Receipt of Grape Part 1

I spent this week in Northern California, a visit intended to look at my grapes and to a lesser extent remind the growers and Sal the winemaker that I'm on the case. The remote control strategy for this wine project can be stressful and I anticipate several more forays up and down the state. Just add it to that "miscellaneous expenses" line item on the business plan.

 

Jason and I rolled up to Amador County on Wednesday morning; I'd spent Monday and Tuesday on personal visits to some family and friends on the Coast and now I was ready to work. Sort of. Observe and taste was more like it. We'd booked a night at a nice Bed and Breakfast in Jackson (about 10 miles from the vineyard), so I wasn't really roughing it.

 

The vineyard where I'm getting my grenache and mourvedre grapes is owned by Charlie, who has a nice residence on his sprawling vineyard spread. I had spoken to him once on the phone and exchanged a few emails before committing to the grape purchase. In other words I was winging it, per usual. I'd decided to try to snag some other Rhone grapes after committing to the syrah and the natural fits were Grenache and Mourvedre, the standard Cote du Rhone and Chateauneuf du Pape blenders (Grenache tends to be the majority grape in those wines so I guess it's not really a blender in those cases).

 

Amador County is yet another wine district in California, distinguished in recent years by huge high alcohol zinfandels. Like Paso Robles, there is now a trend to growing some Rhone varietals as well, although unlike Paso, Amador still is heavily weighted toward the big boy zins as the main cash cow.

 

I had found Charlie's grapes in (where else?) Wine Business Monthly. He was advertising up to 2 tons of Grenache, and 2 tons sounded about right in terms of my budget, coupled with the fact I didn't know anything about the vineyard or him. We spoke on the phone and he referred me to Mount Aukum winery, an operation in Amador that made a 100% Grenache from that vineyard. I called the winemaker at Mount Aukum, an affable guy named Lance, and he assured me that all was well with Charlie and his Grenache. I ordered a bottle of the Grenache from the Mount Aukum but I committed to the grapes prior to getting the bottle, mostly due to a sense of anxiety about not getting some Grenache. There were no other offers of Grenache in WBM and I knew it was getting late in the game in terms of grape allocations and contracts.

 

Charlie's vineyard is in the Shenandoah Valley district, right next to Renwood, one of the best known wineries in the area. Renwood is one of the 6 original wineries in the area we were subsequently told, although apparently they were now owed by an out of state corporation. They make about 12 zinfandels as well as numerous other wines, including a good Barbera I'd had in the past. So off to the Shenandoah Valley we went.

 

 

Amador County resembles many other wine regions as it features rolling hills, vineyards, tasting rooms and little country roads. One way it does not resemble many California wine regions is that instead of quaint little towns dotted with tasting rooms, boutiques and cafes, the area is interspersed with somewhat less charming towns that are as likely to feature auto parts outlets as tasting rooms. Even the most touristy town, Sutter Creek, is right next to Jackson, a municipality whose main appeal seems to be its sleepiness. Even Sutter Creek goes very light on the tasting room presence (I only saw one), although it does seem to be a good place to shop for antiques or wander among Victorian gold rush architecture.

 

We were headed to the outskirts of Plymouth, a tiny town that clearly was not tourist oriented in the slightest. As we left the town proper and climbed into the Sierra foothills the views improved markedly.

 

After I had committed to the Grenache Charlie had offered me some Syrah and Mourvedre as well. Of course I have plenty of Syrah but the Mourvedre sounded appealing and I committed to 1 ton. So I was going to look at both Grenache and Mourvedre.

 

Northern California had experienced a massive heat wave the previous week, so Charlie had emailed me that the sugar levels had shot up on the Grenache and he wanted to pick soon. I called Sal the winemaker and he counseled patience, saying all the growers had become jittery and that the damage had been done regardless, so they should just wait for the vines to rehydrate the grapes and calm down.

 

I had talked to Charlie on the phone Tuesday to remind him of my visit. He had another surprise for me besides his urgent desire to Pick those Grapes Now! Some weeks earlier he had sent me an email saying that due to lower yields I could only expect 1 ton instead of 2. On the phone he now said I could expect ½ ton. He also claimed he had sent me an email saying as much, a complete fabrication. Once again I was feeling rather disrespected in the wine world. It almost didn't make sense to get ½ ton of Grenache. Almost but not quite, as now the strategy would have to be to make a Mourvedre with whatever Grenache I got as a blender.

 

Thus hot on the news of my reduced allocation I was in a bit of a sour mood regarding Charlie and his grapes.

