Moscato, My First Child

I'm currently celebrating my 1-year anniversary of working at Grimes Mill Winery, and I have managed to go through (almost) every step of the winemaking process for a few varietals.  I say almost every step because I did not plant the vines that we harvested this year, but I've done every other step to take the grapes from vine to wine.

The very first wine that we finished from this year's harvest was our 2012 Moscato.  In my opinion, we've made no better wine at GMW.  I don't have kids, but I am starting to understand how hard it is to see any faults in something that I've put so much time and effort into.

Moscato was one of the first vines that we pruned during the early Spring.  Though we hit it early due to its proximity to our back door, it stuck out in my mind because it made my hands hurt for days.  Moscato vines grow quite thick in a very short period of time.  A 2-year-old Moscato vine can look as thick as a 6-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon vine.  The plants grow very tall.  You can find a Moscato row in our vineyard by finding a row with an extra length of wire above all the others to support the height of the plants.  The outermost layer of the vine, the bark, gets very thick and tough to cut.  Yet, we had to cut it, many times, until the blisters turned into calluses and the muscle aches slowly went away.

After pruning, we left them to do their own work  Other than light aesthetic trimming every once in a while, and the occasional mow around the base of the vine, we concentrated very little effort on our 3 rows of Moscato.  That was, until we found the outbreak of phylloxera smack-dab in the middle of our Moscato crop.  We had to cut away all of the infected leaves, which left us worried that the grapes wouldn't mature appropriately, or that they'd get too much sun.

Then there was the drought.  Not only did our Moscato get too much sun, just about every vine on our property got too much sun, and too little rain.  It's a surprise that the Moscato even lasted the whole season, but when it came time to harvest, our little grapes showed their resilience by being deliciously sweet and balanced.  We had high hopes, but we didn't want to get too excited until we took them through weighing and crushing and pressing and fermenting and racking.  When we finally got to the bench-trial phase, the true beauty of this year's Moscato became very clear.  We decided to add 8% sugar back to the wine, since we fermented it completely dry (meaning we let all of the natural sugars in the grape convert to alcohol).

This is only our second year producing Moscato, so we only have last year's for comparison.  This year's Moscato isn't quite as sweet as last year's, but it is still quite sweet.  You really don't want to drink a full glass of it, but you'll find yourself wanting to; it's a perfect way to end a meal.  The amount of sugar is the primary reason we sell them in smaller bottles.  This year's Moscato has none of the strong, bitter-almond finish that last year's had, and we also didn't have to play with adding orange or carbon dioxide to try and balance it.  It did all of the balancing on its own.

The only down side to this year's batch of Moscato:  there isn't a ton of it.  There's actually only 4 cases left.  So, hurry in and snag a bottle of our 2012 Moscato, or what I'm still considering 'my first child'.  By the way, if you're going to purchase a glass of Moscato, it makes more sense (economically) to just purchase a bottle for yourself.  Don't tell them I told you that.

Cheers!

The Winemaker's Apprentice

P.S. The web address for this blog has changed, so check your bookmarks!

Into a Winery

Chances are that if you've been to Grimes Mill Winery's Tasting Room, you've been taken back into the winery by Phil, the owner, or me, if you're lucky.  Unlike the tasting room, the winery has the aesthetic appeal of a garden shed.  Until now!

After a successful season (regardless of the difficulties with frost and drought), we now have barrels resting on top of barrels!  Our winery is starting to look like the winery we've always imagined.

What once was:

Secret: the fourth barrel is turned the wrong way... and empty.

Is now:

And they're all full (and turned the right way).

One day, maybe the wall of barrels will reach the ceiling.  One can only hope.  What did we fill the new barrels with?  5 different blends of red wine, where every single grapes was grown right here in Lexington!

We also harvested a bunch of Cabernet Franc this year that tasted great.  However, we didn't quite produce enough of it to fill an entire 60-gallon barrel by itself.  (We wanted to keep it at least 75% Cab Franc so that we can legally put the varietal on the label.)

So, what are we doing with it?  We're currently experimenting with a more cost-effective way of imparting French Oak flavor into a red wine (lovingly referred to around the winery as "poor man's French Oak").  We have a bunch of segments of new French Oak barrels (that likely didn't make the cut at the cooperage), and we're just floating them directly in our wine.  Instead of wine in a barrel, it's barrel in a wine.  Here's what it looks like:

Yes, there are many pros and cons to thoroughly consider when attempting this.  The good news for you is:  you may be able to get your hands on our first-ever Cab Franc by this summer!  We'll need several months to play with it, but we have high hopes that we can make something great out of it.

