Year 1: Get wine, and I mean any wine, made professionally. Done – 60 cases of Nebbiolo. Permitting process begun. (2008)

Year 2: Establish winery permits and bond. Secure fruit from best vineyards/regions for your desired varieties. Make 500+ cases of wine (equivalent of $150K of sales at $300/case or $25/bottle). All underway. (2009)

Year 3: Establish winery location (downtown Santa Barbara leased facility) that will also function as tasting room on wine trail. Purchase/lease winemaking equipment, hire necessary p/t help. Make approximately 1,000 cases of wine, spread across numerous small lots of different varieties so you will be able to accommodate a wine club membership. (2010)

Year 4: Same as Year 3 but with additional caseload increase. Begin selling wine crafted in Years 2 & 3 (goal: 50% of full year of Year 2 inventory, i.e. $75K of sales, effectively paying for most of Year 4 harvest/processing costs). (2011)

Year 5: $300K of revenue, full year of sales of Year 2/Year 3 product. (2012)

Of course there are marketing schemes, wine club recruitment and hospitality, internet strategy, varietal selection, and various other details along the way. This, however, is a nice, Soviet-grade 5-year plan that ought to put this business of mine into the making-a-living range by the sixth year from launch. Thanks to a modicum of perseverance and determination, I’m already in Year 2 on the five-year arc.

But mostly – especially in wine country — you’ve got landowners who, either by necessity or habit, are busy working their tails off at a white collar gig somewhere – running companies, taking them public, whatever – and who possess neither the desire nor the time to plant their asses on a John Deere seat and rip the cover crops in the rows between 20 acres of vines. Back and forth. Sulfur and maybe some copper or fungicide sprays the next day. Done before the winds pick up or the neighbors wake up to face facts on the semitoxic nature of modern agriculture. Back and forth. Pruning for days on end just to get through an acre or two in the month of February while the vines are in hibernation. And organic fertilizer, AKA chicken manure? Forget about it.

No, for most landowners, the boardroom beckons, either because, as most people in their right mind would see things, it’s cleaner . . . or because there exists the need to keep showing up to work in order to afford the $20,000 a month mortgage on the 400-acre ranch.

Those who prefer the tractor seat, the shears in hand, the hoe to till one’s way toward organic weed control – well, suffice to say that the margins on farming ain’t great even if you have the land, and unless you find yourself in the boardroom of Dole, Del Monte, or Constellation, a desire to work in the farming industry overall is kind of the blue-collar equivalent of the graduate degree in English Lit – probably not the best route to wealth.

No, if you’re a farmer it’s usually going to be because you identify, in the soul, with soil, and leaves, and fruit, or vegetables – with the seasons – with nature, both the good and the bad it brings. These soulful types aren’t usually loaded with a few mill to throw down on that vineyard ranch in Santa Ynez Valley.

So what happens is people find their way to what they like or need, right? The wealthy landowner with a penchant for wine hires a vineyard management company to plant 40 acres of Cabernet. An onsite or offsite caretaking team manages the vines, aided by waves of Mexican immigrants eager for and expert at farming work. The same landowner might hire a winemaker and staff – who, usually, will have studied enology, worked in low-wage jobs as a cellar worker, assistant winemaker, and so on, barely able to pay the bills but happy doing it – yet still, far from capable of affording that vineyard estate herself. It’s magic in its own way: the landowner has a pretty vineyard and enjoys fine wines made from his land; the farming types farm, the winemaking types make wine, and there you have it, a microsociety functioning smoothly in its little circle of life.

What happened to me in this confluence of worlds was, first, a flash of inspiration on seeing Sonoma vineyard properties, a subsequent pursuit of the purchase of such lands, then later, a frustration at the affordability of such lands and a “side hobby” of farming vines and making wine, and finally, and only recently, the realization that while I do want to earn a living doing these things, it is, in fact, the function of the farming and winemaking that interest me. That I’m compatible with. That hook into my soul.

Which begs the question: Why be in real estate?

In other words, my conclusion, reached, perhaps, by necessity, was that I enjoy winemaking and farming. I’d like to start a business directly involving me in these pursuits. This costs money, like any business one launches. But why in the world would you need to buy a multimillion-dollar property to launch or run such a business?

Remember, at the outset of this garagevino journey, I stated that part of my end goal in following the business model I’d devised was to eventually own that rolling vineyard ranch. But as I get closer to pulling off the launch of a winery business, I’ve realized the wisdom of the cheapest-possible business model for getting started is actually superior to that supposed end goal.

Here’s how it works: if there’s no need to buy the vineyard to get the grapes for your wine, why be in real estate? If there’s no need to buy the storefront or warehouse at which you crush your grapes and barrel-age your wine, why be in real estate that way either? If you want to farm, to spend time on that John Deere seat, here’s the thing:

Because of that great divide between landowners and those who desire to farm, you can lease the land from the wealthy landowner, and farm the land to source your grapes.

