Left Coast Cowboys

On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

My second year trying to do NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) and I came up short. Real short. The goal was to post every day for a month. But winemaking and Thanksgiving got in the way. Actually that’s no excuse. Although November is the official month, you can take the pledge every month. Sort of like AA. In fact, I have taken the pledge every month since November 2008. And every month I’ve failed. Well, it’s good to have goals.

All I can say to any disappointed readers is: watch this space. A Vegas roadtrip with a twist is coming up this weekend.

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.

I keep signing up for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) which allows you to retake the pledge every month to put up a post a day. Some months are better than others. Even though I wasn’t going to make it for July, I really fell off the rails as of Wednesday. Blame it on a mega Spanish test that had me using my computer only to cram in as many audio sessions as I possibly could. Then after Thursday night’s test, I took off for Sonoma early Friday. And smack into one of the most intense heat spells we’ve had this year so far. Figures I’d be supervising the moving of furniture right at noon when the temperatures shot up toward 100 degrees. I wasn’t sure the moving men were going to make it. Especially when they had to move horse mats throughout the barn. Those things are made from some rubberized form of lead.

Once that was accomplished, I tried to figure out what I could possibly do with the rest of the day. Well, the refrigerator needed cleaning. Nope, not going to take all the food out and leave it on the counter while I cleaned when it was over 90 degrees INSIDE. (Yes, we are that Green that we have no air conditioning in the living loft above the barn. Hey, who needs it? We’ve situated the building for the prevailing winds and we have ceiling fans. Nice theory anyway.)

How hot was it? Can't say. The heat broke the thermometer.

Work on my blog or do more Spanish exercises? Nope, laptop got so hot I could barely touch the keyboard. Shutting down was the better part of valor. Pick fruit or fertilize the fruit trees? You’ve got to be kidding. That involves a quarter mile hike straight up a 33 degree hill. No thanks. So I ended up involved in the only activity at all doable: lying on the cement floor of the barn with the dogs. Speaking of the dogs, terriers are never inactive. But this weekend, Oscar and Lucy morphed into the kind of lazy sleep-on-the-porch hound dogs you used to see on the old TV show Hee-Haw.

Did I mention that thermometer was completely in the shade?

There’s a blogger I follow who lives in Bakersfield and she’s probably sniggering right now having endured several months of over 90 temperatures. Fine, but it’s a whole different story when you are used to it. When you live most of the time in the perpetual Spring of San Francisco where a hot summer day is 70 degrees, then suddenly, in the space of an hour, land in the fourth Circle of Hell, the heat is more than the human — or terrier — body can stand.

By the way, how hot was it? Well, I’m not exactly sure. It was so hot, the mercury in our outside thermometer — which we should note is located completely in the shade — shot up so fast it split in two. (Note to self, keep a thermometer and a stunt thermometer on hand.)

In short, unless I wake up at three in the morning, I probably won’t be updating this weekend. Except if I want to press my fingers into a melting keyboard.

At least the vines are loving the heat. This is Mourvedre.

And so is the squash bed that ate Sonoma.

Our trailmaker extraordinaire, John the Baptist (right) and his colleague Louis were all smiles clearing brush Saturday morning. At 8AM. It wasn't a pretty sight toward noon.

By 1PM, no one was good for anything.

Not even half way in and I’ve blown NaBloPoMo. (In case you don’t know, NaBloPoMo is a group project where bloggers try to post every day for a full calendar month. I made it in November, which was official National Blog Posting Month.) No post yesterday. I won’t try to give my excuses, I don’t have a doctor’s note. But I’m not going to be a NaBloPoMo drop out. I ain’t no QUITTER. I’ll take my detention and be a NaBloPoMo Delinquent. Hand me my Chuck Taylors, tight pants, leather jacket, comb and hair grease.

Before I get into the thick of writing the next post that will keep me in the game, I’m still trying to decide which kind of delinquent I want to be. The Outsiders, of course, are kind of the Delinquent Gold Standard.

But there’s also something appealing about being the kind of hood who busts ballet moves all over early Sixties New York. ‘Cause

When you’re a Jet

You’re a Jet all the way

From your first cigarette

‘Til they cart you away.

Here’s that whole finger poppin’, pirouetting, Sharks-Jets dance. C’mon, you know you love it.

So for my brief hiatus as a Hood, what’s better: Finger popping or “Stay Gold, Ponyboy”?

Outsiders still courtesy IMDB.