What's Happening Now?

May 2010: We are done racking our 2009 pinots and have started blending trials. Racking is siphoning the wine from one barrel to a clean barrel, leaving behind the solid matter (like dead yeast cells) behind. Then we clean the emptied barrel and continue with the other barrels. We do the racking to ameliorate the need for filtering or fining later on in the process. It's a long, dirty process that nonetheless has to be done carefully and with attention to sanitation. Kudos to David H, aka The Ozonator, aka Cocktail Boy, for a lot of hard work.
Blending as we do it has two stages: first we taste through all the barrels, carefully evaluating various parameters. Next we postulate possible blends of barrels and evaluate these for the single vineyards and for our blended wines. The reason we need to do this for the single vineyards is that we use the subset of barrels from a given vineyard that most characterizes that vineyard.
We are nearly done with the first stage. We make notes on those barrels where there was a different evaluation from each of us so that we can come back and try it again later. Since pigheadedness is a family trait, one of us mercilessly beats the other one into submission. But fear not, we take turns.

January 2010: It's relatively quiet in the cellar now. The major activity is monitoring the progress of malolactic fermentation (ML). ML is a "secondary" fermentation. Instead of sugars being acted upon by yeast to create alcohol as in primary fermentation, malic acid is converted to lactic acid by a particular bacteria in secondary fermentation. The "so what" of this is that ML reduces the acidity a tad, but more importantly it changes the mouthfeel of the wine. This is because malic acid (like the acid in apples) is sharper than the creamier lactic acid (the acid in milk). So much of the angular harshness that was present a month ago is rapidly disappearing.

Once ML is done, we replace the bubblers on the barrels with solid bungs for a more secure seal. The bubblers were allowing the CO2 that is a byproduct of ML to escape. We monitor the rate of conversion of the malic acid using paper chromatography, an example pair of sheets is above. Small samples of wine are placed at a uniform distance from the bottom edge of filter paper. After the samples dry, the paper is rolled into a cylinder and placed into a jar containing solvent. The solvent travels up the paper by capillary action over the course of a few hours. As it travels up, it carries the components of the wine sample. These components are carried different distances up depending upon their solubility in the solvent. Using these distances, we can see which components are present once the sheet of paper has been removed from the jar and dried. If you look at the two dots on the left end you will see not wine samples but samples of pure malic and pure lactic acids which serve as a reference. Using these references, you can then see how close (or not) to completion each wine sample is. For example, on the right hand sheet you can see three samples that are clearly only partially through ML since there is still quite a bit of malic acid appearing in them. The other samples are either done with ML or are mostly done.
LIke I said, there isn't a lot going on in the cellar right now, and this is about as exciting as it gets now!

Crush 2009

Beginning of September 2009: Bottling is done, and now we are prepping for the harvest. It's looking like the first fruit will arrive late this month, the rest in early October. The grapes are looking good. They are fully colored now (except for our tiny vineyard at 1000', but that's normal). There was a bit of sunburn earlier in the summer, but with all the dropping of fruit (see below), that should be a neglible problem come harvest.

Interested in helping Et Fille during Crush?
Give us a call at 503.449.5030 to learn about it, or email howardm atsign etfillewines.com

Early August 2009: We are now visiting all of the vineyards that will produce the grapes for our 2009 wines. Besides observing general conditions and deciding upon any adjustments that may need to be made, we also plan the crop load and thinning instructions. The vines have produced a very large amount of grapes this year. So much that if we were to leave it all on the vine, the wine produced would be inferior, lacking body, flavor and aroma.

We do this most years, but this year the crop load is unusually high. Deciding upon crop load is one of the most important decisions made during a vintage. Too much left on the vine and the wine will be insipid, too little and you are throwing good grapes away needlessly. So we are trying to decide upon the "sweet spot" and anticipate what quantity/quality we will have on the vines at harvest.

Below are three photos showing the crop load at Palmer Creek Vineyards from one vine if we were not to drop crop, the crop load after the thinning instructions have been followed, and the clusters we threw away from this one plant. In fact, we are throwing away more than half of the fruit so that the remaining fruit will meet our standards. It's actually more than that, because we will again discard some fruit when the color changes in a couple of weeks and we will be tossing the green laggards away.

This is the full crop load

This is the crop load once we have dropped crop

This is the fruit from one plant that was discarded

 

Summer Solistice 2009: Bloom! The aroma in the vineyard is intoxicating. It reminds me of visiting a local hop kiln with thousands of pounds of dried hops neatly piled into a mound. Confronted by this mound, the aroma fills your entire head. Although hops smells nothing at all like the grape bloom, it does the same kind of thing to your head. It fills it, makes it lighter, and the world seems like a wonderful place indeed.

Bloom at this time implies that the grape harvest, given normal summer weather, will be right about at the beginning of October. We couldn't ask for better than that.

This week Jessica and I are tasting through all the pinot noir barrels in order to decide which goes into our single vineyard wines, and which goes into a blend. It's a fun part of the process, but it does require a lot of concentration.

As we said in December, the 2008s are very deeply colored wines with intense flavors, excellent acidity, and big tannins. Now that malolactic fermentation is done, the wines have softened.

 

 

 

2008 Crush Photos