Barreling Down

"Barrel Down" is the term used to mean putting the wine in a barrel.

This morning (Thanksgiving day) I pumped the wine from carboys into my 30-gallon French oak barrel, using my new Buon Vino Super Jet wine pump/filter. In about a year, I’ll use the same machine to filter the wine just before bottling.

Now the wine sits in barrel in my home office for long-term aging. I expect it to age between 6 and 12 months – it all depends on how much oak the wine wants, which I’ll determine by tasting regularly. You should smell my office – it’s like a barrel room at a winery!

~Dave Sienknecht

Paper Chromatography

A method to determine whether certain acids are present in the wine is called Paper Chromatography. What at first seemed like black magic to me, is really a cool chemistry technique that I used to determine whether MLF (malolactic fermentation) was complete.

I won't go into the fine details of how to do it. It involves putting a tiny droplet of wine and acids on special paper, soaking up some special solution, and seeing which chemicals separate out. Here is a link to a youtube video (props to Jason Morgan) that I found useful; it depicts exactly what I did. Maybe next year I'll be a better blogger and record videos!

Anyway, the picture on the right shows my results: a chromatogram that shows MLF is complete! No malic acid remains, but lactic acid and tartaric acid do. I know - it's hard to see and you really don't care anyway. But it means I can rack the wine from the glass containers into the oak barrel for long-term aging. I'll do that in the next week.

Cheers!
Dave Sienknecht

Good Gas

Some wine makers use an inert gas (not chemically reactive) to fill the headspace of containers. This helps to reduce oxygen exposure during aging, which reduces the chances of microbial spoilage.

The choices are CO2, Nitrogen and Argon. I'm using Argon, for reasons which I won't go into here... okay - in short, it's heavier than air so it creates a nice blanket on top of the wine surface and it won't mix into the solution as CO2 can.

In the photo on the left, I'm filling the headspace of my Cabernet carboys, where the wine is currently going through MLF. Malolactic fermentation is the conversion of malic acid, which is tart (like in an apple) to lactic acid, which is softer and... kind of milky or buttery in texture.

Today I also tested my Rosé wine, as fermentation appears to have come to a near stand-still. It's actually a light pink color, which isn't well represented in the photo on the right. Anyway, it measures dry so today or tomorrow I will rack it to a new carboy and (a day later) add some stuff (SO2 and Lysozyme) to prevent MLF. Rosé doesn't go through MLF because it should be crisp and refreshing - not round and tongue-coating. If this were Chardonnay, then it would be a preferential choice of the wine maker whether to prevent or promote MLF.

<< two hours pass >>

Blog update...

Okay, I racked the wine to fresh carboys and had a little left over. On the left is a somewhat-better representation of the color. It tastes good - very floral. We'll see what time does for it.

~Dave Sienknecht

Pressing Wine

Last Saturday (Oct-29) was press-day! The wine was measuring dry, which was great because it allowed me to press on the weekend. Commercial wineries sometimes let the must sit after fermenting (called extended maceration), to promote additional extraction of color and flavor goodies. But at home, that's an invitation for wild bacteria to join the party. So it's best to press as soon as the wine is dry (the sugar is all gone).

Above are a couple photos of the press I rented for the day. It's not a manual press you usually associate with home winemakers; it's a bladder press, which has a water bladder in the middle. A water hose is hooked up. After filling the press with juice and skins, you open a water valve. The bladder fills up and presses the skins. Easy and efficient! The pressed wine gets progressively darker as the pressure rises. The wine tasted great! It needs age and oak influence, but it's off to a good start.

Now the wine sits in large glass containers called carboys. The next day I racked the wine (siphoned it from one carboy to another) to get it off the sludge that collected at the bottom. I added MLF bacteria and nutrients to ensure malolactic fermentation goes smoothly. After a month, more or less, I'll move it to the barrel for long-term aging.

~Dave Sienknecht

Fermenting Wine

Here are a few photos of my poor-man's garage winery. Every day of this week of fermentation, I punch down the cap of skins two or three times per day to keep it moist. It also promotes color and flavor extraction and helps prevent undesirable bacteria from making a home of the grape skins.  Those white containers are plastic fermenation containers which allow the CO2 escape out the rim of the lid yet prevent dust and bugs from dropping in.

I also measure the brix daily with a hydrometer. Today it's down to 15, which means about 1/3 of the sugar has already been converted to alcohol. And that means it's time for a little more yeast nutrients. Very important to keep those yeasts happy so they can finish their job without leaving any sugar remaining.

My other task today is to begin caring for my new oak barrel. I filled it up with water and a little potassium metabisulfite to kill any stray microbes. The water might leak for a few days as the barrel staves swell with moisture until they lock in the liquid. Then it will be good and ready for wine in a few weeks!

~Dave Sienknecht

The Crush

On Thursday, Oct-20, I drove from San Jose to Napa to pick up my grapes. I drove early to avoid traffic and grabbed coffee at Bouchon Bakery in Yountville. If you've been to Napa more than once, then you know about the Bouchon Bakery. Amazing breads and pastries for which you briefly imagine that you don't care about calories. You sit outside under a tree enjoying the air, great pastries, and watch an idiot tourist feed their muffin to the birds.

Thus began the longest day of the winemaking process, and the most traumatic day of the grapes' lives.

