I've done a photo of everyone else in a tank...

So I guess it is only fair to do mine. I am also rocking the traditional harvest beard at the moment (it is unlucky to shave during harvest, it angers the gods and stuff like that).

Fighting Frost New Zealand Style

The biggest danger from these sub zero overnight temperatures is not damage to the fruit (the sugars in the berries lowers their freezing point far enough below zero to not be a worry) but the vine going "night-night". Two things can happen, the first catastrophic, the second kind of forcing your hand.

The catastrophe is frost - if the water inside the cells of the leaves freeze, the leaves will immediately die. Remember that water when frozen expands; the pressure from the expanding ice bursts the cell walls open and thus instantly kills them. Without leaves the vine can not photosynthesize any more sugars and flavor compounds and the grapes will not mature further. A real bummer if you still have "green" fruit.

The second scenario is that the vine believes it is now winter and starts going into dormancy. This process is less catastrophic since it is slower - leaves will gradually turn yellow, red and then fall off. A vine can still ripen fruit (although at a much slower rate) after 50% of its leaves have senesced and it may take a week or more to get to this point. Enough cool weather and this scenario is inevitable.

So what can you do? In New Zealand, some grape growers may water their vines when there is a frost warning - this is a double-edged sword since the water may prevent the frost from setting but the vine will then take up that water and dilute the flavors that it has spent all summer developing. Not many growers of grapes destined for premium wines would employ this tactic (one would hope).

The much more expensive option is to create wind. In Gibbston one often sees what look like windmills - but instead of harnessing wind to generate energy, these bad boys generate wind from energy. Usually hooked up to temperature sensors that will turn them on anytime that the temperature approaches zero, the wind they create moves enough air to prevent frost from setting in. At Peregrine we don't have wind machines so we need temporary ones - otherwise known as helicopters! Every morning when there is a frost warning, two or three helicopters show up at 4am to fly over the vineyard until 8am or so, again generating enough air flow to stop frost damage. Gnarly stuff!

Winery Recycling Tip #316: How to reuse beer bottles

Who needs expensive fermentation bungs when remnants of recent beer fines can do the trick!

NB: A beer fine (usually a six-pack) is assessed on the winery staff for making stupid mistakes - like for forgetting to turn the cooling on a tank of cold-soaking pinot. How else do you expect the beer fridge to remain stocked over harvest!

The Germans are wimps. This is REAL cool climate winemaking!

The danger of making wine below the 45th Parallel was apparent yesterday when we showed up to work at 8am and the thermometer read 1° C. And it was snowing too - the temperature the whole day never got above 8° C. You don't know how cold it can get on a crush pad with water spraying everywhere - boy, oh, boy!

With the grapes still a couple of weeks away from physiological maturity this is going to be a race against Mother Nature. As my flatmate might say "this *%@# ain't going to get ripe!". Here's hoping for the best.

Anyone can dig a tank but how many can do "crow" pose at the same time

Yoga teacher and harvest veteran, Elizabeth Keys, digging out a Pinot tank. Om shanti.

How to look fab and graceful when digging tanks

Ummm, not so much...

You say Pinot Grigio, I say Pinot Gris!

Last week we were bombarded with Pinot Gris - the "Grey Grape" and favorite quaff of housewives the world over. While being made from the same grape, in France the wine made from Pinot Gris is called Pinot Gris (surprised?) while in Italy it is named Pinot Grigio. Since the Italian style is more fruity, New World producers usually refer to their versions as Pinot Gris or Pinot Grigio depending on how fruity their winemaking style is.

Normally Pinot Gris is processed like most whites - immediately de-stemmed, crushed, pressed and then usually fermented in stainless steel tank (for some creaminess some winemakers may also ferment a small portion of the final blend in barrel). However Pinot Gris may also be left on its skins for a short period before pressing - the juice picks up some pinkish-grey coloring (which will fall out during fermentation owing to its instability) but it also develops some floral characters which is appealing.

