This past Thursday I headed up I-80 to Davis to attend RAVE 2008. There were a number of cool presentations, but the final talk of the day by Dr. Mark Matthews was by far the most provocative.

Matthews covered a lot of ground in his talk, which was an overview of the research he had conducted on the factors relating to wine quality over the past 25 or so years.

The main theme was that a lot of the dogmas long held by researchers, enologists and viticulturists in the wine industry might be based on a poor analysis of the data.

Dogma #1: Vine Balance

For instance, winegrowers talk a lot about vine balance. Part of Matthews’ talk was designed to show that vine balance appears to be a nebulous concept of little real value since the way we measure it (comparing grape yield to the amount of dead plant matter trimmed off each vine at the end of the year) is flawed.

The acknowledged range for the ratio for crop weight to pruning weights is between 5 and 10. There have been many studies that back this up and wine literature is rife with nods toward the idea.

The problem is that when you graph pruning weight ratios along with wine sensory evaluation data, you don’t find a correlation. Instead what you find is that nearly all wine, both good and not so good, falls within the 5-10 ratio.

In other words, if as a grower you were hoping that by keeping your vine in balance you would give yourself a better chance to make good wine, you’d be wrong. Bad wine is as likely to be made as good wine.

So obviously there are other, more important factors in play. The most we could say is that a 5-10 ratio might be necessary, but not sufficient for high quality wine. There’s more to the story than just vine balance.

Dogmas #2 and #3: Berry size and Low yield

What else is thought to contribute to wine quality besides vine balance?

Lots of folks (myself included) feel berry size is another key indicator. The smaller the berry, the better.

Low yield (sometimes a byproduct of vine balance, sometimes not) is also accepted to be a driver of quality. I’m a big believer in low yields as well.

But here again it seems that the whole process is much more complicated than simply “grow small berries and limit your crop.” Here’s a cut and paste from Matthew’s lab website:

That small berries are superior to big berries, and that high yield translates into low quality, are two prevalently held dogmas within the wine industry. Data suggest that it is the journey rather than the destination that determines wine grape composition and wine sensory attributes.

We have found that the composition of the berry is more dependent on how it got to a size than on the size itself, and that what may matter more to fruit composition and wine sensory attributes than just yield per se, within a wide range of yields, are the conditions under which the fruit arrived at said yield. See the research summary figure below:

Click to enlarge

“It’s not the destination, but the journey that matters.” Interesting stuff.

Could Global Warming Be Dogma #4?

And then today I stumbled across this, from an ABC Radio interview with an Australian biologist named Jennifer Marohasy:

Duffy (the interviewer): “Is the Earth still warming?”

Marohasy (the biologist): “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Last March I wrote about a presentation to the Napa Valley Winegrowers I attended that suggested that global warming might actually be good for Napa winegrowers. I was very surprised at the time, and I still am.

Now I hear that temps have leveled off globally or even dropped? The mind reels.

But there’s even more. From the interview:

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”

The point of this huge spew is, I suppose, that there are huge gaps in our knowledge.

When we taste grapes in the vineyard and decide to pick, do we really know how the flavors we taste then will translate to finished wine? Or are we just guessing? Do we really know which of our vineyard practices are actually contributing to higher wine quality? Or are we just following tradition and accepted wisdom? Is the earth really on fire? Or, in our human hubris, are we underestimating the planet’s ability to adapt and survive?

On this most holy of weekends, these are some of the questions that keep me up at night.

I thought that since I shared my recipe for this year’s crush I’d go ahead and outline the protocols other producers have used in the past. You know, for comparison’s sake.

The following are general outlines for crafting pinot and will be influenced immensely by the quality of the grapes in a given year.

Besides being a useful practical guide, I think it’s fascinating to see how the craft has grown and progressed through the years. And since they’ve been at this thing for just a little while longer than we have it’s only natural that this list is weighted heavily toward French vintners.

Note: Much of the producer specific information presented here is culled and re-purposed from Ben Rotter’s excellent article “Techniques for Pinot Noir”. The article can be found here.

The Traditional Burgundian Approach (note: highly generalized)

• Hand harvested
• Typically 100% de-stemming
• Wild yeast ferment
• Approximately 10 day fermentation
• Ferment in small open-top vessels
• Punch down every 6 hours
• 12-18 months ageing in French oak
• Egg white fining
• No filtration

From this basic template the folks back in France eventually split down distinctly different paths in their search for more extraction and flavor, or for more transparency in their wines.

