GARAGE VINO

These grapes are so dark my hands look like I’ve shifted careers and become an auto mechanic. For days, my hands look this way. All from one night of pressing. This is going to be one good vintage of Central Coast Sangiovese.

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!

Bob Blamire helped me clean bins. I felt as though I nearly owed him my life at this point. I do like cleaning those things — you know how clean you get ‘em if you do ‘em yourself — but I now understand why Dave Yates, assistant winemaker at Jaffurs, offered me a few bottles of wine last year during my harvest-slave month: it’s quite a luxury to be relieved of your bin-cleaning duties when you’re used to shouldering most of that load yourself. Even at my scale.

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…?

Bob Modie has grown his grapes carefully and done it himself. Guy’s sort of living my dream. 3-1/2 acre vineyard, planted in 2004, organically farmed, small crop last year, first full harvest this year. He shoot-thins, drops clusters, keeps the nets over the rows when the grapes are ripe enough to attract birds. His vineyard’s at the top and downslope of a hill, facing southwest, and to my semi-trained eye the soils look like sandy, loamy, limestone-ridden Bordeaux-esque earth. Can’t attest to the organic matter inside the stuff, but things looked to me, up on that hill, like water wouldn’t stick around long in that soil and the vines would struggle and strain to pump out the fruit. He let me take a close look at the vines and the fruit his crews were plucking from them, and the vines were healthy, the grapes fairly tightly bunched for Sangiovese, the clusters medium-sized, the grapes almost as small as blueberries. Mmeaning more skin vs. grape flesh, so more tannins and flavor. Sangiovese is known for a fairly thin skin so smaller grapes might lead to a bolder, more intense single-varietal wine without as much need to blend with Cab or Syrah to give it the robustness Sangiovese can lack.

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”!

900 pounds. Let me tell you, when you’re thinking in terms of cases, it sounds like a fairly acceptable quantity of grapes. Maybe 25 cases, give or take, right? A very small lot of handmade ultrapremium wine. But when it comes to crushing and destemming those suckers with a hand-crank Italian unit fresh from the home winemaking shop, perched unsteadily out on the patio behind your garage — man, that’s a lot of grapes.

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”!