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!

A Felton Road Primer

A month or so ago I promised that I would continue my introduction to Central Otago with a post about Felton Road. Well better late than never I suppose...

Felton Road was planted in 1992 by Stewart Elms on a 15 hectare (37 acre) site near Bannockburn (on Felton Road...duh!) to Pinot Noir (55%), Chardonnay (30%) and Riesling (15%). Stewart was the first to plant grapes in this area of Central Otago even though Bannockburn in the Cromwell Basin was known to be its warmest region, being home to the majority of fruit orchards in this part of the world. Due to Felton Road's phenomenal success here, over 70% of Central Otago Pinot Noir is now planted in the Cromwell Basin! Three different soil types were identified on site - Waenega (a very deep fine sandy loam) , Lochar (a shallow fine sandy loam) and Scotland Point (very deep gravelly loam). Block 3 is predominately on Waenega, with a few rows on Scotland Point while Block 5 has half its rows on Lochar and half on Scotland Point. These two blocks (which make up the Block designated wines that Felton Road is duly most famous for) are on perfectly north facing slopes so that sunlight is maximized for the development of ripe Pinot Noir. With the vinification of the Block 3 and Block 5 grapes exactly the same, and their adjacency in the vineyard (see the above map - click to enlarge) the differences between the wines can truly be said to expressions of terroir.

Along with the original Elms vineyard, Felton Road has a long term lease on the neighboring 10 hectare (25 acre) Calvert vineyard which is planted 100% to Pinot Noir and along with Nigel Greening's purchase of Felton Road in 2000 came the 7.5 hectare (19 acre) Cornish Point Vineyard. Cornish Point is truly an experimental Pinot Noir vineyard with 18 different combinations of clone and rootstock! All of the Felton Road vineyards are farmed biodynamically (the principles of which I will explain in another post) and wine is made using sustainable methods (all water is recycled, spent lees and pomace are added to the organic compost that fertilizes the vineyard etc).

Guiding the winemaking is Blair Walter who has been Felton Road's winemaker for all 11 vintages. With a degree from Lincoln University, with time also at Oregon State University, Blair has also worked in Burgundy (Domaine de l'Arlot), California (with John Kongsgaard at Newton Vineyard), Oregon (Cristom), and Australia (TarraWarra Estate). Felton Road's vinifications are all wild ferments (grapes are allowed to ferment naturally with yeasts that are naturally present in the vineyard and winery) and with Pinot Noir the fruit is only destemmed, not crushed. This means that the grapes ferment inside the berries which imparts some carbonic (feminine, fruity) flavors to the wine. The full color, flavor and soft tannin structure of the Pinot Noir is developed by long cold soaks before fermentation begins and extended maceration (a period on the skins at the end of fermentation before the pomace is pressed to barrel). The Central Otago Pinot Noir is aged in French oak for 11 months and the Block 5 and Block 3 wines see a longer 14 months before bottling.

The next two months are going to be very exciting as I further my quest to produce world class Pinot Noir. On Tuesday the harvest is on as the first fruit comes into the winery - some Chardonnay and Riesling and perhaps some Pinot Noir. I can't wait!

Wrapped Up in Books

As I mentioned in the post before last I have been in the middle of exams. To make things more crazy and stressful, I am also packing for our impending move to London!

I know what you might be thinking - "there's no wine industry in England" (well there is some good sparkling being made in the South) however my wife and I will be using the UK as a "home base" as I will be traveling much of the year on my quest to work with the world's finest Pinot Noir artisans. In fact I will be traveling from April through July to New Zealand and Australia so if I end up doing a harvest in France or the US I will be gone for over half the year!

Because of all this craziness, instead of doing a wine post, I thought I might highlight some articles that have interested me lately:-

• Alder Yarrow's take on when wine tastes best
  
  
• Professor Warren Moran's research article on Pinot Noir and Terroir in New Zealand
  
  
• Clark Smith defends wine manipulation
  

I hope to be back to regular programming soon!

Harvest photos but in a cool web 2.0 kinda way

Photos from harvest

Sorry that posting has been so light! I have been furiously studying for my final exams for Microbiology and Scientific Statistics as part of my Wine Science studies. In the meantime check out some photos from harvest!

Promise to be back to regularly scheduled programming soon!

