Les Blog

With the Pinot Noir now safely in carboys, the Franc ready to press tonight or tomorrow night, and the Cab nearly ready itself, Crush 2009 is starting to wind down. After the sound of rioting yeasts bubbling through wine all through the basement, the lower volume of finishing ferments is a little sad, like a sparsely populated dance floor at the end of a party.

But the light fantastic isn’t fully tripped yet. As I mentioned, the Franc is now weakly mustering a cap, a sign (along with hydrometer readings) it’s pretty much done and ready for the press. It smells terrific, like cran-raspberry flowers, if such a thing exists. We’ll probably press it tonight, from the looks of the sign-up sheet we’ve been using via Doodle.

Next is the Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s close to done itself, but I want to experiment with a short “extended maceration” on this big-shouldered wine, pulling more flavor and more tannin into it. Some wineries leave their wines to soak for more than a month after fermentation is finished, which contrary to what you’d think supposedly coaxes round, soft tannins from the skins. That requires better equipment that we have, since you really need to seal off the wine against the ravages of oxygen, now that the yeast is no longer producing a blanket of CO2 to protect the surface. But we’ll seal it as best we can and keep an eagle eye on it, pressing before anything heads precipitously south.

That’s right, go ahead. No one’s looking: scratch the screen. Doesn’t that Pinot Noir smell incredible? Good god!

For those of you with older monitors, let me try to describe what it smells like. First, I should say I’ve made Pinot Noir before, and I’ve loved the wine for years. I was even on the Board of the International Pinot Noir Celebration for a while. So I understand why people like it, and I’ve smelled my share of it, during and well after fermentation.

But I don’t think I really understood how it can become an addiction, something winemakers throw their entire lives into, until this began to overwhelm my senses. Holy shit: this is ambrosial.

Some of it is surely how much is packed into this fragrance: ripe cherries, but not just cherries; their delicate stems, the branches holding them, a light breeze gently riffling them on a warm fall afternoon, coaxing out the fragrance of the entire orchard you kick up a little earth walking beneath. There’s tea, maybe a pekoe; and roses, a mixed garden of them, and along with a nearby raspberry bramble, warmed by the sun and transported on the air. And there’s something darker, richer, more earthy, maybe some tobacco, and a whiff of lavender bees are happily hovering through.

But what really takes it past a mere perfume counter it is the balance of all these fragrances, which play in and out of one another like the honey bees I just mentioned, their gentle buzzing, like the CO₂ wafting above the cap, adding yet another sensory layer and sharpening the whole experience just so.

Incredible. Think there’s any way we can bottle this? Oh… right!

Last night we pressed the Syrah, sending it barreling toward French oak and malolactic fermentation. It was the first red to finish this year, and the first real test of our reconditioned wine press, so we weren’t totally sure what would come out the other end.

Luckily, what emerged was an inky purple blacksmith of a wine, burly but agile, if not kryptonite for any white garments or pearly teeth nearby. As we loaded it into the press, it filled the basement with an enthralling animal, dark-berry fragrance, and as it cascaded off the trough into the bucket, it tasted full and juicy through the mid and beyond. Wow.

(All images for this post courtesy of our guest photographer, Layla Grice) Read more

For the first time in a dozen years, a white wine is brightening the basement: Pinot Gris from Oracle Vineyard in the Dundee Hills. After pressing and letting it settle for a day, I took a halogen shop light and lit the side of the fermenter to see where the lees-line was (“lees” being the skunge the precipitates out of a wine after fermentation). Man, bask in that warm, golden color: I plan to bring this photo up every time I need a hit of vitamin D through the long, dark Oregon winter.

I’m a little worried about our Merlot, which now appears to be on its hands and knees crawling toward the completion of fermentation.

It’s generally gone through a longer, cooler ferment to (perhaps) retain more of its fruity essence, peaking in the low 70s early on in the ferment. So I suppose you could say it never got a head of steam, and now there’s little momentum to carry the yeasts through the fog of alcohol they’ve created by consuming all that sugar. In addition, wild yeasts got this party started, so there’s no guarantee we have sturdy specimens in there to grab the reins and save the day.

So this afternoon, I zipped home to wrap both fermenters in an electric, heated mattress pad, to see if a little temperature will coax the yeasts out of their stupor. If I haven’t waited too long already, I’m reasonably confident that will work, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to beg some crude, tough-guy yeasts to finish the job. Their specialty isn’t subtlety, but we’ll be in no position to argue.

Today I drove out to the Dundee Hills and Oracle Vineyard to pick up our Pinot Gris. It was a beautiful but bone-chillingly cold morning, as co-owner Amy confirmed when I got there, wrapped in all the clothes she could find and still freezing. By the time I left, the sun had started to break out of the clouds (perhaps for one last encore before heading south for the winter), Amy was finally warming up, and we had all our fruit in hand for 2009. That makes me one relieved Garagiste.

Now that the Gris has been processed, we have 7 wines downstairs in various stages of completion, from the Syrah which we’ll probably press Tuesday, to the Cabernet which isn’t even thinking about fermenting yet.

We picked up our Syrah at the same time we did our Merlot, but as you might remember, we let the Syrah determine the pick date and let the Merlot fall where it might. That decision ultimately showed up in the flavor (more backbone and structure), but of course, in the numbers, too…
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