Because of a similar divide between wealthy owners of downtown warehouse and retail space, you can also lease a facility where you can make the wine and sell it to visiting tourists and locals alike in a retail tasting room.

Take this a step further and you can even lease the equipment that normally would cost a fortune as capital outlay in order to crush, press, and transport your wine.

You can even rent the services of a bottling truck to get your wine in the bottle, in the case, and on the pallet to be kept in the climate-controlled space you rent by the month.

In the end, here is the American fallacy of the value of ownership exposed for what it is: ownership is fine if it gives you something you want on a more or less permanent basis, but this begs the question, What is it you truly want?

And in my case, it’s the function of farming the grapes and making the wine.

So if I can lease a space in which to make the wine and find such a place in the vicinity of a “wine trail” or tourist destination where people might buy wine – for example, Santa Barbara – then for the lowest possible cost, I can operate a business that matches the function of what I care about doing.

If I can also lease vineyards on which to farm the grapes I use to make the wine, then I’m performing the function of farming for the least possible cost within the framework of the overall winery business that empowers the farming and winemaking functions as ways of making a living.

This writerly, convoluted essay can ultimately be summed up a little more simply: I realized I can farm vineyards and make wine without ever buying anything immensely expensive. And since those are the functions I like performing, well, that’s what I plan to do. Do I need some money to get going? Sure. Are there ways of making wine and selling it at someone else’s winery, where you work in your day job, and therefore the business model gets even cheaper to launch? Yes. Can you, in that scenario, trade labor for grapes or barrel space or tasting room shelfspace? Yes. Do I personally have an opportunity for enough moolah to be made in a “day job” out of the wine industry that allows me to launch this business along these lines, while I spend what is the appropriate amount of “learning launch” time at night and on weekends to make first a modest amount of wine, then a more commercially functionable amount, buying the grapes then leasing and farming the vineyards from which I source them, until at the point it is a living, and I am not yet of retirement age, I will then have transitioned to adopting the functions that tie into my soul?

Hell, yes.

So that’s what I’m up to between now and either harvest 2009 or 2010. Smart strategy or no, these things take time to find, to lease, and to get permitted.

Little help from some fellow farm-and-winery “functioners,” and with any luck I can pull it off.

Aside from a hot week here and there, things cooled off in September and October this year in the South Coast region. From how I followed things the summer had been pretty hot in most of the Central Coast winegrowing areas, so harvest was happening earlier than in 2007. Bob Howard’s South Coast Nebbiolo was going to turn out to be the second-to-last fruit being crushed for the season at the Terravant Winery.

First week of October, Bob sent word that he and his “harvest crew” (a bunch of local friends who helped him pick the fruit in exchange for some themselves) would be plucking the grapes from the vines that Saturday morning. The Brix had reached 25, just barely, and ph had crept to 3.25. Exactly where he liked it, and I felt about the same.

I pulled my usual U-Haul truck rental, got a second use out of my Chili Bu Sangiovese bins loaned to me by Bob Modie, convinced Bob Howard to let me take the first grapes so I could get them back for the crush before the afternoon heat warmed up the fruit, and arose at 3 am to haul my ass the four-and-a-half hours down through LA and on south to pick up the grapes. After getting lost a couple times, my journey through inland-empire superhighways ridden with foreclosure-assistance billboards brought me to the tranquil semicoastal community of Fallbrook. Just past the Fallbrook Winery and their swath of vineyards, Bob has a home and a few acres of vines stretching down from the top of a hill.

I arrived at 7:30 to find ¾ of a ton already picked and awaiting transfer from the 40-lb. picking bins into my borrowed pair of half-ton bins. Fifteen minutes later, Bob’s “crew,” with a little help from yours truly, had transferred one full ton, and maybe a couple extra pounds on top of it, into overflowing mounds in my truck. I cut Bob a check, got a tour of his own garage vino operation – much more extensive than mine – then thanked him for the time and harvest and fruit and headed off down the hill.

Five hours later, by around 1:15, I pulled into the crush pad area at Terravant in Buellton, my brain, ass, and stiff legs all in agony. 10 hours in a U-Haul by noon or so – not a good time. Anyway, the fruit was still cold, my covered U-Haul keeping the sun off the grapes, and by 1:45, without any crowds from Santa Barbara County harvest loads (most of which had come in two or three weeks prior), my first professional crush was working its way up the conveyor and into the coolest crusher-destemmer I’ve seen yet.

