Urban WineWorks

We’ll be bottling on September 15th. This is the final step for Start Your Own Winery 2006. The numbers on the wine came out well. We have a free SO2 level of 22 parts per million, a good solid number for both drinkability and ageability, our PH is 3.65, also a good level for stability ( the lower the PH, the higher the acidity) and drinkability. Titratable acidity is .57 g/ ml, a good level for stability and acid balance and alcohol is 14.6%. That number is a little high, but with the elegance and fruitiness of the wine it is well integrated and balanced.

We’ll be starting our 2007 season on September 22nd with our initial trip out to the vineyard for our new (and return) Start Your Own Winery members, so keep your eyes peeled for new postings!

It seems hard to believe that we’re already beginning to prepare for harvest, but it’s true. Part of that preparation is to get last years wine into bottle so that we can open up some space in the winery for the fruit that will be arriving this fall. In essence harvest begins with bottling last year’s wine. Before we bottle, we will sit down and taste through the barrels and decide what each one’s strengths and weaknesses are, so that we can come up with a well balanced blend. Each barrel has its own nuances, depending on how old it is, where the oak came from and how heavily it was toasted. Wine responds to these variables in different ways depending on how concentrated the flavors and what the alcohol levels are among other things. A light wine low in alcohol for example, can easily be overpowered by new, heavily toasted oak barrels, whereas a full bodied intense red wine can take on some of these new oak flavors and actually be enhanced. So when we sit down to blend we may end up blending together wine from new French oak barrels blended together with wine from a mixture of one year old, two year old and neutral barrels to achieve the perfect balance. Wine blending is not a perfect science, because every person’s taste is so individual, but it is a necessary and important process in the art of making wine, and along with other things such as fruit quality and variables in fermentation, it determines a winemaker’s style.

On Wednesday June 20^th we racked the Start Your Own Wine Pinot from the barrels, washed the barrels and racked the wine back in. As I anticipated, the wine benefited greatly from this breath of fresh air. Aromatics were enhanced as was texture and overall balance. We were also able to remove any remaining sediment, and go back into barrel clean. Our next step in the process is to give the wine a needed dose of SO2 and put her up to rest until bottling. Last year we bottled Start Your Own Winery at the beginning of September. I anticipate we’ll do the same this year.

It seems hard to believe we’re already thinking about the upcoming harvest.  We’re keeping a close eye on the weather as we head into bloom because cold and or wet weather during bloom can drastically affect the yields we expect to see this year. Once the grapes have made their transition from flower to fruit, and we have a general idea of what to expect we can start putting our equipment list together. Fermenters, barrels, bungs and lab equipment are among some of the few things we’ll be considering. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for a good bloom!

Marcus and I tasted through the Start Your Own Winery Pinot Noir last week and everything tasted really nice. The wine has been stored on its lees now for a while, and while this has been proven to enhance texture and mouthfeel, it is probably time to go ahead and rack it off. Anytime you move wine out of one container and into another is known as “racking”. In this case the reason we would like to go ahead and rack the wine is to carefully pull the wine from the sediment that has settled to the bottom of the barrel and leave that behind, essentially clarifying it. This will also help release any sulfides (off odors) by agitating and exposing the wine to a little air. After we do this we’ll send another sample to the lab to check the so2 levels so that we can add some if need be in order to make sure the wine is protected from any contaminants or oxygenation.

We are literally just days away from bud break. Bud break is when the buds open up and the new shoots emerge from the fruiting cane. This is when things begin to really pick up in the vineyard. We’re now working on mowing, cultivating, and general vineyard floor management. Soon we’ll be looking at shoot thinning, sprayer calibrations, field grafting, mildew spray programs. weather. The list goes on and on. One thing I really like about this time of year is all of the new growth really reveals the general health of the vines. Fortunately for me this means long days walking the vineyard and taking observations. Oh, the life! With Bishop Creek in the isolated location that it is things are really quiet and peaceful out there. (Oh yeah, except for the roar of the tractor). Meanwhile the wine patiently sits and evolves in the barrel.

We bottled the Start Your Own Winery Pinot Gris this past weekend. The wine turned out great! Ph was 3.2, free SO2 was 30ppm, and TA (titratable acidity) .67. These are all really good numbers for a bright, stable Oregon Pinot Gris! We sterile filtered it and went directly to bottle. A very clean and painless experience.

One of the reasons that people like Dick Erath still make wine in their garage, as Dick is doing this vintage even after selling his winery, is that it provides infinite challenges to the winemaker. No two years are exactly alike. The weather changes from year to year, that affects the growth of the vines and grapes, and that in turn affects the growers response. And the raw material, those carefully cared for grapes, that come into the winery or garage or basement, are unique; unlike in sometimes minute ways and sometimes in significant ways, any other grapes produced by the same site before. And so the winemaker too has a large number of options about how to respond to what the vineyard has given. The process is chemical in nature, but a constantly evolving one; two winemakers interacting with grapes from the same vineyard will undoubtedly adopt different approaches, putting their orginal signature on a vintage. And the greatest challenge is that posed by the pinot noir grape variety, one that is notoriously hard to grow and produce wine from,because those signatures may either help a great vintage shine, or ruin it. When the current participants in our start your own winery program indicated an interest in posting their winemaking experiences, we heartily encouraged them. They will be able to record a journey no one will quite make the same way again. And we are glad there were willing to allow us along to share vicariously in some of their fun.