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.

Jeez, you know you’re blogging too much when you write a post, but forget to hit the “publish” button. Is it Blogging Alzheimers? I’ve only really been blogging for a year, so I must be too young to be getting that affliction. I just hope this momentary blogging lapse doesn’t get me thrown out of NaBloPoMo a mere four days in. Well, until I’m alerted otherwise, I’m assuming “writing a post a day” counts whether or not you “post a post a day”.

Now where was I? Ah yes, the 2009 harvest and winemaking at Two Terrier Vineyards, which by now feels as if it will never end. With Cinsault and Rose processed and nearly through secondary fermentation, and Grenache and Mourvedre just moved to steel tanks for their secondary, you’d think I’d be done. You would be wrong. Just last Thursday, we harvested the Cabernet and I’m now in the most labor intensive part of winemaking. That would be shepherding the wine through primary fermentation. That involves three times a day punchdowns and daily readings and tests of things like pH level, specific gravity and temperature.

I’ve been at this since September (mostly on my own as some people at Two Terrier Vineyards still have a day job), so I’m running out of new and inventive ways to blog about it. I think I’ve told you, over and over, everything about how to run a primary fermentation.

Well, we do have a bit of a twist for this, our third go-around in as many months. Cousin John who helped with the Cabernet crush, was paid in grapes. Which are sitting on our crushpad where I’m handling much of the punchdown for him. Cousin John, as you will remember, is Mr. Natural. No UC Davis yeast or cleaning with sulfite for him! Cousin John welcomes all bacteria, wild yeast and floating spores into his wine. Good thing we restrained ourselves from laughing. Seems, at this early stage, Cousin John’s natural brew is showing more fermentation action than our controlled vats.

Our vats have the advantage of size, so they can generate more of their own heat. And our yeast does have an education from the prestigious UC Davis. However, in life, the biggest guy with the fanciest degree isn’t always the most successful. We may find that winemaking is similar.  Maybe Cousin John’s yeasts, which have been through the School of Hard Knocks, are just tougher than ours. Well, we’ll keep you posted as the great Grape Fermentation Face-Off continues. Who will you put your money on? Two Terrier Vineyards, with its still excruciatingly amateur status? Or the new Mr. Natural, Cousin John?

Our wine in the large white vats. Cousin John's in the tiny bin.

Meanwhile, just to put a big final endpoint on the 2009 harvest, a guy came around to rototill our vineyard.

Nothing says "Harvest Over" like a rototiller.

Yes, I love the sound of a rototiller in the the morning. It's the sound of farming.

Today we faced the final and most daunting physical task of our winemaking, getting the Cabernet picked, crushed and into primary fermentation. We have four varietals, but we’ve planted more Cabernet than the other three put together. So we knew, whatever we’d gone through with the Mourvedre, Grenache and Cinsault, we’d need at least to double that for the Cabernet harvest. Luckily, Cousin John came to the rescue. And Cousin John is definitely someone you want on your side in a pinch. He’s sort of the Indiana Jones of California as he works with archeology teams uncovering Indian burial grounds as well as performing half a dozen other varied careers. In addition, he spent his formative years in Sonoma, so he knows where all the bodies are buried. Especially when they are Native American bodies. Stuff like that always comes in handy.

Another of Cousin John’s identities — he’s a forager. He runs around Sonoma picking things and making foodstuffs out of them. Or more often making alcoholic beverages from them. Sometimes he hits (his Walnut cordial), sometimes he misses (we’re not talking about that strawberry wine fiasco). But he’s a guy who could live off the land if he needed to. He’s also the kind of guy who will work for grapes. So we just had to set aside some crushed grapes for his own little fermentation and he was happy to help. More on that later because Cousin John’s idea of winemaking is a little more radical than ours.

Anyway, another great thing about Cousin John showing up was that I could finally take pictures of our process, such as it is.

Here's Cousin John dumping a bin of grapes off the top of the crush pad into the crusher/destemmer. Usually I do this. But I get more grapes in Andy's hair.

Speaking of grapes. We had loads this year.

Here are two vats of picked grapes. We had FOUR total. That's what is known in the industry as a "sh*tload of grapes." (Actually this would be nothing in the real winemaking world, but it's a lot for amateurs.)

So hours and hours of grape processing later, we finally came to the end of the last vat.

Wait! Here's Cousin John dumping the last grapes into the hopper. That means Harvest 2009 DONE!

Remember I told you Cousin John has a different philosophy of winemaking than we do? Well, let me put it this way. Remember this dude, Mr. Natural?

Let's just say Cousin John is his spiritual son.

When I say Cousin John is Mr. Natural Junior, I mean he ferments the way the Sumerians would. He don’t need no steenkin’ UC Davis yeast, he don’t need no steenkin’ sulfite, he don’t worry about no steenkin’ clean practices. Actually, I couldn’t bear to take pictures of Cousin John crouched in front of his bin of Cabernet combing through the grapes and crushing it with his bare (and unwashed) hands. Given how Andy makes me practically do a surgical scrub up before I even contemplate looking at our fermenting grapes. Well, let’s just say Cousin John’s method is painful to my eyes. But Cousin’s John’s Cab will be fermenting on the our crush pad, so we’ll see who makes the better wine in the end.

Hey, Cousin John’s Cab. That sounds like a Grateful Dead song!

Come drink Cousin John’s Cab

As natural as the tide

Drink it plain or with a scone

Cousin John’s Cabernet stands alone.

Okay, digression. But it’s not out of context to think of counterculture figures when you are around Cousin John. Here’s another example: we went for a walk down our redwood creekside trail to show Cousin John the Miwok or Pomo grinding stone we’d found. The Native tribes around here traditionally subsisted on a flour they ground from acorns. So wherever you find a seasonal creek and oak trees in Sonoma, you often find a grinding stone. Well, Cousin John put on his Indiana Jones hat, started rooting around in the moss and found half a dozen more on the same site!

Here's our grinding rock. Think of a gigantic mortar and pestle.

Here's Cousin John lifting back the moss and finding six more!

And here he explains the geological and cultural significance of the grinding rock.

Actually, there is technical term for these things that isn’t “grinding stone”. (John says that would be something portable.) These would have been grinding spots developed on migration routes and used over centuries by numerous tribes.

After this adventure, we ended the day with a cassoulet I’d been slow cooking all day.

Cousin John had three helpings and pronounced it "restaurant quality".

Did I mention how much I like Cousin John?

Note in the interest of full disclosure: Cousin John is not my cousin, but the cousin of my eccentric friend Julian. But after today, we’re adopting him.