Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

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!

2005 Dragon's Hollow Cabernet Sauvignon, He Lan Mountain Appellation, China

On a recent trip to Sacramento, I picked up, as usual, a few intriguing bottles of wine from Corti Brothers grocery, a cornucopia of delicious and exotic foodstuffs and potables from nearly everywhere in the galaxy. Darrell Corti has one of the most discriminating palates around, an astonishing mental storehouse of food and wine knowledge, and more opinions than are dreampt of in normal mortals.

One of the bottles I couldn't resist was a bargain-priced 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon from China. Chinese wine -- grape wine -- is barely visible on the US market so far, but just wait. When the People's government decided to give wine grapes a try several years back, they did it up in style, planting by some reports a million acres of grapes, just to see what worked where. Not your average test plot.

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.

Truly Interesting Tastings: Rockpile at Rock Wall

The Rockpile American Viticultural Area (AVA) on the northwestern edge of Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County is tiny. The designated area includes about 15,000 acres, but most of them are vertical; planted acreage is about 165 acres, with another 50 or so plantable, at least in theory. Eight vineyards make up the Rockpile Grape Growers Association; about 15 wineries -- none of them located within the AVA -- bottle wines from the area.

The wines are something else: big, flavorful, intense reds, prominently Zinfandel but also Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Petit Verdot, and a few others varieties. The wineries that deal in Rockpile fruit include some very serious names: Rosenblum Cellars, Carol Shelton, JC Cellars and Seghesio, for starters. A chance to taste though lots of them yesterday afternoon at Rock Wall Winery in Alameda -- the new startup for Kent and daughter Shauna Rosenblum, now that the mothership has been sold to the Diageo drinks conglomerate -- was a treat, reinforcing the impression I already had from random drinking that there's something special about the place.

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.

Is It the View, or the Grapes?

Took a delightful trip up to Healdsburg in Sonoma's Dry Creek yesterday with my longtime winemaking crony Pete Stauffer and his wife Diana. The purpose: visit our grapes.

Pete and I are splitting up the output from a backyard vineyard belonging to Paul and Barbara Micallef, who are friends of friends. I met these folks a year or so ago at a dinner party, and we tasted some of each other's home wines, and that was that. This spring, we ran into each other again, at the same mutual friends' house, and Paul said that since he had so much homemade wine built up, he thought he'd be selling his grapes this year, maybe put them on Craigslist.

Oh, Paul, I said on the spot, let me have a crack at them first -- and this post is about why I jumped at the possibility.

His vineyard, producing slightly under a ton of grapes, was constructed 20 years ago on the model of an old-time California field blend -- maybe 85% Zinfandel, 10% Petite Sirah, 5% Carignane. That kind of mix is every Zinfandel fan's dream; it's the kind of grape cocktail that has made Ridge Vineyards famous and made oceans of tasty wine for 150 years. It's the signature of California wine, and Dry Creek is a good an area as any for its expression.

I mentioned this possibility to a couple friends, who began to drool. I mentioned it by email to Pete, who said, why not? I called Paul, promised to take the all the grapes at a very reasonable price; he didn't even ask for a deposit.

Yesterday we got a look at the place. Not your average backyard vineyard.

 

Does that make you want a glass of Zinfandel, or what? The little hillside vineyards, stretching four or five rows further down the hillside than the picture shows, is a mile off of and above West Dry Creek Road, and has a view of several million dollars' worth of Dry Creek real estate.

We walked the entire vineyard, tasted some grapes, and checked the sugar level with a refractometer (around 18 Brix). We could see the sunburn damage in a few places, legacy of a freaky heat spike a couple weeks ago in the midst of an overly cool season. We tasted Paul's 2009 field blend in the barrel, and it was tasty indeed; we tasted a smaller barrel of Petite Sirah made from another part of the vineyard -- a single row, off by itself, dry-farmed, no irrigation -- and it was spectacular.

This will be some seriously fun wine to make -- not to mention the YouTube posibilieies of rank amateurs picking grapes on a steep hillside. Three or four weeks till harvest -- depending on the goofy weather.

Mainly I came away with that unbelievable view in my head. I've always felt that one of the clearest truths in the world of terroir is that once you've visited a vineyard, the wines always taste special, they taste of that place. This is not terroir in a causal, scientific sense -- the idea that natural conditions create flavors -- but rather an emotional association -- that knowing a place changes your understanding of the wine forever.

I can hardly wait.