 

We wound our way up to Renwood Winery, their enormous tanks gleaming in the sun; down a small road we found to entrance to Charlie's spread. Once on his property it was another ¼ mile up a dirt road until we reached a large Cape Cod style house. I rang the bell and, after some excited barking, a tall middle aged man answered the door. Charlie. My Northern climes grape vendor.    

After greetings all around and availment of bathroom facilities we stood around playing with the dog while Charlie paced around nervously fielding calls from what seemed to be more grape customers. From overhearing Charlie's side of the conversation I gleaned that while Charlie wanted to pick now, everyone (like me) wanted to wait a bit. He agreed to pick the following Friday (10 days hence) with a customer clearly more important to him than myself.

 

We followed him down to the vineyard, back outside the gate we had entered and looked at the Grenache grapes. Sal had told me that unless they were totally raisined, waiting would be advisable, which now seemed the prevailing opinion. The grapes were not raisined but tasted ripe; we all agreed that Friday was the way to go, Charlie disclosed to me that he was shorting everybody (including myself), mostly due to the frost (that damn Santa Barbara County frost, coming back to haunt me 400 miles to the North), and he admitted that he even considered shutting me out completely. Upon hearing this I was glad that I had showed up; if I had remained just an anonymous (and small) customer somewhere to the South he might have done so, but now I was a living, breathing, wine dude, so he felt obligated to get me my grapes. Of course there was also the small matter of breach of contract, as he had not wasted any time cashing the deposit check I'd sent him but in the wine world it's all about putting a romantic spin on things. At least first time around.

 

We ended up having a good visit, taking some time to taste the Mourvedre grapes (not ready) and talking about general wine stuff. It seems he would like less Zinfandel and more Grenache planted in his vineyard (he has some zinfandel still for sale), confirming the trend I'd seen in Paso Robles on a visit there some weeks earlier.

 

After an unremarkable "gourmet" Tuscan dinner in Jackson and a nice night at a local B & B it was off to Solano County to catch up on the Syrah vineyard and talk to Sal.

 

The Syrah vineyard is owned by a man named Steve Wirth who I had never met before; it was unclear how involved he was in the actual vineyard. I had always dealt with Roger King, the head of the Suisun Valley Wine Grape Growers Association. Roger had listed the grapes for sale and shown me around the area, drawn up the contract and generally acted like the man in charge.

 

I called Roger and arranged to meet him at GV Cellars, where we would all (hopefully including Sal) go over to the Wirth Vineyard (across the street from the winery) and look at grapes.

 

We rolled into GV Cellars, which was bustling with activity. Their annual harvest festival was set to kick off the next day so there were people milling around everywhere setting up party-related items and equipment.

 

The winery proper is in the back section of the main building, so we walked around to the back, accompanied by one of the friendly vineyard dogs. Just like last time the winery appeared to be in state of chaos. Someone was worker on what appeared to be a small crusher right at the entrance, fitting a new chain. The inside was packed with barrels and fermenters; immediately outside forklifts and various people were running around, some seemingly at random.

 

My initial impression of GV Cellars is that it resembled a winery I might run, if I ran a large winery that did a lot of outside work. I'm not sure this is a great thing - most winery operations are very clean and well organized places, with people doing their work slowly and pourposefully. GV is not too organized or clean from outward appearances, and has a lot of people rushing around, without much purpose. It honestly is a fun place though, due partly to the seemingly random nature of things.

 

We gave Sal a sample of the Grenache from Charlie's vineyard, which he took into the "lab" (a tiny room in the winery with a PH meter, a sink and some cupboards filled with, I guess, pipettes, vials and other testing paraphernalia. or maybe cookies and crackers). He came back and pronounced the brix 25.6 with a PH of 3.8.

 

Brix is the percentage of solids in the juice, essentially sugar content. PH is the degree of acidity in any solution (NOT the amount of acid, which in wine is mostly tartaric acid), with 7 representing a neutral reading. A solution below 7 is acid and above 7 is alkaline. A finished wine will come in with a PH of between 3 and 4 generally. A PH under 3.4 or so will taste notably acidic and a PH over 4 might be a little flabby. Wines with a high PH generally are not good agers, as the acid will provide the structure and the mild preservative effect to ensure longevity. There are many high alcohol, high fruit wines, especially from hot weather areas in California, that come in with PH values around 4or even higher - many of these taste pretty good, but what they have in common most of all is a blinking sign that says "drink me now - this is as good as it's going to get".

 

Since my Grenache allocation was going to be miniscule I didn't worry too much about the chemistry numbers, although I would perhaps prefer a tick or two lower on the PH side. The general equation for brix is slightly less than .6 degrees of alcohol per unit of brix so 25.6 brix ends up as roughly between 14.5% and 15% alcohol in a wine fermented totally dry, a value that was considered outlandish 30 years ago but is now well within normal for a California red.