The better news affects you even more.  A French Oak barrel can cost upwards of $600 to $1000.  An American Oak barrel costs somewhere between $300 and $600.  The opportunity to remove these from the price of the bottle (not that the segments were cheap) allows us the opportunity to provide you with a local, hand-crafted, high-quality wine at a reasonable price.

Who could ask for more?,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Slow Season & Catch-up

Jan-Feb is always the slowest season at the winery.  If you want to feel like you're getting personal attention, there's no better time to show up at the tasting room than now.  Be careful though, almost all of the wineries in the area cut back their hours during the cold, dark, snowy months, so give them a call before you drive there.  (I believe we are Sat-Sun 12-5pm only right now.)

I appreciate the lull in the activity, though, because it has felt non-stop since the last time I posted.  Well, after the drought, watching the grapes was like watching grass grow.  I literally mowed my yard a handful of times before having to deal with the grapes at all.  We just let them grow and develop the best they could with the little water we were able to provide them.

As Autumn was peeking her head around the corner, we started harvesting.  This year, all but one varietal on our property (all except Pinot Grigio planted in 2011) were old enough and mature enough to be harvested.  In general the crop may  have been a little light due to the lack of water, but the quality of most of our fruit was spectacular.  Lack of water slightly dehydrates the grapes so that they're not big and watered down.  Instead they're smaller and full of flavor.  However, it's a fine line between slight dehydration and killing the vine, a line that we walked way too closely this past summer.

Harvest 2012.  That's me in the maize shirt.

We picked through sun and rain and storm and cold, starting with Moscato and ending with our very unique Petit Manseng varietal.  We weighed, crushed, fermented, pressed, racked, and even bottled some of the wines.  I'll try and take some time over the slow season to catch you up on the interesting things that have happened to the winery (and to me) over my busy 6-month blog absence.

Happy New Year,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Water

We're currently in a drought in the Bluegrass.  As someone who just moved here, I never expected a drought.  I assumed that being known for luscious grass meant that there would be more than enough water for everything.  Maybe there will be in the future, but the past few weeks have been really dry.  Too dry for our vines.  Lack of water creates all kinds of problems in a vineyard, as well as all kinds of colors.

This past week, we decided to take matters into our own hands.  We're not large enough to have any sort of industrial watering system.  I'm not even sure we have water pressure for anything like that, even if we could rent one.  So, instead, we built something that we could fill with water, pull behind one of our tractors, and distribute some water to our plants.  Here's what that ended up looking like.

Our tank holds roughly 300 gallons of water.  Unfortunately, we couldn't come up with a contraption small enough to fit through all of our rows.  So, we had to skip approximately 16 of the rows.  Hopefully it will rain soon to help those rows, in particular.  We made sure to concentrate our efforts on new/young plants, since they seem to be struggling the most.  It takes almost an hour to fill this tank with water.  So, The Wizard had the idea of driving it to a nearby water utility service and filling it up for about a dollar in what seemed like seconds.  Here's what he looked like alongside Old Richmond Road in his trek back to the vineyard.

 

He'll be comin' 'round the mountain...

I swear to you, I thought he was going to get pulled over for dragging that rickety, old trailer full of water down the highway. As he was leaving, he told me to get on the back and ride with. No thank you. I opted to time him, instead. He pulled off the whole trip in 20 minutes. I think we decided that it wasn't worth paying to save 30 minutes of time, when we could take the time between full tanks to do things around the winery.

So, if you're an advocate of Kentucky Wine.  Do a little rain dance for us!
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Phylloxera

Phylloxera - the closest thing to a dirty word that can be spoken in a vineyard.

If you are any sort of wine history enthusiast, the word Phylloxera will send shivers down your spine.  Root phylloxera (it is important to emphasize root as opposed to leaf phylloxera) devastated French winemaking in the 1850s and '60s.

So, you can begin to understand the initial panic when we found an outbreak of leaf phylloxera on one of our plants, smack-dab in the middle of our rows of Moscato.  Here's what some of the leaves on that single plant looked like:

If you turn either of those leaves over, each white spot corresponds to a small, fuzzy, wart-like "gall".  (Remember crown gall?)  These galls do little damage, other than make the vines ugly.  However, since the thought of having any form of phylloxera around is nerve-racking, we decided to strip all of the leaves off of this vine and quickly remove them from the vineyard.