It's Over...

So my internship is finished at Kosta Browne and back to the reality of being a wine science student. What an amazing ride - three months of hard yakka, intense learning experiences and amazing friendships.

So what did I learn? I learnt that the skills that made me a good advertising sales person are not necessarily the skills that make you a good wine maker. In advertising sales, creativity is king. In winemaking, being able to carry out a task the same way, every time is the most important thing. In advertising sales, very few mistakes are uncorrectable - it is pretty easy to re-submit a proposal if you put an extra zero in the wrong place. In winemaking, an extra zero can ruin tens of thousands of dollars of wine that can not be replaced. In advertising sales, attention to detail helps. In winemaking it doesn't help -- it is EVERYTHING.

I also got to see a few myths exploded. For example, it has been said that being a good winemaker is like being a good chef. It couldn't be further from the truth. A chef has twenty or more times a night to get a dish right; a winemaker has only one chance a year to get it right. To top it off, he will often not know for sure if he got it right or not for a year or so as the wine evolves in the barrel.

What I really learnt was that I love this job and I definitely made the right decision to pursue this career. I am already chomping at the bit for my next harvest, starting in April, at Felton Road in New Zealand.

The best summation of the wine making process I have heard

From a post at the eRobertParker forums:-

As you now know Jim, wine making is 40% moving things around, 50% cleaning stuff and 10% drinking beer.

Damn straight!

And now the end is near....

The end of harvest is upon us, so there is less to do out on the crush-pad, and there is now time to check in on things that have escaped our attention for the past few months. Here I am on the top of the 2006 barrels, preparing to sample from all of them so we can run some tests on them in the lab.

Bottling the 2006 wines will be upon us in January so we need to check in on them all and see where they all are in terms of pH, volatile acidity, titratable acidity and SO₂. All of these numbers are important in terms of "barrel health", so to speak, and also impact blending decisions. For example, you may have a target pH of somewhere between 3.5 and 3.7 for your finished wine in bottle. If you have a couple of lots with pH's around 3.8 you want to find a home for them with lots that have pH's that are much lower.

Checking SO₂ levels is a key test with bottling around the corner. SO₂ is an important preservative that ensures the wine remains stable during its time in the bottle - i.e. no "in bottle" re-fermentation by any bad yeasts or bacterial spoilage. Most winemakers want S0₂ levels to be in the early thirties parts per million before bottling so running a free SO₂ test in the lab will let us know how much more we need to add. Adding too much SO₂ at once can also "shock" the wine (the wine hides its flavor and aromas) for a while so it is much more preferable to slowly raise SO₂ levels reaching your target just before it goes into bottle.

Next week, I am going to be spending a lot of time in the lab helping out our oenologist so I will post more about the tests we run at Kosta Browne then!

Day 16 - Rosella's

Time to get our tasty wine into barrel for its 16 months of aging before we blend and bottle in January 2009.

Yesterday we drained and pressed the must from our Rosella's fermentations. Basically this involves removing the wine that can be separated from the must by gravity or in our case a pump - this wine we call the "free run". The rest of the must, which without the free run, we now call the pomace is then placed into a piece of equipment which imaginatively is called a "press" and is placed under pressure. This releases even more wine that is inside the skins. This wine we call "press" wine.

In the "old days" a winemaker would slowly increase the pressure of the press as he/she tastes the wine coming out of the press at regular intervals until he/she makes a "press cut". This is the point where it is deemed that any more wine that could be extracted will have more negatives that will outweigh the positives of having more wine. As pressure is increased, and seeds are crushed, all sorts of unsavory flavors and tannins are extracted (next time you eat grapes, try chewing the seeds..yuck!). These days the computers that program the presses are sophisticated enough to never get to this point - extracting just the right amount of wine. Or most winemakers will stop the press (especially at the high end of Pinot Noir) well before one would ever need to make a "press cut". Press wine has a different flavor profile and it has a more viscous, mouth coating texture, which really works in the final blend.

