Update on the 2010 California Pinot Noir

Well, after a day of allowing the yeast to get going and the temperature up to 70 degrees naturally, I finally put the thermostat probe into the must and turned on the heater (an electric blanket) to bring the must to my desired fermentation temperature of 80 degrees. When the must was down to 15 Brix, I added K-Fermaid, a nutrient for yeast that I have never used before. It seemed to speed the fermentation at the end and the result was a day shorter fermentation than I'm used to. This morning I went down to check the brix expecting 3 and it was 1.5, down from 6 yesterday morning. Time to press! So I pressed, which releases additional sugar from the grapes and invigorates the yeast with some oxygen, so once it was in the carboys, fermentation picked up again, with a healthy bunch of bubbles on top. Now I will let the wine sit overnight. Tomorrow I will rack it off the gross lees (learned my lesson on that one with the last batch!) and allow it to ferment to dryness before MLF.

In other news, right now I'm sipping my first taste of Marquette (the variety of grape I am growing in my "vineyard") made by Lincoln Peak winery in Vermont. It's amazingly high in alcohol (13.8%) for a grape grown in a cold climate, and the pH is ~3.27, which is quite low. These grapes were ripe (25+ Brix) and acidic, actually a pretty good combination, although the wine tastes to me a little acidic and thin, like it didn't go through MLF. There is no detectible "foxy" taste common to labrusca-based wines. (Marquette is a hybrid between vinifera and labrusca species). It tastes a tad peppery, but honestly between the hotness of the alcohol and the acidity, it's hard to describe many flavors. I get some floral and some licorice on the nose. I hope I can do better with my Marquette, but on the other hand, this shows that a serious wine can be made with grapes grown in a cold climate.

-Jacques

The Fall 2010 Grapes are here!

Yesterday I got the call I was waiting for from Beer and Wine Hobby. My grapes were in! So I hopped in the car and drove over to pick them up. I ordered 3 cases (36 pounds each) of "select" northern California pinot noir a couple months ago. After loading the car, I drove home to get right to work. First, sanitizing the primary fermentor, then using my goofball technique of hand destemming and crushing the grapes. (One of these days, someone will market a small, cheap hand cranked crusher-destemmer for guys like me. I can't see buying a big electric unit that I will use a couple times a year for about 5 minutes and then have to store the thing the rest of the time.)

Next I dumped 100 mL of 5% meta solution on the grapes to kill bacteria and took some measurements. I used my refractometer to test the brix since there wasn't enough free juice in there to easily get a hydrometer in. Also, I'm a geek and I like the refractometer. I have been using it to measure the brix of table grapes, wild grapes...pretty much any grape I see...just for fun.

So these come it at:

24 Brix

pH 3.23

Temperature 50 degrees.

My friend Steve who got the same exact grapes on the same day as me came up with a pH of 3.4, so I'll calibrate my pH meter and check this again in a few days.

Since the sugar and acid levels looked good, I could start fermentation without having to mess with anything. But the must was too cold. One of the tips I got from Benoit Germain back in May is to start the fermentation cold so that the yeast gets going before the temperature is high enough for bacteria to take over. Doing it this way, once temperature of the fermentation starts coming up, the CO2 made by the yeast will help protect the must from bacteria. Benoit's advice was to introduce the yeast at 60 degrees and let it get going slowly over a few days, rather than try to warm the must prior to introducing yeast. This is just an invitation to bacterial infection.

So this morning, the must was up to 60 degrees (cellar is currently 64 degrees). I re-hydrated the yeast (RC212) in water with a teaspoon of sugar. Within an hour it was a foaming cup full of happy yeast cells. I dumped them on top of the must. (Never stir them in...they need oxygen to get going so you dump them on top and give them a day before stirring or punching).

By tomorrow I hope to have a nice bubbling cauldron of happy yeast!

