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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hello again. Last we spoke I made mention of the cold temperatures seen this spring. Well the frost protection effort in the Napa Valley has continued. Unfortunately, temperatures this last Sunday and Monday mornings were cold enough to cause damage to much of the Napa Valley. Until this last weekend we were winning the battle. We could say that our efforts were paying off in that little to no damage had been suffered. To summarize - it’s been lots of coffee, lots of quick naps in the pickup and a lot of sleepy eyed vineyard managers around here. And now, here toward the end of the frost season, cold enough temperatures to result in damage.
What next? Well there’s not a lot we can do except continue to be ready for more cold weather. Shoots that were completely frosted will fall off the vine and secondary buds will give rise to new shoots and, ultimately, crop. In other areas damage occurred to just the tips of shoots. Vines will likely grow out of this and crop potential may not be affected. However, shoots that arise from secondary buds will track behind shoots arising from primary buds. This makes for an increased need for precision management through the season to minimize variability. In the end we need to know if clusters on the same vine are tracking differently in terms of maturity.
This week I want to give you some insight into what happens during a typical frost event in our vineyards. The morning begins with the phone call. This is almost the hardest part. Being drug out of bed at 3AM by a computer generated voice connected to a thermometer on the other end of the phone is about as bad as it gets. But I guess you can call it a necessary evil. Somehow you need to know it’s time to go. Once you’re in the truck the race is on to get to your first stop, NOT STARBUCKS, THE VINEYARD, there will be time for coffee later. The first stop is always the “known coldest” spot on the ranch and nine times out of ten it’s also the lowest section of the vineyard. Cold air finds its way to the lower points. We use both fancy weather stations that transmit data back to PC’s and good old fashioned mercury thermometers placed strategically amongst our vines to monitor temperatures.
Most of our vineyard sites have anywhere from a half dozen to ten thermometers to check. So once you’ve made it to the 1st thermometer at the low spot, out of the truck you go, flashlight in hand. If it’s cold enough, that’s where you start the 1st machine. Once the motor is throttled up, the prop mixes the cold air below with the warmer air above as it spins around 360 degrees. The net is only a few degrees warmer. But this is often enough to protect a vineyard from damage. From there you keep working across the vineyard toward what typically runs warmer. The first few thermometer checks give you a pretty good idea about what you are in for. By that I mean you quickly know if you are running behind or not. Wind machines work best when they are started at the right temperature. The idea is to keep a vineyard warm, not to warm a vineyard up. So a certain amount of buffer needs to be factored in when making the all important start-up decision. This means that machines are fired up above the freezing mark. With thousands of grapevines staked up on our colder sites, too much is at stake to run it any closer. Most frost mornings at our south Napa Su’skol vineyard (pictured above) see wind machine run times of anywhere from 3-6 hours. Once the sun comes up you’ve made it! Well, most mornings anyway. That’s the thing about frost, you just never know what Mother Nature might throw at you. And in all honesty that’s what keeps it interesting.
Yes, I am a woman and a winemaker. Historically men have dominated this field, but today I interact with many women winemakers. There are even a few visionary women winemakers setting the trends.
Winemaking requires a combination of art and science, but it has been shown that girls may shy away from the science side of winemaking. In the first grade both boys and girls report to like math and science equally, but by the time they are in eighth grade boys are twice as likely to be interested in these subjects.
To get girls interested in math and science fields of work there is a yearly conference for 7th and 8th grade girls called Expanding Your Horizons. Last weekend I taught at this conference, which is put on by the Sonoma County AAUW (Association of American University Women). This conference is designed to be a fun day out for girls (and boys) where they can relate science and math to their daily lives.
I have been demonstrating winemaking for this event for a few years now. No, we don’t drink wine, but we do have fun. I have had the fortunate experience to meet a fabulous flavor chemist in my career. She has these great kits that I use for the kids. If you got a piece of yellow Jell-O would you assume it was lemon flavored? I bet you would. We teach the kids that our flavor memory uses all five senses, not just taste. It is always interesting to me what the kids use to describe the aromas of rose (grandma anyone?), or toasted oak.
I love giving back to something that I utilized during my youth. And if a few of these girls got excited about making wine that would be great, but the greater victory would be to have boys and girls equally excited about math and science.