 

After the brix/ph report Sal took me over to my barrels. My barrels! My guys! I had purchased 20 of the older barrels from Signorello sight unseen; Sal pointed out that they had snuck in an American oak barrel even though I'd been promised all French. Oh well. I'm overstocked anyway. A friend had asked me about getting a barrel as a garden decoration earlier that week and now I had just the thing for him.

 

The Sylvain barrels from Larkmead looked nice. I told Sal about my idea for a reserve syrah, barrel fermented, aged on its lees and to cap it, aged on its lees in the nice Sylvains. He liked the idea of creating a separate lot of wine just to see what it would be like. The lees aging idea is not that common for reds (or even whites in California) but you find it here and there. J Wilkes, a boutique pinot noir producer in SB County ages his reds on their lees and they're very nice. What this has to do with my syrah remains to be seen but I have enough of it to try some experiments.

 

Sal didn't have time to visit the syrah vineyard so Jason and I followed Roger over there. It looked the same as it had last time with the notable exception of purple grape clusters hanging off the vines. Ahhhhh, much nicer. As we were tasting our first grapes (noticeably unripe), I heard a howling in the distance, steadily getting louder. Coming up the small dir access road that runs through the vineyard a man wheeled a World War II vintage jeep around a bend towards us, accompanied by a large dog apparently trying to bite the right front tire of the moving vehicle. This was the source of the howling, as Fido was really making a racket while jousting with jeep. The jeep pulled up and there was Steve Wirth - he really existed.

 

Steve Wirth is a very tall, lean man. He looks like a farmer, although I don't know if he does that full time. I'm not sure he even makes a profit on the syrah. He also grows zinfandel at his vineyard, which does go to a commercial operation and it's a good sized vineyard - I could have gotten at least 12 tons of syrah if I had wanted to.

 

The Wirth Syrah vineyard has never produced commercial wine. This will be the fourth vintage of grapes from it, and it seems to me it's something of a make or break period for this venture, as I'm willing to put enough resources into the venture to produce it commercially. If my wine is less than good it's unclear who else will want to take a leap of faith.

 

Roger had told me the history of the venture: A winemaker from Sonoma had agreed to take the full production of syrah for 5 or 10 years; said winemaker had specified the vine spacing, clones, trellising, etc. In other words, everything. However when it was time to take the grapes he simply walked away and refused to buy any of it, let alone the full production. According to Roger he not only reneged on the agreement but refused to return phone calls or answer email. He wouldn't even tell Roger and Steve what clone is planted there. When Roger tells this story (I've heard it 3 times so far at least) the word asshole frequently punctuates his recap of the events.

 

A sad story it is indeed. Of course I don't know the other side of it. I don't rule out the possibility that the grapes are sub par and in fact I'm worried that they may not ripen fully. The vineyard is in a cool weather area, which is where you want to be in California but maybe it's too cool. After two weeks of record heat in Northern California the syrah grapes were noticeably unripe, and if they don't ripen fully this season they may not ripen in any year. Certainly I won't be around in the future to find out.

 

This sort of negativity is premature and I'm optimistic. In fact if the grapes ripen just enough I may have a complex and elegant syrah on my hands. As I keep reiterating, this year is a pilot project. Or did I say crapshoot?

 

Steve Wirth turned out to be a very solid, farmer type guy. For all I know he has twenty other vineyards, or maybe he supports himself as a software consultant and likes having a vineyard. He acts like a farmer, at one point complaining about the high cost of running the vineyard, as any good farmer would do. Or someone in the wine business.

 

We stood around talking and tasting unripe syrah grapes for a few more minutes. We took a couple of bunches back for Sal to have a look at and run some numbers on our return to GV Cellars. The numbers confirmed what I knew: brix was around 21, so at least 3 or 4 ticks to go. Roger is optimistic that they will ripen nicely in 2 to 3 weeks. Like I said, I'm with him.

 

Following my return to Los Angeles Charlie had a surprise for me: he was postponing the Grenache harvest until 2 local winemakers checked out the grapes and made the decision when to harvest. This was yet another example of my novice status in the wine industry and I'm starting to get very tired of it. First this guy had advertised 2 tons, then he decided I was getting 1 ton, then (without telling me until I came up there ) that was reduced to ½ ton. And now he was jerking me around on the harvest date we'd agreed on.

 

I had already arranged for Sal to go pick up the Grenache. It's 2 hours from Solano County to Amador, and of course Sal is working 12 hours a day during the crush period, so now I was going to look like I was jerking him around. I did not want to do this.