Therein lies the magic of working with a state-of-the-art custom-crush facility for a small lot like mine: for a fairly high per-case price ($60 or so, if I recall the quote), you get technology the likes of which you wouldn’t be able to afford on your own unless you were operating a million-case-a-year facility.

The clusters went up the sorting conveyor at a crawl, with two guys pulling out leaves and unripe grapes on my behalf. As they worked through the crusher-destemmer, I noticed that not a single stem-jack (those pieces look like jacks from the kids’ game) falling into the ton-and-a-half bin. The fruit was gently squeezed, not smashed, going in so clean from MOTG (matter other than grapes) as to render harvest slaves like myself (who spent two months plucking those jacks from the Jaffurs fermentation bins) a dying breed.

Dry-ice chips were poured in a few scoopfuls into the bin, yielding a fog of CO2 gas, so the visual effect was this boiling cauldron of crushed grapes that vanished below the layer of fog within the bin as though into the primordial mist.

The morning harvest, cool truck bed, and dry-ice chips would allow the crushed grapes to start off cool enough to enter safely into an extended cold-soak. I ordered up a half-dose of sulfites as part of the crush, just to be safe, but also to be somewhat conservative on how much I’d be sulfating this stuff. Let the fruit speak for itself where possible, is the way I look at it.

The way things turned out, partially by accident of a one-day delay vs. my work-order, the grapes got a 7-day cold soak, shrouded by that CO2 fog. Temperature in the low forties Fahrenheit the whole way. Fermentation took 6 days once it got going. A little shorter than I would have liked; maybe because of the thin skins, not sure. I also added the enzyme used by Syrah winemakers to extract extra components from the skins, breaking them down further, even though the thin skins of Nebbiolo didn’t really need it. In the future I will probably attempt some temperature-control during the fermentation to stretch out its length, again for greater flavor extraction. I shifted my work-order to ensure that a full week of extended maceration would be part of the equation (leaving the fermented must in the bin so there’s longer skin-juice and seed-juice contact), then came up to Buellton for the press.

As planned, we went into a stainless steel tank on a Saturday, then racked to barrels on a Tuesday. Gray Hartley of the Hitching Post, one of the Terravant founding vintners like me (though his place was featured in Sideways, mine wasn’t!), was kind enough to sell me three neutral French oak barrels (2005, maybe not quite neutral), and I had a fourth 2005 from Meza Barrels with a 2008 cryoclean treatment. I had the Terravant team rack the wine into the Meza barrel and two Hartley barrels…wound up with 2.5 barrels of new wine.

Just tasted it around Thanksgiving and it is bright, crisp, tannic, and light all at once. I’m very optimistic that with 2 years of barrel aging this is going to be spectacular stuff and I will probably, despite the 10-hour round-trip drive, order up even more next year. Was also thinking of trying my hand at some Santa Ynez Valley Nebbiolo, where it’s cool enough that it might make sense there also. There is a vineyard specifically planted for Palmina…maybe they’ve got some extra for ‘09.

I’ve just finished procuring two beer kegs (these things are not that easy to come by) into which to move the half-barrel of inventory, which the crew at Terravant is keeping gassed until we switch it. I had wanted to use my small barrels but there’s no room to use these things in a bigger winery with barrel-racks that don’t fit the 13-gallon barrels, etc. The two 15.5-gallon beer kegs with the tops pulled out work well to store top-off wine, though not to age it that well since it doesn’t get the microoxygenation that a barrel provides. I will simply have to make sure to rotate the inventory every 6 months or so during scheduled racking.

So as of next week, the 2008 Nebbiolo will be in two 2005 French oak barrels and two 15-gallon aluminum beer kegs. At least 50 cases of wine, by my count –

My first professional effort as a winemaker!

Happy to begin taking futures orders for cases scheduled to be released just prior to the 2010 harvest…

Day jobs being what they are, and as you can tell based on the total lack of content on garagevino.com from March onward, I got insanely busy for a while. We were the new management team coming aboard a company that’s been around for a while, and we were bringing in new staff, etc. – lot of work, plus I drive from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica daily to do so.

Meaning I never did get around to completing my application process for the California state (ABC) equivalent of the TTB Basic Permit, which allows you to custom-crush and buy and sell wine as a wholesaler here in California.

Nonetheless, I was in the process of procuring the Chili Bu Sangiovese and Dr. Mark’s Santa Ynez Valley Syrah, and ran across a grower’s listing on winebusiness.com for Nebbiolo. A Barolo was the best wine I remember tasting, so I’ve aspired to make one. I thought, since I was already making some Sangiovese and Syrah in the garage, that I’d at least place a call and see whether my tardy permit-application process might possibly be resurrected in time to make some Nebbiolo under a professional license…thereby going pro once and for all.

