Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Finding Myself in Wikipedia

When my book -- that would be Home Winemaking for Dummies -- came out a couple weeks ago, boxes of copies showed up at my door and got piled in my living room. I emailed friends to let them know it was out, and got many nice emails and promises of orders in return. Soon people I hadn't contacted heard of it and sent more nice notes. I busily set to work organizing launch and signing events hither and yon around the Bay Area. The book showed up in the Amazon rankings, and soon I was checking every few hours as the book made a respectable initial climb.

But I never expected the publication would get me listed in Wikipedia.

My wife Nancy actually discovered this intriguing twist on instant fame -- she was tracking my "celebrity" as well. The entry in question wasn't about me, or about the book; it was a newly-contributed article about Blenheim Vineyards in Virginia. After noting that it's the project of rocker Dave Matthews, the article goes on to describe the lineup of wines, including mention that the Viognier is made with some barrel and some tank fermentation, and with neutral rather than aromatic yeasts.

In footnote 11, the source of the Viognier info is revealed as . . . ^ "Patterson, Tim. "Home Winemaking for Dummies" For Dummies, 2011. p.283." (The repetition of "for Dummies" is apparently an attempt to identify the publisher, which is John Wiley & Sons.) And indeed, Blenheim's winemaker, Kristy Harmon, was one of the dozens of professional winemakers I interview for and quoted in the book. How the book became a source within days of its publication still baffles me.

It's official: I'm a footnote in Wikipedia!

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As mentioned in This Space before, Blind Muscat spent the first half of the year writing down everything he knows -- and more -- about home winemaking. The "and more" part refers to the dozens of professional winemakers who pass on their own insights on various grapes and tecn hiques along the way. 

And now it can be yours:

 

White Wine Gets Ugly

One of the revelations that comes from making your own wine is discovering that white wines, which end up brilliantly clear, delicate and refreshing, and usually clean as a whistle, start off looking really disgusting. Glass carboys, the home wine staple, provide a clear window into the unappetizing visuals of fermentation; commercial tanks obscure the workings, which is probably good for morale among commercial winemakers.

Every Wine Has a Story

This strange harvest took some even stranger turns in the past ten days, and not all of them have to do with grapes.

Leading up to the ever-later harvest, the prize batch of grapes was always the backyard field blend at Paul and Barbara Micaleff's place in the hills overlooking Dry Creek Valley near Healdsburg. (See September 5 post,) The spot is gorgeous, the vineyard a 20-year-old labor of love, the owners delightful people, and the prospect of an old-time field blend -- Zinfandel, Petite Sirah and Carignane from one stretch of dirt -- was mouth-watering from the start.

Paul called periodically through September with Brix readings, and every one was an awful lot like the last; the chilly weather meant the grapes were taking their sweet time -- bad choice of words -- accumulating sugar. The Micaleffs were always planning a short vacation in Maui in early November, celebrating the wedding of one young member of their large and complicated family, and we worried about having to pick with no one around. But then, the grapes were so under-sugared, we eventually figured they'd be back before harvest.

On Saturday October 9th, Paul called me from Maui; the wedding and the reception afterwards had been terrific, and they would be enjoying a couple more days, and by the way, he had fresh sugar level readings done by a neighbor that morning. Creeping up, but still not ready -- at least a week off, maybe two.

Later that day, swimming in the Pacific, Paul started coughing up blood, and was rushed to a hospital, sinking fast. He had been fighting cancer for quite some time, knowing the cancer was winning, still taking drugs and treatments to stave it off, and determined to get the most out of life for as long as he could. The last straw was probably a heart attack. By Sunday, we heard through friends of friends that he had died.

Waiting to Extract

Finally, the Malbec is in the house.

For 15 home harvests, most of my grapes have been in by the end of September; this year, the first major batch of fruit came in Octrober 2, with the rest anywhere from one to three weeks off.

I know you're all asking, "How late is that really, Tim?" Here's how late. This morning, I was talking with Ed Boyce, the winemaker at Black Ankle Winery in Mt. Airy, Maryland, and I told him I was about to go pick up some Malbec, my first grape of the season. He chuckled and allowed as to how his Malbec was already fermenterd and pressed. There's the 2010 story: the East Coast gets ripe sooner than Lodi this year.

Take that, climate change deniers.

Bottling Flashbacck

While we wait, endlessly, for the new grapes to come in -- what was supposed to be Malbec on Wednesday is now maybe Malbec on Friday -- let me think my way back a few weeks to the most recent bottlings of the 2009s.

