GARAGE VINO

These past few months I’ve chronicled a combination business-strategy debate and another harvest season’s home-winemaking “garage” 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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Winemaking, Starting Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.