Henri Jayer

One of the most famous and influential is Henri Jayer, who is credited with inventing the pre-fermentation cold soak.

Jayer thought that saignée would reduce the life of a pinot and so never practiced it. He also avoided fermenting in wood vats because he thought that they gave the wine funky aromatics.

Jayer popularized the idea that wine is grown in the vineyards and prided himself on the fact that he took a very hands-off approach to winemaking (though you could argue that the cold soak is the very definition of a manipulative winemaking technique).

Jayer’s wines found favor with a pretty diverse set of palates. The co-owner of Domain de la Romanee Conti tasted his 1978 vintage and reportedly said that his were they type of wines that they aspired to at DRC. Robert Parker was also a huge fan of Jayer’s wines because of their concentration and elegance.

Of all the Burgundian winemakers Jayer is one of the most revered and celebrated, and his style influenced California and Oregon pinot noir winemaking immeasurably.

Jayer passed this last September.

His protocol looked something like this:

The Henri Jayer Approach

• Low yields in the vineyard
• Late harvesting to maximize flavor
• 5-7 days cold soak
• No saignée
• Native yeast
• Ferment in open cement tanks
• 18 months in 100% new oak before bottling
• Fining with egg whites until 1990
• No filtering

Guy Accad

Guy Accad’s name is fairly reviled in French winemaking circles these days, but interstingly he was heavily influenced by Jayer. Accad simply took Jeyer’s pre-fermentation cold soak to a new level, stretching it out to 10 days. But perhaps the most controversial technique he used was a regime of heavy sulphur addition that allowed his cold soaks to clear 10 days without spoiling.

Accad consulted with many of the best producers in Burgundy before his style of wine fell out of favor.

His recipe included the following:

The Guy Accad Method

• Advocated densely spaced vineyards
• Late picking to enhance flavors
• 50-75% destem
• Sulphuring at the crusher in large amounts (300-400 ppm)
• Extended pre-fermentation cold maceration 7-10 days long (41-50°F)
• Fermenting slow at cool temperatures for around 25 days

Domaine Jean Grivot

It is interesting to contrast the protocol above with the one currently employed by Domaine Jean Grivot, a producer that once employed Accad. Their recent offerings have garnered scores in the 90s by critics like Alan Meadows and Steve Tanzer, and neither are very big fans of concentrated, dark colored pinot.

Still, the recipe they use looks a lot like Jayer and Accad’s, the main difference being a more restrained use of oak.

• Very dense planting (around 4500 vines per acre)
• Crop thinning at the end of August/beginning of September
• Careful grape selection/sorting
• 95% destemming
• 4 day cold maceration
• Native yeast
• 14-18 day fermentation with daily punching down and pumping over
• Approx. 40 percent new oak
• Addition of tannin powder to stabilize color and avoid oxidation
• 18-20 months in oak with an average of two rackings during this time
• No fining or filtering

Interesting stuff. I’ll continue this series next week with some producers that are known for their more restrained use of winemaking techniques. See you then.

I promised a cool annoucement and today I’m delivering. But first I’m going to subject you to our tale of licensing woe. If you’d rather skip ahead to the goodies, just skim down to the heading “Follow the Evolution of a Pinot Noir” below.

Our Tale of Licensing Woe

I mentioned earlier that we had some licensing issues this year, and that was quite the understatement. Early this year (March to be exact) I contacted a very reputable compliance consulting firm and hired them to shepherd Capozzi LLC through the maze of federal, state and local regulations that you must traverse to make and sell wine commercially. They had many years in business and after talking with the owner I felt they were a perfect choice to help us get the nasty process of getting an AP (a license that allows you to legally share space in a community winery as if it were your own) out of the way.

Since we weren’t yet ready to break ground on the winery itself, I decided to sign on with a new custom crush outfit in Santa Rosa called Vinify. It was their first year and the owner Justin seemed excited about providing a space for all sorts of small local producers to make a small batches of high quality wine. His terms were very generous (unfettered access to lab instruments, free dry ice etc.) and the folks making wine there there seemed like a good bunch. I was excited to get some wine into production in advance of our actually building our winery for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was to have some cash flow coming in our first year in the new winery. Things were looking good.

