Left Coast Cowboys

Cousin John, as you’ll remember from this post, is a purist. He makes wine, but spurning our carefully crafted and specially raised UC Davis yeasts, Cousin John uses whatever is floating in the air. In fact, Cousin John only uses au natural techniques and ingredients to make wine. He’s been known to wander the byways of Sonoma picking wild fruit for fermentation. I’ve even accused him, although I have no hard evidence, of trying to make wine out of roadkill. It’s only a matter of time.

So it’s been great fun to have Cousin John make some of his wine from our grapes using his Stone Age methods. Call it the ultimate control group. Since the Cabernet pressing, which Cousin John did with our old basket press, our two Cabernets have been fermenting side by side — ours in oak barrels, Cousin John’s in glass carboys.

This past weekend, it was time for Cousin John to do another racking of his wine, which made the perfect opportunity for a side-by-side tasting. So who is winning? Our college boy yeasts or Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent yeasts? The jury is still out, but both are tasting quite good. However, I still think a college education, even for wine, gives the edge.

Watching Cousin John rack wine the old fashioned way. With tubes, muscles and carboys. No, I'm not nostalgic for THOSE days.

"Terrier" is a unit of measure around here. After racking, Cousin John has two terriers of Cabernet. Appropriate.

Our first tasting was our Rose, the first Rose we’ve ever made.

The verdict: almost all the residual sugars are gone and it's tasting very, very good.

Then we tapped our Cabernet from the barrels.

Compared with Cousin John’s, ours had fermented out more completely. And the oak of the barrel is adding interesting notes. John’s is still a tiny bit fizzy as residual yeast keeps struggling to the last. But the good fruit is holding up in both.

The verdicts on our other barrels are more mixed. Our predominantly Grenache blend and predominantly Mourvedre blends are tasting very good indeed. But last year’s Mourvedre, which is fermenting on its own, is troubling. Andy was ready to pour it out. It’s been reprieved at the last minute and will have a few more months to redeem itself.

All that "tasting" can really add up. So we took off on a hike to the redwoods to burn off the alcohol.

We saw some mushrooms that looked so toxic, even John, the ultimate forager, wasn't tempted to pick them.

He concentrated instead on trying to determine what animal teeth marks we were seeing on some scattered bones.

Obviously, the thought that a large predator was hanging around, caused me not to get the above picture in very good focus.

But I later did get an in-focus picture of the stump of petrified redwood that John the Baptist found in the creek.

And I managed to do that "fuzzy water" photography technique.

All in all, a successful day of winemaking. I’d say we and our college boy yeasts are ahead at this point. But it’s probably not wise to bet against Cousin John.

Harvest and primary fermentation seem to get longer every year. I’ve been wine babysitting in Sonoma since early September with hardly a break. That means living out in the wilds with two terriers, a bobcat, a newly resident coyote and a whole lot of fermenting wine. But today, we got the last of our Cabernet grapes out of primary fermentation vats (where they needed three times a day punchdowns) through pressing and into enclosed steel secondary fermentation vats. At this stage, they can fend for themselves and I can return to the big city of San Francisco — just in time to prepare for a Thanksgiving dominated by Brits. But that is another story.

In the meantime, stop me if I’ve told you this before, but here’s how we get grape juice off the skins and out of the primary fermentation vats and into secondary fermentation in steel tanks. In case my first attempt at in-photo captions isn’t a success, let me recap: the crushed grapes and their skins have been sitting in those white vats fermenting. Now we pump and shovel them out and into the press. There the juice is pressed out of the skins, the skins are thrown in small bins to be composted. Meanwhile the juice is pumped by this complicated series of hoses across the crushpad, into Dr. Frankenwine’s Lab and into enclosed steel tanks, where the young wine enjoys its secondary fermentation.

Okay, captions a big fail. Let me recap below.

The juice is pumped from these primary fermentation vats. Then the skins, also called the Must, are shovelled with the juice into the press.

Once we have the bladder press full to the top with grape skins, we connect a hose that will fill up a cylindrical bladder inside the press. AND WE TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN!

Actually, we crank it up to 3 atmospheres of pressure. Roughly 45 lbs. per square inch.

Out pours more juice!

When you've pressed enough, you release the pressure by letting the water out of the bladder. A terrier will be waiting for this stage.

Now you have to clean the press, mostly with elbow grease. And transfer those pressed skins up to the compost heap.

That involves an ATV ride. Some participants will tell you winemaking should include more ATV riding.

We won’t even go into the post press clean-up which is very time consuming, very wet and very boring.

Except to terriers. "Yeah, turn on the hose!"

But this is the part that’s interesting to the people doing the work: a tasting of vintages present and past.

Here's our just pressed Cab and our Grenache/Mourvedre Rose. Both are tasting good. The Rose is a bit sweet but isn't done yet. That residual sugar will get fermented out.

Next a barrel tasting of our wines in oak.

Both Grenache and Mourvedre blends, which are just recently in oak, are tasting great already. Last year’s Mourvedre is not as good, but then the grapes weren’t mature yet. (That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.) Last year’s Cab is starting to taste more mature. But we think this year’s will be even better.

