Budbreak

♫ [Spring] is in the air, everywhere I look around.  [Spring] is in the air, every sight and every sound. ♫ - John Paul Young [kinda]

This is what the tulips in front of my house looked like last week:

Beautiful, right?  The only problem:  it was mid-March.  When I moved to Kentucky from California, I was anticipating enjoying all four seasons again.  This isn't a luxury that Californians have.  However, the Winter here was less extreme than I expected.  It sounds like it was even mild by Lexington standards.  Though that sounds nice, seasons greatly influence the vineyard.  First of all, bugs are expected to be a big problem this year.  Mosquito bites are annoying on our arms and legs, just as small bites taken out of our vines and canopy can bother our grapes.

It didn't get very serious until we had the warm spell in mid-March.  It takes an average temperature above 50 degrees Fahrenheit before there is much motion/growth in the vines.  As we were pruning, I got some nice color on my skin, but we also noticed that some of the buds were starting to break.  We didn't expect to see budbreak until late-April if not early-May.  So, this budbreak was happening about 6 weeks earlier than a typical year.

Notice the small blooms coming out of buds on the vine.

On one side of the coin, it is exciting that we may have a very long growing season in front of us.  This allows for further development of flavors and sugar (which becomes alcohol) before there is threat of frost or excessive rain forcing us to harvest the grapes.  On the other side, budbreak leaves the vines in their most fragile state.  You really don't want it to occur until after there is no more threats of frost, or you could lose your whole crop.  Sometimes you can save parts of it, but it's never as plentiful as a harvest not damaged by late frost.

That made this morning's frost advisory very nerve-racking.  It's a little early to say if there was any damage to our vines.  Much like farmers, we found ourselves hoping that the weather would pull our way.

Soon enough, we should be in full bloom, which is an exciting thing to see from our tasting room.  Due to the nicer weather, longer days, and excitement at the winery, we'll be extending our hours and days that we're open at our tasting room.  The changes will start next week.  Swing by, taste some of our wine, and take a walk with one of us out to the vines to see all of this stuff yourself.

All of my pictures taken for this blog come from an original iPhone that I've managed to keep alive for 5 years, so I apologize for their low quality.
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Pruning

"You cannot ruin a whole vintage with one bad snip.  It's ok to make mistakes.  In general, you're doing dramatically more good for the vines than bad." - Philip "The Wizard"

It's March.  Most people that work for wineries are abuzz with the first real work of the year:  pruning.  In my head, I always pictured a man in denim overalls walking down the rows of vines and snipping a few branches here and there.  I pictured a zen-like Mr. Miyagi trimming a bonsai to pristine beauty.  In a way, pruning grapevines is similar to what I pictured.

However, with everything else I've experienced at the winery so far, there are so many other things I didn't picture.  First of all, there is so much work to do.  In the first day, while I was being trained, it took us roughly 4 hours to prune one row of vines.  We finished triumphantly, but looking around at the roughly 60 other rows was depressing.  We need to get all of these pruned within 2-3 weeks.  Though all of my snips are beautiful and well-thought right now, I've heard that the quality of the pruning goes down as the days progress.

 Click on the pics to zoom in on before (Left - wild & tall) and after (Right - trimmed & pristine) pruning.

Luckily, we just got some seasonal reinforcement, and it's so refreshing to get so much more done each day.  It finally looks manageable, but tiring nonetheless.  I'll just be working farmers' hours for a few more weeks.

It was really nerve-racking at the beginning.  I hate making mistakes.  I realized that making a wrong cut doesn't really matter after it's done.  You can beat yourself up about it, or you can move on.  It's not really a wrong cut after it's been done, there's just a new right cut to be made.  I'll probably make thousands, if not tens of thousands of cuts of the vine before I'm done this season.  I can't get stuck on one that went poorly.

The first stack of trimmed vines. We've had 4 more of these so far!

If you see us in the vines when you come out to the winery, give us a wave.  We don't bite.  We may, however, wave back and show you the blisters on our hands.

I've already got a good farmer's tan, and it's mid-March,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Farming

More than anything else, winemaking is farming.

Some farmers only grow grapes and sell them to wineries.  Some wineries just purchase grapes from growers.  Some wineries do it all.  We don't just purchase grapes from other farmers, and we don't just purchase juice.  We do everything from the ground up, even though we are a very small operation.  It requires you to know all aspects of grapes, from the vine, to the wine.

The vineyard can really be thought of as a farm.  And where there's a farm, there's manual labor to be done.  Winemaking is not just sitting around at a bar deciding which cheese pairs best with the sparkling wine while you slowly get intoxicated.  There is a never-ending list of chores that need to be finished.  The first chore we tackled was spreading gravel in the driveway leading to the back of our winery and throughout the vineyard.  We knew the ruts would only get worse as the seasons progressed.

Just before we started shoveling the first ton.