Keep Your Friends Close…And Your Consultants Closer

After a couple emails and a telephone call with the consultant I figured things were being handled and put the whole compliance business out of my mind. Silly Josh. Then June rolled around and I noticed that every other producer at Vinify had their notice posted on the door of the winery. Everyone except for us. I emailed our compliance expert, who had done the same work for the rest of Vinify’s clients, and discovered that our application had somehow “fallen through the cracks.” Nothing had been done. At all.

So long story long, we were SOL. Without an AP license Capozzi is unable to make or sell wine commercially in the US, much less ship to all the states represented in our mailing list. A little disappointed (ok, a lot disappointed) I contacted Morgan, Alan and some other folks and sold off the majority of our grapes.

Brainstorming

In the end it was my job to keep on top of the consultant, so the blame lies with me and I take full responsibility for the failure. But at the same time I was shaking my fists at the sky wondering what good consultants are for if they can just arbitrarily forget about clients.

I also racked my brain to try and come up with some way to take this huge disappointment and turn it into an opportunity. I especially wanted to find a way to try and delight the folks who have been so supportive of our little venture at such an early stage.

Well, here’s what I came up with. I’m excited about it and I hope the folks who’ve been following our progress will be as well.

Follow The Evolution of a Pinot Noir

In the next month or so (after malolactic fermentation is finished) I’m happy to report that we’ll be sending out two 375 ml half-bottles to each of the folks on the samples list. The wine in the half-bottles will be from the lot I just finished fermenting – naked, with no oak influence. One bottle will be to open and taste immediately, the other to save.

I’ll follow the initial two half-bottles with another two 375s after barrel aging is complete (roughly a year from now) so that you can get a feel for the evolution of pinot as it takes on oak flavors and aromas. Again, one bottle will be to open immediately and the second will be to save.

Finally 18 months from today I’ll send a full 750 ml, bottle aged pinot to each person on the samples list. Now’s the chance for each of you to crack open the two 375s you’ve been dutifully cellaring. You’ll be able to pour a glass of each of the pinots, each sample from a different stage of development, compare them to the finished wine and reflect on the interesting changes that occur during Élevage.

Hopefully you’re as excited about this experiment as I am. I’m not positive, but it’s a distinct possibility that something like this hasn’t been done before. We’ll truly be pinot pioneers! Sweet.

So to sum up, here’s what’ll be headed your way at various times over the next year if you’re on the samples list:

• Two 375 ml bottle of ’07 pinot post malolactic but pre-oak
• Two 375 ml bottles of ’07 pinot post barrel aging but pre-bottle aging
• One full 750 ml bottle of finished, bottle aged ’07 pinot

If we have any extra after the initial samples go out I’ll open up the samples list to newcomers. Also, technically these wine samples are personal gifts from me, a home winemaker, to you. You won’t be charged anything, including shipping. This is to keep everything (hopefully) on the up-and-up with the Feds.

I’ll be sending an email out to those of you on the list later this week to confirm that you would like to participate.

Free A’s Tickets

And finally, I have 4 tickets to Saturday’s (Sept 29) Oakland A’s game vs. the hated Las Angeles Angels of Anaheim available to anyone who wants them!

The seats are great (just ask Tina of Wine Broad) and included is a pinotblogger tee shirt and a parking pass as well, so all you’ll have to pay for is beer and hot dogs. Good times.

All I ask is that you snap a photo of yourself at the game wearing the shirt and send it in to me. Fair trade if you ask me.

Just shoot me an email at josh@pinotblogger.com if you’d like them.

Thanks again for reading. And samples list people, I’ll be talking to you soon!

If you’re just joining us, part 1 in this series is here and you can find part 2 here.

Also congrats to my sister Sara and new brother-in-law Ryan Bradley who got hitched last Saturday at Viansa winery! Hope you’re enjoying Rome guys!

Ahh, fermentation. The time when the real winemakers get to do their work.

Choosing a yeast has become quite a process. Local labs and supply houses have pages and pages of yeast strains to pick from, each promising to provide some combination of fruity esters, improved mouthfeel or color extraction. Trial and error is really the only way to know for sure which strains will work best with your particular fruit, and without that experience it can be a bit of a shot in the dark.

Initially I was thinking of going with a natural ferment using indigenous yeast (yeast that hitchhikes in from the vineyard on the skins of the berries). However after talking with Morgan at Bedrock, who went au natural with his ferment of our fruit, I decided against it. According to Morgan there was a heart-attack inducing 2-day lag before the yeast took off, and when it did take off, it really took off.

