Fermentation

Well, just as I suspected, the fermention got started within about 12 hours or so.  You always want to have the juice in contact with the skins as much as possible, so I wasn't all that thrilled about this.  But like I said, I made the conscious decision to minimize my influence on the process as much as possible, its a philosophy thing.  You want long contact time because the good stuff we all like is in the skins. Generally, you want a long fermentation (Burgundy can take 22+ days) to get this contact.

Some believe in a cold soak, where you cool down the grapes (also called must) with dry ice to delay the start of the fermentation.  Fermentation generally starts when the must warms up into the 65degree range.  This does have some risk of creating volatile acidity (think a smell like nail polish), so you need to keep an eye on things. Another way people try to increase skin contact is to leave the skins and juice together post fermentation.  The risk here is the alcohol can extract harsh, bitter tannins from the seeds.

So, after 12 days, fermentation was underway. My general protocol this year was to only do one hand punch down and to do a few "pump overs" per day.  I didn't add yeast, so this was a native or natural fermentation.  I also decided to not add any yeast food or nutrients or anything else to must.

A punch down is a fancy term for pushing the grapes down, back into the juice.  During fermentation, the skins rise to the surface due to the creation of carbon dioxide, so you need to push the skins back down into the juice.  The yeast that convert sugar into wonderful alcohol, need oxygen to do their job, so the punchdown also adds oxygen into the must.

A pump over is when you take juice from the bottom of the tank,and "pump it over" the top of the must.  It was too much of a pain in the ass to clean and hook up a pump every night, so I just used a bucket to empty juice from the bottom valve and pour it over the top.  I decided to give this a whirl when I read about this being done by several big name Burgundy houses.   It also,gave me the benefit of being able mix up the juice, to even out the temperature in the must and mix in some oxygen. It's hard to keep the temperature even in the tank with so many whole clusters, because it makes it pretty damn hard to mix things around.

During fermentation, you keep track of the temperature and brix, which is a measure of how much sugar is left to ferment. You do this to make sure you don't get a stuck fermentation, which can have a real negative impact on the final wine (assuming you can get it unstuck).

Here we're the stats over my too brief seven day fermentation. This ended up being a pretty healthy fermentation to give you an idea of how it should go.

Sept 29th

Fermentation starts, temp still at 69 degrees

Sept - 30th 

brix 23.5

pH 3.45

Temp 70 degrees

Oct 1 

Brix 22.2

Temp 71 degrees

Oct 2

Brix 20.0

Temp 76 degrees

Oct 3

Brix 10.0

Temp 84 degrees

Oct 4

Brix 3.6

Temp 90 degrees

Oct 5

Brix 0

Temp 86 degrees

I was happy to see the temp peak at 90 degrees for a day, which isn't too hot for Pinot and gives me confidence that I will get a ton of the good stuff extracted from the skins. The highest I was able to get my Pinot to hit last year was 84 degrees. I think the difference was having more mass in the tank. Last year I only had about 250lbs of grapes, this year I had 400+. Good stuff. 

The only thing I wasn't able to get was a reading on brix and pH pre fermentation. Generally it takes a few days of the juice to get to a point where you can get a real reading on both. I'm not too worried about it based on how well the fermentation went. The final wine will be what it will be and that is how I wanted it anyhow, as little human intervention as possible. 

October 6th, I pressed the wine off, since brix hit zero.  Zero here doesn't mean the wine was completely dry, you need the brix reading to be a negative number for complete dryness. I'd prefer to get the skins out the wine at this point to prevent extracting harsh tannins from the seeds. 

Next post will be all about pressing and "barreling down"

Crush

It's hard to believe it has already been a week since I picked up the grapes. This year, I got Pinot from Smith Rd Ranch in Watsonville, at the end of the Santa Cruz Mountain Range.

The fruit was incredibly clean, just about zero rot, zero water berries or shot berries.  Just good, clean fruit all the way around. It made sorting through the 400+ pounds relatively fast.

The only bummer was by the time I got the fruit home and processed, the tank read 68 degrees.  So I knew I wouldn't get much of a cold soaks his year, especially since I opted to to use dry ice to cool things down.

Here is how things looked before I started to process and crush (well, after a couple of hours of cleaning and sanitizing everything) Stainless steel tank in the back for the fermentation, crusher/destemmer and the grapes in the bins. Similar to last year, I threw in as many whole clusters as I could and only crushed and destemmer maybe half of the fruit.

Grapes in the hopper, ready to be crushed and destemmed. Next year I need to figure out how to remove one of the rollers so I get more whole berries and gentler treatment of the fruit. Pinot can be a bit sensitive!

First juice coming out of the bottom of the crusher destemmer






The aftermath...takes a couple of hours to clean up..but that is winemaking.  90% cleaning and sanitizing and about 10% of the cool stuff.

  

And finally all of the grapes and juice into the stainless steel fermentation tank.

It's harvest time

I got the call today that I have been waiting a couple of weeks to get.  Harvest time is finally here!  This year I am getting Pinot Noir grapes (again) from the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Since I am a small home winemaker, I don't really have a say in what grapes I get.  When a winery schedules a pick date with the vineyard, that is the day I am (hopefully) getting some grapes.  It's perfectly fine by me.  I am super thankful to be getting anything in such small quantities, since its a pain in the ass for a grower to deal with just a few hundred pounds.  Plus I really would have no clue about being able to decide what day to pick.

This will be my 4th harvest in my garage winery. In 2009, my first attempt I made a Livermore Cabernet/Cab Franc blends that was just awful. Looking back at my notes, the peak fermentation temp only got up to 74 degrees, no where close to what you need to extract all of the goodness from the grapes. I fixed that issue by buying a stainless steel fermentation tank to be able to put all of the grapes in one fermenter. This increases the mass in the fermenter, thus increasing the potential temperature.  I learned trying to ferment in food grade bins in small quantities doesn't work.

