Winemaking and a brief beermaking comment

Now that we've got some extra room to do stuff in, we've restarted our home winemaking activities, along with making beer.

2012 was an interesting summer -- it stayed fairly cool (we may not have had a single day in the 90F range), but it turned out to be a long and dry summer.  The grapes had plenty of time to fully ripen.  I was going thru my wine journal for some additional facts & found that we had picked the Pinot on October 11.  We took home about 500 lbs of grapes, 20 bags.  The sugar content was 21 Brix which is typical for ripe Pinot grapes from Fred's vineyard.

Fred's vineyard was planted in the mid 70's (in the Pommard clone) so the grape vines are close to 40 years old now.  He is located at the very end of the Willamette valley at about 700ft elevation.  He claims that on a very clear day he can see one of the Sisters Cascade volcanos.  We privately doubted that, since there are lots of hills between his vineyard and North Sister.  But we took a look at some topo maps and there may be a gap in those hills -- Fred probably is correct!

When we vinify Pinot, we like to manage the fermentation time and temperature so the cap (where the grape skins accumulate during fermentation) hits a maximum temperature of about 90F, and the time is about 1 week.  When we do that, in a good year we get very good extraction, both in color and flavor.

2012 went as well as we could have hoped, as far as the time/temperature profile goes.  The fermentation took about 1 week to complete.  We used two different types of yeast -- it had been awhile since we had made wine, and one of the yeast varieties we'd used in the past was no longer available.  We used Pasteur Red in one fermenter and the other was pitched with Borgovin.  The latter is a variety that is supposed to be especially good for Pinot.

 On 10/20 we pressed the pinot and got 4 5-gallon carboys of each variation.  Tasting at that point is always interesting -- the young wine is very fruity (and full of yeast, too).  It tasted pretty typical for that stage of the game.

Skipping ahead a bit, on January 2, 2013, we racked the pinot.  I was able to consolidate the volumes some so wound up with 3 carboys each of the Pasteur and Borgovin.  Tasting showed that the Pasteur is more fruit-forward with raspberry notes, while the Borgovin is a little more restrained and more black cherry.  So far, so good.  As Lisa says, the key to making good wine is to start with good fruit and then not screw it up!

4/13/13  we oaked the Pinot.  I decided on 4 oz of "french oak chips", purchased at a local wine and beer making supply store.  I had forgotten how much the wine foams up when you add wood chips to it -- some of the CO2 comes out of solution I guess.  We had to suck a bit of wine out of some of the carboys to give some extra head room.  We destroyed the evidence by drinking it....


Also a note about the Riesling.  Yes, we made riesling, too.  But I kinda screwed up, by adding too much sulfite before pitching the yeast.  I had wanted to discourage the wild yeast from starting up before we pitched the yeast we wanted (wine yeast has been cultured to be more tolerant of sulfites).  However, the yeast took a very long time to kick in, and when it did it started making a lot of H2S -- hydrogen sulfide.  That is NOT a pleasant component to have in a wine.  So I went out and bought an aquarium air pump and an aeration stone, and aerated the wine.  That helped.  I haven't tasted it lately to see if the problem is completely solved or not.  If not, we will put some clean copper strips in the wine to try to ty up the H2S -- copper sulfide is not water soluble so the reaction between Cu and H2S is a one-way deal.

The air pump will come in handy for aerating beer, as well.  Yes, I've been making beer too.  Most beermaking recipes these days call for aerating the sweet wort very well before pitching the yeast -- the added O2 in the wort gives the yeast a good start and reduces the production of off-flavor fermentation byproducts.  I have to say that my results, by simply pouring the wort in a very "noisy" fashion into the carboy, seem fine.  But now that I've got the air pump I guess I will have to give it a try....

This isn't the end of the story on beermaking, but that's the subject of another blog.

And now for something completely different!  Enjoy (or not, up to you).
 

               Oregon Sunset

The Sun was a Crimson Cadillac
    burning rubber on the crystal Sphere:
  and the skyway cops were ticket-mad behind.

Caddie and cops screamed down Main,
tossing pedestrians and poet's cliches aside

crashing into the west-side junkyard
  of a billion sunsets

and the conflagration scorched
   the purple night.