Viognier and Pinot Grigio Harvest in Virginia, Part 1

Our first harvest of the season at Three Fox Vineyards in Delaplane, VA occurred on Friday September 7th. It was a beautiful day, but the remnants of some tropical storms were supposed to blow through later that weekend, and we wanted to get the fruit off the vine before that happened. The last thing you want to have happen right before harvest is a big rainfall: the vines suck up the water and pump it into the grapes, effectively diluting their flavors at best, and possibly even bursting the fruit on the vine and losing crop. We had tested the fruit just a few days prior (more on that in a sec) and knew we were within the "harvestable" window, so rather than take the chance with the rain we decided to harvest perhaps a few days before what may have been the optimum time. This is not at all unusual, as especially in Virginia you are at the mercy of fickle weather systems and must adapt your harvest schedule appropriately.

Determining When to Harvest
To understand the decision of when to harvest, you need to know a little bit about how grapes grow and ripen. From the perspective of a winemaker, grapes go through two phases: an initial growth phase, during which time the berry size steadily increases, and a following ripening phase during which berry growth slows, sugar levels start increasing and acidity starts dropping (pH increases) [Ignore the anthocyanin in the cool cool graph I stole from the Texas Cooperative Extension page]. The transition between these two phases is called veraison - this is a French term which means "change of color of the grape berries". The berries start softening, and their color starts changing from fresh growth green to the color appropriate for their varietal (i.e., "red wine grapes" start getting reddish purple, "white wine grapes" start getting yellow-gold). Shortly after veraison is when you want to start taking readings of the sugar levels in the grapes to gauge how the ripening process is progressing.

Sugars levels in a liquid is measured in brix. The unit of measure- ment for brix is "degrees", so when you take a brix reading of the grapes, you'll record a result of something like "19.5 degrees brix". To take a brix reading of the grapes, you first walk around each "block" of vines (Three Fox "blocks" are 30 rows long) in the vineyard, and take a random sampling of 15 or so grapes. This random sample should include grapes from the beginning, middle and end of the vines, as well as from both of the East and West facing sides of the vines (Three Fox rows are oriented N-S). You then allow the grapes to rest a bit, and cool down to 65 degrees F or so (winery temps). Then you mash them up and use a refractometer (or fancier instrument, but a refractometer gives you a precise enough reading at this point) to measure the brix by placing a couple drops of the juice on the plate and looking through the viewer and taking your reading.

So, we had done this with our Viognier and Pinot Grigio a few days prior, and knew that we were within the "harvestable" window in terms of brix levels (I don't have my notes, so I can't tell you exactly what the brix levels were, but they were in the low 20s). Thus we decided to harvest the fruit before a possible storm could negatively affect their quality.

Next Up: Harvest and Crush
I think this has been a rather scary post for the non-technically inclined, with lots of weird terms like "brix" and "refractive index" thrown into it, so I'm cutting this one off. My next post will detail the harvest, crush, press and yeast addition to start off the fermentation of the Viognier and Pinot Grigio, and will have cool pictures rather than boring graphs!

A Mini-batch of Chardonnay

After our final bottling of the 2006 vintage at Three Fox, there was much cleaning of tanks and re-arranging of the winery that had to occur. Since our indoor temperature-controlled space is pretty limited, we had moved several (empty) stainless steel fermentation tanks outside to make room for the oak barrels that we aged the red wines in. Now that those barrels, too, were empty after bottling, we had to reverse the process, cleaning out the oak barrels with soda ash and moving the stainless steel tanks back inside.

Easing into the 2007 Vintage
The first harvest to come in was a small batch of 800+ lbs (not quite half a ton) of Chardonnay. Grapes come in to the winery in small, sturdy plastic containers called "lugs". Each lug holds approximately 30 pounds of freshly harvested grapes. (I have since determined that lug is a very appropriate term, as you spend a considerable amount of time and effort lugging them around!) Lugs are filled to just below the top of the container such that when they are stacked, none of the grapes get squished by the container above it.

