Pinot Gris tasting

2014 will be Claar Cellars second vintage working with Pinot Gris (aka Pinot Grigio). In order to get the entire team on the same page we had a tasting this morning. We bought 6 of our competitors Pinot Gris to blind taste next to 2 of our own unfinished Pinot Gris. After the tasting but before the reveal we all voiced our opinions on each wine. Then we revealed which wines were which and discussed which styles we liked best and which our customers would appreciate. I cannot indulge in the details of the outcome but I can say that this a great way to make decisions!

Diggin' Tanks

Diggin tanks, diggin tanks. Most red wine is fermented with its skins for good extraction of colors and flavors. This leaves the task of getting all the flat, empty grape skins out of the tanks. If you have ever mucked out a horse stall or a corral after a good rain then you will have a partial understanding of the task. 

I love digging tanks. Call me crazy but I find that it is a great physical challenge. Its also nice to have a little alone time. At bigger wineries you would probably have a digging buddy in the tank with you but here we don’t have other people and only some of our tanks are that enormous. There is always a point near the middle of the dig where you look at how much you have done, how sweaty and sore you are then at how much you still have left to do. For just a second you think that there is no way you will ever be finished! This is the point when I hear my Mamma's voice in my head telling me to cowgirl up. I then have no choice but to smile and dig in hard! It soon after this that I start to see the end.

The grape must (grape skins) is heavy and of course wet, it is also somewhere between knee and shoulder deep. You have to go FAST! Someone is waiting on you to get it done, like now. The must is hot, its reaks of hot alcohol so much that sometimes it can take your breath away. You are inside a dark tank with a box fan blowing down on you from the top door. The fan is to remove as much Carbon Dioxide as possible and maybe to cool you down a little. The fan cannot always remove all of it, sometimes it can get trapped in pockets of smushed grapes. Your reward for being able to see the floor of the tank is that you start slipping and sliding around and sometimes when you shift your weight the tank resonates with a startling BONG!  

Digging tanks makes me really feel like I’m in the heart of it. Like, “How badass am I? I make wine! I work like a man! And I look good doing it!” It is such a great feeling to know that you just shoveled 15 TONS of wet, sticky, staining grape skins out of a tiny door of a huge tank. I can't wait to drink a glass of wine that came out of one of the tanks I have dug out!

P.S. I would like to thank my Momma for making me shovel so much shit over the years! Bet she never thought she'd get a thanks for that one.

Monitoring Fermentation

In order to manage fermentation we have to monitor the Brix and the temperature on a daily basis. Brix is the measurement we use for sugar and we all know what temperature is. 

As fermentation progresses the yeast use up the sugar, decreasing the Brix and producing three byproducts; Carbon Dioxide, alcohol and heat. If a fermentation gets too hot it can 'blow off' the the fruity-ness, cause off flavors or aromas and even cause a stuck ferment. The temperature can be regulated by the use of glycol jackets on tanks or cooler location for barrels. Both of which are kept cooler in the beginning of fermentation to promote a slow leisurely pace for the gluttonous yeast. This will give a better chance of the yeast eating all the sugar then dying. Otherwise they gorge themselves then die before the sugar is all gone. Also whites are kept cooler throughout simply because they have more delicate fruit to lose if overheated. 

I measure the Brix with a hydrometer and of course I use a thermometer for temps. At bigger wineries I have had the opportunity to use one of these DMA do-hickies, pictured below, you push down the plunger at the top, it sucks a very small amount of juice up and gives a read out of both Brix & temp (it does a lot of other really cool stuff but I wont get into that now). These are very expensive, even just to have them calibrated is a lot of money so I do not have one at my disposal right now.   

But remember noses and taste-buds are the most important tool we have to determine any issues that a fermentation may be having. I always stick my nose in my sample and give it a taste as well. 

Kickin' it off! Juice to wine.

Inoculation. The introduction of cells or organisms to a carbohydrate, nutrient rich substrate. The organisms in the case of wine-making can be either yeast or bacteria depending on the fermentation you are trying to initiate. Primary fermentation is yeast and secondary or Malo-lactic, is bacteria. The substrate is yummy grape juice. Most inoculations use freeze dried yeasts or bacteria that have to be reconstituted.The yeast has to be mixed well into 40C water and left for 20 minutes. Before the yeast can be ‘pitched’ into the juice the yeast should be within 10 degrees of the juice, which means that you often have to add juice and wait, add juice and wait, add juice and wait. This process gets the yeast very excited! Sometimes the yeast will more than double in size. 