Luckily, there's a gravel quarry across the street.  Literally.  So, it's pretty easy to swing over there and get 1-2 tons of gravel and bring it back on a trailer.  The machine that actually dumps the gravel at the quarry is a giant, metal monster.  It was a little intimidating.  I was really surprised with the finesse that the controller was able to operate it with.

That's 1 ton of spread gravel.  We spread 4 tons before the rain got us.

The heavy rain pushed us inside, but not before we drove around and filled in little puddles that were already forming along the driveway.  Four full tons of back-breaking shoveling.

Rain clouds over the vines.  It ended up soaking us.

Going inside meant that we could tend to organizing the barn.  It wasn't in awful shape, but it was easy to trip over things strewn along the ground when you were looking for a specific tool.  It also meant that we could get rid of some of the old fertilizer that had been stacked on a pallet for years.  That required a pallet fork attachment for the tractor.  That also required me to learn how to drive a tractor.

As I was driving the tractor at a brisk 10 miles an hour across the property to dump the fertilizer, the song from the Footloose scene where they had the tractor chicken fight was on loop in my head.  So, yes, I've been officially inducted into the large network of farmers.  If only all of my engineer friends could see me now.

Looks like I'll need to invest in some overalls,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

First Day, First Bottle

I never realized how much alcohol a winemaker might consume before noon on any given day.

Today was my first day as The Winemaker's Apprentice.  I met Philip, owner and winemaker of Grimes Mill Winery, on site at 9am.  He had already been there preparing for my arrival.

We got straight to work.  Though I'm unfamiliar with all but the last varietal, the 4 white wines currently fermenting at the winery are:  Catawba, Cayuga, Chardonelle, and Pinot Gris.  (I'll have future posts about information that I collect about these varietals, but their names are about all I know right now.  We'll learn more together.)

Since the wines are actively fermenting, it is important to track the sugar percentages.  Once the sugar percentage goes to zero in a batch of wine, the yeast that converts sugar to alcohol has nothing to feed on and dies off.  At that point, fermentation is done.  So, tracking the sugar tells us when the wine will be done fermenting.  It also gives us a chance to sneak a taste at the flavors that are developing as the wine ferments.

You actually measure the sugar percentage via measurement of specific gravity of the wine by floating a glass bobber in a graduated cylinder.  The bobber is designed with markings on it that tell us how much sugar is left in the solution.  Apparently, the density of wine decreases as sugar is converted to alcohol, so this is a really easy way to measure the sugar in the wine.  All 4 wines were measured, and little sips were taken of each one to compare sweetness, tartness, flavor profiles, etc.

The glass bobber inside a graduated cylinder is in the center.

At first I thought we were going to drink all 100 mL from each wine, which is necessary to measure the specific gravity.  After all, I've never thrown wine out before.  I've never spit it out of my mouth, either.  Maybe it's the cheap graduate student inside me, but wine is for drinking and cooking.  Not for wasting.  Today was a first for many things, including pouring perfectly good alcohol down a drain.  Otherwise, I would have been a thoroughly intoxicated Winemaker's Apprentice before 10am.

After finishing the documentation for the 4 wines that were measured, we moved on to actually making wine.  Yeah, on my first day!  There is a batch of Vidal Blanc that is resting in a tank in the back of our cellar.  The task for the rest of the day was to decide on the sugar content that was necessary to balance out the flavors in this particular wine.  I discovered that Vidal Blanc is a fairly simple varietal (*subconsciously typed as Vidal Bland*).  It doesn't have a strong bouquet, it doesn't have strong fruit flavors, it's not very floral, it is typically not as tart as other white varietals when it is dry, the minerality isn't very noticeable, and it isn't too acidic.  So, it was a perfect grape to start off with.  I'd be able to see how small increases in sugar alter the wine.

Though some wines have residual sugar left over from fermentation, it is much simpler to just let the yeast use up all of the natural sugar.  Then, you can add back in sugar after fermentation so that it isn't too terribly dry. That's precisely what we were experimenting with.  We tried a range of sugar concentrations from 0.5% to 2.5%.  0.5% still had too much of the harshness of the original wine, and 2.5% started to get way too sweet.  We settled on 1.75% as the optimal amount of sugar for balancing the wine without letting it get too sweet.

This didn't come without some mental effort.  Our scale for measuring sugar is only accurate to 0.1 g.  In order to get percentages like 1.25% and 1.75%, some very crafty math and pouring had to be utilized.  It felt like a series of brainteasers, only harder.  Not only was it early, but there was also some alcohol floating around in my stomach with this morning's cereal.

After settling on the optimal sugar content, I mixed up my first batch of wine.  I poured it into a bottle, and I learned how to cork the bottle.  Before long, I had completed my first bottle of wine.

My first bottle of wine. The corker is on the right, the capsule applicator on the left.

I bottled 2 other bottles of wine with this sugar content for the owners to take to a party tonight to see what people thought.  I got to take this, my first, bottle home.  Cleaning up the mess I made concluded my first day.  Tomorrow sounds like less wine and more manual labor.

So many firsts,
The Winemaker's Apprentice