Alabama

My trip to Alabama was a great look at a new market for Fogarty wine. I spent Wednesday in and around Birmingham. I had a great lunch at Chez Fon Fon, a classic French Bistro styled spot, and an incredible dinner at The Highlands Bar and Grill. Frank Stitt is the proprietor of both and is somewhat of a living legend when it comes to Southern Cuisine. The Stone Ground Baked Grits appetizer alone at Highlands is reason enough for me; man it was good!

On Thursday I drove to Huntsville and visited numerous restaurants and wine shops. Lara Isbell, from The Wine Source, had put together a number of appointments as well as spearheaded our involvement at the Museum Dinner; we are very grateful to have sales reps that are this driven! We had lunch at the Chefs Table where i had an awesome Crawfish Bisque! After a busy day of visiting accounts we were the featured winery at the Huntsville Art Museums Winter Wine Event. After the tasting we dined at The Chophouse, where i had a massive slab of seared Ahi, it was great stuff.

Friday saw more account visits and a great lunch at Cafe Michael and had another awesome Bisque; I think you are pretty safe ordering Bisque in Alabama, they take it pretty seriously!

Fogarty was the featured winery at the Backers of Bacchus Dinner and Live Auction. We poured our '06 Skyline Chardonnay and '05 Skyline Red with a series of appetizers. The dinner by 801 Franklin was paired with our 2006 Gewürztraminer, the 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley Yountville, Vallerga Vineyard and the 2003 Lexington Meritage. The food was really well put together, both the fillet and the scallop, the main course, were cooked to perfection; no easy feat when cooking for 150+ people.

After the dinner and auction we headed back to The Chophouse for a celebratory libation. I was lucky enough to try a 1977 Chateau St Jean, Cabernet Sauvignon, Wildwood Vineyard. This is a wine from my birth year and was graciously poured by Mark Flatt, a wine fanatic I had met the night earlier who had offered to bring the bottle after a conversation about old California wine and birth years. Thanks a bunch Mark that was great! The wine was in great shape and barely showing its 30 years of age!

A big thanks to Frank Hanson for and Glenn Tony, the Owner/President of the Wine Source, for the hospitality in Birmingham. And a serious shout out to Lara in Huntsville, thank you so much!

From afar

Greetings from the luxurious A terminal at Dallas Fort Worth Airport! I am on my way to Alabama to work with our distributor there, The Wine Source. Unfortunately there aren't any, to my knowledge, direct flights to Alabama from SF. The layover did allow me to catch up on the blog here, and have the privilege to pay T Mobile $10 to use their WiFi for the day (yeah!).

We are the featured winery at an event to benefit the Huntsville Museum of Art.

In other exciting news Michael and I meet with noted Biodynamic consultant Philippe Armenier about possibly trialling this exciting and controversial farming technique on a few blocks!

Gotta board my plane!

6 Gewurztraminers

As I mentioned, yesterday we tasted 6 Gewürztraminer with the winery staff. It's always nice to taste blind with the staff as you get a lot of honest opinions and some insight into how your wine looks in it's peer group. All wine tasted blind. I posted these from Cellar Tracker, if you are into wine and don't know about this site, fix it in a hurry!

• 2003 Cesconi Trentino Traminer Aromatico - Italy, Trentino-Alto Adige, Trentino (1/16/2008)
  Very pungent with high tone ginger, lime, some floral elements with candied fruit, pungent spice and fresh herbs. With air some red pepper elements really come for. Very complex if somewhat herbal nose. Very interesting and complex. Heady and rich in the mouth with exotic fruit and spice flavors.


• 2004 Claiborne and Churchill Gewürztraminer Alsatian Style - USA, California, Central Coast (1/16/2008)
  Sweet melon and orange marmalade one the nose with some green grass and herbal notes. Dry and lighter in style with firm acidity. Some pear and apple fruit complement the fine texture.


• 2005 Bott Frères Gewürztraminer Reserve Personelle - France, Alsace, Alsace AOC (1/16/2008)
  Smokey and spicy with bosc pear mango and ginger nose. Very rich and oily in the mouth with a good dose of ssweetness, balanced somewhat by the oiliness. Very full with cashew, smoke and exotic fruit flavors. very big and complex but a touch too flabby, saved only by the oily texture.