-Jacques

Racking time

This whole winemaking thing is a lot of work. I decided tonight that I wanted to taste, test and rack my two 2010 Chilean wines again. The pinot noir has been sitting with an oak "spiral" in it for 2 months to add a little oak without the use of a barrel. The Malbec has not had the oak added yet, but needs a few more rackings to remove the hydrogen sulfide odor that I inadvertently allowed to happen by letting the wine sit on the gross lees too long while I was in Australia in the spring.

So first I checked the Malbec pH (3.25) to make sure it was the same as the last time I measured it. Then I did a titration to check the SO2 (it was 50 PPM, a tad high for this low pH, but not terrible). Next I tasted the wine. The H2S smell is still there, although it's not that strong. The wine tastes really excellent though--once you aerate the H2S smell out with a few swirls. I decided to rack through some copper to try to reduce the Hydrogen sulfide. (Copper reacts with the sulfur and precipitates it out). If racking and a little metallic copper contact doesn't help the H2S situation, I will be forced to use the age old copper sulfate treatment to bind up the sulfur and settle it out as precipitate. If I can get a handle on this H2S issue, this is going to be a great wine. So anyway, I racked it and added the oak spiral to the Malbec.

Lesson learned: always rack the freshly-pressed wine off the gross lees the day after pressing! Don't go to Australia and let it finish fermenting on the gross lees unless you like a swampy smell!!!

Next I tested and tasted the pinot noir. Ironically, this wine tasted better at the last racking than the Malbec, but now it's not as good. My Malic acid test showed that neither of these wines completed MLF--which I knew because they just didn't do anything after adding the MLF bacteria. I finally gave up. But unlike the Malbec which has enough alcohol to offset the low pH, the pinot noir doesn't. The pinot has pH of 3.35 (a tad low) but it tastes quite acidic. It's a little late in the game to alter the pH chemically (and frankly, I'm against playing with the pH of wine artificially).

Both wines had considerable tartrate crystals in the bottom of the carboys. Maybe a cold stabilization to precipitate a little more? Have to think about that. Both wines have clarified beautifully and have another 7 months in bulk aging before it's time to bottle, so I have time to let them mellow and see what happens. It's still a little early to worry too much about it.

On another note, I put in my order for the fall California grapes. I considered doing two cuvées again, but I just don't have enough carboys and the place is getting full of them. So I decided to do one batch of Northern California pinot noir. The grapes are due in October, hopefully not interfering with a business trip to Bonaire at the end of Sept. I ordered 100 pounds of pinot noir.

So that's the update from here!

Jacques

Chateau Oiseau Vineyard Update

It has been a long, hot summer! The vines have been doing well, but it has been dry, so watering has been important. When we went away on vacation for a week, it was really dry and one of the new Marquette vines croaked. That was a bummer. But the rest of the new vines planted this spring in the still-unnamed vineyard site, are doing pretty well. Most are up to the wire on the trellis, and a couple are even spreading out into a T shape.

The vines in the side yard (Clos Oiseau) are all spreading out on the trellis wire. Today I removed the grow tubes from them so the trunks will harden off. I am hopeful that next year I will have some grapes from these vines.

The Reliance vines down on the driveway (Cotes du Oiseau) are doing the best of all the vines in the yard. They are growing like weeds and will need some pretty vigorous pruning this winter. I am quite certain that I'll have grapes from those next summer--for munching, not wine.

-Jacques

A morning at Coastal Vineyards!

Yesterday I headed down to South Dartmouth, MA for a meeting with Dave Neilson, the winemaker and owner of Coastal Vineyards. I wanted to meet Dave because he is one of the first people to grow Marquette grapes in large quantity here in Massachusetts. If you are following this blog, you know that Marquette is a rather new variety of cold-hardy hybrid grape developed for red winemaking in cool climates. Unlike previous hybrids, Marquette is supposed to be one of the only cold hardy varieties that doesn't produce wine with the "foxy" taste for which labrusca-based wines are known.