Whole Cluster Press
For this small of a batch of grapes (~800 lbs), we have to use a small 1/4 ton press as there isn't enough mass to sufficiently fill our (much nicer, faster and exceeding less messy) 3 ton rotating bladder press (I'll show you this bad boy in subsequent posts). The "technique" we used for this Chardonnay was "whole cluster press", meaning the entire grape cluster (grapes, stems and all) are all dumped into the the press. An alternate method sometimes employed for whites is to send them through a destemmer first, to gently jiggle all of the grapes from the stems, and then only the grapes are pressed. Or, you may send the grapes through a crusher/destemmer, where the grapes are first destemmed, then crushed - breaking the skins and allowing the juice to flow freely out of them - before being pumped into a wine press. This last method is the one we used for our Viognier and Pinot Grigio, and I'll describe it in a later post.

So, here's a picture of the small 1/4 ton wine press we used for the Chardonnay. Grapes are simply dumped into the top of the press, which has a large bladder in the center of it. It's a bit tricky to see the actual press in this picture as it's been wrapped in plastic, but the wine press is made of wooden slats with a small space between each slat. These had been soaked in water for a day or two prior to use so that the wood has absorbed some water and swollen in size, pressing close together. Typically, you line the inside of the press with a mesh screen, which prevents grapes and seeds and things from squishing through the wooden slats, clogging them up and making a mess. We did not have such a screen available, so wrapped the outside in plastic to catch the "burps" of grape skins and seeds that would occasionally squirt out during press.

In the center of the press a large rubber bladder which will eventually be filled with water (this is a hydraulic press - our larger press is pneumatic and uses compressed air which is much faster). As the bladder expands, the grape clusters are pressed against the wooden slats, breaking them open and forcing the juice from the grapes. The juice runs down to the bottom of the press, where it is collected in a clean bucket. We then carried the bucket to a stainless steel fermentation tank, and carefully poured it in. Voila - we're ready to start making wine! And the only thing we need to do that is some yeast.

Fermentation
Since we want to end up with wine and not grape juice, we employ yeast to convert the sugar in the grapes into alcohol in the process of fermentation. Yeast occurs naturally in the environment, and there are generally several strains of yeast living on the grape skins, in the winery, everywhere. It is possible (even likely) that if we did nothing at this point, our grape juice would start fermenting naturally from the "wild" yeasts of the vineyard. However, each strain of yeast has its own characteristics and ferments in a slightly different way, some proceeding faster or slower, some producing hydrogen sulfide or other unpleasantness, having different alcohol tolerances, etc etc. Thus most winemakers like to stick with a known variable and add in a specific strain of yeast rather than take a gamble and see what happens to develop.

There are numerous strains of yeast commercially available to pick from. The type of yeast we used for this Chardonnay is called Lavlin #D47, which is especially recommended for white varieties. Much like the yeast you might buy from the grocery store for baking, D47 comes in packets in a powdered form. To determine how much D47 to add, we multiply the volume of grape juice in gallons by 0.75, and the result is the number of grams of yeast to add. The yeast is not added directly into the stainless steel tank however - you must first "wake up" the yeast from their powdered dormancy. To do this, we filled a bucket with a couple of gallons of the pressed juice, then added the entire amount of yeast for the whole batch into the bucket. We stirred this up, then let it sit for about 30 minutes.

When we returned, the brew was bubbling nicely (the result of the yeast releasing carbon dioxide) and the smell you would normally attribute to baking bread was in the air. Thus we knew our yeast had taken off and were happily munching on the grape sugars, so at this point we are safe to pour the bucket of yeast into the tank full of waiting juice. And that is largely the end of the story for this Chardonnay for several weeks, until the fermentation has concluded (i.e., all of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, resulting in a "dry" wine and killing off the yeast for lack of food) and we start racking the wine from tank to tank to remove the sediment ("lees"). More on that process in a later post. Next up: Viognier and Pinot Grigio!

Makin' Wine in Virginia...

So you may have noticed my posting frequency dropped off a cliff. After a fun summer of vacations, I was ready to get back into the thick of it when an opportunity came along that I just couldn't pass up: starting in the end of August, I have been working as a part-time winery assistant for Three Fox Vineyards! Luckily I have been able to work some flexibility into my "day job" so that I can work at Three Fox on Wednesdays and Fridays (and my wife and I both continue to work periodic weekends)!

This has been an amazing learning experience for me so far - I started just as harvest season rolled around, and there certainly has been plenty to do! So I think I am going to start posting about the ins-and-outs of working at a small, family-owned winery during harvest for the next couple of months. I think this should provide whatever readers have stuck with me through my summer hiatus with an interesting and educational look at winemaking in Virginia.