Below are two press loads of Pinot Gris that we processed at the same time last week. The first press held grapes that were left on their skins overnight and the other was full of grapes that were pressed immediately after crushing.



Notice the very different coloration. I will let you know about any different flavors and aromas that develop after fermentation - I know I am excited whether you are or not is another matter!

How to spend $1000 in five minutes at a winery

Above is a packet of dehydrated lactobacilli - our little microbial friends who turn malic acid into lactic acid.


This is five minutes later - five malolactic inoculations ready to rock - at the cost of $1000 a packet, these are some expensive measuring jugs!

Malolactic fermentation (MLF) is the process where lactobacilli convert malic acid, which is more acidic, into the less acidic lactic acid. This lowers the pH of the wine and also creates a rounder mouthfeel - lactic acid is the main acid in milk! Malolactic Fermentation is a must for all red wines and most whites - your steely unoaked chardonnays and rieslings are prevented from going through malolactic fermentation to retain more "crispness" in the mouth and keep the acid at a palate cleansing level.

For years scientists couldn't understand what was in it for the lactobacilli since no energy is released when malic acid is converted into lactic acid. Very recently however it has been shown that the electrochemical gradient of having a higher pH inside the bacterial cell (all the malic acid) and the lower pH outside the cell (the wine now having lactic acid instead) is high enough for the bacilli to use it as a generator (think of a battery - the voltage is the electrical gradient between the two terminals). Amazing, huh? Life will always find a niche!

Day 3: Gewürztraminer

After almost two days on the skins we drained the free run Gewürztraminer juice out of tank and then pressed the left over skins for the rest of the juice. As you can see the free run has this "pinky" tinge to it from its time on the skins. As soon as it appears it is gone. The picture below is from just an hour later.

Once we sent all the free run juice to tank we then pressed the skins in this massive press which slowly inflates and deflates its bladder over a two hour period to extract more juice without extracting any bitter or vegetal flavors in the seeds or skins. The blended free run and pressed Gewürztraminer juice will settle overnight in tank and tomorrow we will rack (transfer from one tank to another) the clear juice so we can then filter the solids (suspended proteins etc) that will settle at the bottom for the remaining juice. As well as making more wine, this last bit of juice has a lot of valuable complexity through its contact overnight with the solids. Hopefully today I will get some photos of the wicked filtration machine we use!

After a couple of days at Peregrine

Busy, Busy, Busy. First thing I learned on the job is that 12 hour days are not just common here, they are expected. Boy, was that right. A 12 and a 13 hour days straight off the bat - and when you are doing manual labor you get tired to the bone. Sleep feels very deserved.

It has been enjoyable working on some new varieties of grapes for me. Yesterday we processed Gewürztraminer - a very aromatic German variety. The flavors that most associate with this variety is lychees and turkish delight (rosewater flavored jellied sweets). The berries are a mauvy-grey color - not quite white, not quite red. It is also best tasting wine grape I have ever had - extremely moreish and very hard to stop eating when lunch is hours away! One thing about getting to eat wine grapes is that you can never enjoy table grapes again - they are so bland and watery in comparison.

Gewürztraminer is an interesting grape to make wine from. For every white I can think of it is very important to get the juice off the skins as soon as possible after crushing (despite its violent name, it is actually a rather gentle breaking of the skins so that the juice can flow from the berries) because the skins often have unwanted phenolics (some of them being green, vegetal flavors - one common one being capsicum). Gewürztraminer, on the other hand, has very desirable floral . and thus after crushing and destemming the juice that has been released from the berries and the skins are both pumped into a tank for a few days to intermingle (official winemaking term being skin contact). This allows the aromatic compounds in the skin that is so prized in Gewürztraminer to leach slowly into the juice over a couple of days.

