wine in Barrel

Our Amber Ridge went "dry" (the yeast have finished their job and converted all the sugar into alcohol) so it was time to get the wine out of the fermenters and into barrel. We had a few different fermenters going for the Amber Ridge fruit. We had two 8-ton Rousseau wooden fermenters full of Amber Ridge clone 667, one with fruit from the upper block, one from the lower block. We had a 8-ton steel fermenter full of Amber Ridge clone 777 and a few 1.5-ton plastic fermenters with some Amber Ridge clone 115 and clone 667 where we used some different strains of yeasts.

At Kosta Browne, we like to keep all of the lots separate to keep our blending options open. So we barrel down each fermenter separately, rather than blend it all into one large tank, and then into barrel. We also like to use a variety of barrels that give the wine different characteristics as it matures, again to increase our blending options and hopefully the complexity of the finished wine. Here you can see me "barreling down" one of the 1.5-ton plastic fermenters into a Saury (a French cooper) barrel that was first filled with wine in 2003 so it will impart very little or no wood to the wine as it matures. You need to keep a damn close watch or wine will come flying out the top pretty quick and at $50 a bottle it not only gets you drenched, it gets expensive fast too!

Vineyard Sampling

This morning we got up at 5am to drive up to the Yorkville Highlands to visit Weir Vineyard. Shane Finley, the Associate Winemaker at Kosta Browne, is getting some fruit for a new label he is starting - a great coup considering that Williams Selyem makes a Weir Vineyard Pinot Noir! The seven acres of Pinot sit on a south facing hill slope to get maximum sun, but is cooled by the marine layer that is funneled through the Anderson Valley straight from the Pacific. The great Pinot areas in California all have this marine influence so I was excited to get out there.

Our job this morning was to "walk the rows" and to bring some samples back to the winery for analysis. The vineyard is planted to clones of Domaine Romanee-Conti, 2A, Pommard and Rochioli and Shane is getting them all except for the Pommard. The Domaine Romanee-Conti and the Rochioli clones tasted like Pommard which gives an elegant red fruit profile. The 2A is richer and darker with blue/black fruit, so they should mingle well in the finished wine. The grapes were getting close but they were still a touch "green" in flavor. Hopefully this cool weather we have will hold and they can get another week or so to hang!

So how does the 2007 season look?

Harvest is in full gear here in Sonoma. At the winery we have about 15% of our fruit in already and our first fruit from Amber Ridge has finished its cold soak and fermentation is just kicking into gear. The berries have been very small this year, giving the juice an amazingly rich deep purple hue after cold soak (because of the high skin to juice ratio). These are going to be some dark pinots!

Above are some samples of Keefer Ranch. We get six different Pinot Noir clones from Keefer Ranch - 115, 2A, 23, 667, 777 and Pommard. Clone 23 is my favorite - up here in Sonoma it gives the wine a beautiful green apple tartness. Just spectacular. We sampled the Keefer juice this week and the flavor is just about to pop - we should see the fruit in the winery this week just as it hits its peak. What a great time of year!

Harvest in ON!

Today we got our first blocks of Amber Ridge Pinot Noir in the winery. The fruit from the 667 clone was especially tasty - voluptuously rich blue fruit and some sassy acidity. We put our new "crush-pad" (where we process the grapes) through its paces today - 37 half-ton bins of grapes were sorted, crushed and de-stemmed. "Crushing" is a misnomer, especially for Pinot Noir -- in the winery we want to treat the berries like the delicate children they are.

First, we sort through the harvested fruit (the crew at Amber Ridge started harvesting at midnight with the first 16 bins showing up at 8 am) by picking out leaves, looking for damaged fruit (e.g. bird damage or botrytis infection) and "second set" clusters (fruit that appears in the middle of summer and thus does not get ripe) and generally making sure that just the tastiest grapes end up in the fermenter. The grapes are then destemmed and the naked, whole berries are put into fermenters for their "cold soak" whereby the grapes are chilled to around 55 degrees for a few days before fermentation is allowed to begin. Cold soaking helps with color extraction, something that can sometimes be challenging for Pinot Noir, and also has the benefit of allowing the juice to slowly bleed out of the grapes, passing over and through the skins where the vast majority of a grapes flavor lies.

If the Amber Ridge fruit today is any sign then we will be in for a "cracker" of a 2007 vintage.