Grape phylloxera is a microscopic, aphid-like insect native to eastern North America, so it's not uncommon to come across it in Kentucky.  The French wine disaster of the 19th century pioneered an entire field of root grafting in order to fight off these small pests.  Since native American vines grew resistant to root phylloxera, French grapevines were grafted to North American rootstocks.  This has been the best defense against the little buggers, and grafted vines are used throughout phylloxera-known regions to this day, but it hasn't been perfect.  In the 1980s, California discovered that one of their most common rootstocks, AXR1, was no longer resistant to phylloxera and had to replant over 60% of the vines in Napa and Sonoma Valleys over 2 decades.

I first learned about phylloxera back in 2007 when I was regularly listening to the Napa Valley Wine Radio podcast.  Nancy Hawks-Miller, the wine educator at Goosecross Cellars in Yountville, CA, at the time, was responsible for most of my wine education up until 2010 or so when I decided to start studying on my own.  You can listen to the 5-year-old podcast about phylloxera here.

After spending a whole post telling you how awful phylloxera is, I just wanted to reiterate that our vineyard is in no real danger.  We have root phylloxera-resistant rootstocks, and we have a close eye on any developments from their leaf phylloxera cousins.

I had no clue that a wine podcast I listened to during my first year of engineering grad school would matter to me at all later in life,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Cream of Tartar

Did you know that angel food cakes & souffles exist partly because of wine?

Those lucky individuals who have been given tours of our winery might already know this.  It usually depends on if you happen to be visiting during one of our white wine 'cold stabilization' periods or not.

One of the key ingredients to baking powder, and an egg white stabilizer by itself, is Cream of Tartar, or tartaric acid.  I happened to pull out the Cream of Tartar from my spice pantry today, and I read the side of it:

"Cream of Tartar is a pure, natural ingredient that's created as grape juice turns to wine."

I was looking at my jar of Spice Islands Cream of Tartar, so I investigated their website.  They took the description even further.

"Tartaric acid, or cream of tartar, is the natural byproduct of fermented grapes, collected from the wall of the casks used to age fine wines.  Naturally reddish-brown in color, it's carefully refined until it achieves its signature white color, earning it the name "cream" of tartar.  Cream of Tartar is a key ingredient in baking powder and adds a fluffiness and stability to egg white dishes such as meringues."

We come across crystallized tartaric acid when we chill our white wines down to 29 degrees Fahrenheit.  We do this at the end of our white wine-making process, just before filtering and bottling, so that these "wine diamonds" don't eventually precipitate out into our bottled wines.  The crystals form all the way around our cooled tanks, and I guess we could collect them and crush them down to Cream of Tartar if we really wanted to.  Instead, we spend hours scrubbing them off the inner walls of the tanks and disposing of them.

These crystals could occur in our wine bottles if we didn't go through the extra cold-stabilization process.  These are examples of what "wine diamonds" look like, though not in our wine bottles:

So this summer when you're eating a delicious lemon meringue pie, give a silent nod to wine for making it possible.

We happen to be cold-stabilizing some white wine right now,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Frost Bite

Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

The weather was weird this year, or so I'm told.  It got warm so early that the buds on the vines broke almost 2 months earlier than they typically do.  Though it meant that it might be a long growing season, which allows for amazing wine, it left the door open for damage from frost.  From what I remember, there were at least 3 frost advisories this year after we had full-scale budbreak in the white varietals and Cabernet Franc.

Two of those frost advisories didn't drop the temperatures low enough in our vineyard.  As you're driving along Old Richmond Road, you'll notice that our vineyard is at the top of a small hill.  That's great for keeping air moving through the vineyard and not letting the cold temperatures settle.  It also allows for some great sunshine throughout the entire vineyard.

Finally, on the 27th of March, after two days of frost advisories, the cold enemy rolled in and damaged some of our plants.  At first, parts of the leaves were stained white like someone ran around the vineyard with a small paintbrush.  After a while, those leaves shriveled and died, and we were left with noticeable sections throughout the vineyard with dead, brown, frost damage.  It took a few weeks to be able to see and tally all of the damage, which is why it is easier to discuss it now.

It seems like our 1-year-old white grape vines took the most damage.  You can barely see the vines in the following pictures, because the leaves are brown and shriveled.  1-year-old plants aren't very big yet.  Since their buds and leaves are closest to the ground, where the cold air settles, it's no big surprise that they were the most damaged.

The good news is that the frost did fairly little damage overall.  It was seen on about 10% of our plants, and for those plants that were at least 2-years-old, its damage was sporadic instead of total.  Months later, you have to really look for the remnants of frost damage, since everything is growing so quickly and so full.

Next time you're out at the tasting room, ask us if it's alright to take a walk in the vines.  We'll let you know if there's anything to look out for, and you can discover this all for yourself.

In Vino Veritas,
The Winemaker's Apprentice