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!

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)

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.

2005 Chasseur Durrell Chardonnay (Sonoma Valley, USA)

Lively golden straw color - this wine promises a lot just at first glance. Lush tropical notes on the nose, not overpowering passionfruit or banana though, think guava! Tasty Golden Delicious apple and apricot fruit notes and a bready, first rise of dough, smell and taste that is divine.

The wine has all of the mouth coating fattiess you want from a Chardonnay with none of the cloying butteriness that often comes with it. Smooth, long clean finish makes you want to go back for more.

Reminds me more of a Meursault than any Californian I have tasted recently. Just "sex on a stick"!

Score: 95 points
Price: Not Yet Released (Chasseur Wines)

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!