Left Coast Cowboys

At the last moment, we found ourselves headed to the gala opening of the Sausalito Art Festival this evening. Gala sounded serious, so we asked our friend, Keith, what was the dress. “Oh, casual” and this from a man who, since his retirement from daily work, thinks the shorts without the holes and the Hawaiian shirt that’s less than ten years old is pretty duded up.

Imagine our shock to show up at the gate and see people in tuxes and evening wear. Seems the opening gala is always “Black Tie Optional”. Then imagine our relief to see that the evening’s theme was “The Summer of Love” and there were plenty of people in tie-dye, trailing Indian fabric scarves, headbands and Jimi Hendrix t-shirts. In my batik skirt and with Andy in his Mexican print shirt, we kind of blended as “Corporate Hippies”.

As the evening wound on and the band started to play Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield and other tunes from the 1967 San Francisco music scene, I found myself more fascinated thinking about my relationship to the Sixties than in looking at the art.

Although I was too young to be protesting the Draft or traveling up to Woodstock — in fact, I was too young to even be buying records — Sixties music seems like the music of my childhood. It was what my babysitters were playing. Then when I was old enough to buy my own records, we’d moved to Europe, so I missed Southern Rock, Disco and all the other music of the Seventies. So I’m left feeling kind of like a child of the Sixties, but not really.

Maybe that’s part of why I’m getting into this whole organic vineyard, solar powered, off the grid land development project we’re starting.

Having just transferred our third vintage out of oak and into storage (read about it here), made me think back on our first attempt at winemaking lo these many years ago (three actually).

Scrounging back in my iPhoto Library — or what I could save from a really disasterous hard drive crash — I was pleased to find that these photos had survived. Well, maybe not too pleased. They are, at the least, a testament to how much I’ve learned about operating my inherited Nikon Coolpix 5700 in recent years. In other words, in those days I was just aiming, pointing, clicking and praying. Sometimes I remembered to take off the lens cap. But let’s view these photos for their educational content, not artistic and technical qualities.

Another shocker was seeing how really, really primitive our winemaking equipment was. Which may have something to do with how the Merlot turned out. But that’s another story. We’ve gotten much better at it now.

Lesson One: Get Good Grapes & Process Them Fast

If you stop at this lesson, you’ve achieved 90% of it. And I really can’t overemphasis how fast I mean when I say fast. If you can get from vines to vats in a few hours, that’s best. That didn’t happen for us. Two problems: when you are only buying half a ton of grapes, you stand in line behind all the big boys and you get the dregs. Anyone with great grapes has long term contracts with REAL winemakers. The best luck you’ll have as a small buyer is finding a local farmer without enough crop to warrant a big contract. I’ve heard that some winemaking clubs use their aggregate buying power to get bigger lots. And then there are places like CrushPad. Second problem: through some sort of mix-up, our Merlot grapes sat around on the truck for about half a day in the hot Sonoma sun before getting to us. Then we didn’t process them all that fast with our jerry-rigged equipment.

Lesson Two: Clean Absolutely Everything. Then Clean It Again.

You will learn that sulfite solution is your friend. Even though it cracks your hands like clay and turns your hair to straw. Sure, you can try to wear surgical gloves, but you’ll get it all over yourself anyway. But it stops stray yeasts dead in their tracks. And if there is anything you don’t want stray yeast to settle in, it’s your wine. So that means you hose out, wash out and sulfite everything: all utensils, your hands, your vats, all the hoses you are using, every piece of equipment. Anything that might touch the grapes or the wine. And if you are doing this outdoors and a bird flies overhead. . .panic.

Lesson Three: Spring for the Real Equipment.

Take a look at the chewing gum and masking tape rig we have going here. Now switch back to my earlier post on the Cabernet. Big difference in equipment. And it makes all the difference.

Lesson Four: Have a Workflow Figured Out.

Otherwise, you’ll be bashing into each other with bunches of grapes, kicking hoses out of vats and stepping on terriers. Or. . .you could have a situation like the one I’ve seen for the last three crushes. My husband, and whatever friend he’s roped into helping, stand around evaluating the equipment while I carry a ton of grapes, bunch by bunch, from delivery point to crusher/destemmer. And do you have any idea how heavy ONE TON of grapes can be?