Here I am barreling down the free run into a new Ermitage barrel. I really like Ermitage barrels, traditionally used for Rhône wines, especially on Rosellas 828. It gives the wine an exotic, spiciness which lifts the feminine, high toned flavor that we get from Rosella's 828. We also used a new Cadus barrel, which also delivers some spiciness and some creaminess which I love and also a new Remond Bertrange, which is just sex on a stick for Pinot Noir - voluptuous creaminess and a full velvetly mouth feel. Matched with these new barrels were two once filled Rousseau barrels (which deliver a bit of power, some iron fist to match our velvet glove if you will) and some neutral barrels (which impart no oak flavor since they have been used 3 or more times).

Some may think that once it is in barrel that wine kind of rests - in fact, it couldn't be further from the truth. Wine is an amazing living animal, always changing - sometimes asking for love, sometimes going through the wine equivalent of the "terrible twos". Our job as wine makers is to be open to "listening" to what the wine wants over the next 16 months and help each barrel to develop into the best damn delicious juice it can be!

Fark!

Have a look at the photo above. Notice anything unusual about the tank in the foreground?

Yes the arm is completely bent and broken. How did I do it and what did I learn about the laws of physics?

I was barreling down the free run wine from our Rosella 828 fermentations which we drained into this variable head tank that you see the top of in the foreground. A variable head tank works by having a lid that can lower down to various levels allowing you to have a 2-ton up to a 5 ton tank. The lid is held in place with a gasket that you blow up to a pressure that does not allow air into the tank.

I made the mistake of not releasing the air from this gasket (nor removing the bung that also seals the tank - consider me 0-2 here) before I barreled down. I had barreled down about 200 gallons of wine before I realized my mistake. Too late the damage was done!

It amazes me that the vacuum that I created could bend a steel bar - physics 101 lesson for today I guess.

Fark!

Day 14 - Rosella's

On Day 14 we determined that the Rosella's bins had finished their fermentations and it was time to prepare to drain and press.

Above I have graphed the fermentation so you can see basically how it ran. The left axis is temperature in °F and the right axis is ° Brix (the units we measure sugar content of the must in). You can see from both the temperature and Brix readings, the fermentation really took off around Day 6 and peaked on Day 10 which is how we want a fermentation to run at Kosta Browne. 86°F peak temperature is perfect - if the temperature goes into the mid 90's, you risk the yeast being killed off and being left with a "stuck" fermentation (where you have sugar left in the must but no viable yeast to digest it - basically a nasty bacteria's wet dream!) and if temperature is too cool, in the 70's say, you don't get full tannin and color extraction. Can't ask for anything more than one in the mid 80's which we hit.

Remember, we added the DAP and Superfood on Day 8, which was a great call - just what the yeast needed to get the fermentation in our sweet zone.

A pretty textbook fermentation really, if I do say so myself!

Day 8 - Rosella's

Well, fermentation is well and truly underway. The Brix reading this morning was 21.3 and the temperature of the must was 67.9° F - the yeast are well established and multiplying.

At this point in time it is important to help the yeast as much as possible. Yeast need both nitrogen based nutrients and O₂ to build strong cell membranes (which for yeast is where all cell metabolism takes place). Above you can see me introducing O₂ via a sparger at the end of my punch down device (the sparger is submersed in the photo, you can only see the shaft of the punchdown device). Introducing O₂ can be dangerous at the wrong times since most of the "baddies" are primarily aerobic organisms (remember the post about wine microbiology?) but when a fermentation is firmly established the yeast will out-compete any "baddies" for sugar and O₂, so no worries there!

The other thing yeast needs is nitrogen based nutrients (remember we discussed YANC, or Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen Content here). If yeast do not have enough nitrogen they will start to break down amino acids such as cystine to acquire the nitrogen. This digestion releases sulfur which reacts with acid to form H₂S (hydrogen sulfide - rotten egg smell). So every morning before punch downs start we smell the fermentations to see if we can pick up any "fartiness" (no better term for it really) and decide to add any nutrients and/or O₂ to help our yeast out.

For nutrients we have two options which we often use in combo. One is called "superfood" which is like a "protein shake" for yeast, full of all sorts of amino acids, vitamins, minerals that a growing yeast needs. The other is "DAP" (diammonnium phosphate) which I like to call "yeast crack". Since yeast needs to convert any nitrogen-based nutrient into ammonia before metabolizing it, DAP just gives them a double dose straight into their system.

Happy yeast who are ready to work overtime!!

Merlot really "jacks" me off!