Inoculation of grape juice is the main reason that I hate going to the grocery store after work during harvest. I have yet to figure out how to inoculate a tank without getting covered in juice and yeast. As you can imagine by the end of a 12 hour day I do not smell fresh and clean. A stop to pick up a gallon of milk instigates looks that say ‘Girl, you need to see a doctor about that smell!’ This is the only down side. It doesn't smell bad when you are mixing it or adding it, I think it smells fantastic, but once its on your clothes (in your hair!) it doesn't stay fantastic.

I love doing yeast additions! You can see, hear and even feel the yeast wake up. I even have a song I sing to the yeasties!  

Punch downs & Pump overs

Both activities are performed to allow more extraction of colors and tannins from the skins of red grapes. If red grapes are pressed off the skins the juice, depending on variety, will be a light rose to clear. When red varieties are processed they are crushed and destemmed then sent to the holding vessel (tank or bin) that it will ferment in.

 No matter the size of the vessel or volume of the juice/skins, a 'cap' will form. This means that the skins raise to the top and the juice settles at the bottom, decreasing the surface area of skins that the juice can be in contact with. If the volume is small enough one can punch down the cap into the juice but if it is a large volume the cap is too thick to break through with that method. At Claar we use mainly pump overs, where we pump the juice from the bottom and spray it over the cap until well mixed. We use what look like sprinklers for our smaller tanks and with the larger ones we manually hold a hose and spray it around. We employ this method every 12 hours, so it is how we start and how we end our days.

CRUSH!

Harvest started last Saturday for us. It has been fairly (for harvest...) easy here in the winery because our harvester kept breaking down. Now that we have this problem fixed the work will be non-stop and the hours will be getting longer. The Friday before we kicked things off I was so excited I had to get some of that anxious energy out in order to sleep so I wrote this, and promptly fell asleep on the couch with my laptop in my lap. 

"I am not sure how to explain it. Tomorrow is my first Saturday to mark the true beginning of crush! And I am, for the lack of a better word, STOKED! The logic in me keeps saying, 'it's just twice the amount of stress and work!' But the romantic side screams 'THIS IS THE MAGIC!' It is an intense surge of physical, mental, emotional and sensory activities. Every load of grapes is the dream of a beautiful wine. Every addition, every movement, every analysis recorded; is the action of that dream. Every morning is a sunrise and every night is a sunset. You end every day covered in sticky juice, smelly yeast, and coated in a fine dust of yeast nutrients" 

I am sure if my eyes would have stayed open for longer the end of this love letter to harvest would have made more sense and been beautiful. The honest truth is I cannot talk about harvest without sounding like a starry eyed literary arts major. This harvest is so early this vintage that the days may not be sunrise to sunset yet but I'm sure there will be a few of them.  Although that is different this vintage everything else is on par. The air is electric with anxiety and excitement. It smells of the crisp change of the seasons, the ripe fruit, dirt from the tractors and the yeast of fermentation. Every morning starts with pump-overs and punch downs which rewards your morning with all the fruit aromas that will eventually present in the glass. Throughout the day the sounds of the tractors delivering fruit, forklift dumping fruit, the rhythm of the the crusher/destemmer timed with the must pump, the funny sigh of the press when it releases air. The beautiful pink hues of the red juice in my sample jars, the amazing fuchsia of the red fermenting juice when it is punched down/pumped over. The energy exerted to drag hoses, move pumps, climb ladders and dig tanks. All in all harvest is total sensory overload. It is amazing.  

 

If you want more about harvest follow me on twitter, @tiffanybritton8 and for all the awesome pictures follow my instagram Winegeekette. The fast pace of harvest is much better suited for quick pics and 140 character comments.  

A little bit 'bout harvest prep

As the sugars in the grapes rise to harvest levels so does the excitement of the pending season. Along with excitement comes the stress of the time crunch. Last week the first grapes were harvested from Washington state. This put everyone into a mild panic. We still have tons of bottling to get done and our bottling line broke down last Thursday. The part should be in today or at least that's the dream.

