-- In which Wes, Chanda, Steve and the crew experience the wonder of night picking, some pinot noir is pressed into barrel, the fruit’s looking beautiful, and we’re all getting a little giddy…

Year in the Vineyard, Week #26

September 18-24, 2009

With Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager/Winemaker Clos Pepe Vineyards

Good Thing That I Love My Job!

Six picks in seven days:

Most winemakers are responsible for their cellars, and most of harvest is spent waiting for fruit to arrive, crushing, pressing, barrel work, organizing, etc.  I have the added joy and deep responsibility of being both a grower and a winemaker, so my days are split between two professions that are normally not joined at the hip in the United States.  I’m a bit of a doppelganger during harvest.  I wake up early (sometimes it would be considered late the night before), help run the crew through a pick, snip as many clusters as I can while I’m not making phone calls or driving the forklift,  and then head off to the winery for morning punch downs, or to crush some tons of fruit, or to press some tons of fermented must.  It can make for easy days of 9-10 hours, or crazy days in excess of 17 hours.  Beer is involved, though, so it’s not all that bad.

Take today for example.  Alarm goes off at 3:17.  Coffee and a quick look at email and I’m off into the field to start picking by headlamp with the crew.  Four tons of pinot noir later I grab a few interns, leave the crew to finish the last bins, and we’re off to the Clos Pepe Estate production facility to press off 3 tons of fermented (dry) pinot noir wine into barrel.  The interns have paved the way to make today a bit easier.  The barrels have been swelled, cleaned and ozonated and all we have to do is turn them upright, align them perfectly on the barrel racks, check the interiors with a flashlight to guarantee they are free from defects, give them a few good, deep whiffs to assure they are sound for winemaking, and then we prepare the press by ozonating (sterilizing), aligning, testing power and the cycles, and doing the morning punch downs.  By the time we started pulling wine out of the fermenters it’s almost 9:30 am—almost six hours into our workday and the fog has yet to burn off outside.

Then the wine starts filling barrels and the mood lightens.  A glass appears (from nowhere or the Irish intern, Liam?) and we taste the 2009 nectar.  I say that the heady aroma reminds me of bing cherries with a hint of medium rare venison.  The interns really search for the venison—they smell more fruit and spice, but let me be my freaky self.  We open a big bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale and celebrate the first press—it’s almost 10 am.

The new visiting intern this week is Matt Six from Brooklyn, New York.  He’s here for 9 days and his presence has been a wonder—like a relief pitcher emerging from the dugout in the 8^th inning.  He’s been taking up a bit of (my) slack with punchdowns in the morning, giving me the extra time to smell and taste barrels of Chardonnay all morning (I know, it’s tough work…), do tests, make additions, crunch numbers, fill out forms and paperwork.  Matt’s been kicking some ass and he’s moved into the field and cellar with an undeniable passion, skill and alacrity.

Winemaking is pretty simple, if not laborious and exhausting.  We start by doing a few hours of dishes—cleaning and sterilizing everything (bins, fermenters, barrels, stainless, hoses, tanks, what have you…) with either the ozone machine, or by using TSP water, then clean water, then citric acid water, then clean water again.  Then we move some liquid from one container to another.  Sometimes yeast is added.  Sometimes grapes go through a machine.  Then we do dishes for another few hours until the entire winery is clean, wet and sparkling.  Then we are spoiled by Cathy Pepe’s cooking and hospitality during 4:30 pm suppers, then we try to get a few hours of rack time before getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 am the next morning to do it all again.  It’s gloriously challenging, and reminds me a bit of Lord of the Rings.  You never know how pastoral your life is until you’ve had to march to Mount Doom and be attacked by a mutated, magic-addicted midget who bites your finger off.  OK, maybe not, but harvest is a good test of your will, patience and strength.

This week I’m going to share my recipe for Chardonnay, and next week for Pinot Noir.  The reason I’m doing this is to prove that the cellar practices have little to do with the quality of our wines.  We try to allow the wines to represent the vintage and the vineyard—and even if you followed this recipe exactly, you would never be able to make a Clos Pepe wine unless you first secured some Clos Pepe fruit.

Recipe:  Clos Pepe Estate Chardonnay (in the Chablis style)

Ingredients:

3000 lb (1.5 tons) Dijon 76 or Wente Clone Chardonnay from Clos Pepe Vineyards, cold and morning picked.

6 stainless steel 55 gallon drums or neutral (4 years+) clean French Oak barrels (55 gallons).

42 grams of potassium metabi-sulfite

250 grams Fermaid yeast food.

250 grams CY3079 yeast, swelled in 45 degree Celcius water for 30 minutes.

A few grams of Ml bacteria ‘Beta’, swelled in water or apple juice.

Sterilize a stainless bladder press (we use an ATI ‘Soft Press’), and carefully load the stainless cylinder with the 3000 lb. of Chardonnay fruit.  Start the press cycle and watch the beautiful Chardonnay juice come pouring into the press pan.  Move 40 gallons of cold juice to clean, ozonated barrels.  Each barrel only gets 40 gallons so it has room to foam and bubble during barrel fermentation.  Add 7 grams potassium metabi-sulfite (sulfur dioxide) to each 40 gallon barrel of cold chardonnay juice.  Stir well with barrel stirring wand.  Repeat the process until the end of the press cycle until all 6 barrels are filled equally with 35-40 gallons.  Mix 45 grams of fermaid yeast food into about a liter of distilled water, stir until consistent and cloudy.  Add and stir into each barrel.  Then split the 3 liters of yeast in warm water into six equal portions and SLOWLY dribble the warm yeast mixture into the barrel of juice.  The idea here is to allow the yeast to form a warm colony at the center-top of the barrel.  Do NOT stir the yeast in—let it float and start reveling in its sweet, sweet new home.  Add some ML bacteria to initiate malolactic ferment while juice is still warm from primary ferment.  Go home and shower off the sticky.  Stick your nose in the barrel after 24 hours and hope for the stingy C02 smell of ferment.  If the barrel is not fermenting actively in 48 hours, take a few gallons from a rapidly fermenting barrel and add it to the slow poke.  After the juice is dry wine, rack the clean wine off the gross sediment into neutral French or stainless casks, filling each barrel completely full.  Top up ullage every two weeks and test sugar, ML and so2 at least every few months.  After 11 months of barrel age and completion of malolactic fermentation, wine is prefiltered, then sterile filtered, and bottled.

Two more things I want to share this week before I go man down for tomorrow’s pick and crush.

First, Liam the Irishman will be headed back to the UK on Saturday and I want to pay him a few compliments.  His positive attitude and smile could not be quelled, even on the hottest day in the field or the coldest night at the winery.  He reminded us to stay happy, and drinking.  He guaranteed beer would be in the house, as when there was less than a 12 pack, he made sure we went to the market.  He taught us to listen carefully for every word, so we would know what the fuck he was saying.  Simply, we would have been scrambling to keep up without him, and we’ve been comfortably exhausted with his excellent help.  Thanks Liam!  You are ALWAYS welcome at Clos Pepe, and we’ll never be quite the same without you close by.

Second, I want to pay tribute to our very own Vigneron, Steve Pepe.  Clos Pepe is Steve’s dream, and I’ve been happily squatting within it for 14 years.  He’s put his entire ‘retirement’ into making this vineyard great—when he chose this piece of dirt in 1994 it was not a mistake that it would become (arguably) one of California’s ‘Grand Cru’ pinot noir vineyards.  He applied the same care and diligence to finding this ‘terroir’ that he did in his law career, where he was one of the Top 50 Employment Lawyers in the US for decades.  He’s been more than fair and more than supportive of my management of the property, and thankfully we agree on a winemaking style that stresses elegance and balance over ripeness, concentration and score-whoring.  You may also know that Steve is Clos Pepe’s #1 grape picker.  He’s the only member of the family and/or crew that’s made every day of harvest since 1998.  A conservative estimate of the fruit Steve’s harvested with his own hands would be over 175 tons in those dozen vintages.  Whether by guts, Celebrex or both, he’s in the field picking without complaint at night, in the morning, even in the heat of the day if need be.  No other vineyard in California has a boss like Steve: a guy who could comfortably sit back and sip limoncello while watching the tons roll in, and be justified in doing so after such a demanding career.  He leads by example and is also intimately involved in the cellar work, racking, blending, bottling, and of course ‘product testing’.  Let’s all raise a glass in tribute to the man who knows how to live the wine lifestyle from all perspectives: from field labor to a host at an elegant dinner party.  Oh and thanks for the THREE bottles of 1986 Lafite you busted out for the crew and interns last week.  Guess that would be the Wine of the Week.  I didn’t take notes.  It was very good.