Harvest Hassles 2010

Every harvest is an adventure, even in comparatively grape-friendly California. Every grower and winemaker spends at least some time every year worrying about the weather -- late frosts, rain at blossom time, summer heat spikes, rainy fall weather, and so on. Comes with the territory; the wine industry, regardless of its growing technological mastery, remains subject to the rule of the grapes ane of Mama Nature.

Some years are weirder than others, and this one is a doozie. Unusually chilly weather has predominated all up and down the California coastal areas, from Santa Barbara to Paso Robles to Monterey to Mendocino, and through most of Sonoma and Napa. The record chill has been punctuated by tiny outbursts of extreme heat -- one a couple weeks ago, one going on as I write this. Right now, it's just under 100 degrees in St. Helena and Sonoma, which is pushing it; a week from now, highs are predicted to be only in the mid-70s, not enough to ripen anything on schedule.

The generally cool weather means the grapes are late in developing; the explosions of heat mean that a lot of them have some sunburn on the skins, too. Some of them may never get ripe; many growers are hurriedly dropping fruit to make sure that what's left has a fighting chance to achieve full ripeness.

The chill has brought fog with it. A little fog at night helps cool vineyards that are sunny during the day, and can be a plus. Fog all day in places that don't usually harbor it -- and don't have persistent winds to blow it away -- is a recipe for mildew. This is something humid areas in Europe, like Bordeaux, fight with every year; here, it's a novelty, and not in a good way. More crop to drop, or just dispense with.

Oh, and then there's the grape quarantine. Small infestations of the European Grape Vine Moth have been found in Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino. This is not a helpful insect friend, and controlling its spread is a high priority. To that end, affected areas cannot just ship out grapes at harvest time, since they could carry moths or larvae or eggs; the grapes have to be crushed on site and only then hauled elsewhere, all by certified compliant producers and carriers.

A nice -- if you'll pardon the expression in this context -- write-up on all this came out via email today from Brehm Vineyards, probably the continent's largest supplier of premium grapes for home winemakers (and many small commercial outfits). If you're a home winemaker, you probably known Brehm already; even if you're not, the Grape Mail blasts at harvest time are worth receiving. Alas, the quarantine info is only in the email., but here's the gist.

Lots of Brehm grapes come from affected areas, which means the operation will not be handing out whole grape clusters this year, something many homies prefer so that they can do the entire process themselves. Fortunately, Brehm has a nice crush facility, so nobody will be left grapeless.

But I'm planning to get some Arneis from a grower in Mendocino County, and some Zinfandel from a home vineyard in Dry Creek, both in the quarantine zone. And am I a certified anything? No. And am I sure how I'm going to get these babies -- if they ever
ripen at all -- to my garage? Nope -- not yet.

Writer's Cramp -- In a Good Way

Signs of life have been spotted at Blind Muscat's Cellarbook.

After eight months of basically zippo, I'm giving it another try. The reasons for my inattention to the blogosphere are many, including the standard ones -- like why in hell would I spend time on this for absolutely no money? But the main cause for absence is that I have been pre-occupied with a large, demanding, paying project -- an old-fashioned, hard-copy, printed "book" -- if you remember books.

Said tome is Home Winemaking for Dummies, due out in a couple months, just in time to stuff that over-sized stocking. The 2010 harvest, alas, will already be over, but maybe all the sections on blending and barrel-aging and troubleshooting will come in handy for some folks.

I will shamelessly share more about this fine volume as part of my personal buildup for the gala release in coming posts. But meantime, one small, fleeting, source of publishing amusement. Quite a while abck, I received a dummy (as it were) of the cover, and it looked basically OK to me, some prose, pictures of carboys, the Dummies guy, whatever. Only when I printed out large book-sized copies to hand out at a talk I was doing on home winemaking did I notice one bizarre detail: the front carboy had a label on it referring not to any known grape variety, but to a stalky vegetable treated as a fruit.Starts with an "r."

Here it is on Amazon, the placeholder for the soon-to-be-book. Take a look.

See that little mailing label on the neck? See how it says "rhubarb"? I'm here to tell you, this is a rhubarb-free home winemaking book. Ah, the perils of using stock photos to save a buck.

The image has, in fact, been air-brushed and PhotoShopped and whatever, and so the book will carry no references to strawberry's constant accompaniment in pies. It will, however, tell you how to make lip-smackin' good Petite Sirah and Muscat and many other things.