Harvest 2011

Bringing 2011 to a close was a labor. The season started with a series of frosts that greatly reduced the crop but after that the season was rather gentle on Canelo Hills Vineyard. No major weather or pest events threatened the fruit and as usual Joan's farming resulted in fabulous fruit. I suppose the fact that we got any crop at all in 2011 after the devastating August 2010 hail storm is a miracle and a tribute to Farmer Joan.









We ended up with very little of anything but for the Tempranillo. Perhaps a ton and a half of Tempranillo got harvested on September 19, about two weeks later than is typical. The fruit was beautiful. Joan and the picking crew scoured the rest of the vineyard and came up with a few hundred pounds of mixed Syrah, Zinfandel, Riesling and Malvasia. It all got tossed in with the Tempranillo so techincally the 2011 Vintage of Tempranillo is a bit of a field blend.




Last weekend I finished off the major tasks of Harvest and initial winemaking. It is always a mixture of sadness and relief when I clean up the press and push it back into the winery for the winter, awaiting 2012. Such is the cycle of winemaking.

2010 White Line Up

This past weekend I racked the white wines from the 2010 harvest. The grapes are sourced from Dragoon Mountain Vineyards in Kansas Settlement and Sierra Vista Wineyards in Sasabe. Each batch is fairly small but very distinctive and true to variety. The Gewurztraminer is completely dry at this point and Joan and I like it. I was thinking of returning a little fresh juice to the wine to sweeten it but perhaps not this year. The Riesling was more ripe when harvested compared to last year and consequently is more complex - still piercingly dry and acidic but rounder and richer in the mouth. It's my first year working with Pinot Grigio and I was totally faked out when I saw the grapes. They are greyish red. How strange for such an ethereal light white wine. The Viognier comes from what must certainly be the most southern vineyard in Arizona - Melissa Owen's vineyard in Sasabe. It is the second harvest from the vines so the wine is consequently fresh and light and crisp, but true to Viognier. Look for them all to be released during our Memorial Day Weekend White Wine Release.

ZZZZZZ

- as in asleep. So what does wine look like in the winter? I realize it’s not yet winter but close enough. After harvest, crush, ferment, press, settling, and racking – comes the slow quiet action in barrels and tanks. New wine is very fruity but rough with lots of yeast and vegetable smells and tastes. It takes a few months for that to settle out and integrate into the wine. In the case of wine in barrels there is the additional activity of merging the wine with the oak characteristics of the wood and managing the subtle but important chemical reactions that only can occur in a wood. This is what it looks like. Not much I know, but in the absence of vigorous fermentation and bubbling the wine is actually very susceptible to spoilage and other problems. It is a nerve wracking time for me as I’m busy with topping off barrels, testing the wine, tasting the wine and keeping it healthy, but actually it is one of my favorite stages of wine making.

What's a Farmer To Do?

I have a few more weeks left before I go back into the vineyard to start the winter pruning. Tim does the wine-making, Kathryn does the marketing. So, what am I supposed to write in the blog when I have no farming to report? Nothing. I'll just post pictures from the past couple of months. The first is Tim pitching the grapes into the crusher/destemmer. The second is of the juice collecting in the tray after being squeezed by the press. I love watching the running juice and listening to it splashing into the tray. It seems like magic to me even though I know there was lots of work that went on before this. After all, it is the end result of my grape farming.
Oops! I guess I did find something to write about!

FIZZZZZZ

I was reluctant to enter this blog post until I was sure it was a done deal. Or at least was moving in the right direction. Especially considering the experience with last year's sparkling project. You may recall that last year there was problem with the compatibility of the bottle and the closure. It was not tight and the secondary fermentation was not contained leading to serious leakage as the youthful sparkler built up pressure in the bottles. Well this year after scouting out a bunch of suppliers and running some test bottle fermentations, I had a winner. A couple weeks ago Joan and I bottled the 2007 vintage sparkling Chardonnay and Nebbiolo Rose. I address some of the technical aspects of this winemaking adventure in the July Winemaker's notes for those of you who are interested. If all goes well and so far so good - namely no overwhelming smell of spilled fermenting wine in the winery, I will have a dozen or so cases of each available during the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years holidays this year.

Zork Results

We had a great time with the Zork closure survey. The on-line vote was 78% for and 22% against. The tasting room survey customers voted 90% for the Zork and 10% against it. So, I guess it looks better when you can see it up close and play with it. Some of the "yes" voters had rave comments like, "It's awesome!" "It's easy to use!" "It's a great idea!" and "Why didn't someone think of it sooner?" Some people's yes's had qualifiers like, "but not in red, only black or maroon," and "for emergency use only." The no voters had comments like, "too much plastic" and "too hard to open." Great things for us to take into consideration. The plastic is recycle-able and a kind customer showed me how it can be opened easily.