Fermentation temps quickly reached into the 90s and Morgan had to swiftly add dry ice to cool things off so the potentially heat-sensitive yeast didn’t end up killing themselves. The whole thing was hot and quick, finishing up in 3 or 4 days. While I’m intrigued to see how Morgan’s wine turns out, this wasn’t what I had in mind for our juice. I wanted a long cool ferment to try and preserve any floral and fruity aromas created during the ferment, and that meant going with a reliable commercial yeast strain.

Mein Führer! I can walk!

So, instead of letting the freeloading, carpetbagging yeast have their fun, I went with the tried-and-true Assmanshausen strain. It’s a great yeast for pinot, adds some fruity aromas and is a reliably cool and slow fermenter. But for me the best part of using Assmanshausen is that you can’t say the word without raising your voice and channeling Dr. Strangelove. Try it for yourself. ASS-mans-hau-sen! Sweet.

Most commercial yeast are sent to you sleeping peacefully in a sort of suspended animation, awaiting a bit of moisture to waken them from their slumber. And like a sleeping child the yeast can wake up in a good mood ready to eat and play, or they can wake up cranky and destructive. Your goal is to make sure they are gently prodded awake and cuddled lovingly in a nice warm blanket of nutrients. Then you add a little must, just to give them a taste. They’re still dazed and you don’t want to shock the little fellas. Gradually you bring their environment down to the same temperature as the rest of the must and set them loose. Then you wait and pray.

Assmanshausen has about a 24 hour lag phase where the yeast kind of lounge around doing nothing. Maybe they’re preparing for the hard work ahead, or perhaps they’re just shiftless. In any event, after a day they finally get hungry and start to eat and reproduce.

While I patiently waited for my soldiers to get off their duffs and do their duty, I decided I wanted to experiment with some fermentation tannins.

Tannin Management

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the fermentation decisions I made would probably outrage the purists out there, and this was it. First though, a bit of winemaking theory.

During fermentation a couple interesting things happen that affect the beautiful, velvety skin tannins in pinot.

Pretty early on a bunch of horny little proteins are extracted from the grapes. These beer-goggled frat boys don’t care what kind of tannins they hook up with. They just want to score with whatever’s closest, then drop out of solution with them to a private room at the bottom of the tank. They’re every father’s worst freakin’ nightmare.

To compound the problem, the first tannins released into the wine are the virtuous, perfect skin tannins responsible for pinot’s famous velvety smooth mouthfeel. I mean, you work hard to raise these tannins correctly; to protect them from strangers, birds and mold. And then along come these horn-dog proteins looking to defrock your babies, to completely remove a large portion of them from the wine and to generally defile everything you’ve worked so hard for. It’s a pretty serious situation.

So I decided to do what any good father would do and protect my precious tannins. The best way to do this isn’t to try to beat the proteins, it’s to distract them. You accomplish this by crashing the party with a gaggle of filthy, whorish reactive tannins.

Reactive Tannins (aka Dirty Sluts)

Reactive tannins are the dirty little sluts of the tannin world and are just as horny as the proteins. Throwing them in the mix early is like unleashing an army of platinum blonde, plastic-fantastic strippers on the delighted frat boy proteins.

The proteins end up leaving your wholesome tannins alone and available for more respectable activities, like getting hitched to an anthocyanin and stabilizing color in your wine. Even better, those that don’t marry an anthocyanin will happily stay at home in the wine and provide the luscious mouthfeel that helps make drinking pinot such a pleasurable experience. At least that’s the theory.

The most traditional way to make more tannins available during fermentation is to just ferment in a large oak vessel. Unfortunately I didn’t have one available. Other options include powdered chestnut tannins, which are highly reactive with proteins, and powdered oak tannins. I chose to go with a third option – lightly toasted french oak chips.

What’s that you say? Oak chips??

Yes, blaspheme, I know. Does my spoofulating know no limits? “Oak chips are only for cheap, mass produced wines!”, I can hear you cry.

Yes, that may be true if what you’re trying to accomplish is wine flavoring. But if what you’re attempting to do is to improve the quality of the tannins in your finished wine and are only leaving chips in for 8 or 9 days, flavor isn’t really affected by adding chips.

