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.

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.

I’ve got a lot of small subjects that aren’t, in themselves, worthy of a whole post, so perhaps, since I’m experimenting with Slow Cooking, I should just throw them all in the pot.

Actually, while we’re on the subject, let’s get right to that Slow Cooker. Long days on the crushpad or in the vineyards, then Sonoma’s cool nights creates a perfect environment for the kind of cooking you start early in the cool morning, then let simmer all day unattended to eat at night when it’s cool again. But I’d been having unsatisfactory results until I started to experiment. Maybe it’s because I’m armed with the chemistry of winemaking that I started looking at Slow Cooker cookbooks with a more critical eye. And my conclusion is that most are clueless about the dynamics and physical properties of what happens in a slow cooker — hence so many tasteless watery results. Firmly pulling my Alton Brown Food Science Nerd cap on, I set out to experiment.

The key thing to remember about Slow Cooking: condensation. The liquid recycles and never evaporates. So you need to take other steps to concentrate flavors.

First off, don’t accuse me of not doing my research. I think I own every current Slow Cooker cookbook out there. Sadly, the vast majority are of the “chop stuff up, throw it in the pot and let it stew” variety. Nothing with that little effort is ever going to yield anything good. And as I added ingredients and experiments, I’ve found some Slow Cooker secrets that most cookbooks will never tell you:

1) The Slow Cooker, by the nature of the way it cooks, can’t concentrate flavors (nothing evaporates), so don’t fergawdsake ever add water to any recipe. Substitute the appropriate stock for anything that calls for water. I had wild success with beans cooked in stock and a very special beer as documented here. You’ve got to try these beans. FABULOUS!

2) Poultry skin, raw bacon and any other fat is nasty unfried and uncrisped. Why on earth would a recipe to ask you to put such a thing in the Slow Cooker where it will just stew and get slimier? But most of them do. Bollocks, as my English husband would say. Add bacon, by all means, but fry it up crisp first. I did this with my fabulous beans and with a recent Cassoulet and it was just the ticket. All the bacon flavor and, after hours of slow cooking, it was still crunchy.

3) And while you are crisping up all that bacon, use the rendered fat to brown any meat or root or hard veggies you are planning to put in the pot. That goes for onions, carrots, parsnips, etc. Believe me on this one point. When you brown things first, you get a depth of flavor that the Slow Cooker can never achieve on its own. And stop freaking out about that fat. Most of it stays behind in the skillet. Just enough makes it to the Slow Cooker to make a world of difference in the result. I used these techniques in my Slow Cooker Cassoulet and Cousin John had three helpings and declared it “restaurant quality”.

Did I mention that one of Cousin John's careers was a deejay at fancy European ski resorts? Cousin John knows his food!

Okay, there is a reason that I am not a food blogger, nor do I play one on the Interwebs. Because, I’m not a trained enough cook to come up with anything original. Yet, 99.9% of Slow Cooker cookbook authors don’t tell you what I’ve just learned, but one does.

If you buy only one Slow Cooker cookbook, make it this one. Andrew Schloss has cracked the secret code of the Slow Cooker.

Andrew Schloss is no “throw it in the pot and hope for the best” slow cooker and he’s way ahead of me on all the things I thought I discovered. He explains the science of the Slow Cooker, what it can do and what it can’t do. He will only steer you to cooking with the ingredients that are truly enhanced by the cooker. And he’s got some great ideas, such that one about removing all skin from poultry, rendering it and using the fat to brown the veggies and the meat. The result: the same depth of flavor you get from cooking something long and slow in the oven — without the oven’s requirement that you hover over the pot and make sure it isn’t scorching.

Another great suggestion/technique he advocates: thicken liquids and sauces BEFORE you put them in the Slow Cooker. Or, strain the ingredients afterwards and thicken the strained sauce by boiling it. Hey, it’s a bit more work. But if you want to do zero work in cooking, go to McDonalds!

New subject: Cousin John and the great Fermentation Face-Off. Twitter and Facebook have been lit up since I told of this culture clash now happening on our crushpad. (People, talk to the blog!) I hear the odds are changing in Vegas hourly as our college educated UC Davis yeasts compete with Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent local yeasts. Which will produce the best wines? It’s going to take at least a week for us to see how fermentation goes, and months after that to assess the final results. Meanwhile Cousin John, on behalf of his yeasts, has thrown down the revolutionary rhetoric:

“My wild yeast shall prosper after the revolution while your decadent intellectual yeast shall be sent to reeducation camps in the countryside to learn how to be productive members of the ecosystem without sucking at the tit of the corporate funded dogs of Davis!”