I showed up at Coastal Vineyards around 10 AM and Dave met me in the driveway. We walked down into his vineyard, thriving with a dozen varieties of grapes including Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and even Pinot Noir. He has planted 2 rows of Marquette consisting of about 200 vines. I couldn't believe how well his Marquette has grown in only 2 years. It easily looks like it is a full year older than mine, when in fact it is the same age. Dave said it well when he described his Marquette as "growing like weeds."

Dave is a believer in vertical shoot positioning, and his Marquette seems to be really liking his location and his training system. He even has some Marquette grapes on the vines, which is not bad for vines in their second year! (See picture of me holding a bunch of them!)

After some tips on growing Marquette, we headed up to the winery to taste some of last year's whites and the '08 Merlot. I am not a fan of the syrupy Merlot from California but Coastal Vineyards does a lighter Merlot--more like a pinot noir. This is simply because it doesn't ripen as well in Massachusetts, so it's a lighter wine. They make a blush from the pinot noir. This is the reason he is experimenting with Marquette--it's a variety that ought to ripen exceptionally well in Massachusetts and make a full-bodied red wine. Of course, so far there are not enough grapes to make a batch of wine, but I expect Dave will have enough grapes in the fall of 2011 to make his first cuvée of Marquette. I can't wait to taste it!

Thanks Dave for the great advice, and taking time out of your day for me! And for those of you who want to try a really fantastic white that is estate grown right here in Massachusetts, I really recommend checking out the Coastal Vineyards Seaside White which is a blend of estate-grown Sauvignon Blanc and Gewürztraminer. Delicious! And for red, of course that Merlot!

-Jacques

The Vineyard is flourishing with the coming of summer!

The 2010 Chateau Oiseau Chilean Malbec and Pinot Noir cuvées have been racked following completion of fermentation and have been inoculated with MLF bacteria to start the malolactic fermentation. Not much to show--and kind of boring, actually.

But in the vineyard, things are coming along well! The one year old vines in Clos Oiseau and Cotes du Oiseau are up to the trellis wire now (first couple pictures)! And the 3 week (!) old vines in grow tubes in the front yard (as yet unnamed vineyard) are rapidly climbing the grow tubes. Two have actually reached the top already. GROW TUBES RULE!!!

The wild labrusca vines in the back yard are taking over not only the simple trellis I built, but the entire woods behind it. Unfortunately, while they flowered this spring, there is not a sign of a grape. I have seen this variety of wild grape all over town now that I have an eye for it, and I have yet to see a single grape. This stuff might think it's grapes, but it's pretty useless if it doesn't actually make any. I might have to pull it out and plant something more useful in the spring. I'm toying with the idea of planting a few Cabernet Franc vines, which are said to perform fairly well in this part of Massachusetts.

-Jacques

The 2010 Malbec is pressed!

Well, this evening the Malbec was down to 2.5 Brix so it was time to press, after a 10 day fermentation at 80 degrees. My daughter helped me out and, as usual, we had to press by hand. We start by disinfecting our hands with oxyclean and disinfecting the carboys, jugs, etc. We can't use sulfite to disinfect at this point as it would be toxic to the malolactic bacteria to be introduced later. So we use oxyclean, which works well using oxygen to kill microbes. Next, we go scoop at a time, dumping must into a mesh bag in a large funnel over a 6 gallon carboy. After a little over an hour pressing, we had 9 gallons (!) of wine from (7) 18 pound crates of Malbec grapes. We put airlocks in all the jugs and put them in the first floor bathroom shower to finish fermenting. Why the shower? Well, we never use our tiny first floor shower, and it's about 75 degrees all the time in there (we have central AC so we keep the house pretty much at 75 in the summer). The cellar is too cold to finish fermentation without heat, and the electric blanket is not consistent enough when wrapped around 2 carboys, 4 one gallon jugs, 3 half-gallon jugs, etc. So the Malbec has joined the Pinot Noir that was pressed two days ago in the shower, and it will sit for a few weeks to completely finish fermentation. They are all nicely bubbling though their airlocks now.