Because the tannins made available by the chips are precipitated out of solution by the horny proteins, tests show that tannin additions during fermentation don’t show up in the finished wine. All you’re really doing is preventing the natural, soft pinot skin tannins from getting gobbled up and dropping out of solution.

As a quick test I added the chips to our DRC clone but kept them out of the Pommard 4. Tasting the two after ferment completed I noticed just a slight difference in suppleness. I think this is mainly because I was extremely conservative in the amount of chips I added (around 5.5 grams per gallon). I also didn’t detect any oak flavors or aromas.

Ultimately though both wines were tasting fantastic after fermentation, and the 50-50 blend is tasting even better. If adding oak chips wasn’t so darn easy I probably wouldn’t bother. Still, I’ll likely continue to experiment with oak tannins during ferment, whether it be chips, staves or vessels. It’s just too much fun not to.

Check back tomorrow when I’ll wrap up the series with a cool announcement. See you then.

Part 1 of this year’s pinot story is here.

After the must had soaked and temps started to rise, I went about fixing the sugar and pH problems I was facing. As I mentioned in the last post, 27.5 Brix is remarkably high. This is especially true for fruit picked on September 1st.

Clearly something needed to be done, otherwise I would be looking down the barrel of a pinot with alcohol approaching 16% alcohol. Besides being waaay too hot, there aren’t many pinot friendly yeast strains that can survive ethanol levels of over 15% to ferment a must that sweet to dryness.

So, how did I go about solving these dire problems? The gritty details follow.

Jesus Units To The Rescue!

Currently there are two ways that winemakers address a high sugar situation:

1) Re-hydrate by adding back water that was lost due to the high temps just before harvest
or
2) Reverse Osmosis (RO) removal of alcohol after fermentation.

Given the choice between the two options above, for me the decision was easy. RO is rough on wine, and pinot doesn’t seem to take to it like the more robust varieties like Cab and Zin do. Plus, to my way of thinking, adding water is really no different than irrigating through a hot spell to combat berry desiccation.

Since I wanted to preserve the red fruit flavors, letting the grapes hang and irrigating wasn’t an option. But re-hydrating the berries after picking accomplishes the same goal. Water through the roots or water in the must – in the end it’s all still water.

The basic rule of thumb when re-hydrating must is to add 7 gallons of distilled water per ton of grapes to drop it one degree Brix. To ensure that the flavors we worked so hard to grow in the vineyard weren’t diluted, I first saignéed (bled) off 1.5 times the amount of juice. The water addition was done in 50% increments and tests were run to make sure things were on target. At the end of the process we had a must with a Brix reading of 25.5, right on the button. And there was much rejoicing.

The pH adjustment was dealt with at the same time by adding tartaric acid to the water prior to the re-hydration. Another rule of thumb: in general, 1 g/l of tartaric acid will drop must 0.1 pH. The key trick here is to properly estimate the volume of finished wine you’ll have from a given weight of fruit. Which leads us to another rule of thumb: 1 ton of grapes will provide you with anywhere from 140 to 160 gallons of finished wine. Again, making 50% additions helps to ensure you don’t over or undershoot your target.

So that’s it! A few easy additions and my must was sitting pretty with 25.5 Brix and a pH of 3.4, just like I wanted. Incidentally, I got an email this morning from a grower up north in the Willamette Valley that I’m friendly with. Marcia and I exchange emails every once in a while and her take on the local scene up there is always fascinating. Hopefully she’ll start her blog soon, and we can all read about her farming adventures first hand.

Anyway, Marcia correctly predicted that I’d use “Jesus units” (water addition) to cure my must’s sweet tooth. As you can see, in the grand scheme of winemaking problems you might face, high sugar is probably one of the easiest things to fix. And as a cool bonus doing so has little to no effect on the concentration of the flavors in your must. Good times.

The Story Continues

Tomorrow join me as I take you on a quick tour of the fermentation choices I made with this year’s fruit. If you’re a purist I guarantee you’ll be shocked at one of the super-spoofulicious decisions I made. Also, I’ve put off any big announcements until this ’07 recipe series is finished, but I think folks on the samples list will be pleased when my plans for this year’s wine are finally unveiled. See you tomorrow.

P.S. if any of you are scratching your head wondering what spoofulation means, be sure to check out Jeff’s comprehensive analysis of the term over at his excellent blog Good Grape. Thanks Jeff!

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.