Signed The FSRF
(Free Saccharomyces Revolutionary Front)

Just call Cousin John’s yeasts Che, Ho, Cinque and Patty Hearst.

Hey, Did Someone Mention Salma Hayek?

I once mentioned the Mexican Bombshell in connection with a Spanish class I’m taking. I was unprepared for the groundswell of worldwide interest. My web hits quadrupled. From around the world. So I had to follow with this completely gratuitous Salma Hayek post. And since that date back in June, the most frequent Google search that drives hundreds of readers to my blog, from Internet cafes as far-flung as Indonesia and Mali, is “Salma Hayek Cleavage”.  Then just the other day, a sometime reader sent me an email telling me that he’d be a more frequent visitor if I’d include more pictures of Salma Hayek.

Okay okay. Can we count this as the post that seamlessly melds wine, terriers, slow cooking, eccentric English friends and husbands into one post, and still open the door for dozens of completely gratuitous shots of  Salma Hayek’s…er…assets.

UC Davis yeast revving up before being added to our grapes.

If you don’t make bread, beer or wine, you probably think of yeast as something slightly icky. But for those of us who depend on it for the outcome of our products, yeast is a beautiful thing. And we’re always looking to use the best. UC Davis, one of the world’s foremost centers of winemaking expertise, has formulated yeasts that are perfectly tuned to the grape varietal and that work consistently and effectively.

But Cousin John, who helped us with the Cabernet crush, is all about the natural yeasts. To the uninitiated, that means the stuff that floats in the air, develops on fruit and lives on your skin. Doesn’t matter to him. He took the crushed grapes we gave him, plunged his hands into it, let it sit in the air for a bit and now he’s letting the natural critters do their thing.

Actually all this is happening side-by-side on our crushpad. So it’s a bit of an experiment. Experiment? No, think culture clash. Think gang warfare.

See while our yeasts were earning letter jackets, taking Advanced Calculus and getting college degrees, his yeasts were smoking in the boy’s room, riding motorcycles and robbing liquor stores. There’s a fermentation face-off happening right at Two Terrier Vineyards. Who will win? The Chi Omega House or the Greasers?

Our yeasts row crew and posed for this Bruce Weber Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

Cousin John's yeasts are juvenile delinquents!

Okay even I will admit, you can't always count on a college education to mean anything.

You might be tempted to bet on the guys with the credentials. A college education from a top university means something, right? Well, not always as we learned for eight years. And there’s something to be said for the tenacity developed at the School of Hard Knocks. In this instance, the latter case appears to be true. Cousin John’s Cabernet is bubbling furiously, while ours is just tentatively starting fermentation. But we’ve got big vats compared to Cousin John’s little bin. So our boys are producing more heat and condensation. (Wait, the College Boys are producing more hot air? Guess, that’s not a bragging point.)

If Cousin John's "native yeasts" are native like Chief Solano, all bets are off!

I’m still betting the College Boys will surge ahead tomorrow when fermentation is established enough for me to start taking readings of Specific Gravity, pH and other measurements.

Meanwhile, I’ve been kidding Cousin John about his delinquent yeasts. And he’s been taking umbrage. In my last post, he commented that I should be “kinder to our local yeasts” and even name them, as every other critter at Two Terrier Vineyards gets named. Of course, I ran through the list of hood, delinquent and greaser names from movies and TV: Vinnie, Spike, Riff, Tony…

Then I suddenly had a thought. These “local yeasts” that Cousin John is relying on, they could also be called “native” yeasts. Native as in Native American? As in Chief Solano, the fearsome 7 foot tall Suisune war chief from early 1800s Sonoma? If Cousin John has that kind of yeast, my College Boy yeasts don’t stand a chance. And what if my College Boys aren’t lettermen, but bespectacled science geeks? Cousin John’s warrior yeasts are going to be kicking their nerdy butts all over the crushpad!

After two previous harvests, crushes and fermentations, I thought I was getting sick of it all. Now winemaking has just gotten interesting again.

I'm just hoping my yeasts aren't these kind of College Boys.

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.