Click on the link below to hear about what’s new on Mount Veeder.

 
Mount Veeder Vineyard Redevelopment from The Hess Collection on Vimeo.

Click on the video below to see a demonstration of “Leafing” by Hess Collection Viticulturist, Sander Scheer.

Leafing at The Hess Collection Vineyards from The Hess Collection on Vimeo.

I am not sure if you all know this but Hess Collection Winery is one of four wineries in the world which is a part of the Hess family. The wineries in our family span 4 different continents- Colomé is in Argentina, Peter Lehmann in Australia, Glen Carlou in South Africa and, of course, Hess Collection Winery in North America. This definitely brings a world of winemaking knowledge to the proverbial table. Only sometimes the table is not proverbial, like last week. Winemakers from all 4 wineries gathered in Napa last week for our first ever winemaking summit. It was a unique opportunity for all to get to know other techniques used around the world. Not to mention meeting, greeting, and in a few cases reminiscing with fellow family winemakers.

After meeting each other over lunch we started the actual work. Since this was the first time the global summit was held, everyone thought it would be best if we got to know everyone’s wines. This was our afternoon work, tasting through 24 wines from 4 different continents. The winemaking staff from each winery talked about the vineyards, wine making techniques, and particular strategies for each wine.

As we finished our flights of wine, one common theme rang true to me, the Hess family of wines in each continent is doing their best to make sound, quality, hell - great wines! I know I’m an insider, but I think that our portfolio on a whole is awesome. So next time you are at your local store look for one of our family, trust me it will be a great wine.

Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker

Click on the video below for a lesson on grafting from our Viticulturist, Sander Scheer.

Grafting Demonstration from The Hess Collection on Vimeo.

Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t feel much like summer in Napa, but our activities in the cellar keep on going all year long. We have been following the Su’skol Chardonnay’s journey from barrel to bottle and today we are going to continue along that path. Last we spoke I talked about blending the Su’skol in our cellar. This time we will talk about what we do in the winery to get the bottle ready for enjoyment.

There are two things that wineries need to do to get any variety of white wine ready to put in the bottle. These two activities are making sure that it is both heat and cold stable. These are processes that get rid of excess protein and excess tartrate in the wine.

When you pump out any wine there is a slight haze from lees. Lees are essentially proteins such as yeast cell walls and long chains of certain wine chemicals (like color compounds and tannin compounds). To make a wine heat stable it is necessary to add purified clay which will bind with all of the proteins in the wine. Thus leaving the wine clarified. If there are any remaining proteins in suspension, the wine is susceptible to hazing in extreme heat. The haze does not affect the flavor of the wine, but it is visually unappealing.

Have you ever had a bottle of wine with “glass” in it? Tartrate crystals are commonly mistaken for “glass”. This is one of the main reasons why we cold stabilize our wine prior to bottling. The tartrate crystal that becomes the “glass” comes from one of the main acids in the grape, tartaric acid.  Tartrate typically drops out of wine when there is an abrupt temperature change. These two reasons are why white wines are more susceptible to this process. In the winery, we seed tanks with cream of tartar, which is tartrate crystals that have been purified. In fact it is the same substance you have in your pantry. Chilling and seeding the wine work to push the equilibrium of tartaric acid from suspension to crystallization. This relatively easy process allows us to bottle wine that will not throw crystals while in your refrigerator.

Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker

Last time we spoke about what it takes to blend a particular wine while in the tasting room. Today I will explore what it takes to translate that blend, known as “bench top” in the industry, into the actual wine blend that you enjoy.

Two weeks ago the winemaking staff got together and worked out a blend of our Su’skol Chardonnay. This wine is our single vineyard Chardonnay from Napa County. The vineyard site is close to Carneros and with its often foggy summer mornings is a perfect site for Chardonnay. Now it is time to complete the work in the cellar.

First off, we translate our blended smattering of different lots and different oak types into the hard numbers for the cellar. Are we only using 25% of this lot? Is it the new oak portion? Well, the cellar crew better know that. After setting the scene for our crew they begin to prep the barrels, taking out the bungs and possibly moving barrels to an easier working location.

Next is the fun, but necessary, part folks. I smell every barrel that will be pumped into this blend, and the Su’skol blend averages to about 1000 barrels! My preferred method of sampling the barrels is actually using a turkey baster. It is fast, and far more efficient than the cumbersome wine thief that is often used. Smelling barrels when pumping out offers two very important securities. The first is that I can double check the cellar is planning on pumping out the proper barrels that I envisioned going into this blend. The second is that we can screen every barrel for any problem and remove the wine from the blend. From time to time a barrel does go bad and this is the one time we have to weed out our problem.

Next, we carefully extract the wine from the barrel using a nitrogen sparging mechanism known as the Bulldog. As the wine gets pumped out of the barrel we transfer that into a tank that has also been sparged with nitrogen. When that tank gets filled we start on another tank until all 1000 barrels are pumped out. The barrels are then carefully cleaned and stored. To ensure that no “bugs” grow inside the barrel we treat barrels regularly with sulfur gas while they are empty.

Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker

Click on the video below to see Viticulturist Sander Scheer talk about the effects of the April frosts on our Mount Veeder vineyards.

Mount Veeder Vineyards from The Hess Collection on Vimeo.

As you have read from my co-blogger, spring is a busy time in the vineyard. Our jobs in the winery do not require us to be peeled out of bed at 3am by a phone call (Thank god) but spring is also busy in the winery. I thought I would give you a little insight about what happens when we start getting ready to bottle our wines to make room for the next vintage.

The wine that I will be following is our Su’skol Chardonnay blend. As some of you may know, this wine is our single vineyard Chardonnay from Napa County. The vineyard site is close to Carneros and with its often foggy summer mornings is a perfect site for Chardonnay. This is why a few years ago we decided to make a Chardonnay exclusively from the Su’skol ranch.

Before the winemaking team can blend the Su’skol Chardonnay, our lab samples all of these lots out of our barrels. In order to sample we must first identify all of the oak types and vintage percentage in each lot. When we sample these wines they will all be oak correct and from many different representative barrels from each oak vintage. This method of sampling insures that the wine samples are as close as possible to the overall flavor of each lot. As an extra precaution we will top all of these barrels after sampling to make sure the wine in the barrel does not get overly exposed to air.

On a given morning, again not 3am, the winemaking staff sits down with 10 – 50 samples in front of them.

For the Su’skol ranch we tasted about 30 wines, broken down in flights of 7 wines. After tasting a set of 7 lots we go over our notes, talking about our favorite wines, or maybe some that we need to move out of the program. This often leads into brainstorming talks about what worked in the vineyard or cellar the previous year. After all of the wines are tasted individually we create a table top blend of our favorites and taste that. If this wine is an expression of what we know the Su’skol ranch brings to the bottle, we are done. Often though, we make minute changes to the blend, adding and deleting partial lots to create that vintage’s perfect Su’skol Chardonnay.

Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker

I am pleased to report that temperatures have balanced out a bit since my last submission. Shoot growth has taken off and it looks as if we may be out of the woods for frost with any luck. The cold mornings in April meant for losses in Napa Valley and the entire North Coast for that matter. The reality of the situation is that grape prices will be affected in 2008 and beyond, while many growers have no fruit to deliver this vintage. When a shoot is frosted it literally looks as if it was hit with a blowtorch as pictured below.

Sizing up all of this damage is quite time consuming. In my travels it does appear that much of our affected acreage will ultimately bounce back from this. However, moving forward this season we will need to be more liberal with irrigation, vine nutrition inputs and cropping levels will need to be kept to a minimum in all frosted zones. The vines will in a sense be in “recovery mode” this year. The photo below shows the vines response to the damage just 13 days following the frost event. New growth has pushed and while these shoots will track behind and ripen less crop, the long term sustainability of the vines in this block on Mt. Veeder will not be affected.

The crews are moving through our vineyards at the moment suckering (removing any unwanted growth). We have decided to postpone this work in frosted blocks. This way we allow new growth to push and potentially we have more options for what gets left on the vine and farmed this year.

So this is what we’ve been up to for the last two weeks, short of putting on our first sulfur sprays for mildew prevention and beginning to check our irrigation systems for any required maintenance. Let’s hope for continued consistent weather.

-La voz del Monte

Well, it could be. I think most of you know that cork comes from trees. They are the bark of cork oak trees, which means that this closure is a renewable resource. Fortunately you do not have to cut down the tree to collect the cork; however they can only harvest each tree 1 out of every 10 years. In fact it takes 50 years before the cork company can harvest the tree for wine cork!

At any rate, it is part of my job to look at and smell the cork we buy. For some of our programs I actually smell every cork that goes into the bottle! I am still a little shocked by this. We soak the cork in diluted alcohol (13%) for 24 hours then we smell them for off odors. The clean ones go in the bottle; the bad are destined for the trash. Off odors you may find in corks are the following: the compound that provides the “corked” aroma in your bottle is known as TCA, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, and it smells of various things, but is mostly described as wet newspaper. Other compounds that may be found in cork are 2-methylisoborneol (think dirt) and geosmin (described as earthy).

Before you get to the point of smelling the cork there is a visual inspection. Who knew there was such attention to the look of cork, right? So, first you send your cork to “school”, yes you give it an A – D letter grade. This is done by looking at a representative sample of cork for your bottling. My grading scale goes a little something like this:

A – No lenticels on the ends of the cork (lenticels are the lines or channels running through the cork) and an almost perfect body, meaning very small channels, if any.

B – One end of the cork with lenticels, the other clean. The body has channels, but fairly small. No cracks, or bark grain.

C – Both ends of the cork have lenticels. The body has bigger channels, it may have bark grain, cracks or small holes as long as they do not traverse more than ¾ of the cork length.

D – These are “defective” corks. They do have bark grain, cracks or small holes that traverse more than ¾ of the cork length.

After you sort your sample you can make a designation of quality of the cork lot. If the grading suits your standards then you can weed out off odors by soaking that sample of representative cork. After all that work you’ve got your cork lot you can use for that bottling.

Julie Murrell
Assistant Winemaker