-Jacques

The Vineyard is coming along....

Well, my new Marquette vines finally arrived...late. Very late. They should have been in a month ago. But at least I was able to get them in the ground immediately after the UPS truck departed. The kids helped. We had 10 vines to get in the ground. We soaked the roots of the dormant vines, and planted them all in a prepared space (with no name yet). I already have two trellises set up with another to be built. The next day I put the grow tubes on them and staked them. Hopefully with luck they will reach the wire of the trellis by the end of the summer. In the meantime, the other two "vineyards" are doing well.

Clos Oiseau, in the side yard has 6 Marquette vines that are all now above the grow tubes and reaching for the wire. Cotes du Oiseau on the hillside next to the driveway has 4 healthy Reliance vines growing up out of the grow tubes. It looks like only one of the cuttings survived, but I do have one healthy cutting to transplant to my mother-in-law next spring!

As for the wine in the cellar, the Malbec measured 7.5 Brix this morning. I might be pressing it tomorrow. We'll see.

Captions

1. The new Marquette vines in the as-yet-unnamed vineyard.

2. The healthy Reliance vines of Cotes du Oiseau. They are one year old.

3 & 4: The Marquette vines in the Clos Oiseau vineyard. They are one year old.

Pinot Noir is pressed...

Last night the Pinot Noir was down to 3.5 brix, so I scheduled this morning to press the grapes. Not owning a press, I did it the same way I did the last batch--by hand with a press bag and a funnel. (See previous blog post for sample pics. I couldn't shoot pics by myself this morning.) I ended up with 8.5 gallons of wine. There were quite a few whole berries in there. Once you press them, you get a fair amount of sugar back into the wine, so the fermentation picks up again in the carboy. So right now I have a 6 gallon carboy, (2) one gallon jugs and (1) 1/2 gallon jug, all with airlocks in the necks. They are still fermenting. I will let them sit and ferment to total dryness over the next 3 weeks. The Malbec was down to 10 brix last night (remember, it was chaptalized) so I expect it will be ready to press in 2 days.

In other developments, the 10 additional Marquette vines showed up yesterday, so the kids helped me plant them yesterday. Today I put them all in grow tubes. Tomorrow I'll post some pics of the developing vineyard!

-Jacques

Fermentation Continues on the Chilean grapes!

Hey Everyone,

Time for an update on the 2010 Chilean grapes. Fermentation has been going for 5 days on the Pinot Noir and the Malbec. Two nights ago I chaptalized (added sugar to) the Malbec as the must measured only 22 Brix, which is a bit low. Some calculations suggested that about 2 pounds of sugar would be about right. I used unrefined (brown colored) sugar which is a little more natural. My first inclination was to just ferment them at 22 Brix, but the alcohol would be a little low. The problem there is that Malbec is naturally a bit tannic, as it is a big, bold, thick skinned grape like Cabernet Sauvignon, so without the alcohol to counter the tannin, the wine would taste overly tannic and have a strongly astringent mouthfeel. Benoit Germain suggested I chaptalize. When a winemaker from Burgundy tells you what to do, you just do it. So I did it. Once I added the sugar, Brix measured 3.5 points higher. Benoit suggested that I wait until the fermentation was well underway before adding the sugar. So I added the sugar at 15.5 Brix with a solid 80 degree fermentation going and it brought the must up to 19 Brix (3.5 increase) which extrapolates out to making the must as if it started at 22+3.5=25.5 Brix. That should be about right.

The Pinot Noir on the other hand was perfect at 24.5 Brix to start with. I did absolutely nothing to the pinot noir.

So after 5 days of fermentation, last night the Pinot noir was down to 7.5 Brix and the Malbec (post chaptalization) was down to 15 Brix. They are dropping around 4 Brix a day.