Lesson Five: Rope in All Your Friends and Make Them Work

We continue to ignore this piece of advice. It involves telling every friend who thinks they might get a bottle or a visit to your “winery” that they are expected to work for that privilege. We sort of said this, nobody showed up for the work, we continued to hand out the wine and now all our friends know we are wimps on this issue. See the picture to the left. Our friend Rob is not helping. He’s drinking a latte and watching. Teach your friends that if they show up, they have to actually work.

Lesson Six: Keep All Terriers Locked Up During the Process

An easy equation. Winemaking = water, fluid, hoses, noise. Terriers = high pitched yapping, leaping, attacking in response to all the elements of winemaking. Terriers and winemaking don’t mix. This is a hard one for us as our working name is Two Terrier Vineyard. I mean the terriers are part of ambiance. They’re on the label. Then there was the time Founding Terrier Charlie leaped into a vat of primary fermentation and emerged as a rare brown, black and purple terrier. But we say (with a Gallic shrug) “Eet is part of thee terroir.”

So How Did it All Turn Out?

Well, let this story be your guide. After the oaking and a bit of aging, Andy happened to be hosting his Russian Sales Manager and took him up to the vineyards. He gave Phillip a glass of our Merlot. He thoughtfully swirled, tasted, then said, “Reminds me of the rough country wine you get in Ukraine.” Rough Ukrainian plonk? Not exactly what we were going after. We still haven’t had our Tribute to Bacchus Return the Wine to the Earth Ceremony, but eventually we’ll have to. No amount of aging is going to make this first effort turn into something Robert Parker would drink.

But we’ve gotten much better. I swear. The new equipment really helps.

Extra Notes

Find pictures of the first crush and subsequent processing of our Merlot here.

The Bibles of amateur winemaking are this book and this book.

Don’t ask me how I accomplished it, but somehow I managed to graduate as an English literature major without ever having read William Faulkner. I have a vague recollection of perhaps reading part of one of his short stories and really disliking it. But I’m not sure if that really happened. I’m also not sure what made me think, through the years, I wouldn’t like Faulkner. I’ve always loved Southern Gothic tales — especially when the atmosphere of the book or play is humid and dripping with Spanish moss and there is a wise, all-seeing Black character acting like a Greek chorus to the self-destruction of the Whites. (I read every one of Carson McCullers’ books twice for Advanced Placement English until I think my teacher begged me to do a book report on another author.) I guess all that Southern decadence and decay just seemed so fascinating to me having never been in the Deep South.

As I planned our cross-country roadtrip, which took a huge detour down through Mississippi to New Orleans and back up the other side of Big Muddy through Louisiana, I told myself, it really was time to crack open a Faulkner novel. Still, I resisted even though we’d be traveling right through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (actually Lafayette County), land of Snopeses, Compsons and Sartorises.

A month after our return, I decided I had to do it and figured I might as well just plunge right in with The Sound and the Fury.

Okay, full disclosure time here: first, I scanned through the on-line Cliff Notes. Normally it’s a matter of honor not to resort to the cheater’s way out. I’ve only done it once, when — halfway through Joyce’s Ulysses and having started the book way too late in the assignment to read carefully — I realized I had no clue what was going on. This time I decided to confront “stream of consciousness writing” head-on and read the synopsis first, then tackle the book.

Best decision I ever made! Freed of having to try to impose a timeline and some sort of “who did what” sense on autistic Benjy’s sense memories and jumbled impressions, I could just enjoy the language. And what language! This is not a book you read to find out what happens (although knowing what happens didn’t stop it from being a page turner.) You read to find out how each character reacts to what happens or how each character’s psyche is changed by what happens. I couldn’t stop reading. Then I read whole sections again, just to make sure I hadn’t missed any of the wonderful imagery. Ironically, the parts I ended up liking least are the two sections with the most straightforward narrative and timelines: Jason’s section and the “omniscient narrator” segment. Autistic Benjy’s and mentally distraught Quentin’s sections were the most rewarding for putting you instantly in the smells, sounds and gut feeling of an event in a way that made you overwhelmed with it as if YOU were actually experiencing it.