Randy Pace at Terravant passed me off to Alan Phillips, the head winemaker, and we talked about working out a deal where they’d give me the “founder’s discount” – a reduced rate for the inaugural winemakers involved with Terravant’s first harvest season – on a ton of fruit crushed at the winery.

One key benefit of Terravant’s business model is that the majority of the permitting fees and process, handled through a partnership with a company called Compli (based in Paso Robles), are included in your per-case rate as a custom-crush or AP client at the winery.

Final note: it’s only about a $1,200 difference to go with the AP permit, thereby being an actual winery (of which there are 25 others at Terravant) entity sharing the winemaking premises on an “alternating” basis…versus simply being a custom crush client. The AP version allowing you to sell your wine as a retail wineseller, not just wholesale to stores and restaurants etc. Anyway it turns out Terravant and Compli was able to handle my order of a ton of Nebbiolo, with the permitting process to be completed as we went. Any failure in the permitting process would mean that Terravant would own my wine, but given the fact I already had a TTB Basic Permit, I figured it was worth the risk and we’d be able to get it done. Terravant has a monthly payment plan which makes life easier as well.

We customized the plan for my Nebbiolo:

• Crush into 1.5-ton bin with dry-ice chips
• Five-day cold soak
• Fermentation with RC-212 yeast in open-top 1.5-ton bin
• Addition of enzyme to assist in breaking down the skins
• Seven-day extended maceration (daily CO2 gassing)
• Press to stainless steel tank
• 72-hour settling period
• Rack to French oak barrels
• Top-off every 2 weeks
• 18 months minimum barrel aging

In this way I believed I would be getting just about every molecule of flavor and intensity out of those skins. Enough people say that you can’t make a Barolo-type Nebbiolo from California grapes that even I was starting to believe it…but a few producers, such as Palmina, do Nebbiolo pretty well, and I suspect the reason much of the Nebbiolo made here isn’t so fantastic is that the winemakers don’t go for it. Barolo, at least most of it, is a big wine that requires a lot of aging…and Nebbiolo is a think-skinned fruit. I figured that by extracting every last bit of tannin and flavor from the grapes I was getting, I’d have as big and intense a Nebbiolo as the fruit would allow.

We settled on our fees, began the permitting process (very intense set of questionnaires, bank statements, evidence of social security number, all that jazz), and began waiting for my new friend Bob Howard’s vineyard to get those grapes ripe and ready to crush.

Since laying out the series of semi-pictorial essays on the 2008 “Crush in the Hood” (where I made 45 gallons of Sangiovese from San Miguel), I also partnered with a friend to crush a half-ton of Santa Ynez Valley Syrah. I’ve been busy: I also “went pro” in October with 1 ton of Nebbiolo from San Diego County (South Coast AVA, near Temecula from a place called Fallbrook).

Rather than repeat the same old entries for each of these steps in my quest to become a “vigneron,” I thought a quick summary of recent events was in order. Here goes:

DR. MARK’S SANTA YNEZ VALLEY SYRAH

Friend of mine named Mark Pomerantz, a wine expert and similarly aspiring winemaker, had the chance to get his hands on some Syrah grapes, thanks to some relationships he’s got with vineyard managers and winery owners as part of his doctor’s practice in Santa Maria. Thanks to “Dr. Mark’s” access and passion for Syrah, we were able to get our hands on half a ton of Santa Ynez Valley Syrah from a crop destined, otherwise, entirely for one Santa Barbara county winery.

What happened next was we basically repeated the Crush in the Hood – another afternoon party with all the kids coming by to crush, parents partaking of a brown-bag wine-tasting quiz, and the usual blast of hand-cranking my Ferrari-like manual crusher-destemmer through bucket after bucket of grapes.

With the Syrah, now pressed off and residing in a 2005 French oak barrel and a couple of gallon-size jugs, we went straight to fermentation (no real ability to safely cold-soak that many grapes in the garage) and shot for three or four days of extended maceration once the must stopped pumping out CO2. Utilizing my newly rented CO2 tank to its fullest potential! The oak barrel we got from Meza Barrels in Santa Maria, and it was “cryo-cleaned” in 2008, which is an intense internal cleaning process which supposedly takes a three-year-old barrel and allows it to give off oak influence similar to a one-year-old barrel. We can confirm that the barrel is more or less functioning like a new-ish barrel. Plenty of oak oozing into the new wine, but it’s not overdoing things.

Ultimately we ought to each come out with 12-14 cases of this stuff. It came in very Brix-heavy at 28.5+ Brix and packs a wallop as you taste it…but there appears to be the complexity, depth, and tannins to match what will probably be 16+% alcohol. Similar, I am hoping, to the Consilience Syrah I tend to buy from our local wine shop. We inoculated with ML and added “Leucofood” as nutrients for the malolactic fermentation, and the temperatures in the garage were warm enough so that the ML should be complete. Haven’t tested for this but it tastes as though it’s there.

