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.

Yesterday, I posted about our newest resident of Two Terrier Vineyards, the coyote who is surely Coyote with a Capital C, the Cosmic Trickster of Native American legend. If you’d seen his almost levitating, loose-limbed lope and the way he slips under a gap in the vineyard fence that is almost too tight for Oscar, you’d know what I mean. Well, today we met another new denizen of our patch of Sonoma — one that works the other side of the spectrum. Seems we’ve become a hang-out for the Pileated Woodpecker. That’s the goofy hole-drilling bird that inspired Woody Woodpecker. Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!

Believe me, in the flesh (or the feather) these guys are just as goofy as their cartoon counterpart. They’ve got big bodies and stubby wings that don’t look as if they could lift them. When they fly, they look as if they are just barely going to achieve lift-off. But ours have mostly installed themselves in the vineyard where they are busy cleaning out the few grapes that were left on the vines after harvest. They are welcome to them. But hopefully they won’t let that taste carry over to the times BEFORE harvest. Meanwhile they better restrain their drilling instincts. Our vineyard poles are made of metal!

This is as close as I could get without a telephoto lens. See Woody in there with his red head?

Here he is again! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

Meanwhile on the wine front, if you haven’t been following the great Fermentation Face-Off between our college educated yeasts and Cousin John’s local yeasts, read about it here. It’s the college boys versus the juvenile delinquents and time will tell who produces the better wine.

Here’s the latest: our wines, thanks the College Boy yeasts, have been maintaining a 78 degree temperature, even as the outdoor temps have been low 60s and the 40s at night. Cousin John’s juvenile delinquents have struggled to stay a few degrees above 60. The University Crew Team yeasts are almost at the specific gravity where we can press them, Cousin John’s liquor store robbing thug yeast is only halfway through. Other than proving that college boys are hotter than the dropouts, what does this prove from a winemaking perspective? Well, Andy says John’s slow colder fermentation will produce a very fruit forward wine that will be drinkable earlier, but not such a long keeper. Ours will be more balanced between tannins and fruit and will age better. But taste? Cousin John’s could still win on that. Stay tuned.

Our grapes are hotter thanks to College Boy yeasts.

But Cousin John's biker yeasts are cooler. Producing what looks to be more depth of color.