As soon as we broke down I ran out to the vineyards (from this point on I will ONLY be running) and gathered samples from all of our early ripening blocks. When I got back to the winery I smushed the samples and ran my pre-harvest analysis on the juice. The news was great! My numbers indicated that we still have a week and a half at the least.

Smushing the grapes in a colander to collect the juice.

What's the process of the maturity samples you might ask.  Well I normally grab the Rhino (its like a cross between a golf cart and a 4-wheeler) and a bucket for every sample. Then I drive through the different blocks collecting random but representative samples of 24 clusters per block, tasting berries as I go. I mash them up in a colander back at the winery and collect the juice. 

The juice after settling for a bit. In the front is my handy refractometer.

I let the juice settle, then I run three basic laboratory tests for acid and sugar. Sugar is measured in Brix with a refractometer. A drop of juice is placed on the measuring prism and the small cover plate is closed over the drop, then the prism is held up to the light, I look through the eyepiece and there is the reading. pH is measured with a pH meter (I just stick a probe in the juice and it gives me a reading). The final measurement is T.A. which is titratable acidity, often confused with total acidity although they are not the same. Titrating the T.A. a little more complex and boring to explain (if you are interested let me know and I will go into more detail). We use these numbers to decide when to harvest as well as to tell us how balanced the juice or wine is during the process. BUT, the final decision is always a sensory one. Swirl, sniff, taste! Taste, taste, taste! Then taste again!

  

Signs of change

Veraison. The official definition is the point at which the grapes change color. This is a beautiful time in the canopy of the grape vines! There is more to it than that of course, especially since not all grapes actually change color. This is a sign to the growers and winemakers that harvest preparation needs to start immediately if it is not almost done.

Grapes grow in what is termed a 'double sigmoid growth curve'. This means they initially grow in size (cell replication and expansion, the curve rises) then growth pauses for a bit, this pause is called the lag phase. Then at veraison the grapes start to ripen (the curve rises again) or accumulate sugars. During this time the acidity decreases because Malic acid is degraded, leaving tartaric acid as the main acid in the grapes. The top of this second curve indicates full ripeness, once completely ripe the plant no longer puts any effort into the berries and they start to die.

Although the plant is no longer producing more sugars for the berries does not always mean the grapes will be picked at that point. Once the plant stops caring about reproduction (fruit production) the berries of the grape clusters start to lose water retention due to the thinning of the outer waxy cuticle on the berry skin. This causes a higher sugar to water ratio, as well as an oxidation of some of the flavor/aroma compounds that can be highly coveted. The practice of leaving the grapes on the plant after they are ripe to get these effects is call 'hang time'

Wine is sunlight held together by water

The benefit of starting at 6am is the awesome light! 

Hahaha!

International Sales!

We just received an order for three pallets of wine to ship to India! This is obviously exciting! EXCEPT, that every single bottle that we ship to India has to have a secondary sticker with some information from the Indian government. 

 

Yesterday my cellar guy, Mac and I started the process of stickering 2,160 bottles of wine. Keep in mind that this wine has already been put in cases and taped up. So the process; cut open box, remove bottles, sticker them, put them back, re-tape then put them on a new pallet is very slow. 

When we started we called the farm manager to see if we could borrow a couple members of his crew. They were busy so we trudged forward alone. Turns out we are rock stars, so of course we finished around 10am today. Now the trick is to find something else to do to keep us busy for the rest of the day. It is a little wet outside and here in eastern Washington we will straight up melt if we get rained on, so inside jobs only! :)

Throwback Thursday

Getting barrel samples for winegrower Paul Vandenberg during my first internship for Washington State University at Paradisos del Sol Winery in Zillah, Washington. 

What wine is, really.

Cheese 101

After a very long day of sitting through seminars about barrels and winemaking, I was signed up for a Cheese 101 class at our local cheese shop, Cheese Louise. The cheese monger, Alex, was amazing! His is just as curd nerd as I am cork dork. We discussed the evolution of cheese throughout history and the process of making 7 different cheeses, which we also got to taste. The cheeses included a fresh Chevre, Brie de Meaux, Taleggio, a Wisconsin Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a cheddar, Isle of Mull (also cheddar), and Colston Basset Blue Stilton. The only cheese I didn't enjoy was the Taleggio, but my boyfriend loved it so it worked out. I had a great time and will be attending Cheese 201 when it is available!