Anyway, when I drove through the town of Napa, it was so foggy, I had to use my windshield wipers intermittently. It was cold and the grapes in the valley were still struggling to ripen when, in a typical year, they would have been picked weeks before and happily fermenting in a cement or steel tank somewhere.

Not my grapes. My grapes were up on Mt. Veeder, overlooking the foggy Napa Valley. I drove out of the foggy valley, up to a beautiful hillside vineyard called Godspeed. The farmer was nearly done stacking my grape containers. As you can see, the vineyard was well above the fog-line, allowing the grapes to ripen earlier than their Southerly cousins, however still four weeks later than a typical year in Napa. These grapes had no sign of mold, but grapes in the valley are beginning to suffer badly from Botrytis. On the contrary, the grapes I loaded into my 4Runner were amazingly congruent, sweet, ripe and clean (save for the ants, spiders and earwigs crawling around).

As it turns out, I calculated correctly - 600 pounds of grapes just fits in containers packed into my 4Runner, including one container in the passenger seat. I turned the air conditioning on high for the two-hour drive home to keep the grapes cool and prevent wild bacteria from prematurly grazing on my grapes. So ten minutes into the drive, shivering, I pulled over to put on my jacket as it was too cold for two hours at that temperature! At one point, a spider rappelled from the ceiling right next to me, but I hastily brushed him out the window without crashing my refrigerated insect zoo.




I got the grapes home and unpacked into my garage, ready to crush and soon realized I had made one mistake - I didn't recruit any help to finish this labor-intensive task. That's also why I have no pictures of the day, the most important day of winemaking - I had no time nor energy to get pictures of the crushing! Sad but true. Nevertheless, the crush went pretty well. I sanitized my four fermentation containers; crushed grapes one bucket at a time with the motorized crusher; and poured crushed grapes and juice into fermentation containers until I could lift no more.

I then added sulfur dioxide (via potassium metabisulfite) to prevent undesirable bacteria from making a home of my juice. After tesing the Brix, pH and acidity, I was happy to know that my grapes were of great quality and needed no adjustment (the joy of living within two hours of Napa Valley). Later, I rehydrated some yeast (BDX and Pasteur Red), along with a yeast nutrient (Go-Ferm), and mixed it in to kick off fermentation.

It's now already two days later (bad blogger). I've been "punching down the cap" twice a day and monitoring the sugars and temperature. As of tonight, I can open a fermenter and actually hear carbon dioxide bubbling up through the cap (skins and other solids). It's a wonderful sound. I had a big smile when I heard it tonight. Even better, my garage smells like heaven. I thought I liked the smell of brewing beer! The smell of fermenting wine is... mouthwatering... ambrosial?

Alright, more next time on "punching down the cap" and managing fermentation. Thanks for reading, friends!

~Dave Sienknecht

T Minus 4 Days

Last Tuesday, Caroline and I took a day off to visit Napa, check out the grapes, and pick up my new French oak barrel from Demptos Napa Cooperage.

We took these pictures at Chimney Rock Winery in the Stag's Leap District. We walked through their winery and barrel aging room, watched a barrel get topped up, and tasted the sweet grapes in the vineyard. They make fantastic Cabs at this winery and use some unique methods for fermenting and pressing (they don't press). But that's for another blog. In short, theirs is the first and only wine club we've ever joined.



Napa wineries have been harvesting grapes of many varieties for weeks, but Cabernet is a later-ripening grape so it continues to mature on the vines. It's nearly ready though! I got the call from the grower this weekend to say he's harvesting the Cabernet this week! So I'll drive up early Thursday morning (Oct 20) to pick up 500+ pounds of grapes. Then begins a long day of destemming, crushing, preparing yeast, and kicking off fermentation. More on the fine details as I go. Oh man - I can't sleep!

~Dave Sienknecht

"Vin de Garage," The Beginning

1^st Entry.  This blog is dedicated to my first attempt at making wine from beginning to end – from grape to bottle.  Having never made wine from scratch, I expect this to be quite a journey and a great wet mess at times!

In the last year, I’ve been reading books and magazines, talking to people, watching dozens of Youtube videos, and Googling innumerable questions about every topic from fermentation options to yeast nutrients, to sanitation methods, to inert gases, to oak barrel care, and on and on…  I’ve found the adage is absolutely true – if you ask 10 winemakers a question, you’ll get 11 different answers.  But that‘s one reason this hobby is so enticing.  There are so many different choices to make at every turn, each of which affects the final outcome.

The home wine making pursuit incorporates (apparently) a metric-ton of time and effort, a bucket-load of science, and a good deal of artistry – or personal taste.  I will be measuring and tasting constantly over the course of a year prior to bottling, trying to steer the juice toward my favorite expression of wine: a modern-style Napa Cabernet.  Of course, that’s my objective now.  Let’s hope the grapes I get can support that style.  Otherwise, I’ll have to adjust my aim accordingly.

Here’s my high-level plan:

• Outfit my garage winery (nearly done).
• Early October, pick up a 30-gallon French oak barrel from a Napa cooperage.
• Late October (more or less), pick up grapes in Napa (Mt. Veeder).
• Separate around 10% of the juice to make Rosé, the rest for Cabernet.
• Ferment, then transfer to barrel for aging.
• Around a year later, bottling party!

I intend to record the journey here in words and photos.  Let’s hope the final product is good enough to justify some of this time investment… and maybe even good enough to inspire a second vintage of "vin de garage!"

~Dave Sienknecht