• 2005 Francis Tannahill Gewürztraminer Dragonfly - USA, Washington (1/16/2008)
  Some vanilla mango and pear on the ripe-fruit flavored nose. Fairly sweet and a little flabby with herbs, pear and persimmon flavors.


• 2006 Londer Gewürztraminer Dry - USA, California, North Coast, Anderson Valley (1/16/2008)
  Vanilla/linalool aromas with candied fruit, crystallized ginger and some citrus on the very sweet-fruit driven nose. Needs some air to open. Dry and steely with zingy flavors of herbs, flowers and melon. Fairly lean and showing pretty tight.


• 2006 Thomas Fogarty Gewürztraminer - USA, California, Central Coast, Monterey County (1/16/2008)
  Pungent spice, with chile, clove and ginger flavors complementing cashew and pineapple fruit. Good weight in the mouth with good balance of richness and acidity. very spicy in the mouth with more ginger and candied fruit flavors. Long finish.

Posted from CellarTracker

The Londer is always one of my favorites. This was my first go at the '06 and it seemed pretty tight; a few months in the bottle should do wonders.

The '04 C&C is from the Ventana Vineyard, where we sourced 50% of our 06 Monterey Gewurz. It was a really pretty wine, much more feminine than others in the tasting. It showed some similarities to ours; maybe that terroir thing is for real.

The Oregon entry, Francis Tannahill, was very fruit driven and had a beautiful floral nose. I'd like to see a bit more cut or structure but it was undeniably lush.

The Bott Freres is a new Alsatian producer to me. It showed the oily characteristics the varietal is noted for, but was pretty sweet. I liked the wine but It is further proof that "Alsatian" style is anything but dry these days. Maybe it is the house style, again I am unfamiliar with the producer, but it seemed a bit too cloying.

The star of the tasting for me was the Cesconi. What a fabulous and exotic take on Gewurz. I will definitely seek out more wine from this producer from Trentino-Alto Adige. Superb stuff and very compelling wine.

This was a fun look at a few wines and I found a real winner in the Cesconi, gotta get more from this producer.

Safety and Gewurz

Though i have spent a considerable amount of time writing about lab work this past week, I have to be honest- it is by far my least favorite part of the job. An important one to be sure but not the most exciting. As romantic as titrating and aspirating may sound, It can become pretty repetitive and boring.

The best part about my job is the diversity of tasks I am asked to perform. It keeps things fresh and exciting.

For instance this afternoon I am holding our monthly safety meeting. This is new for us and should help us communicate better regarding our safety policy. To ensure people show up I decided to combine a little wine education and tasting with the safety meeting. Nothing like a good bribe of wine to get people to attend!

Today we are tasting 6 Gewürztraminers and talking about the history of the grape, some general characteristics and some important regions where it is grown. Doing an all staff education seminar each month is, in my eyes, very important. By increasing the overall wine awareness and wine intellect of our staff we will be better suited to help our customers and be able to converse intelligently in what can be a very confusing industry.

Ill let you know how the tasting goes, I doubt anyone cares how the safety portion of the meeting goes!

Reading Chromatography

This morning i removed the chromatography sheets from their jars and hung them outside the office to dry and resolve.


You can faintly see the wine spots have 'wicked' up the paper as it was carried up the paper by the solvent.


The order the organic acids resolve from bottom to top is tartaric, citric (if present), malic and then lactic. This finished sheet shows a large tartaric acid spot (yellow spots) and very faint if any malic and a small lactic acid spot. The small lactic spot could mean the wine had little malic to start with, which it did, and therefore there is little lactic produced. I like to see a better lactic spot ideally. The Wine Lab has a great pdf with instructions on the test and reading the results.

The drawback of the test is that it is qualitative, not quantitative and it can give somewhat questionable results. The test yesterday was far from conclusive, but does lead me to believe that the wines tested are vary close to being through, if not already finished with MLF.

The next step is to validate the chromatography with a enzymatic assay that give a quantitative amount of malic acid present. At that point i'd go ahead and add SO2.

I wish the test was a bit more conclusive, but such is life.

Happiness is Chromatograhphy

After the turn of the year I spend a significant amount of time checking and tracking the progress of malolactic fermentations (ML or MLF) in our new wines. This secondary fermentation is a bacterial fermentation or conversion of malic acid (think green apples) to lactic acid (think dairy acid). This conversion softens the acid profile of the wine and also supplies a degree of stability as malic acid is essentially food for a number of spoilage organisms.