Among the adventures from that vintage was a five-grape Bordeaux blend, the whole contemporary crew -- Merlot from Sangiacomo Vineyard in Sonoma, Cabernet Franc from the Russian River, Cabernet Sauvignon from El Dorado County in the Sierras, Malbec from Russian River, and a pinch of Petit Verdot from Napa. I will admit that Bordeaux grapes are not my preferred cup of tea, but with some goading from my co-conspirators, doing the whole Bordeaux Bingo became an irresistible force. (No, no Carménère, the phantom Bordeaux grape that migrated to Chile; we'll get around to that when we find a source.)

For the first few months of its life, this blend tasted marvelous; almost ready to drink, full of tasty fruit. Then it had an attack of aldehydes, unpleasant compounds put together by the mating of ethyl alcohol and oxygen, dampening the aromas/flavors and offering up something stale and nasty instead. Thanks to the miracle of sulfur dioxide (aka sulfites or SO2), this unpleasantness got fixed, and the fruit came back.

When we got around to the label, like most home winemaker efforts, this one has a convoluted, private story. But stick with me; the labels themselves are worth it.

Chardonnay, R.I.P.

While the Grenache and the pink wine start to ferment, the remainder of the harvest remains somewhere between late and endangered.

My personal casualty this year was the Chardonnay growing along my friend John Buechsenstein's fence line at his place in Mendocino, the source of last year's first-ever sub cellars Chardonnay. Labor Day a year ago, four of us trekked up there and harvested the yummy clusters, devoured a tasty lunch John made for us, and headed home for the crush and press in the driveway. The wine came out just fine: no oak, no malo, just Chardonnay fruit, pure and simple. John was nice enough to serve it at his daughter's wedding.

Grapes, FINALLY!

Today, finally, we got actual 2010 harvest grapes here at subterranean cellars. Nothing humongous; just 100 pounds of Grenache from Lodi, destined for blending, but still, REAL GRAPES!

My main cellar rat Ivan and I picked up the grapes at Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley, my winemakimg home, lo these many years. We de-stemmed and crushed these tasty suckers in the driveway, and here they are about to meet their fate in the hopper atop the hand-crank crusher:

After finishing the job, and hosing everything down, we retired inside, and as is the ritual deal here, had a glass of something as similar as practical, just to bless the vintage. In this case, a 2007 Bokisch Vineyards Lodi Garnacha (Grenache's in Spain, where it originated), which was quite tasty.

Among the fine things about today's grapes was that they came in with pleasantly low Brix / sugar (23%), meaning pleasantly low alcohol (around 12.5%). Since the future of these grapes is wine to be blended into a summer-weight, picnic-friendly blend, I couldn't be happier. Sometimes late harvests are good harvests.

And as a bonus, later this evening, I pulled off a bit of juice from the crushed Grenache, about one gallon out of the seven gallons 100 pounds can yield, and dedicated it to be the mother/starter for this year's pink wine program. The routine here is to suck off 5-15% of the juice of every red grape that comes in (and a tad of the whites, too) and ferment it all into a mongrel rosé, often my favorite wine of the vintage.

In the morning, both the red Grenache and the pink starter will get yeast, etc., etc. So, one tiny batch of grapes, and the makings of two wines. HARVEST 2010 IS ON!

Slow-Mo Harvest

Still in slow-mo here in most of formerly sunny California.

A week ago, the grapes I'm getting from a backyard (actually, front yard) vineyard in Dry Creek looked like they'd take another three weeks to get ripe. Today I got new sugar readings from Paul Micallef, the home vineyard owner, suggesting that they'd take . . . another three weeks to get ripe. With high temperatures in the mid-70s, the weather for humans is dandy, but for grapes, it's about as motivating as watching paint dry.

A week ago, I thought I'd be getting some Grenache and some Malbec from normally torrid Lodi later this week. Today's projections are that they'll take . . . another week. Mother Nature on hold.

Frozen Starters

Veteran home winemakers know about this already, but for those of you who don't, here's an ode (actually, some prose paragraphs) in praise of frozen grapes.

In this peculiar California harvest, very few grapes are ready to pick so far. Which means that the resourceful home winemaker turns his/her attention to frozen stuff, just to get a head start on the vintage. Peter Brehm of Brehm Vineyards probably gets the nod as the inventor of this scheme for North American homies, at least on the scale of national distribution. For a couple decades, Brehm has been brokering fresh grapes from multiple growing areas and vineyards on the West Coast to home winemakers and small commercial outfits, but also icing down a portion of the harvest -- crushed grapes for reds, crushed, pressed and settled juice for whites -- for shipment to the far corners of the US and Canada. Sign up for this fruit, and you get five-gallon ice cubes of frozen grapes or juice, or 55-gallon drums, either at your door, at a frozen foods warehouse, or through several regional distributors.