At this point I’m simply topping it off every two weeks from the smaller jugs of excess that didn’t fit into the big 55-gallon barrel, using my CO2 tank to gas the smaller jugs whenever I borrow from them.

It’s the Staeger custom crush garage winery…give a call and we’ll make a barrel for you for price of half that barrel of wine! (Actually I paid for my half but I’ll still go ahead and call Dr. Mark my first custom-crush client!)

THE INAUGURAL 2007 GARAGEVINO ZIN

Just wanted to use the word “inaugural” to make sure the billion people searching that word stumble across my Website by mistake…

But I’ve also got an update on my 2007 Zin. After its back-and-forth aging journey through small new American oak and neutral French oak barrels (plus some time in carboy glass), around the wine’s one-year anniversary I racked it all into my new 29-gallon French oak barrel ($595 worth of barrel, by the way). Did this for the following purposes: a) to give the whole batch some consistency of oak influence; b) to punch up the oak flavors one more notch; and c) to take the edge off the new oak barrel so that I could put the 2008 Sangiovese in there and leave it in there for 6+ months without over-oaking the stuff.

After about 7 weeks in the new oak I actually thought the wine was getting too much vanilla oakiness – though the flavors were very good, they were getting a little strong – and so continued with my plan and racked the Zin into my new 79-gallon variable-capacity stainless steel tank ($650, thank you very much), where I hope to have the patience to leave it for a full 6 months longer before bottling.

I have since tasted the wine three times – once right after placing it in the tank, once a month later (early December), and once on New Year’s Day. Each time it’s tasted farther along, almost as though my double-racking helped oxygenate that stuff to where it’s just about ready to bottle and drink. In particular, the New Year’s tasting confirmed that this stuff is all but ready to drink. I still intend to show the patience and give it till May or so in the tank before bottling it. This way it will be as good as it can be, with about 18 months of aging before I release it to the neighborhood and anyone else who will partake.

THE 2008 “CHILI BU SANGIOVESE”

At last check my dad was in town for the pressing of the intense Sangiovese I bought from Bob Modie’s 3-acre vineyard in the San Miguel area, just over the Monterey County line near Paso Robles. Couple updates here.

First, since Bob Blamire and I went up to get this fruit together and he did all the hard work of the bin-cleaning for the crush, he and I have christened this wine the “Chili Bu Sangiovese.” Why, you ask? Well our daughters are in Flamenco class together, and the Flamenco program has these two-year-olds (not our kids, they’re older) who dress up in these glamorous Flamenco dresses and do a semi-unified dance around a song called “Chili Bu.” I don’t know if I’m even spelling it right, but that is now the name of this wine, spelling errors or no. The 2008 Chili Bu Sangiovese.

Updates on the wine: first, it’s coming along very well. I’ve liked it from the outset. It’s smooth already, but with a puckery kind of tannin-laden finish. It’s fairly dark, darker than my Zin was last year at this time, which leads me to believe it’s going to be a rich, complex wine with a smooth drinkability – exactly what I had hoped for in making a Sangiovese to begin with.

I was just reading that Brunello wines, from Italy, are big, powerful Sangiovese wines, as compared to the typically more mellow Chiantis made from the same grape. From The New Wine Lover’s Companion:

Brunello di Montalcino DOCG (broo-NELL-oh dee mawn-tahl-CHEE-noh): The wines from Brunello di Montalcino are regarded as some of Italy’s best. They’re made totally from a Sangiovese clone, a strain of Sangiovese Grosso called Brunello (“little dark one”), so named for the brown hue of its skin. The wines are big, deep-colored, and powerful, with enough tannins and structure to be quite long-lived. Brunello di Montalcino wines have one of the longest aging requirements in Italy – 4 years, 2 of which must be in wooden barrels.

After the press, I kept the wine in the stainless steel tank for about 10 weeks. It’s starting to get a little more clear as a result – began somewhat cloudy as compared to the Zin at the same stage last year. Left it alone in the tank that whole time. It’s hard not to check on it or otherwise fiddle with the wine – but the wine prefers to sleep, age, and be left alone, as long as it isn’t getting exposed to air.

Following the Zin’s six-week stint in the new 29-gallon French oak barrel, I transferred the Chili Bu Sangiovese into the 29-gallon barrel, a 2005 13.3-gallon French oak barrel I procured from a guy listing it on winebusiness.com, a gallon-size jug, and a half-gallon-size jug. About 45 gallons all told. Note: small barrels are hard to find. People tend to keep them. If you can get your hands on some, do so…or if you would like to sell any to me, please send me a note! They come in handy for the smaller batches of garage wine and I have the feeling they still will when I’ve got a bigger winery facility going on.

