Grapes being dumped into the Crusher

This bin of grapes is about 15 feet off the floor on the forklift. The forklift has a rotator and the grapes are being dumped into the hopper bin of the crusher.

Adding dry ice to the must

Brian shovels dry ice into the must. About 100 pounds of dry ice go into each T-Bin depending on how cold the fruit is when we crush it.

Must fresh out of the crusher

As crushed grapes fall from the crusher/destemmer the addition of dry ice for the cold soak creates a fog.

4 tons of Garys' Vineyard grapes

These grapes arrived by refrigerated truck about an hour ago. We will process them today, which involves sorting, crushing/destemming, adding enzymes, adding sulfur, and adding dry ice. The must is put into Macro Plastics T-Bins (you can see these stacked in the background) where it will cold soak for a few days. After the cold soak, we will innoculate with yeast for fermentation.

Cleaning is a a huge part of winemaking

Gary and Kevin volunteered to help crush grapes. When they arrived we were adjusting the acid and sugar levels of the Keefer Ranch must. That involved bleeding some juice and replacing it with acidulated water. They are cleaning up the mess.

Pinot Noir Clones

From Professional Friends of Wine:

Genetically unstable, the parent vine may produce offspring that bear fruit that is nothing like the parent's in the size and shape of the berry or cluster and will frequently even have different aromas, flavors, and levels of productivity. There are 46 recognized clones (genetic variants) of Pinot Noir in Dijon, France. Ampelographers estimate there are as many as 200 to possibly 11,000 clones of pinot noir worldwide. By comparison, cabernet sauvignon has only twelve identifiable clones.

I've adapted this short and sweet clone description from Cambria's website:

The Pommard clone [4] adds deep plum fruit, Swiss clone [2A] adds floral components and structure, while bright red fruit characters come from Dijon clone [777].

This Issue of the Pinot File also has a great article on Pinot Clones. I excerpt:

[The Pommard Clone] is known for its structure, tannins and density. [The Swiss clone] provides more red fruit flavors and notes of violets and blueberries. It can be blended with Pommard grapes to soften the wine as it texturally has less density and tannins than Pommard. [Dijon clone 777] features more black fruits in its flavor profile such as black raspberry, black cherry, cola and spice.

Sour Grapes (waterberry, sour berries)

Well rumor has it that there will be some more sour grapes in the ton of grapes we get today from James Ontiveros and his Rancho Ontiveros vineyard. Here's a link to an article about James (and Peter Cargasacchi).

In 1997, James established Rancho Ontiveros Vineyards and planted five acres, all pinot noir, and Clones 113, 114, 115, 2a and Clone 4 from Pommard. He planted an additional three acres in 2000-Clone 1a from Burgundy and two clones from vineyards in California - Benedict Selection (from the Sanford & Benedict Vineyard) and Swan from northern California, from the late legendary, Joseph Swan (not to be confused with T.J Swann, of "Night Train" fame, I think.)

So we will again be sorting grapes by hand to pick out sour berries. Sour grapes are redder and more translucent. They also taste sour because they have little to no sugar. Nobody I've spoken to seems to have a definitive answer as to why this is a problem this year. A limited Internet search on my part found overproduction and poor nutrition to be likely causes. But I'm not sure I've actually found the right symptoms.

Punching down the cold soak.

Measuring sugar levels of the must.

22.5 Hour Work Day

I started work at 2:00 am Wednesday morning and finished at 12:30 am this morning (Thursday). It was our first day of harvest and I have a lot to blog about. Here is a list of upcoming topics:
- Sour berry problem, worse with clones P4 and 2A. Not as bad with 777
- What's the difference between clones (777 was ripest)
- Back to sorting again. What are the disadvantages. I've heard there's a great discussion about sorting at Harlan I need to find
- We hand sorted every single cluster today to eliminate sour berries.
- Adding sulfur, how much and best method
- Cold soak -- advantages and disadvantages
- Letting grapes sit for hours before crushing/destemming. Any problems here?
- mixing clones prior to fermentation -- how to avoid

I'm exhausted.

Sorting table

Andrew and Casey sorting sour berries at our Ikea sorting table.

First grapes into the new winery!

Marcy Keefer

After a night of harvesting grapes.

Andrew and Kim Loring

Kim is Brian's sister. They got Andrew started making wine.