Tim and I decided we will use the Zork for our spring bottling of our 2007 Chardonnay. We will survey the people who buy it and then consider where to go from there.

Thank you all for participating! Joan

What the heck is that?

This one is for the wine geek in us all. Wine is spoiled grape juice. The initial spoilage is caused by yeasts that turn grape sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This vigorous and exciting process is called primary fermentation. Later secondary fermentation called malolactic fermentation, is caused by friendly wine bacteria. They convert malic acid (think sour green apples) to lactic acid (think the mouth experience of melted butter or milk) and carbon dioxide. It is usually encouraged in red wines and discouraged in whites. If it occurs after a wine is in a bottle the wine can get a little fizzy – generally considered a wine fault. In this picture I’ve used paper chromatography to figure out if a wine has gone through malolactic fermentation. Small drops of each wine are deposited at the bottom of the page. As the diluent travels up the fancy blotter paper, it takes with it the primary acids that are present in wine. The lowest yellow blotch is tartaric acid. The middle yellow blotch is malic acid and the upper most yellow blotch is lactic acid. The wines to the left of the paper have only tartaric and lactic acid blotches – voila, done! The wines toward the right have all three yellow spots. That would be five of the six barrels of Sangiovese clone 2. They are not done yet, but once the weather warms up those little bugs will get happy again and finish the job.

POW!

A couple weeks ago, I transferred the last of the new wine into oak barrels. The week before, I had let the wine settle and finish fermentation - or so I thought. This weekend as Joan and I were labeling some of the 2006 Sangiovese bottles, we heard a loud POP. Upward went flying a bung from one of the Nebiollo barrels. A quick inspection revealed that the wine was still bubbling, albeit rather weakly. That made me decide to check the remaining barrels and for the most part I was able to vent just a little pressurized carbon dioxide. However there was a particularly stubborn bung in one barrel of the Estate Syrah and as I struggled with it, it finally gave way with an explosive sound followed immediately by a geyser of carbonated, delicious, fragrant, inky black wine. As Joan mopped up the mess, I groaned. This is one of ways that barrels get that beautiful purple embrace.

Harvest

Last week was the end of the active phase of harvest. Coincidently the Harvest Moon occurred on the same night Joan and I pressed the last of the Sangiovese. It was a spectacular sight rising over the Mustang Mountains at dusk and setting behind the Santa Ritas the next morning. As exciting as harvest and crush is for us; it is totally crazy busy - bringing in, receiving and harvesting grapes, crushing them, punching down a couple times a day, pressing the must, then after settling for a day or so moving them to the barrels that will be their first resting place. Did I mention cleaning up before and after each step? The fruit this year look fabulous, even better than last year – both our own and the grapes that come from our growers in Cochise County. I’ll keep you posted as the wine progresses.

Screw the cork or Zork the cork?

From the beginning we had planned to use screw caps as the closure for our wines. Corks were a great improvement over sealing wax and cotton plugs a few hundred years ago, but there are more consistent alternatives these days. Small guys like us just can't afford to sacrifice 5-10% of our wine to the spoilage that accompanies corks. But we couldn't swing the cost of the screw cap machine with everything else we need and we already had the gear to stuff corks in a bottle, so for the next year or two we are buying the cleanest corks we can and keeping our fingers crossed. Along comes the Zork closure - a new fangled idea from Australia. Joan told me to check them out a few months ago, but I paid no attention until Will returned from Australia and sent me a photo and testimonial. The technical data confirm it has no risk of cork taint as might be expected from a plastic device, and is more like a screw cap that a cork in terms of oxygen ingress and premature aging of wines. Maybe we'll try a few hundred and see how they fair in the tasting room. Check them out at: http://www.zorkusa.com

Stages

It’s taken me a few days to write this entry. First there was Denial – “Tim, when I was down at the winery today it smelled a lot like sparkling wine. Maybe one of the bottles leaked”. Then there was Anger, accompanied by a lot of cuss words. I tried to Bargain – well maybe not all the bottles leaked, maybe if I just do a super tightening redo job on the crown caps it’ll preserve the pressure that is remaining in the bottles, maybe it was just one bottle that was defective and blew up under the pressure. The Depression stage is just lifting as I’ve stopped busying myself with meaningless and repetitive tasks to distract myself from Accepting that almost all 45 cases of sparkling wine were lost because of a defective bottle that didn’t allow a pressure tight seal for the secondary fermentation and essential carbonation that occurs in the bottle. I did learn that the yeast build up was successful and the secondary fermentation was progressing full steam. My dad asked what I learned. “There are a lot of ways to screw up winemaking.” (Apologies to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross)