…in which Wes, Chanda, Jackson, Steve and the Clos Pepe crew burn the candle at both ends and get over the ‘hump’ of harvest.

Year in the Vineyard

Week #27

September 25-October 1, 2009

There comes a point in harvest where a winemaker goes on autopilot.  Mornings arrive too fast, sleep doesn’t come when you need it, the mind is whirring and clicking in strange rhythms and your life is framed by the sound of snips clipping, Mexican radio echoing, and the sound of winery equipment gently separating grapes from stems, wine from skins.  Barrels fill and are put in tidy stacks, and it seems just when the winery is perfectly clean, it becomes used again and the cleaning begins again.

I might have said it already but it merits rementioning:  winemaking really only consists of two tasks.  One is cleaning.  Before we start, we sterilize everything with ozone—the press, the implements, the hoses, the hopper, everything.  Then we make it sticky and stained with wine.  This is the second part of winermaking—moving liquid from one vessel to another:  grapes to press pan, press pan to barrel, barrel to another barrel, tank to another tank, tank to bottle.  Then, after moviong liquid, we do dishes again.  Lots of dishes and lots of cleaning.  Skins and stems go into bins and are brought back to the ranch and spread in our compost pile.  Then we clean the bins. 

Of course most winemakers aren’t growers, and I consider the vineyard management my main job and the winemaking secondary.  To be honest, making wine is not that complicated.  Get good fruit and make sure your production is crafty and clean and the wines make themselves.  Growing perfect pinot noir is the real challenge, and then the focus in the winery is to allow that perfect fruit to express itself.  I’m not saying we don’t manipulate the process—all of winegrowing and winemaking is purely human manipulation.  Planting a grapevine is a manipulation.  The grapevine’s natural habitat is the forests of the Transcaucuses.  So the first Paleolithic men who planted vineyards in a village were vine manipulators.  Now we choose dozens of cultural practices in the vineyard and dozens of production techniques in the winery.  There are those that call their production ‘hands-off’ because it is rustic and non-sanitary (sorry, Brettanomyeces is NOT terroir), and there are those that call it ‘low-impact’ because they honestly try to allow a wine to represent the vintage and the vineyard.  All well and good in my book, but if as a winemaker or grower you believe that you are not manipulating the process, you need to go back to Armenia, gather some unripe fruit from the boughs of the trees in Fall (good luck fighting the birds), crush it in a stone basin, ferment the juice in a dry gourd and see how good the wine is.  Manipulation, a dirty word for some, to me means we have the science of a post-Pasteur wine business to help us, and a bevy of stainless steel implements to help us make wine that is clean, delicious, and properly uses technology to improve the final product.  Remember, winemaking, by its nature, is manipulative.

So what the hell have we been doing over the past week?  We’ve been night picking Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for Siduri, Roessler, Brewer-Clifton, Diatom, Prodigal, Ed Kurtzman, Ken Brown and the Clos Pepe Estate wines. We’ve been pressing off fermenter after fermenter of pinot noir at the Estate winery.  We’ve been racking Chardonnay—taking ½ full barrels that were barrel fermenting and combining them to make happy, full barrels of wine.  We’ve been doing punch downs on pinot noir, both the bins that are fermenting and those that are cold soaking.  Cold pinot noir must (must is a combo of skins and juice from red grapes) stays cold and without added yeast for up to 5 days in Clos Pepe’s cellar before being inoculated with cultured yeasts.    Then the must slowly turns into wine over the next ten days.  Maybe I promised you a Pinot Noir recipe this week.  Again, I have no problem giving the ‘recipe’ for my pinot noir, as there is no special ingredient or secret.  The idea here is that this recipe is attuned to Clos Pepe fruit and a philosophy that wines should be restrained, elegant, cellar-worthy and balanced.  I make wine for my own palate, as was suggested 15 years ago in a convo with Jim Clendened of Au Bon Climat.  Hey, it works for me, and (I hope) my customers.

Pinot Noir, the Clos Pepe way:

Ingredients:

3000 lb. fresh Pinot Noir grapes, cold from a night pick.  Chemistry varies, but target numbers (picks are dependent on flavor as well), are about 23.8-24.5 Brix, 3.25-3.4 pH with nut-brown skins, rich, deep flavor and a dark color bleeding out from the skins.

Few scoops of food-grade dry ice to ensure the fruit ends up around 50 degrees F or cooler in the fermenter.

One ton-and-a-half fermenter.

40 grams Potassium Metabilsulfite (S02) to stabilize the must and stun/kill feral microbes and yeast)

250g dry yeast, rehyrdrated in 40 degree Celsius water with a bit of yeast food and grape juice/must.  For pinot noir, I favor RC212 yeast, but also have used Assmanhausen, Barolo 97, Wadenswil, and even native yeast.

4 French Oak Barrels

250 grams Fermaid yeast food to help feed the yeast and to keep them from cannibalizing one another and producing off-aromas.

A splash of malolactic bacteria top start ML fermentation while the must is warm from fermentation kinetics.  This is a slightly controversial practice, as many winemakers wait to add ML bacteria until after the wine is barreled.  ML bacteria eats the malic (green apple-like) acid and creates lactic acid, which makes a wine more seamless, elegant and complex.

Punch down tool and the Plank of Pain.  The Plank of Pain is a 6” wide, 12’ long board that wqe lay over the fermenters, stand on, and use a punch down tool to mix the juice and skins in fermenting red wine three times a day.  Skins float as they are filled with C)2 from the ferment, and we want the skins in contact with the juice, so we punch/mix them.  It’s really good exercise.  The Plank has a nice strip of grip tape down the middle, and we sometimes add a phrase like:  ‘Pain is weakness leaving the body’.

Recipe: 

Sterilize fermenter and crusher/destemmer/hopper, and carefully use the bin dumper/forklift to dump the cold, freshly-picked Pinot Noir into the destemmer.  Stems pop out one side and the berries and juice fall safely into the fermenting vessel.  Add dry ice as necessary to keep the fruit/juice temperature in the high 40’s, and add sulfite to about 35 ppm.  Once the fermenter is full, pallet jack it to the area in the winery used for ferments/punch downs.  Lay a cotton sheet over the fermenter.  Punch down the bin twice a day during cold soak.  Once the bin starts warming up into the 60’s, add the yeast nutrient (Fermaid), mix well, and then take the active yeast and pour it slowly into a corner of the bin.  Allow the yeast to form a colony over the next 12 hours with no mixing or punchdowns.  When the corner of the bin swells with active ferment, punch the bin down, mixing the yeast and starting the ferment in earnest.

Punch down 3x a day, more vigorously if the ferment doesn’t smell perfectly clean, and after around 10 days the must will have turned miraculously to wine, and the whole sloppy mix goes into a wine press where the wine is extracted gently, and  the dry skins are taken home for compost.  Alternatively, you can add water and sugar back to must, referment the mix and then distill grappa/eau du vie.

Pump the wine from the press pan into French oak barrels, keep the barrels topped for 11 months, taste regularly, keep free so2 around 20 ppm during ML ferment and about 35 ppm afterwards, bottle before the next harvest.  Drink vigorously over the next 10 years.

We lost two interns last week, and we’re still a bit sad.  Liam and Matt both went home, to the UK and to Brooklyn respectively, and we miss their humor, camaraderie, and their bartending.  We miss you guys, come back soon.

That’s about all I have time for this week.  Sorry about the lack of purty pictures.  I may try to add some in the next few days.

Keep drinking pinot and I’ll see you all next week!