Today we will press the juice in a wine press (a bladder gently squeezes the rest of the juice that remains in the skins) and then put all the juice into a tank for fermentation. I'll try and get a photo of the Gewürztraminer being pressed so you can get a better idea.

Gewürztraminer is often a great pairing for Asian food. The little bit of sweetness from the residual sugar cuts the spiciness and the aromatics often complement the pungent aromas of Asian cuisine. A Thai Green curry is a classic match. Personally I enjoy a chilled Gewürztraminer on a lovely summers day, sitting under an umbrella with a wicked selection of antipasti. Try some with your chorizos, salumis and anchovies - Gewürztraminer just laps up all that fatty goodness!

Clyde Wine and Food Festival

On Sunday I traveled down to Clyde for their annual Wine and Food Festival to understand more about the Alexandra wine region. As I have alluded to in the past there are three wine making regions in Central Otago - Gibbston Valley, Alexandra and Bannockburn (where Felton Road is located).

Whereas Gibbston Valley's issue is sometimes not getting fruit ripe enough and ending up with "vegetal" flavor in their Pinots, Alexandra's problem seemed to lay more with having overly ripe wines with not enough acid or tannins to give the wine structure. Tasty on first sip but the wine ends up "blousy" and unsatisfying.

The one exception I found was the well made Three Miners. Their 2006 Pinot Noir had a ripe cherry flavor with some juicy acid, silky mouth feel and with some light oaky tannin to fill out the wine on the palate. It is a bargain at NZ$25 where most Central Otago Pinot Noir is north of NZ$35. Their vineyard in Alexandra is very new so they have a bright future indeed as the vines mature. Currently they only distribute in New Zealand but I am sure you will see them in the US and UK in the future as production expands. Keep an eye out!

I still think that the real quality Central Otrago Pinot Noirs are being made in the Bannockburn area, and since over 70% of Pinot Noir vines are here, other vintners seem to agree. Just my $0.02.

Gibbston Valley Harvest Festival

Within an hour of arriving in New Zealand to start my two months at Felton Road I was on the gate at the Gibbston Valley Harvest Festival helping to collect tickets and park cars. Well over 2,000 people showed up to the event which was held on a beautiful sunny day in Central Otago.

Gibbston Valley is where the pioneers of Central Otago first planted vines - Chard Farm, Valli, Gibbston Valley and Peregrine were all there. Pinot was first planted here in the late 80's but the region hasn't grown to the extent that the region around Bannockburn (where Felton Road is), which now has 70% of the Central Otago plantings.

The Pinots were variable in quality, in my opinion. Rockburn and Valli had made some cracker jack Pinots in 2006 but there were others that had obvious vegetal characters. Gibbston is a marginal area for Pinot being cooler than Bannockburn and they can struggle to get ripe flavors in many vintages. When the season is warm enough the super long hang time can often mean killer Pinot but in other vintages you can be left with fruit on the vine that have not reached flavor maturity while leaves have started senescing (with no more photosynthesis, there will be no more fruit development).

A great introduction to the region. Tomorrow we start bottling the 2007 vintage at the winery, and will try and get some photos up!

Central Otago: Otago, maybe. Central, hardly.

Readers of the blog may already know that in April I am off to Felton Road in New Zealand for the 2008 harvest. So I thought I might write a couple of posts about who Felton Road is and why I am so excited to be heading there to learn how to craft Pinot Noir.

Felton Road is located in Central Otago on the South Island of New Zealand, which at latitude 45° is the most southerly wine growing region in the world.

