Les Blog

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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Ah, Merlot, you corpulent, shar-pei of a wine, you. Despised by many, tolerated by few, I alone sense your inner beauty, your generosity of fruit, your gentle tannins…

… but this? 27.5 brix? 4.02 pH?! Girl, how could you?!

Oh, well. Nothing a tummy tuck and boob job can’t fix. Follow along with me as we do the merlot numbers…
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Looking over Sam’s shoulder as he was beginning to punch down just now, the Merlot is showing a telltale mini-cap rising toward one edge of the fermenter. And on closer look, there are a few bubbles popping through every now and then.

Thus fermentation begins for 2009!

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Just heard from our second grower with an update: sugars are starting to eek into the right range (22.5 – 23.5), but the acids are still high enough that the whole package is simply out of balance. So it’s only time to pick if we have no other alternative, but for now, it looks like we do — no major storms appear to be coming, and no severe frosts are predicted. The grower’s still leery of frost, but feels confident the grapes will make it to next weekend.

By that time, the fruit will have hung another week, cinching up those sugars (though not too much, since it’ll be relatively cool), and bringing acids down to levels we can deal with. With luck, that may actually get us ideal fruit: sugars in the 24-25 range focused by just the right amount of acidity, and true physiological ripeness. We got syrah pretty much at the peak; let’s hope we can make it 3 out of 4.

Yesterday morning there were the faintest signs of life: the odd bubble here and there, the islands of grape skins slightly more pronounced than before (or were they?). Now the stuff’s going full throttle, right up to the rim of the fermenter.

The syrah came in with pretty nice numbers, spot-on sugars and pretty good pH. I’ve already added a dash of acid to bring that pH down into more comfortable territory, but all the building blocks are already there: the fruit tasted at perfect ripeness out in the field — maybe the most spot-on I’ve ever tasted in our winemaking — and it hasn’t changed in the winery, either. This looks to be a stellar syrah year if we don’t screw it up.

For fun, to increase flavor for what remained, and to sneak a little more space into the fermenter, I also bled out 10 gallons of syrah juice 24 hours after crush — a technique which also the traditional way to make rosé. I see now I should have done it maybe 3-4 hours afterwards, however, since the color is more garnet than rose, but if we can ride its fermentation to the ground without crashing, that should also make it a mighty flavorful summer quaffer. It’s currently a little stinky (something David and Amy of Westrey warned me about), but I’ll hit it with some nutrient and if that doesn’t improve matters, a little copper should have it seeing things our way.

But man, you should smell it: there’s a rich, deep sweetness to the must (since it’s only just begun to convert sugar to alcohol), laced with smokiness and a whiff of leather. Can’t wait to see it at press in a week or so.

This morning, somewhere deep in the darkness of the Merlot, the effervescent joy that is fermentation officially began. It was easy to miss, but when my wife peeked under the fermenter cover, she noticed that most of the liquid formerly pooling around the skins had disappeared (fermentation pushes the grape skins, or “cap” to the surface). And sure enough, there were a few tell-tale pops of CO₂ when we got closer.

As the nature writer David Rains Wallace said, “fermentation may have been a greater discovery than fire.” Indeed, over the next few weeks, Bacchus will take Prometheus to school. Ladies and gentlemen, here we go!