I’ve gotten some comments lately that pinotblogger has been dealing too much in marketing and bloggy matters, and not enough with the business of wine making or how our winery has been progressing.
I have quite a bit to say about the difficulties we’ve been facing lately (mainly with licensing issues) and I’ll have an announcement soon that should make the folks who’ve been kind enough to join our samples list and who sent in shirt photos happy.
Today though I’m going to get my hands dirty and share this year’s pinot recipe.
The High Extraction, Moderate Alcohol Style
First a little explanation on the choice of style. Since I was sporting my “Parker’s Bitch” shirt for this year’s crush I decided to try my hand with the California high-extraction recipe, but with a twist. I didn’t want the black fruit or the high alcohol typical of the CA style. My goal was to pick at physiological ripeness but before things got too black-fruity, and then use the high extraction methods to craft a flavorful and relatively intense red fruit driven wine that also sported a little of the floral elegance that I love in pinot.
Nothing goes completely according to plan of course, and it was an interesting year for berry ripening at Rebecca’s Vineyard. Things were going along great for most of August: nice and cool with relatively warm nighttime temps which allowed for nearly constant flavor ripening both day and night. This is great because it lets the berries ripen independent of sugar accumulation. It’s the best of all possible worlds for pinot. Indeed, it was beautiful.
But then, typically, along came a late August heat wave that sent sugars into the stratosphere. Here’s a graph of daily temps courtesy of our Ranch Systems weather station.
Click to enlarge
As you can (hopefully) see, after August 28th temps began to spike and the grapes began to desiccate (dimple and shrivel like a raisin) on the vine, causing Brix to rise quickly. Tasting the grapes I didn’t feel as though the red fruit had been completely eclipsed by the late August heat wave, so I was still hopeful I could make a wine close to my preferred style while still employing the now tried-and-true high extraction protocol for CA pinot. I called up my good friend and longtime winemaking partner Ken Lippe and scheduled a quick harvest. We picked on September 1st.
And there we were, surrounded by pinot fruit. Lots of it. In my opinion, after when you pick, the next most important decision you can make as a winemaker is how rigorously to sort your fruit. No matter how good your fruit, no matter how talented your vineyard manager, you are going to have some berries that are either under-ripe or over-ripe scattered throughout various bunches.
One of the benefits of long hang-time is that you pretty much eliminate the under-ripe berries from the equation, but this often comes at the cost of more over-ripe berries and raisins. Bottom line: to get high quality wine you need to sort pretty rigorously. Which we did, Ken and I. And it took a long time. Oh yes, it took a long time. Let me tell you, when the SBA loan clears, the first big equipment purchase I’m making will be the Vaucher-Beguet Mistral® system. Lovely.
Let the Spoofulation Begin!
Anyway, after sorting and de-stemming (no crushing), into the fermenters the grapes went for a 5 day cold soak using dry ice. I tried to keep the must under 50 degrees, and was generally successful, but there were periods where the temps rose above 50 for a few hours. At the same time I added some enzyme to the must which helps to speed up what can otherwise be a lengthy extraction process. In general, enzymes help increase color (important in pinot), improve mouth feel and release more aroma and flavor precursors into the must. You have to be careful though, if you have grapes with green or off flavors you’ll extract those as well. And that can really ruin a party.
My targets for Brix and pH pre-ferment were 25.5 and 3.4 respectively. After soaking up the must was extremely sweet at 27.5 Brix. The pH was high as well, clocking in at 3.6. So things weren’t perfect. Without some intervention we’re talking about a potential alcohol of around 15.7% and a finished pH of 3.8 plus. Both are extremely scary numbers for pinot.
Cue the ominous music.
But never fear! Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I went about correcting these relatively minor problems using some useful rules of thumb. I’ll also give my initial thoughts on how this Capozzi vintage is shaping up based on how things are tasting right now. I may even have a cool announcement for the Pinotblogger tee shirt crew so be sure check back then.
Out of curiosity, how many tons of grapes are we talking about here that you and just one other person hand-sorted? Wondering about the level of effort involved there. And is it pretty common practice for pinots to get a whole 5 days cold soak for extraction, or is that pretty variable amongst pinot producers?
Nate,
We only were working with about a ton of grapes. Because of the licensing issues I alluded to in the post, I had to sell off most of this year’s crop. So I took the opportunity to experiment with a new hybrid style I’ve been considering.
