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