Another big thing I learned was not doing a good job of letting all of the sediment settle out.  Some of the bottles were more like a motor oil than wine.  I've since figured out a better process and I have it down to a science now.  I don't belive in filtering or fining, so I need to rely on gravity.

In 2010, I was REALLY lucky to get Syrah from a high end vineyard in Carneros called Las Madres Vineyard. I experimented with and used more than 50% whole clusters in the fermentation.  I'm pretty excited about this wine, I think it has some potential.  My only worry is it seems to have a very high acidity level and I don't think I got enough sulfite in at bottling. I need to send it out for some lab work.

In 2011 I was again VERY lucky to get some Pinot from Belle Farms in Santa Cruz Mountains, from the vineyard at their home. Santa Cruz Mountain Pinot is hard to get, since there isn't a lot of it and its becoming more and more the epicenter for potentially great Pinot Noir in California.

I'm also pretty excited about that 2011 Pinot.  My only worry is that I left it in the new Hungarian oak barrel too long and the wine will taste too much like a 2 x 4 piece of wood.  Fingers crossed.

Oh, yeah, you might be wondering how I leaned all of this.  In 2008 I was again blessed and fortunate to meet an incredibly kind and generous person, named Ed Kurtzman.  Ed has been making wine for decades and currently runs August West, Roar, Freeman and Sandler wineries.  That year I had a two month sabbatical from Clif Bar and Ed was kind enough to let me volunteer and work the harvest for/with him.  I was also super lucky to spend a week up at Outpost Winery with two of the biggest names up in Napa, Thomas Rivers Brown and Mike Smith.

My plan is to do my best to document the process here in this blog.  Should be fun.  I can't wait to find out what vineyard the grapes are coming from.

I hope it inspires someone out there to give it a try in their garage.

Tailwind Nutrition

I found out about these guys from a podcast I listen to.  While the podcast seemed like a late night infomercial, I liked what I heard and decided to order a sample pack.

Check them out at http://www.tailwindnutrition.com/

Taste

For those of you who have issues with the sticky/syrupy nature of Gatorade, this should be right up your alley.  It has a super light, clean taste with zero aftertaste.  It seems to have just enough flavor added to cover up or mask the sodium (see below for ingredients). 

I mixed it with 50% less water than recommended, mostly because it was just the size of the water bottle I was using (recommend using 1/2 of the single use pouch or 200 calories in 24oz of water, I used 1/2 a pouch in 16oz). Using the recommended amount would probably taste as close to water as you can get in a sports drink.

So far, in warm and cooler weather seems to taste great, but obviously tastes best cold.  We've had some warm days lately and the water bottle has gotten pretty warm, but it hasn't really impacted the flavor at all.

Of the three flavors, Berry is my clear favorite, followed by Mandarine Orange.  The Berry has just enough of a delicuous factor (for me) to keep me interested and wanting to drink more.

Ingredients

The calorie source is all simple sugars (glucose, sucrose) and avoids using the usually problematic fructose (GI issues for many people).  I thought this was a nice departure from the current trends where everyone is using some form of maltodextrin for a better marketing story (complex carbs vs simple carbs).  Personally, I don't care if the source is simple or complex during exercise.  To my knowledge, there really isn't any science out there that says complex is better than simple during exercise.

I love the fact the sodium levels are about 3x more than the Gatorade standard (303mg of Sodium vs 110mg in Gatorade) and cones from two different sources (Sodium Citrate and Sea Salt).  Despite the higher sodium levels, you can't taste it, but it does help to keep the overall taste more "savory" than sweet.

They also include the other electrolytes that come out in your sweat (potassium, calcium, magnesium), which is a nice touch.

Another nice point is the flavors are organic and no colors are added, so it looks like water.  Another huge departure from just about every other sports drink out there.

Other Good Things

Most sports drinks seem to cause GI issues when they are mixed at higher percentages.  I know Gatorade (to me) can be pretty over the top syrupy when the aid station crews mix it incorrectly.  It can be pretty much undrinkable. 

I mixed the sample packs to higher than the recommended level and had no issues and still found it to be light, clean and zero aftertaste.  This is a huge benefit, because it gives you the ability to make a water bottle up with a higher calorie content and you don't have to worry about it tasting terrible or causing you and GI issues. For long distance racing like an ultra marathon or an Ironman, it makes Tailwind an ideal solution.

I also like how they have two packaging options, a single use pouch and  bigger pouch that has about 50 servings.  The single use pouch is just about the right amount for higher volume fluid systems like Camelbaks.

Bottom Line

I think it easily the best sports drink out there, bar none. It is now my sport drink of choice and worth the money to try it for yourself.

It's about time...

Starting this blog has been on my mind for a long time.  The idea behind the name is pretty simple. There are two things that tend to be the best at higher elevations, trails and wine. Thought it might be time to write about both.

Running uphill makes me happy.  Getting to the top of a big climb, like the Corduroy Hill in Las Trampas is a great feeling, not sure I can put it into words really.  Climbs like this are even better when you are rewarded with a ridge top single track trail like the Las Trampas Ridgeline trail.  Pure heaven.

Wine seems to also thrive at higher elevations. I've been impressed with the Rhones coming out of the Sierras and the Pinot and Chardonnay from the Santa Cruz Mountains. If you haven't had or heard of Rhys Vineyards in Santa Cruz, track a bottle down. They are expensive and rare, but they are happiness in a bottle.

So that is the idea in a nutshell....wonder where this will all go, if it goes anywhere at all.