Although I read at least a book a week, I seldom have that wonderful feeling of suddenly finding an author whose writing suddenly compels me to immediately buy and read everything he or she has written. It’s like discovering some new and wonderful place. Except, everyone else seems to have discovered it before me.

In searching the web for tidbits on Faulkner and his work, I stumbled over the fact that Oprah had “assigned” everyone THREE Faulkner novels for their summer reading of 2005. (And Oprah can make the Flatbush telephone directory a best-seller if she makes it a Book Club Selection.) So all of America has presumably read Faulkner ahead of me (or at least those novels on Oprah’s reading list). They also probably understood it all better than I did, thanks to Oprah’s amazingly comprehensive multi-media on-line study guide for The Summer of Faulkner.

Who IS this woman? And why is she so far ahead of the rest of us? Okay, I’m not Oprah, but get some Faulkner today!

Whatever anyone tells you about the romance of winemaking, let me set the record straight. At least 90% of it is cleaning equipment and moving liquid from one container to another. Again and again and again.

This weekend we took our 2006 Syrah out of oak barrels and transferred it back into stainless steel tanks where it will sit awhile before bottling. Of course that necessitates buckets of sulfite solution, power washers, loads of hoses and screaming terriers who view all spraying water as something to be killed immediately.

The whole process also tested the limits of our jerryrigged winemaking operation. It’s pretty amazing that we can process a ton of grapes through all the many stages of winemaking with only two people, but our workflow is in serious need of a re-engineering. (You can see from the look on Andy’s face in the picture above that this hose and chewing gum thing is getting a little old.)

Despite all these handicaps, the results are pretty impressive, especially for the portion of the wine that we aged the longest in a new Hungarian oak barrel. This is significant as Hungarian oak is a fraction of the price of French oak and in this experiment the oak from the Land of Liszt beat out our French oak barrel by a long margin. Maybe it wasn’t actually a fair experiment as the Hungarian oak was new and the wine in it stayed there longer while the French oak was actually a re-cooped barrel (meaning it was an older barrel that had been scraped on the inside to give it an extended life.) The point of all this? No matter what you spend on grapes and equipment, it’s the cost of the oak barrels that will break you. The Holy Grail is to find something that isn’t French oak that works just as well. But, as I remember from my high school chemistry, an experiment is only valid when you only change one variable and we’ve probably changed three for each of the four barrels of wine.

That would also include the tail-end of the crush where Andy thought he needed to oil up the press. That lead to what we thought was a hefty dose of WD-40 going into the last few gallons of our wine. Luckily we were able to isolate this from the rest of the wine that we’d already processed. However, what we’ve been affectionately calling our “Crank Case Wine” showed no odd aftertaste. Hey, it’s all part of the terroir.

Check out these pictures on Flickr of our latest wine processing.

We finally got to see our resident bobcat, who we call Leonard for no particularly good reason.

I’ve been following his movements for over a year now — ever since I bought what I call “The Bumper Book of Poo”. This is Peterson’s Field Guide to North American Mammals which shows you lovely artists’ renditions of every imaginable kind of poo and footprints. I mean everything from a field mouse to a human.

Wikipedia, which I always take with more than a grain of salt, says in their entry that the bobcat can take down a deer. I’m finding that very hard to believe, even after seeing Leonard who was much bigger than I thought he’d be. But other sites are confirming that these critters are quite ferocious and can tackle something several times their own weight and growl so loudly you’d think they were Mountain Lions (we have one of those too!) Want to see one in action? Not from my camera. They’re also a lot faster than you’d think, judging by Leonard’s pace. I cribbed the above picture from Wikipedia and this movie clip from Desert USA.

If Leonard wants to clear out the rabbits that are already invading the vineyards, he’s my pal. I just hope he doesn’t decide terrier might be tasty.