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.

When the going gets tough, the tough winemaker makes rosé. Or something along those lines. We told you earlier how we were planning a panic harvest of the tenderer Mourvedre and Grenache ahead of this typhoon-driven rainstorm that was heading our way. We just made it, harvesting, crushing and securing the harvest into primary fermentation vats just hours before the big storm hit. We couldn’t have done it without my brother who, fortuitously, was here and devoted a vacation day to hard manual labor for no pay. Despite his heroic efforts, it still was a close call. We managed to scrounge up six vineyard workers to pick our harvest on their lunch break between “real jobs”. Not an easy task, given that every vineyard in Sonoma and Napa was in the same emergency mode that we were. That is unless you had Cabernet. Apparently Cabernet grapes are tough as old boots and — barring a storm of Biblical proportions with frogs, toads and fierce Prophets wielding burning bushes — can withstand just about anything.

But as I said, it was a close call. We had six Mexicans picking and three Anglos on the other end desperately trying to process enough grapes to keep shuttling empty picking bins back up to the vineyard. It wasn’t a fair fight. If it had been three Mexicans against six Anglos, it wouldn’t have been fair. Given that one Mexican can do the manual work of eight Anglos. And that’s a Mexican child. I’m telling you, these are the hardest working people on the planet. But somehow we managed to do it.

Toward the end, we had filled all the primary fermentation bins and the Mexicans were still picking. We had to sacrifice three of these bins of grapes for the deer and critters.

Then, just before the storm hit, Andy decided it would be a great thing to do something we’d never done and make rosé. Blame it on the glycol chiller he just bought. We’re very equipment-driven here.

So here’s how you make rosé using the saignee method — the only method allowable in France for fine rosé. If it’s good enough for the French, it’s good enough for Two Terrier Vineyards. Saignee literally means “bleed” or”bled”. And that’s what you do:

Syphon or bleed some juice off of the red wine grapes you've just crushed and placed in primary fermentation vats.

Typically, you allow the juice to have only a few hours contact with the skins before bleeding it. But with the barometric pressure and the temperature dropping dramatically, we ended up not getting to the process until the juice had been on the skins overnight.

Now drop the glycol plate into the tank of bled off juice. The glycol runs through an enclosed plate and chills the wine liquid.

The next morning between the rain gusts, with our trusty hose systems, we siphoned off about a 25 gallon mixture of the Mourvedre and the Grenache into a steel tank and dropped in the glycol chiller to bring the temperature down to 31 degrees.

Here's the whole set up. The tank with the wine is on the left, the chiller is the black box on the right. The green stuff is the glycol running through the tubes and into the enclosed plate.

And why chill? If you get it down to about 31 degrees, all the particulate matter drops to the bottom and the liquid clarifies. It's a science-y thing.

We returned today, removed the glycol chiller and racked the baby rose into a new tank for fermentation. A few sips told us the juice is tasting really really good. Too early to get excited about it, but it’s a good benchmark, since, if it isn’t good now, it isn’t going to get better.

Yup. Tasting good. And our Baby Rosé isn't even fermented yet. It's just sweet, sweet juice.

So today, we added yeast to our juice.

Let the winemaking begin!

A note on an earlier point: yes, you can make rosé from a variety of grapes. Grenache is a traditional one, but we thought, since we were experimenting, we might as well blend.

And the red wine vats we siphoned the 25 gallons from? Well, what's left is more concentrated, so, we hope, we'll have even more robust, flavorful Grenache and Mourvedre.