One of my QC improvements since the last batch is a temperature controller for the heat on the fermenters. You may recall that my extremely high-tech heating system for the fermenters is just a cheap electric blanket wrapped around them. The problem is that you really can't find a setting on the blanket that keeps the must at the right temperature because the fermentation process is exothermic but not constant. It throws off heat, but the amount of heat it throws off is a factor of how strong the fermentation is. At the beginning, the fermentation is not going strong yet, so you need to add heat to the fermenters to keep the must warm to get it started. Once it gets going, the fermentation heat production goes up. At that point, the electric blanket can be shut off. As the fermentation loses strength, the external heat has to be applied again, increasingly stronger as time goes on, to hold the must temperature up so the fermentation won't stall. So the heat put out by the fermentation over time looks like a bell curve, and the heat that needs to be applied to the fermenters looks like the inverse of that curve (an upside down bell curve.) The temperature controller has a probe you stick in the must and a temperature set point. When the temperature of the must hits the set point, the controller shuts off the electric blanket. When the temperature drops a couple degrees down (also settable) it kicks the blanket back on. It works great! No longer do I have great swings of temperature. The biggest problem I had with my last batch was the heat getting too high and encouraging the growth of bacteria. I have my temperature set at 83 degrees with a 3 degree delta so my temperature stays between 80-83 all the time. Perfect.

Of course, if I were doing this in my first floor with a nice even 75 degree room temperature, I probably wouldn't need any of this. But in the cellar (temperature currently 62 degrees) it's just too cold to conduct a fermentation reliably. And a cool fermentation like that would not extract much fruit.

I enjoy my three times a day punching routine as it gives me a chance to smell the sweet smell of fermentation and have a look at how things are coming along. The cap rises way up between punches. Punching gets the cap back under the juice so the top berries don't dry out or grow mold. It helps extract more flavor and tannin from the skins. However, there is such as thing as punching too much--extracting too much tannin. So I punch three times a day, approximately 9 AM, 3 PM and again before bed.

Attached are a few pics.

1. The fermenters wrapped in an electric blanket and some plastic to hold it in place.

2. The readout on the temperature controller.

3. Punching the must--when the punch tool goes through the cap, foam comes up from CO2 underneath.

4. After punching the whole cap, all the CO2 is released from under the cap.

Too bad I can't post the wonderful aroma!

Jacques

An Amazing Opportunity...and some bad news!

Yesterday I was blessed by an incredible coincidence. My friend Pierre Séguin from Montreal came to Boston to join me at the Emmy Awards as a fellow nominee for Jonathan Bird's Blue World. If you follow this blog, you may remember that in addition to being an Emmy-nominated underwater cinematographer, Pierre is a world-renown wine expert and wine importer in Canada. Well yesterday, he informed me that his good friend Benoit Germain would be in Boston for some wine tastings, and I would have a chance to meet him. Mr. Germain is the owner/winemaker at Domaine du Chateau de Chorey, one of the most prestigious Domaines in Burgundy, France. ("Meet" him here on Pierre's site.) As a lover of pinot, of course I am a lover of Burgundy where the world's best pinot noir is grown and vinified. In wine circles, a guy like Benoit is a celebrity so for me as an aspiring winemaker, it was a great opportunity to meet him. So I picked Pierre up at the airport, and after a little breakfast we headed over to a late morning tasting at Federal Wine in Boston. There I met Benoit and his importer, Bob Hurley from Cynthia Hurley Wine importers. We tasted some of the 2007 vintage and although the wine press loves to knock this vintage, the Domaine Chorey wines from 2007 are stellar. In fact, I ordered half a case of the 2007 Chorey les Beaune on the spot. (I would have ordered a whole case but, being Burgundy, it's not as cheap as I am.)