Harvest

Andrew, Craig Keefer the wine grower, and the hard working pickers. It amazing how fast they work.

Picking Keefer Tonight

We bring our first grapes in tonight! We are picking Keefer Ranch in the Russian River Valley starting at 4am Wednesday. Due to some problems with a higher than expected percentage of sour berries, the grapes will require extra sorting. It should be an exciting day! The photo is of Andrew today at his "still dry" winery.

Boss

Andrew Vingiello, the Winemaker/Owner of AP VIN

Bakerlane (Baker Lane ?) 2004 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir

I enjoyed a great dinner at Nopa the other night and had the 2004 Bakerlane Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. The wine, from grapes grown on The Hurst Family's Twin Hill Ranch was cellared and bottled by Bakerlane Wines in Sebastapool. I mention it because it was a good value. It retails for about $30, and Nopa was selling it for $40 (also by the glass for $10).

I really enjoyed the wine at dinner. Here's my notes from finishing the last glass two days later:
Smoky, berry fruits on the nose with some earthy notes. Great acidity. Currant, cherry and blackberry and a hint of oak. Noticing a touch of menthol on the finish. Lingering oak and vanilla.

The Wine Aroma Wheel is a great tool for new wine tasters like me.

Harvest starts Tuesday night with Keefer Ranch. More later.

Fruit Variabilty

In an earlier post I speculated about how to deal with harvested fruit that may vary from under ripe to raisined. Yesterday ran across this article by Mark Greenspan on the Wine Business Monthly website which addresses this topic.

I think that it's a fair statement that if you ignore variability in the grape, your wine will tend towards mediocrity.... Winegrowers need to pay closer attention to the cream of their crop and how to prevent blending it in with the lesser fruit from their vineyards.

...Great wine can only come from great grapes...There are numerous factors in any vineyard that can limit the potential fruit quality, regardless of how ripe the fruit is...but it often does come down to uniformity of ripeness.

So my earlier speculation that variability in ripeness may add to a wine's complexity seems pretty clearly refuted here. The question becomes how high of a cost is a winemaker willing to pay for uniform ripeness? I think I would be willing to discard a significant percentage of the grapes that show up at my winery door. We will see...

Winemaking is not glamorous

After living in San Francisco for over nine years and making many trips to beautiful Napa wineries I was under the impression that winemaking was a fairly glamorous business with beautiful people and beautiful wine estates. The reality I've confronted couldn't be further from that. Great grapes are grown by true rural farmers. Great wine is made by onetime cab drivers. Apprentice winemakers have fulltime "second" jobs that are nothing to wrie home about. Wineries are squeezed into industrial warehouse spaces (one I saw resembles an old car repair shop). Expensive wines collections are held by ordinary people who have a wife and two kids in Livermore. The glamour is in the bottle I guess...

Sanitizing

It seems that most everything I learn in winemaking has multiple answers. Take sanitizing equipment, which I seem to spend most of my time doing. At AP VIN I've learned to mix a solution of about a half tablespoon of potassium metabisulfite per gallon of water. We follow that up with a ozonated water rinse. That, by most accounts, is pretty effective. Another winery I've visited sanitizes with an iodine solution, followed by a 5 minute wait, followed by a water rinse. Not sure what is best, but I prefer the sulfite/ozone both for its double cleaning and for the fact that sulfites are naturally occuring in wine and any residue left behind is only going to have the mild effect of minimally increasing a wine's sulfite level, which gets tested anyway.

Here's a nice link about sanitizing with chemicals.

Here's another about using ozone.

Crushed 4 tons of Pinot Noir today in Berkeley

Today was my second day ever actually making wine. I was helping out at a winery in Berkeley where we crushed 4 tons of Pinot Noir from Brosseau Vineyards. So what did I learn today? That grape quality can vary. Of the 8 half-ton picking bins, ripeness varied from just barely ripe to raisined. We sorted out the damaged fruit and leaves, but most everything else went into the fermenter. When I make wine I would consider sorting the fruit more heavily. I would try to eliminate almost all raisined and partly raisined berries. I don't like wines with prune flavors and I think this may be where that comes from. I also would taste test bunches that looked slightly less ripe and eliminate those as well.

I wonder if this would lead to better wine. Maybe it would just lead to one-dimensional wine...