We got some fruit in from Jemrose Vineyard today - Merlot. One of the bummer things about Merlot (which I learnt today having never worked on it before) is that the rachis (a cluster of grapes minus the grapes) is very brittle and breaks up into little bits that we call "jacks" when the clusters pass through the de-stemmer.

Unfortunately our de-stemmer lets these "jacks" fall through into the newly de-stemmed fruit. So what is one to do? Well pick them out by hand! Here you can see Pete, one of my fellow interns, and Michael Browne, the head winemaker, sitting under the de-stemmer and picking out "jacks". Imagine sugar syrup and twigs dropping on your head for an hour and you can imagine how much fun we were having!

Thank god, Beer o'clock rolled around two hours earlier!

Day 6 - Rosella's

It is now 36 hours since we inoculated the Rosella's and we have done two punchdowns since then. At this stage punching the cap down is to mainly help the yeast colonies that might be forming in certain parts of the must (winemaker term for fermenting juice and skins) mix throughout the rest of the must. Punching down also integrates a bit of 0₂ which the yeast need to multiply.

Every day we take Brix and Temperature readings which help us understand how fast or slow the fermentation is going and whether it needs any help. Today's readings show that Brix (approx. measurement of sugar content in the must) was 25.4 and temperature was 59° F - basically where we were when we inoculated 36 hours ago. When you are punching down you kind of know how the fermentation is running (cap feels hot, CO₂ escapes when you break through the cap etc) but the numbers give us a more accurate guide and back up our sensorial judgement.

We should see some activity by Day 7 as the yeast colonies grow and start to get chomping!

Day 4 - Rosella's

Time to make some wine! On Day 4, we brought our four fermenting bins of Rosella's out from the cold room into our fermentation room. The four days of cold soaking has really brought out some lovely citrus and feminine sweetness in the juice. Yummy!

In order to inoculate we culture up some yeast. At Kosta Browne, we predominately use a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae called RC212 to run our fermentations. RC212 is a Burgundy strain that works well on Pinot Noir and is known to give great color extraction - important in Pinot Noir where sometimes wines can be thin on the looks front. RC212 is also quite alcohol tolerant (can survive up to 14-16%) and heat tolerant as well (up to around 94° F) which helps in California where we have ripe fruit (and thus alcohols in the 14-15% range) and with the new wood tanks we use for some of our fermentations. The wood fermentation vats give an incredibly sexy mouth feel to the finished wine but the wood retains a lot of heat. Thus it helps to have a yeast strain that won't die on you and leave you with a "stuck" fermentation. RC212 is known to need a lot of nutrients (remember the YANC) or it will start using any sulfur compounds in the juice to create hydrogen sulfide.

To culture yeast we take dried powdered yeast from the fridge and slowly adding water we allow the yeast to wake up from their slumber. Once our yeast starts to froth we slowly add juice from the bin/tank we are inoculating until the temperature of the yeast is within 10° F of the juice temperature (since we just brought the bins out from cold soak the juice was 58° F when we inoculated) both to give the yeast some food to eat, live free and multiply, and also to make sure they don't get "shocked" by the cold temperature when we pour it into the juice.

Once the juice is inoculated we now call it the "must". We now sit back and wait and see how our little yeast babies adjust.

Day 3 - Rosella's

So Day 3, its time to see what kind of "numbers" the Rosella's is giving us this year. While at the end of the day wine comes down to taste, there are certain numbers that help guide a winemaker to get the most out of the grapes as possible. From what I have learned so far, it is far more important to see the "numbers" as a guidepost, your sherpa if you will, on your expedition to craft the best wine possible from the grapes you have in front of you, rather than as a "be all, end all" recipe for wine.

With this is mind, Lydia (Kosta Browne's resident enologist) and I ran what you call a "juice panel". A "Juice Panel" gives the wine maker an idea of the amount and types of sugar, acids, and nutrients available for the yeasts to do their work. We ran several types of tests. The first was a simple Brix reading with a pocket refractometer.

As you can see here, we have a nice Brix reading of 27.1 which is right in the sweet spot of tasty wine. Brix is a pretty good approximation for the sugar content of the juice and thus the amount of "fuel" we have available for the yeasties. 1 Degree of Brix will produce somewhere around 0.55% alcohol so this Rosella's juice will give us a projected alcohol of 14.5%. Just about where you want it.