After the tasting, we all went to lunch and chatted about wine. My wife Christine was able to get out of work in time to join us as well. During the conversation I mentioned to Benoit that I am an aspiring winemaker. I told him about my attempts make my own wine. He asked me where I got the grapes and I explained that my most recent batch came from Chile. I don't speak French very well but I did catch something about about "Only in America!!" with a laugh to Pierre. He found the whole thing quite amusing. Since he had several hours to kill before he had to be at this next tasting, Pierre convinced him to come up and visit Chateau Oiseau for a couple hours. (He found the name Chateau Oiseau pretty funny too.) Are you kidding me? A top Burgundy winemaker was coming to my house? I was nervous and excited! But how cool is this??

So we drove up to my house. Benoit looked at my vines. They are still so young that he didn't have much to say except that they look pretty good. Then we went to the cellar. He inspected the two fermenters. I could tell he was skeptical of the grapes. He grabbed a glass, dipped it into the must and sampled the pinot noir juice. His eyes lit up and he smiled. "This is good juice! Tastes good!" He was pleasantly surprised--and I was relieved! Next he moved on to the Malbec. He tasted and said "It's a little low on sugar...you will need to add a tiny bit." So we pulled out the hydrometer and measured the brix of each. The pinot noir measured 13.5% potential alcohol--perfect just like Benoit said. (The French use the "potential alcohol" scale for sugar while American winemakers use brix, a measure of the sugar percentage. 13.5% potential alcohol equates to about 24.5 brix.) Next we measured the Malbec and it came in at 12% potential alcohol, about 22 brix. A little low. Damn, the guy was right on--just by taste. He could taste that the must was only 2% low on sugar. OK, I'm impressed!

So he gave me some advice on fermentation temperatures and generally approved of what I was doing. His respect for my effort had gone up a click. I was proud! But then we decided to taste the 2009 Pinot Noir I have been working on for 6 months. I used my wine thief to put a little wine from the carboy in a pair of glasses. Immediately, I knew something was not right. The color was too pale. Something had gone wrong. We tasted it. It was not good at all. Since the last racking, it went downhill. "It tastes like the sugar fermentation was not completely finished before the malolactic fermentation started" was Benoit's observation. I was bummed. (I later discovered the cause of the issue: I had accidentally put in two teaspoons of meta instead of 2 grams, so about 5 times too much. It bleached the wine.) Oh well, my first effort is toast. It will have to be discarded because there is no saving it. :-( Benoit suggested in all seriousness that if I distilled it, it would be a good fine (Brandy). Around here I think we would call that moonshine.

So after cracking a few jokes at my expense and taking pics of everyone tasting the 2009 and making faces, we headed upstairs for a beer. (A beer made by a brewery that knows what they are doing.) Then it was time to drive Benoit to his next tasting. In the car I got a few more tips and pointers, and a bona fide offer to spend a couple weeks in Burgundy after the harvest in the fall learning wine-making from a master. It probably won't be this fall, but I am definitely going to take him up on that offer at some point!

Meanwhile, let's see if Benoit's advice helps me do a little better with the 2010 cuvées than I did with 2009. Anyone have a still I could borrow?

-Jacques

Chilean grapes are here!!!

I was pretty happy to get a call that the Chilean grapes were going to be ready for pickup this afternoon. Yes, it's spring here, but it's autumn in the southern hemisphere! Harvest time! I cleared my schedule and drove over to Woburn to pick them up at Beer and Wine Hobby. As you may recall, I ordered them back in Feb or so. I ordered 7 boxes of Pinot Noir and 7 boxes of Malbec. Each box is about 18 pounds of grapes. The rule of thumb is that 20 pounds of grapes makes about a gallon of finished wine. Since I want to be sure to have enough grapes to make a full 6 gallon carboy of each type, I would need 120 pounds of each varietal. So 7 crates is 126 pounds...should be plenty.