Out with the Old, In with the New
One of the first things we had to do in preparation for the coming harvest was bottle up the remaining 2006 wine! We'll be needing those tanks and barrels that the wine is sitting in for this year's fruit, so time to bottle everything up. It doesn't make sense for a small (~3,000 cases per year) winery to own their own bottling equipment, and so what most folks do is rent out a "bottling truck". If you saw this thing driving down the highway, there's no way you would think it contained a mobile bottling lab!

It's a bit of a tight squeeze on the inside, with a bottle washer, wine dispenser, corking machine, foil - adder - and - heat - it - to - shrink - it machine, labeler, and conveyor belts everywhere (no, I have no idea of what everything is called, but it's fascinating to watch!). And let me tell you, this thing really MOVES - we were pumping out a case of wine approximately every 10 seconds! "Frantic" only begins to describe the sense of urgency you feel as more than one bottle a second is hurtling down the line at you, to be yanked from the belt and shoved into boxes by hand - there is literally no time for mistakes. Luckily, bottling is an entertaining enough event that we had a good crop of volunteers there, so someone could step in and swap out positions once the repetition of whatever it was you were doing started getting to you.

I don't have the exact numbers right now, but we ended up bottling several hundred cases of wine in the matter of a few hours. Not bad for a days work! And now all of our stainless steel tanks are empty and ready for cleaning in preparation for fermentation.

Timeline
So this final bottling run actually occurred in late August. Not to ruin the surprise, but we have already harvested our Viognier and Pinot Grigio and pressed them along with a load of Vidal from one of our growers and started their fermentations, and we've also received a load of Chambourcin grapes from one of our growers which we crushed and started fermentation. None of the other reds are ready for harvest yet, so I have a bit of a breather in which to catch up to the present with my posts. My next post will discuss how we determined when the Viognier and Pinot Grigio were ready to harvest, what goes on during harvest, and what wine chemistry we performed on the newly pressed juice prior to fermentation. So stick around - it should be an interesting next couple of months!

Summer = Vacations...

Wow, so blogging in the summertime is a tricky affair. As a government employee, I'm blessed with a low wage but copious amounts of vacation and comp time. My wife and I have been putting that to good use this summer, and the results are showing in my meager blog postings. Our latest trip was out to Portland, Oregon and through the Willamette Valley wine country - I'll cover that in my next post. This post, I want to do a couple mini-reviews on a few of the more interesting wines we've had this summer...


I arranged the bottles in no particular order, so I may as well start left-to-right...


2006 Strauss Samling 88 (Scheurebe)
I think the important things to remember from that name are "Strauss" (the winery) and "Scheurebe" (the grape). Weingut Strauss ("Weingut" is the German way of saying "winery" or "vineyard") is an Austrian vineyard that makes a variety of interesting wines, one of which is from the Scheurebe grape.

The Scheurebe is a cross between Riesling and Sylvaner, and my immediate thought upon first tasting it was if Germans were to make Viogniers, this is what it would taste like. It has a flowery, peachy sweet nose that really jumps out of the glass at you, and some of that peach comes through to the tongue, with a stony mineraliness and a nice lemon acidity to it. It's sweet yet dry, which I find refreshing in German/Austrian wines as so many of them seem to contain a hint (if not more) of residual sugar. The Scheurebe also had an appealing golden yellow color in the glass, which added to its allure. Purchased for $12 at Finewine.Com in Gaithersburg, MD, I'd say this wine had Good Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR). And if you bought it somewhere that wasn't Maryland, you'd pay several bucks less for it which would make it a great "alternative summer wine"!


2005 Pisano Cisplatino Tannat Merlot
Always bravely going where few have gone before (vinologically speaking), I picked up a wine from Uruguay a while back. I bet most Americans would have trouble naming the appropriate continent that Uruguay is located on (South America), much less point to it on a map. But regardless of where it's located (in between Argentina and Brazil along the Atlantic Coast), the important thing here is that they make some pretty good wine!

So the real reason I picked this up is because I saw that it was made with 60% Tannat (and 40% Merlot). I have encountered Tannat a couple of times in the past: it is a major player in wines from the Cahors region of Southwestern France; it is also grown at a handful of vineyards in Virginia, particularly at Hillsborough where they blend it into their Ruby wine (all of their wines are named after gemstones). But the interesting thing about Tannat (undoubtedly named due to its high tannin levels) is that, much like Malbec in Argentina or Carmenere in Chile, it has found a perfect home in South America - specifically in Uruguay, where it is considered the national grape.