I’m not sure how standard a 5 day soak is, but anywhere from 1 day to two weeks of cold soaking is the basic range. I’ll do a post on the different pinot styles, producer methods, etc. in a future post.
Thanks for the questions!
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Sorry to hear you are having licensing issues! It sucks that you had to sell your fruit because of it. Do tell sometime soon.
Regarding weather - we never even broke 100 during that time frame! How weird is that?
Regarding sorting - I’d urge you to save the money and continue with the hand sort - it’s like you have anything better to do than give your fruit your undivided attention?
Undivided attention to fruit is nice and all, but check out those “before and after” pictures from the Mistral on the Scott Labs website! Awesome!
Hey Josh, sorry to hear about the licensing issues. Do tell, the TTB rarely ever reads blogs!
I will now dazzle you with my enology and must/wine lab analysis learnings of the last few weeks.
Anyhow, you mention using enzymes. Was it pectolytic enzymes to help with extraction during the soak? Are you in the camp that believe that those enzymes don’t spoil the varietal character/terroir?
And five days is not unheard of for a soak, keeping it under 50 using just dry ice is the part that’s really the challenge. Did you do the soak in a tank or a macro bin? Inquiring minds what to know!
–R
Hey Randy,
It was a mix of different enzymes including pectinases and hemicellulases.
As to the terroir question I kind of come down somewhere in the middle.
Excuse me while I wax philosophical. Be sure to set your pretension shields to full strength…If you define terroir as a kind of transparency where you can taste a minerality in the pinot, then you are going to probably cover that up with heavy extraction of fruity aroma and flavor precurors. However I happen to believe Jamie Goode is right with his hypothesis that minerality comes from sulfur compounds, and those volitiles are more easily recognized when you have wine that’s very light in character.
My ’05’s have great minerality for example, but they’re extremely lean and austere. My personal stance is that I’m mineral agnostic - if it’s there great, if not no biggie.
This year I was trying for a hybrid style, a kind of compromise between the classic French profile (especially the nose) and the robust CA style. If that means that minerality got sacrificed, so be it. But to say what’s in the tank right now isn’t an expression of Rebecca’s Vineyard terroir is, IMHO, ludicrous.
I soaked and fermented in 24-A-S MacroBins and they rocked the party.
Thanks for the comments and questions Randy! How did this year’s harvest go?
Oh, and I’ll tell the whole sordid licensing tale in an upcoming post. Didn’t mean to duck that one.
El Jefe,
I’m green with envy. That heat wave sucked.
BTW I’m coming up to visit soon. Can’t wait to see the oak in person.
This years harvest hasn’t happened yet. The eastern slopes of the Mayacamas down here (approx 1100′ elevation) is apparently not slated for harvest for another few weeks. And of course, since the strangely mild weather (not to mention the rain from Wednesday night) has set things back a bit.
I only ask the questions because I’m taking both an enology class and a must/wine analysis class (at Napa Valley College), so I am curious to see the choices people are making out here versus, say, what Emile Peynaud and Zoecklein et. al. write about in the boat anchor textbooks…
The enzyme question was really wondering if what you were trying to do was to free more juice and polyphenols (and get more extraction from the skins) by breaking down the pectins in the cap. Seems that’s exactly what you were doing, so I pat myself on the back there. The concern with enzyme use there was the reduction in varietal character, not so much “terroir”.
I guess for terroir, I don’t know enough to even be dangerous, per se. I’m seeing that the choices you make up to this point (high extraction) start to close doors to certain destinations for the final product. Neither good nor bad, it just is.
And you and Kaz use the same fermentation vessels. He’s big on doing his completely anaerobic; I’m starting to delve into the mysteries of that kind of winemaking too.
Good times, I’ll keep you posted on the harvest here in Glen Ellen. Cheers!
Duh, how about mentioning that it’s Cab Sauv in our vineyard, hence the late harvest.
Oh! I’m thinking seriously about finding a way in the next year or two to clear another few acres and plant dry-farmed Cab Franc and Petit Verdot near the current 9 acres already planted. It seems that there’s even some market demand for them, from a blending perspective at least. Have any thoughts?
I’ll be delighted to see you!!! Give me a heads up - I will be away 9/28-9/30 - so I can give you le grand tour!
[...] you’re just joining us, part 1 in this series is here and you can find part 2 [...]
[...] more interesting to hear them talk about why they make their wine the way they did. Since I already outlined my decisions this harvest, I thought it would be interesting to point you towards some other folks who are openly discussing [...]