THE END!

(Well, not really the end, but the end of the most labor-intensive part of it: getting from Vine to Primary to Secondary.)

Today we tackled the Cabernet press and again, we were lucky enough to have Cousin John to help us. But that also meant two different presses as we are still in the throes of an interesting experiment. Andy and I are processing our Cab with UC Davis yeasts and modern methods. Cousin John, who we “paid” in grapes for his help with the crush, is defiantly Old Skool: sulfite-free, natural yeasts and keep the methodology as manual as possible. For instance, we use UC Davis college-educated yeasts for fermenting, while John trusts his grapes to leather jacket wearing, motorcycle riding, liquor store robbing wild local yeasts. (If you aren’t up to speed on this epic Battle of the Yeasts, read this.)

So our first task was to press Cousin John’s Cabernet, which meant dragging out all our old equipment including the old basket press.

Some would say the basket press extracts too much, including some astringency and herbaceous flavors. Not Cousin John, he wanted to press to the last drop of liquid.

Contrast that with our new Italian bladder press. A rubber bladder inflates with water and gently presses out the juice from the must, and conveniently turns itself off when the pressure is getting too much for optimal flavor.

Plus the Italian bladder press has that elegant Mondrian color scheme!

Meanwhile back at the Old Skool, it’s a complicated series of tubes, funnels and lots of manpower.

It takes two men and a terrier to handle this Rube Goldbergian system.

Meanwhile the kinder, gentler bladder press was considerably easier to man. But still required extensive hose-ery.

At this point, we took time out to taste the two different wines. Not surprisingly, even though they are both made from the same batch of grapes, two wildly different flavors.

Cousin's John is very fruit-forward and a bit astringent. Ours is more subtle with darker fruit tones.

That's 'cause John pressed the last ever loving drop of moisture out of his poor grapes.

But, we had to agree, both wines promise to be interesting in their own way.

And both are dark enough to stain a terrier's feet purple.

So with Cousin John’s wine in carboys and half our wine in a steel tank, we called it a day.

We'll see how Cousin John's delinquent yeasts make it through the next stage, malolactic fermentation.

With a good day’s work behind us, we repaired to the barn for a well-deserved cassoulet. But first a check on the Mourvedre and Grenache blends we just put into oak.

Ah, the sweet music of wine gently bubbling in oak barrels.

Find more pictures of today’s activities here.

It seems as if it’s been a long harvest season, but it finally looks to be drawing to a close. Tomorrow we press our Cabernet and transfer it from vats to steel tanks. Once there, they’ll need no more attention from me except on weekends. I can go back to the Big City. Which is looking very attractive now that it is getting very cold. Yesterday, it was still 46 degrees at 10AM, so I’m assuming it must have been near freezing overnight. With a woodstove the only source of heat in the barn, cold weather takes a bit of the charm off the place. I’ve been waking up at 3AM to stoke the fire for morning. Luckily, I’ve remembered to bring enough wood in every night. I’d hate to walk the quarter of a mile to the woodpile now that we’re having more frequent coyote sightings.

Still, even in the cold and the isolation, Sonoma still has it’s charms off-season. Here are the vineyards, stripped of their grapes, leaves turning and heading into a graceful dormancy.

The rows between the grapes are already rototilled and planted with mustard waiting for spring. Which around here is February.

Our Grenache, Mourvedre and Cinsault have been happily sitting in steel tanks for their second fermentation (with a few rackings to clarify out dead yeasts). This weekend, it was their time for the destination of all good wines: oak barrels. We had the further ambitious plan to develop a few Southern Rhone style blends from our separate varietals. Or at least get as close as we could to a Southern Rhone style blend, given that we haven’t yet planted that key Rhone varietal, Syrah. And we don’t have half the dozen or so other grapes that go into a true Rhone wine. But, baby steps.

The first step was to pull samples of all our varietals from the steel tanks.

Then set up a blending station.

Yup. There’s no fancy blending at Two Terrier Vineyards. We just think of a possible mix and adjust and take notes until we think we have a combination we like. We started with a couple of classic Southern Rhone blends like Chateauneuf du Pape. Well, we got as close to Chateauneuf as we could given that we don’t have the thirteen or so grapes they use. But hey, their blends are mostly dominated by Grenache and Mourvedre with half a dozen other varietals at 1% of this and that, so we thought we could get close enough for amateurs. So we developed a Grenache dominant blend and a Mourvedre dominant blend.

Once you have the formula for your blend, it all becomes a matter of, not shutes and ladders, but hoses and pumps.

You need really long hoses. And lots of them.

See you have to pump the wine in the tanks...

into oak barrels in the wine cave. With a short stop in a carboy for measurement purposes.

This is a complicated and time-consuming process. So note to self: start early. Which we didn’t.

Instead we hot rodded down to Sonoma for lattes in the morning.

And took a hike around the property.

And activated Mole Patrol.

So by the time we were at the messy, wet clean-up stage, it was dark and cold.

But we did get to see this wonderful sunset.

Which was still amazing even while viewed cold and wet.