Getting on to the wine - it had a very pleasant nose, spicy, some tobacco perhaps. The wine was lighter in color than I was expecting, given the whole tannat=tannin thing. It most closely resembled a grenache, actually. On the tongue was the spice, with black pepper and bright berries. I think this wine was around $12 at Total Wine in McLean, VA, and for that price I'd give it a Good QPR - mainly because it's "different", and I always like trying new wines.


2004 Mas de Guiot Cabernet-Syrah
I'm not sure what made me pick up this bottle in the store, but it sure as heck wasn't the label - I don't believe they could make this wine appear any less interesting if they made a deliberate attempt to do so. The French seem particularly afflicted with "lame label syndrome" - one of the many traditions that I think they need to change if they want to become more competitive in a global wine market... Anyway, I'm glad I grabbed a bottle despite the label, because it ended up being really good!

The wine was made from 60% Cabernet Sauvignon and 40% Syrah, and came from the heart of Southern Rhône near Nîmes. It had a big nose of black pepper and ripe cherries. On the tongue there was the ripe cherries in front giving way to deeper blackberry and tobacco, with a black pepper / spice finish. It had great tannin structure, and excellent overall balance. Kind of gave me the impression of a superb Argentinian Cab for some reason. For $16 at Total Wine, I'd give this a Very Good QPR.


2004 Hillsborough Opal
Hillsborough is one of our favorite Virginia wineries; they produce all blends, and as I just mentioned above each is named after a gemstone. The Opal is a blend of Viognier and Chardonnay, making for a crisp, medium-bodied white wine. It had a "timid nose" (to use wine snob speak), but quite a bit of flavor: lemon citrus, red apple, pineapple, and perhaps some peach notes. It was a bit sweeter than I was expecting, but it the cornucopia of fruit pulled it off somehow.

I didn't write down a price, but being a small boutique Virginia winery I'm guessing this was in the low $20s. Given that, I'd give this wine an "OK" QPR - you could probably find something similar for less, but probably not from Virginia. I think Virginia is starting to craft really distinctive wines with certain varietals, and Viognier is definitely a grape that is starting to thrive here. So the Opal should probably get some extra QPR points simply for being an interesting Virginia wine.


2005 Hacienda Araucano Carmenére
First off, I obviously need to apologize for the picture quality - it was late (and dark), I was trying not to flash out the cool watermarked image on the label, and I just snapped a single picture and hoped for the best. Clearly, the best is not what occurred. But you can see it well enough to identify it in a store sometime I bet...

So - another Chilean Carmenére: I told you before that I just love these wines! If you've never heard of Carmenere and what to learn a bit more about it, you can read my past post about Anakena, another Chilean Carmenére.

This Carmenére was also quite good. I misplaced my tasting notes, which were written on some scratch piece of paper while watching a movie, so I can't tell you exactly how it was good, but trust me that it was. :-)

This wine was purchased for $13 at Rodman's, and for that price I'd say the Araucano (like virtually every Chilean Carmenére that I've had) has Very Good QPR. It definitely gets a spot on my "buy again" list!

OK, mini catch-up post complete - more regularly scheduled wine commentary on the way!

Vote for your Favorite Virginia Winery!

I have a big long explanation coming of why I haven't had any posts in almost a month now, but I wanted to sneak in a quick announcement first: the Virginia Wine Festival is coming up September 15th & 16th at the Morven Park Equestrian Center in Leesburg, VA. They have an online poll to vote for your favorite Virginia winery, and I think it would be really cool if Three Fox Vineyards, the winery that Kris and I volunteer at, won! We really do think it produces some of the best wines Virginia has to offer, but when you factor in the overall Three Fox Experience of visiting the winery, chatting with the owners, relaxing in a hammock down by the creek or playing horseshoes, croquet or bocce out on the lawn, we think it's tops!

If you've had the chance to stop by and visit and agree with us - please click on over to the Virginia Wine Festival Voting Page, and cast your vote for Three Fox Vineyards! And if you haven't paid us a visit, or live out-of-state, you could take our word for it that Three Fox really is terrific and click on over and vote for us anyway! :-)