Most of our wines complete 100% MLF, save our Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Gris and stainless-steel Chardonnay. We add SO2 immediately after primary fermentation to block the MLF from occuring.

When the conversion is complete we can then add SO2 to our wines for protection (SO2 is inhibitory to the bacteria that perform the fermentation).

One of the ways we track the fermentation is by using paper chromatography. This is a relatively 'old school' technique for tracking the fermentation. It uses the principles of chromatography (essentially a substances affinity for a solvent) to separate the acids present in the wine. It's a bit convoluted but it is a pretty easy method for getting a basic idea of your MLF progress.


The rack above contains 60 test tubes, each representing a single barrel of wine. They are coded with a letter and number (A1-A10 though F1-F10) so each barrel is identified. Using special chromatography paper, I 'spot' 10 wines per page with a tiny capillary tube; the smaller the spot the better. After passing over each spot three times i leave the paper to dry.



When dry I roll the paper into a tube and staple it together. The tube is then placed into a sealed container that contains a small amount of chromatography solution. I leave the paper in over night.

Tomorrow I'll take the paper out, develop it and read the results. Ill post a pic of the results tomorrow afternoon and we'll see where we stand

SO2 and Camels

The above apparatus is used to run an Aeration/Oxidation test for free sulfur dioxide (SO2), a winemaker's primary tool in fighting oxidation and to a lesser extent microbial spoilage. It looks pretty 'mad-scientist'-like but it's relatively practical chemistry at work.

The pear-shaped flask at the bottom contains the wine and a big dose of acid, which combined with aspiration (pulling some air though the solution with a vacuum pump) liberates the free SO2. The free SO2 essentially travels up through a condenser (cold water) and is trapped in the solution in the top flask. The top flask contains hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and an indicator solution/dye. It begins the test a green color and turns purple in the presence of the SO2. We can then titrate this solution with Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) to calculate the free SO2. Ill spare you the boring details of the chemistry, its pretty easy and fairly accurate; it's downside is that it takes 10 minutes of aspiration to run a test.

We began another round of racking in the cellar this week. Ryan racked our 2006 wines from the Camel Hill Vineyard(Merlot, Cab Sauv, Cab Franc and our Lexington Meritage (so far 68% Cab Sauv/20% Cab Franc/12% Merlot)) to tank yesterday. While he was washing the empty barrels i ran analysis (Free SO2, VA (Volatile Acidity), pH and TA) on the wine in tank. We are going to do a little blending, correct the SO2 and return the wines to barrel.

I feel like I have a pretty good gauge on where these wines are going at this point in their life. 2006 is a much more classically styled vintage, especially when compared to 2005. The 05's needed ever day of the almost 2 year we gave them in barrel, while the 06's should be ready for bottling in another 4-5 months. The are much more suave and nuanced; the 05's are much more structured.

The Lexington and Cab Franc have darker and denser flavors- think blackberry and coffee. We only have a single barrel of Camel Hill Cab Sauv and it is getting blended into the remaining Camel Hill Merlot. It added a little more heft to the Merlot and filled in the mid-palate nicely.

I am headed up to Tahoe early tomorrow for a little snowboarding action; got a new board last week and am super excited to try it out.

More soon....

Aftermath

We survived the storm fairly well, this drain pipe being our biggest casualty. We had a couple of leaks, here and there, but all together we came through in top form.

Currently we are getting battered again by another windy storm; this one is a bit cooler as well. The rain is much needed and we are close to 100% of rainfall for the year-to-date!

Reconciliation

The activity in the cellar has really picked up this week.

The first task of the New Year is to take a physical inventory of our bulk (wine in barrel and tank) wine. This inventory is taken twice a year and serves to ensure my records are current and accurate. I use a database (Winemakers Database) to track day to day activities and inventory. Once I have taken a physical inventory it must be reconciled with the database. If I am doing my job well the two should line up, and low and behold this year things went swimmingly!

As of January 1 I am tracking 116 separate lots (including 835 barrels) and a total of 65,369 gallons. It actually sounds worse than it is! By keeping so many lots we are able to keep numerous variables separate and ensure the ultimate in quality.