 

I had to tell Sal that the grapes might not be picked that Friday; here's my email:

 

Yo Sal

 

The grower is not picking on Friday, looks like late next week. Sorry for the confusion, he's jerking me around big time. I'll update you ASAP when he commits to a firm date.

 

MS

Here's his response:

 

I thought the quality from the samples you brought was already degrading.  Grenache has a tendency to become very unbalanced in late pickings, I'd rethink these grapes Mike, weather is supposed to be in the low 90's by Monday up there.  I'd hate to see you spend all this money for 90 gallons of Grenache you're not happy with.  Let me know what you think.

 

And here's my response to his response:

 

I agree w/ you completely but the problem is the guy sells a lot more of it
to winemakers in Amador who are focused on fruit bombs (it all tastes like
zin no matter what the varietal). So these winemakers have decided on an
extra week.

 

Yes, I was getting frustrated enough to start ragging on everybody, not just Charlie. These damn Amador County growers. It's all part of the massive zinification conspiracy.

 

I forwarded Sal's email to Charlie and voila! Charlie was picking Rousanne on Friday, so he could have his crew pick the Grenache afterwards. Of course, since I was a more or less unimportant customer (ah, that frustration ...), the Grenache would be picked last, meaning in the hot sun, and it would ride back another 90 minutes in the hot sun.

 

When you pick grapes you want to do it as early as possible. The simple fact is that the grapes taste better cold, in addition to the negative effects of sitting in the sun (or even shade) as the temperature rises. Sal had bins with lids, so that would help, but I was still worried. Doing it all by remote control wasn't helping my mood either.

 

After going back and forth with Charlie a bit (at one point in a phone conversation I told him we might as well throw the grapes in a toilet rather than transporting them back in the sun) he promised to have them picked by 11:00 am and keep them in the shade.

 

So we were on. It turns out Sal didn't get there until 12:00 anyway.

 

Sal and I had agreed to do a cold soak on the Grenache, so if he could them back to Green Valley intact the thinking is they would be more or less okay. One of the overriding factors in the whole scheme is that there's so little of it that the last little iota of quality and nuance is moot - it's going into a blend and it will be the decided minority in whatever blend it ends up in.

 

Charlie called late Friday and complimented me on Sal's professionalism. He assured me the grapes were beautiful and all was well. What else would he say?

 

 

I received an email from Sal today (Thursday). After the cold soak he inoculated the grapes with yeast on Monday and they're currently fermenting. He says they smell "very bubble gummy". I don't think this is a good thing at this point, but at least they don't smell like rotten fish or fertilizer. Bubble gum is not really a flavor component I had in mind though.

 

One of the problems Sal had relayed to me was that the fermentations at GV were going very fast. He said in the email he would press it off Saturday, which means a 6 day fermentation. When I was up there he remarked that a large lot of Sauvignon Blanc has also fermented in 5 to 7 days. Generally you want to ferment your wine around 14 days. The slower the better (to a point). This seems to be directly connected to GV's equipment. Normally fermenting tanks have cooling sleeves in order to slow down and extend fermentation. GV has some big tanks, but for the smaller stuff I think they just leave it in the winery and let it go.

 

So I'm glad this small lot of Grenache is just about ready for barrel - I'm learning what's going on up there. I'll be going up for the syrah harvest and I need to address a couple of things with Sal, most notably the fermentation times. I have to insist we try to get to 14 days, or at least a few more than 6. Whether I have enough influence to get them to do this, and whether their facilities will even support it is another issue entirely.

 

The other factor I'm worried about is the cold soak. I would like to cold soak the entire lot of syrah, 3 days or so for most of it and 6 or 7 days for our potential reserve. I'm not sure this place, cramped and chaotic as it is, has the ability to let 6 tons of grapes sit around in a cold soak.

 

A cold soak is a common method of extracting additional flavors, tannins and (primarily) color from grapes. Additional chemical reactions occur that extract more phenols from the juice and skins over the period of cold soaking. Phenols are the flavor components of grapes and wine.

 

There is no downside to it if you have the proper facilities and the proper attention. There is tremendous downside if either of those two factors don't exist - if the temperature is not kept cold and if the grapes are not hit with SO2 once or twice you can get premature fermentation with native yeasts, bacterial infection, etc. Bad stuff. So again I'm worried - I may have to settle for just cold soaking the "reserve" (only about 1½ tons) and plunging forward with the rest.

 

The silver lining in all of it is that the mourvedre will come in so late we can probably do whatever we want in terms of soaking and fermentation because that will almost certainly be the last lot of grapes into GV - Charlie told me it never ripens before late October.

 

Time to check in with Roger on syrah ripeness. I hope he doesn't tell me it's tasting like bubblegum.