Of course, I was not prepared for the task of destemming 14 crates (250 pounds!) of grapes. I do not own a crusher/destemmer. Nor do I own a press. In the volumes I make wine, I can do things manually. (Yes, I may buy a destemmer and a press one of these days. We'll see if my wine deserves it!) That means, just sitting down and plucking the grapes off the stems by hand. We're talking SLOW here. My daughter came home from school in the middle of the first batch (pinot) and offered to help. I honestly figured she would get bored and leave in about 3 minutes, but she turned out to be very good at it! With some encouragement ("Gee hun, you are better at this than me! Keep going!") She stuck with it for about an hour and we finished the pinot in 2-1/2 hours total. The crushing was easy...we just destemmed about 5 pounds at a time into a bucket and smooshed it with my punch-down tool. Then we dumped it into the fermenter. (I have upgraded to a better pair of fermenters. They look like plastic trash cans but they are food-grade plastic barrels with lids.)

So the pinot is going to do a couple days cold soak to extract some color from the skins before we start fermentation. This is pretty standard operating procedure for pinot noir because they have thin skins and don't put a lot of color or tannins into the wine if you don't extend the maceration time a bit beyond the fermentation schedule. So, I'll wait a few days before warming the must and initiating fermentation.

Then it was on to the Malbec. I was annoyed about the quality of the Malbec grapes. In contrast to the nearly perfect pinot grapes, the Malbec was pretty sad looking. One of the 7 totes had absolutely perfect fruit. The other 6 had a lot of shriveled raisin-looking grapes. I paid for grapes, not raisins. I would say 10% of the grapes were shriveled and dried looking, so I did not put them in the fermenter. Good thing I ordered plenty.

It was interesting to taste the Malbec and the pinot grapes side by side. They tasted quite similar actually, except the Malbec have noticeably thicker skins. Pinot would be tasty to just munch on, except for the seeds of course. Table grapes, they aren't.

Anyway, the whole family came down to help out with the destemming of the Malbec. Even the 3 year old got involved and did a pretty good job too, except for dropping a few on the floor. Christine pitched in destemming and crushing but since she took the pictures, she was on the wrong side of the camera for the blog.

Once the Malbec was destemmed, it went into the other fermenter and I set the temp of my thermostatic control unit to 85 F. Yes, I bought a thermostatic control unit. Last time, my fermentation temps were all over the place because I was trying to do it manually by turning an electric blanket up and down. Now at least I have a little more control over the temperature. Basically, you just have a probe that goes in the must and it turns the power to the heater on or off based on a set point. I'm still using an electric blanket around the fermenter...it's low-tech, cheap, and works great. The cellar is 60 degrees right now, so once the must makes it to 75 or so, I will initiate fermentation with an inoculation of RC212, a nice yeast that is isolated from Burgundy, France. It is good on both Malbec and Pinot Noir. In a few days, the house will have that wonderful smell of fermenting wine! Can't wait!!

-Jacques

Pre-Baby Grapes are here!

I wish I could say that these cute little pre-baby grapes are on my Marquette vines, but alas I am not expecting to see grape production from them for another year. In fact, I have some wild grapes in the side yard and they are sprouting some little grape clusters. It's interesting...I have lived here for 12 years and had wild grapes in the woods behind the house the whole time. I never noticed. I think the birds got the grapes before they were big enough to notice. And we have so many mosquitos in the summer that the last thing I want to do is go walking in the woods. This past winter the kids and I were walking in the woods, exploring the property in the bug-free splendor of cold weather. We saw some vines that looked a lot like wild grape vines climbing some trees. But with no leaves (or grapes!), we couldn't be sure. Later, I found some more of them pretty close to the house in the side yard. So this spring I cleared the brush from around them, picked them up off the ground, put in a couple of stakes and tied them up to see what would appear. Voila! Wild grapes! Probably V. lubrusca, a wild version of the Concord grape. I'm going to do some kind of a simple trellis for these and see if I can bird-net them well enough to get some ripe grapes just for fun. These clusters are going to flower and then they become grapes.

Jacques

Update on the 2009 Pinot Noir!

Well, today was the day to rack the 2009 Pinot Noir again, having spent three months settling out. Once it was off the lees, I used up the rest of my "spare" jug to top it off, so now I'm down to just one single 6 gallon carboy. I also added the medium toast oak cubes--an alternative to oak barrel aging.