Unlike the rest of New Zealand's viticultural regions, Central Otago has a continental climate, rather than a maritime one. Most of the New World's most promising Pinot Noir regions so far have been maritime ones -- Russian River Valley in California, Mornington Peninsula in Victoria for example, in which the delicate Pinot Noir grapes are cooled by morning fog and cool ocean breezes. Central Otago, on the other hand, is dry (less than 500mm of rain a year, often much lower), with very low humidity, and has a climate most similar to Burgundy of any of the New World's Pinot Noir regions. Central Otago is also 300m above sea level (again, similar to Côte de Beaune) with the same hot Summers and frigid Winters. The dry continental climate also means that the Summer nights (with no cloud cover) are cool with temperatures getting as low as 1° C at harvest time. This big variation in diurnal temperatures is perfect for Pinot Noir which excels in such conditions - the reason being that the hot days (and greater UV penetration at 300m above sea level) ensures proper sugar and flavor development while the sudden drop in temperature overnight keeps acid levels high - a key quality of top Pinot. As an aside, this is one of the reasons why I think the Macedon Ranges in Victoria will end up being Australia's great Pinot Noir region but that is another subject for another time.

Another reason why Central Otago holds great promise is the poor quality of the soils. All the great vineyards in the world have poor soils. Vines are essentially weeds and grow in pretty much any conditions. However when nutrients and water are too readily available, vines tend to put too much energy into vegetal growth as well as producing too many clusters of fruit. This leads to plump, flavorless grapes unsuitable for premium wine. Under "stressful" conditions (low nutrients, little water) the vine thinks to itself that it is in danger of dying and will instead put all of its available energy into passing its genes into the next generation - just what a vigneron wants! Low water also ensures that berries stay small which is especially important for Pinot Noir which needs a high skin to juice ratio to produce world-class wine. Central Otago is mainly sand on top of a gravel base, which allows water and nutrients to drain quickly and thus become unavailable to the vines.

Thus Central Otago has all of the necessary ingredients to be the "Southern Burgundy". In fact in the mid 1890's the New Zealand government paid for Romeo Bragato, a Yugoslavian viticulturist to travel around the country and recommend the areas with the most potential for the development of a wine industry. In his "Report on the Prospects of Viticulture in New Zealand" he wrote:-

"There is no better country on the face of the earth for the production of Burgundy grapes than Central Otago."

Sadly, his report was ignored and instead it became sheep country and it wasn't until Felton Road was founded in 1991 that this began to change. Felton Road's 14.4 hectares of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling that were planted in 1992 represented over 20% of the vines in the whole of Central Otago at the time! Felton Road's incredible success since their inaugural vintage in 1997 has made the wine world take notice and now there are over 1,00 hectares under vine with the region well on the way to being considered alongside the Willamette Valley, the Russian River Valley, amongst others, as the future of New World Pinot Noir.

Central Otago is obviously still an incredibly young wine growing area - Felton Road's oldest vines are only fifteen years old and they were the regions pioneer's but it seems like Romeo vision of Pinot Noir heaven has finally arrived -- even if it is 110 years late!

Felton Road! Woo Hoo!

I just found out that one of my dreams came true! I have got a job at Felton Road for their 2008 harvest. A 2001 Felton Road Block 5 was one of the wines that inspired me to take the plunge and become a wine intern and I am so excited to be able to work with Blair and Jane and the rest of the crew at Felton Road.

Felton Road is a boutique winery in Central Otago, the most southern wine making region in the world. While known for their amazing Pinot Noir (their latest release of Block 5 received the highest rating amongst 2006 NZ Pinot Noir from Steve Tanzer, one of the world's best wine critics) they also produce some Chardonnay, Riesling and Vin Gris. All of their fruit is bio-dynamically farmed which is very exciting to me.

I start in mid April for a few weeks in the vineyards, picking the harvest and then will move into the winery to make the wine. All the wine is in barrel by end of May so it will be another intense 6 weeks.

I am so excited!!

2005 Amisfield Central Otago Pinot Noir (Central Otago, NZ)

Very dark, deep color in the glass - I love it!

Fresh red fruits on nose and palate: strawberries and bright red cherry. Some interesting spices and earthiness too.

Very "juicy" and mouth watering with a long cleansing finish. My flat mate loved it!

Well worth the $27 tariff!

Score: 90 Points
Price: $27 (Bottle Barn)