That’s it on the Chili Bu Sangiovese – it’s sleeping in its barrels. Just tasted it on Jan 1 also and it is very nice now that it’s getting that new French oak (but not too new) influence.

Next entry…the scoop on that part of this whole venture I’ve been cawing about for all 16 months I’ve been maintaining this blog…GOING PRO.

Wines & Vines Article

Best of luck, Ira – I can certainly confirm you’re doing all the right things, or at least I can confirm that you’re doing it about the way I am, which had better be the right way!

My only suggestion based on what’s covered in the story is that Ira’s notion of needing $750K in investment capital is potentially on the high side, depending on the business model he’s looking to pursue for that 5,000-case winery he mentions. Probably only need that much if you are in fact buying the vineyard…in which case you’d need more than that to buy the appropriate land in California. Perhaps in Michigan that would do the trick, and perhaps he’ll need to plant some grapes to assure himself of high-quality fruit in an emerging winegrowing state.

I keep learning that winemaking, maybe anything you like doing, is really about the time you spend doing it with other people. Last year, Dave Wheaton loaned me everything and we spent a couple hours pressing my quarter-ton of Zin with his candy-apple-red press, whole clusters and all.

This year, who better to have in town for the physical help and spiritual companionship than my own dad. We squeezed the wine out of the fermented Sangiovese, staining our hands, feet, tools, and concrete patio as, bucket by bucket, we transferred the precious wine out of the big half-ton fermentation bin, into my new press (now stained purple thanks to Bob Modie’s amazing Sangiovese fruit), and ultimately into my equally new stainless steel 79-gallon tank. Seems like about 55 gallons, all told, at least if I can judge by the depth to which we’ve filled the tank.

Think I showed the courage to go three days of extended maceration. Armed with my CO2 gas tank, I knew I could go at least a couple days, making up for the fact that there wasn’t any cold soak to speak of.

Inoculated three weeks later with ML culture and “Leucofood,” which feeds the ML bacteria. Doesn’t seem to be resulting in anything yet other than sleeping wine.

Thanks, Dad — couldn’t have pressed this stuff off alone…and there’s no better time than a nighttime press with your father over a couple of beers. Amazing what you talk about, the things you catch up on, as you crank the Italian pressing machinery under the lights and have nothing better or worse to do than watch the wine trickle down from the skins and pour into the transfer bucket.

Ready, a mere two years from now, to be consumed!

Soccer practices and a few other things held us up for a minute — the grapes keeping cool in their half-ton bin in the back of the truck, parked in my driveway (neighbors wondering, are the Staegers moving already? Just got here a year ago)…and getting grapes from the bin, through the garage, and to the only place where I could operate the crusher-destemmer, proved a major endeavor.

I need a space to make this wine for real — that, I assure you, I will have by next year.

But then the hand-cranking crush began…and people started showing up from all corners of our ‘hood. Good thing too — I swear I had a crew four times the size of the professional, paid gang working their way through 7 tons a day on some mornings last year at Jaffurs, and still it took us a good four, five hours and then some.
The crusher-destemmer worked pretty well. The grapes were ripe and gently affixed to the stems, and so there were some pieces of stem in the must and we did our best to pluck them out (another trick learned as harvest slave last year). I sulfited, about half what is typically recommended — I did a quarter teaspoon per 7-8 gallons instead of a half-teaspoon every 5 gallons as many suggest. I remember Craig Jaffurs not using any last year — he hates the stuff — just sprays a slight sulfite solution, and not much of it, on the surface of the bins as he puts them into cold storage. Working at home, giving the neighborhood kids a chance to stomp some of the grapes…I needed a little insurance and so I made sure to get a decent dose of sulfites in there.

The size, height, and nature of the crusher-destemmer, and I’m talking both the input and output side of it, just didn’t really work for any type of efficiency. The top was high enough so we had to pour grapes in from above, in food-grade trash-bin loads small enough to prevent us from dislocating a shoulder for the hoist. No forklift on my back patio… and the chute was too low for anything but a 5 or 10 gallon bucket to take the must into. This worked fine in the end — transferred from the bucketloads into the sterilized extra 4×4 half-ton bin Bob Modie had loaned me, keeping it covered with a plastic sheet and bungee cord just the way I’d learned as harvest slave last year.

Bucket by bucket, crank by crank, pitchforkful by pitchforkful, we got the 900 pounds of grapes destemmed, partially crushed (probably should have figured out the adjustment facets of the crusher in advance, but I didn’t, so plenty of the berries remained whole; again something notable from last year’s lessons was that Jaffurs had removed the crusher part of his crusher-destemmer and so I take it that, at least for Syrah, the way my little Ferrari of a hand-cranker machine worked was actually the best-adjusted setting in terms of degree of crushing)…out of the picking bin and into the fermentation bin.