Inventory and record keeping is a far from glamorous aspect of this business, yet it is an integral (and legally required) part of what I do on a daily basis.

Flogged!

Well between the 70 mph gusts and the multiple inches of rain we are doing pretty well, considering!

We are getting absolutely hammered by a storm today. My drive up the mountain was incredibly treacherous: dodging cars, down power lines, trees, trees on cars- you name it. If I had know it would be this bad i would have parked my behind on my couch for a movie marathon!

I drove around with Michael this morning to check culverts, drains, and for signs of erosion in the vineyard; luckily we seemed to have done a good 'winterizing' job as everything looks to be in good order.

The National Weather Service has issued a "sombrero" of warnings: Flood, Flash Flood, High Wind and just plain Hazardous Weather. Lucky us.

There is a good Doppler of the storm here.

The storm is supposed to calm a bit by 4, so hopefully I'll make it home.

Wish us luck!

New Year, new tasks

Ryan Teeter, Cellar Master, finishes topping our 2007 reds

Back from a long (and hopefully much-deserved) break and we are back into it up here on the mountain. The cellar crew finished barreling down and topping right before the holidays, this ensured everyone was able to get away for a spell.

The New Year brings new tasks and a definite switch in mind-set. No longer are we in “post-harvest” mode; the next range of tasks involve lots of racking and getting ready for our bottling in February. We had originally planned to bottle in the beginning of the month, but we were unable to secure our Stelvin “screw-caps” for our aromatic white wines (Gewurz, Pinot Gris and Riesling). Kind of a bummer, but these things happen. We re-scheduled for later in the month. We are using Bay Area Bottling for the first time. Our friends at Clos La Chance in San Martin recently purchased the line and we are excited to have a local mobile bottling option.

My last post was right before our ‘assessment’ of the ’07 vintage, I was unable to get my thoughts down before my vacation but definitely want to get them down at this time.

Without a doubt, 2007 has the potential to be the finest vintage yet, across the board, in my four harvests here.

Our first flight consisted of three wines: 2007 Monterey Gewurztraminer and Riesling, and our Estate Pinot Gris from Gist Ranch. The wines were already aromatic and showing great definition. The Gewurz has great balance and texture and should prove to be a worthy successor to the fabulous 2006 that is in the marketplace now.

The second flight featured four different lots of Pinot Noir (We skipped tasting the Chardonnays as they are in the throes of Malolactic Fermentation and are difficult to asses at this time). We upped the percentage of whole-clusters we used in our fermentations to about %25 this year and this, combined with great fruit has yielded some pretty awesome Pinot. They have great structure and texture, yet they are not heavy or cloying. I am super-stoked on the Pinots this year and can’t wait to see what they are like in bottle a year from now!

Our third flight was a combination of Merlot and Cab Franc, our ‘Right Bank’ flight if you will. The Cab Francs were very aromatic and pure, particularly the Gist Ranch. However, unquestionably the showstopper of the tasting was the Merlot samples. Huge tannins, dense fruit, but definitely not over the top. These are classic mountain wines that should prove to be long lived. It is gong to be very interesting to see the Camel Hill and Gist Ranch lots progress over time.

The fourth flight was a horizontal of Cabernet Sauvignon. Cab is notoriously tough to taste when so young but all the wines showed great character- dark fruits mixed with spice and mouth-coating tannins. The Gist Ranch and Raines Cabs seemed to be the strongest lots.

The final flight included two lots of Fat Buck Ridge Syrah (one 50% whole cluster with 30+ days of skin contact, the other %50 whole cluster with about three weeks of skin time) and our 2.5 barrel lot of Malbec. All three were impenetrably dark with complete saturation of color. The Syrah lots were quite different, the longer skin time lot (Lot #1) was much spicier and austere, while the shorter maceration lot (#2) was fruitier and lusher. The blend should prove interesting, and may make our best Fat Buck Ridge yet.

Malbec is a grape we have struggled with in the past. We decided to let the crop hang this year and the resulting hang time seems to have worked in our favor. This is certainly one of our more exotic lots, it is brimming with black fruit and wild exotic flavors. Too bad we only have 150 gallons!

As you may have guessed we are quite pleased with the vintage. Certainly feels good to justify all the hard work!