The fact is that for a home winemaker, using real oak barrels presents issues.

1. You need to keep them full all the time or they dry out and leak. If you are only doing a batch or two a year, this can be tricky. Some people fill them with water, but the water leaches out the oak flavor, which is the whole reason you use the oak in the first place.

2. They require cleaning in between uses--which can be a pain without the right equipment.

3. They are expensive!

4. Small barrels, suitable for the amount of wine the average home winemaker produces (5 to 15 gallons) have a lot of surface area in comparison to their volume. As a result, in newer barrels, the wine takes up too much oak flavor if it stays in the barrel too long. So you put the wine in the barrel for a month or two, then it has to go into something neutral (a glass carboy). Now what do you do with the empty barrel? See #1 above.

While the high-end winemakers still use oak barrels (French oak for the most part), many of the less expensive brands of wine simply cannot afford to use oak barrels and keep the price of the wine down. Virtually all wines priced under $10/bottle retail are not aged in oak but in stainless steel. The oak flavor comes from chips, cubes, or powder. These days, the oak infusion spiral is gaining popularity with home winemakers. It's what I will probably use for the next batch.

At this point, I am likely done racking this cuvée and it will stay in this carboy until the fall when it will be bottled. In Burgundy, it would age in barrel another year--they would be bottling the 2009 sometime in 2011, not 2010. But alas, I have limited space and by the fall I will have more grapes coming in. Time to start thinking about a label design I guess.

Speaking of grapes coming in, I have been told that my shipment of Chilean grapes will be here in about 2 weeks. The nice thing about the southern hemisphere grapes from the perspective of a home winemaker is that the seasons are 6 months off from the northern hemisphere. So I can make some wine in the fall from northern hemisphere grapes, then another batch in the spring from the southern hemisphere grapes! So have 120 pounds of Chilean pinot noir and 120 pounds of malbec on the way--to make about 7 gallons of each wine. :) Should be fun!

Jacques

Spring is here...time to work on my vines!

Spring came early and wet to New England this year. Now that the floods have subsided, I have been turning my attention to the vines in my yard. You may recall if you go back a year in this blog that I planted 6 Marquette (Vitis vinifera) wine grape vines in the side yard and 6 Reliance (Vitis labrusca) table grape vines in the front last spring. They didn't grow upward much last year, but put down good roots. I decided this spring to move the table grapes to a new hillside location near the driveway down by my neighbor's house. This spot gets good light and has excellent drainage. This cleared up my prime sunny front yard location for the ten more Marquette vines I have coming next month. This will put my Marquette vine count at 16, which should be more than enough to give me 10 gallons of wine once they are fully mature and producing. Of course the ultimate goal of my new winemaking hobby is to make my own wine from my own grapes grown in my own yard. And yes, I want the wine to be GOOD!

While digging up and moving the table grape vines, I noticed they had produced huge and healthy root systems. (I felt kind of bad disturbing those nice roots to move them). I hadn't been seeing a lot of growth above the soil (even though they produced plenty of leaves) but as it turned out, all the growth in the first year was developing roots.

During my vineyard course at Umass in March, I was turned on to the benefits of using grow tubes on the young vines. In studies, grow tubes take nearly a year off the amount of time for vines to mature and produce fruit by giving them a "turbo boost" in growth the first year. Since my vines didn't grow much last year, I figured the grow tubes would insure that my vines all reach the top wire on the trellis this year--hopefully even the new vines that are not going in until May when they show up.

Attached here are some pictures of the side yard Marquette vines, the hillside Reliance grapes and the grow tubes. I am really excited about this season and watching thee vines grow. I have started trellises but none are finished yet.

The last picture is a cutting left over after pruning that is already budding and growing. All I did was prune it off the vine, stick it in the ground and walk away. I'll be interested to see if it grows roots. This could be the start of my nursery!

Jacques