Along the way, every kid got two long stretches of stomping in his or her own bin. What a blast — and what a tradition. We all felt as though we were in Tuscany, making the wine for the neighborhood for years to come…which, obviously, we were, except for the Tuscany part. Though the weather’s not so different there…

Somewhere along the way I ate a piece of pizza or two, and tasted some decent wine Nadine bought for the occasion. We even barrel-tasted my 2007 Zinfandel (French oak barrel — great; American barrel — not too far along and too “fakey oakey”), and I finally did get around to testing the Brix on the Sangiovese - 26.5. Pretty high — and pretty good. While I had neglected to buy the ph- and acid-testing equipment I will eventually stock on my garagevino shelves, I was told that Ariel, with the same grapes, tested between 3.4 and 3.6 ph depending on location (some hillside/top, some flat down near the bottom of hill). Good enough for me this time around. We’ll average mine out around 3.5 for this season’s winemaking reference. Want to let the grapes speak for themselves anyway, unless things taste totally off at some point.

Darkness arrived, bedtime for the kids came too, and at long last we had one empty bin and one ¾ full of must. Smelling delicious and looking ruby purple the way only red winegrape must does. The last of my comrades headed home, I cleaned, covered, and gassed (CO2) the fermentation bin, hosed things off, hid the two trash bins of stems behind the garage, then considered going to bed before realizing that since I wasn’t doing a cold soak — too big of a bin for me to keep cold with ice bags and a blanket — it was time to get the yeast going.

Mixed up a couple containers worth (you have to rehydrate the yeast in warm water, adding some nutrient mix like “Go-Ferm” and let it sit for 15 minutes) then dug some holes in the must and got a pair of patches started for the night. Closed things up, went to sleep, got up early and mixed the two starter spots around a little before going to work, then came back that night to discover the fermentation was already getting warmed up and moving right along.

Final challenge that arose, kind of a disappointing one for me: I started the fermentation late Wednesday night September 10, and had a business trip that would take me out of town from the 14th through the 18th. Greg Schlosser, neighbor and mensch, along with Bob Blamire, came through in the clutch and kept the two-a-day punchdowns going, handling it perfectly after the one afternoon of instruction I offered just before heading to the airport on Sunday. Sterilize the punch-down tool, mix in some “Superfood/DAP” powder to keep the fermentation going and reduce the potential for off odors from the sulfur on the skins of the grapes, pull off the plastic sheet, punch down the whole bin in some systematic way, rinse off the tool, wipe down the sides of the bin with a vodka-soaked rag, replace the sheet, and, early on, provide a little shot of gas just in case. Didn’t even need the gas by Sunday — put your head down close to the grapes and sniff, and you’ll understand why added CO2 just wasn’t necessary. Your nose hairs curl, your brain freezes up like you’ve got a Slurpee headache, and you know quite well how little oxygen exists on the surface of those grapes.

Now I’m back, and I had the pleasure of my first punchdown in four days, a mere 30 minutes after pulling into the driveway from the airport. Things are still going strong in there, getting juicier by the moment, or winier, I should say, but CO2 is still in effect and the grapes are warm and fermenting still, here on day 8. Longer the better — more gentle, more flavors extracted.

I’m planning to do with extended maceration what I couldn’t do with cold soaking — give it a few days on the skins once the primary fermentation is, well, primarily over. I’ve got my CO2 gas gun so I should be able to keep air off of the surface of those suckers for a week following completion of primary.

Then we’ll put my new press to use and my kids will know not only how to crush red wine grapes, how to punch down the cap, to clean a winery facility before and after…but how to press the fresh wine off the skins and move that young stuff into the tank.

Extended maceration and press, coming up in seven days or thereabouts.

Thus ends the Crush in the Hood 2008 — at least until the Syrah and Nebbiolo I’m seeking is ready to harvest and I try the whole process all over again with slightly smaller lots! Or maybe just the same size all over again…?

It’s a cool morning and the clouds keep it cool while the half-ton bins of grapes come into Bob’s driveway two-by-two, aboard a trailer the harvest crew is picking and dumping into. I’m fortunate to be joined in my desire for Bob’s grapes with one of the premier winemakers in Santa Barbara county — turns out Ariel Lavie, owner-winemaker (along with his wife Angela) of La Vie Vineyards in Lompoc is there taking all of Bob’s fruit that I don’t. If this guy has chosen this fruit? I’m in luck. Stumbled across the right vineyard is what that means.