We then run some acid trials where we slowly titrate NaOH (Sodium Hydroxide) into a sample of the juice to see its buffering capacity. Sodium Hydoroxide reacts with the acid in the wine and the amount of NaOH that the juice sample can take for any given pH target (say pH 3.50) gives us an idea of how much the juice will be affected by any change in its acid levels.

We also run some tests to find out how much YANC the juice has. YANC is a nice acronym for Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen Content. In order to live free and multiply our yeasties need nutrients, mainly in the form of nitrogen compounds, in order to healthily digest the sugars in the grapes into alcohol. Too little YANC and the yeast struggle, often giving off odors of ethyl acetate, and hydrogen sulfide and worst case scenario you get a "stuck" fermentation where all the yeast die before all the sugar is converted to alcohol. Trust me, you don't want that to happen. As you can imagine knowing how much YANC is available is pretty helpful to a wine maker (and there are several things we can add to the juice to increase the levels -- a topic for another time).

All in all, the Rosella's juice looks in great shape and ready to make some killer Pinot. One more day of resting until we inoculate and get 2007 Rosella's underway.

Day 1 - Rosella's

So the Rosella's grapes have been sitting in the cold room for 24 hours and it is time to "bleed" some juice which we then take to make rosé -- the proper french term is saignée. Those damn frogs, they always know how to make a simple process sound sexy!

Above you can see me siphoning off some juice from one of our Rosella's Pisoni Clone fermenting bins. Some calculations based on the flavor, sugar content, pH level etc of the juice allows us to determine how much juice we need to "bleed" off. The main consideration being to increase the skin to juice ratio, which concentrates the flavors, structure and color of the finished wine (and also to make a tasty summer rosé).

The Rosella's juice that we bled off was sweet and flavorsome and had some lovely feminine qualities. This stuff has some promise alright to make some killer Pinot!

Day 0 - Rosella's

Today the last fruit for Kosta Browne arrived for harvest and we saved the best for last - my favorite vineyard, Rosella's Vineyard. We get both the Pisoni and 828 clones from Rosella's which we sorted today. The photo here is a "grapes eye view" as it falls onto the elevator that takes it to the crusher/destemmer.

As you may notice from the title of the post I am going to take you through the whole process of the Rosella's arriving in the winery until it goes into barrel in two weeks or so. The grapes arrived on a truck that left Rosella's at 6am. By the time they dropped some fruit off at A.P. Vin and headed up the highway to us it was 11am. Still the fruit was nice and cold - which is very important since we don't want to let any nasty bugs get a foothold before the must is inoculated with yeast in a few days.

Here is a cluster of Rosella's Pinot Noir Clone 828. The cluster is very tight with great shape - like a little hand grenade. The flavor just zinged -- zippy acidity with some of that characteristic Rosella's citrus. We destemmed the Rosella's into six fermenting bins - three for the 828 clone and three for the Pisoni clone.

These beautiful de-stemmed honeys will spend their next four days or so chilling out in the cold room (which is a nippy 55°). That little bit of time just lets the skins and juice get to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere before we sic the hungry yeasties on them and start making some damn tasty wine!

Sometimes the only thing that gets you through the day...

... is the thought of that ice cold lager at the end of work. Like they say "it takes a lot of beer to make a little wine" and with our 14+ hour days at the moment, boy you need it.

Tomorrow we have our last big day of grapes - Rosella's and Kanzler for Kosta Browne and the first Syrah of the season for Shane Wine, over 20 tons to process along with maintenance of all the fermentations we have running (40+ bins and 11 tanks of rotting grapes).

I bet the keg will be tapped by 3pm.

Crazy times!

Almost all of our fruit is in the winery now - with the cool weather the vines really slowed down and so instead of getting fruit evenly spaced out it came all at once. In the last week we processed over 50% of the whole harvest worth of fruit - 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week.

Here I am in a fermenting bin of Garys Vineyard Pinot Noir. This bin is made up of 100% whole cluster fruit. This means that we have not de-stemmed the berries and we are fermenting the "whole cluster" of berries. Retaining the stems for fermentation helps bring extra complexity and structure. However punching the cap down can be very hard, especially at the beginning of fermentation. Sometimes the only way is to get your feet sticky!