The first four bins get weighed on Bob’s new scale and head up onto Ariel’s truck. My bin totals out at 900 lbs., even with the grapes mounded as high as they’ll go. Ariel is running Bob’s forklift this morning — he’s an old cellar pro and could steer a forklift through a maze of grandma’s china in his sleep. He gets my bin into the back of my U-Haul truck, the grapes still cold from the chilly night, and Bob loans me a second bin to crush the grapes into — a bin I’ll also use for primary fermentation.

Then my neighbor, pal, and dad of my daughter’s best friend, Bob Blamire and I hit the road, slightly reticent and full of guilt for leaving one of the area’s top winemakers behind as the sun begins pounding down on the hillside (and the grapes on Ariel’s truck). I tell myself he knows what he’s doing — plus, he’s got a shorter drive than we do, let alone less prep time before the crush once the grapes arrive at his winery.

Guilt aside, my grapes are shielded from the hot Paso sun that by now has made its way through the cloud cover — the back of the truck keeps cool until we cross over the mountain range north of Pismo Beach and the marine layer welcomes us with noonish temperatures in the seventies.

Couple stops at stores to procure some things I’d forgotten I need (that happens, it seems, even to the old pros, not that I am one — you only do this once a year, so you forget some of the things you had down pat, after a few tons of crushing, eleven months ago, and seemingly need to learn the annual process all over again). After these stops I’m ready to test out my new crusher-destemmer.

This time, unlike last year, it won’t just be me, my dad, and a couple of squishes from my kids — seems my wife, who has a passion for family traditions (including the new ones we’ve established here in Paradise, AKA Santa Barbara), has, in the span of a few hours, managed to create an annual event that you can go ahead and call unexpected in a beachfront city community: the First Annual Mesa Neighborhood Crush!

AKA The Crush In The Hood.

Turns out I’d need the help…since, as I began this three-part tale, 900 lbs. of grapes is one hell of a load if you’re crushing and destemming the things with a hand-crank Italian device meant for a quarter of that quantity. Plus, I had to assemble the stand myself without the aid of instructions, and after a few cranks it would prove particularly wobbly.

And so, accompanied by more than few parents, a gang of kids, and my best Mesa pals — the wine and beer and lemonade flowing, the pizzas arrived and, following the Jaffurs-trained cellar-master/harvest-slave sterilization stage…the crush was ready to begin. Destined, perhaps, to take us on into the night…

Next…Part III of “The Crush in the Hood”!

Sangiovese grapes, in this case.

Having debated and discussed possibilities with Sonoma area growers for some time, I’ve ultimately become way too busy in the day gig to get myself all the way up there without losing so much of my family time that the kids would forget who I was. So I kept searching for a grower cultivating Sangiovese or Nebbiolo grapes in the Central Coast area — i.e. within driving distance — and stumbled across Bob Modie’s offering of Sangiovese in San Miguel. An excellent Lompoc winemaker named Ariel Lavie was taking the majority of the grapes from Bob’s 3-acre Indian River Valley vineyard, but Bob had half a ton he could spare. Perfecto.

I get the note that they’re comin’ in on a Wednesday morning — September 10. It’s a little hotter in the Paso Robles area than in Santa Barbara county, so the grapes were ready a couple weeks earlier than, say, the Syrah will be down here.

Two problems with this: harvest had snuck up on me, so I hadn’t bought any of the equipment I’d hoped to. So I wasn’t ready for whatever wine I was planning to make in the garage (as opposed to a commercial custom crush). Second problem…well, I work during the week.

No problem.

Issue one was solved by a Sunday afternoon visit, various kids in tow, to John Daume’s “Home Wine Beer and Cheese Making Shop,” in Woodland Hills (about 75% of the way from SB to LA). I did what I’ve fantasized about doing since last year and bought a crusher-destemmer, 79-gallon stainless steel tank, press, 30-gallon barrel, and all the fixins (RC-212 yeast, supplements, sulfite powder, citric acid, etc.). Wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t as much as a custom crush on the same amount of grapes either — and I get to keep using this stuff every year. Made sure to get everything covered - pitchfork to move grapes, elastic rope to hold the plastic on the fermentation bin, even rented a CO2 gas tank from Santa Barbara Ice Company to make sure I could keep oxygen off my freshly crushed fruit.

Issue number two…move some meetings, take a vacation day, rent a 10’ U-Haul truck…then get lucky and find a friend of mine, Bob Blamire, has Wednesdays off from the business he runs and wouldn’t mind heading up to San Miguel with me to take possession of the grapes.

Cut to a six a.m. departure in the U-Haul, a blast heading up the highway, and an 8:30 a.m. arrival in San Miguel…Indian River Valley, to be precise.

One thing I keep realizing, or remembering, about winemaking, is one of its greatest benefits: you need help doing everything, so the process results in some good times with friends.

Exactly what I had in store that day…all day long, in fact.

Next…Part II of “The Crush in the Hood”!