The first thing we will do is hold an inaugural “vertical” tasting of several wines from our collection. In this case, the wines being tasted will be the 1999, 2000, & 2001 Cabernet Sauvignons. Saturday, April 21^st is the date, & the event also includes a lunch of coq au vin being prepared by Bistro Laurent. Tasting & lunch will both take place in the Library itself, & there are still a couple of openings available for this intimate experience. So if you are interested, phone us at 1-800-549-4764. 

What can you expect when you participate in a Library event? First, the library is essentially built under ground & consequently maintains a natural cool temperature ranging between 58 – 59 degrees, with humidity approaching 80%. These are ideal conditions for wine storage, but perhaps a bit chilly for humans. It would be wise to dress with comfy layers:

This will be your view walking down the hall towards our tasting area:

The tasting table awaiting decanted wines & coq au vin:

And finally, a view looking back down the hall towards the entry door:

Here are some of the points we will be covering in our Library tastings: 

• How & why to build your own wine collection.
• The care & feeding of older wines:
  • How to store them.
  • How to open & decant older wines.
• Some ideas on how to track your collection.
• What to expect when tasting older bottles.

In addition to holding tastings of the Library wines, we will also be making some of our collection available for purchase in the sweet by & by. This brings us to our next task: how to provide reasonably easy access to a Library listing that is expected to push towards 9,000 bottles over the next several years. More on this later, i.e., once we figure out a system. 

The chairs & tables are made from recycled wine barrels by Over a Barrel here in Paso Robles. Check out their website www.overabarrel.us for a view of what they make. Good green ideas!

Initially, we thought that we could complete our work by grabbing a half day here, a few hours there, but we were hardly making a dent in our pile of library cases; so we consequently decided that we needed to put in at least one full day a week on this task if we wanted to be able to begin making use of the library this spring.

Applying the usual photos to tell the story, this first shot is of the back wall of the sitting area in the library. The table around which we will sit & taste with oh so serious concentration is more or less evident in the foreground, or at least the tabletop is. Once stocked, we will have easy seating for 8 tasters around the table, or as many as 10 especially friendly tasters. You can see that the bottle racks are actually bins. They hold roughly 48 bottles each. The shiny disk at the top of the 3^rd bin from the bottom of each "column" has a number that helps us inventory a given wine by assigning a bin number to its location. Thus, in “column” # 38 for example, you would have 5 bins identified as “A” through “E,” & in theory you would know where to go digging for the wine of your choice.

And, oh yes, in the above photo the bottles on the back wall are all that remain of my collection of the wines I made under my ownership of Adelaida Cellars. Here you have Cabernet Sauvignon going back to my first legal vintage in 1981, & all the way through to my last vintage at that winery in 1998. Some of our Adelaida sparkling wine (AKA, champagne) from 1982 through 1984 can be seen in the second column from the left.

Next below is a shot of Doug stocking bins today, in this case with Syrah:

The fruit of today’s labor:

Now a view looking down the hallway towards the entry door. All the bottles on the right side were stocked some weeks ago, & represent most of our library bottles of Chardonnay, Viognier, Chrysos, & rosé. The chairs at the far end of the hallway await the table, which itself awaits final stocking of the wines:

To conclude this blog, I offer up a couple of shots of a sunflower from our garden, a sunflower that managed to survive winter, or least did so until cut from its stalk. I spied upon it a white spider dancing with a bee which I think you can see if you look closely:

Closer inspection indicated that the spider had invited the bee to dinner, for on the morow the bee's hollow husk lay abandoned by the spider who herself was hidden, presumably in mode of digestion. Here I think we have a shot of the bee in the act of being cast off:

Thus the daily ordeals of life are conducted here upon our little hill in the wilds of Paso Robles.

On January 18^th I drove up to Sacramento where I had been invited give a talk at a meeting of the Sacramento Home Winemakers. Several members of the Sacramento group are also members of the Le Cuvier Elliptical Society, & I guess that the folks wanted to use my overview of Weird Winemaking as counterpoint to the vastly more rational approach presented by other speakers they’d had.

We started the evening with a perfectly scrumptious buffet at the home of Neal Shleffar & Donna Brown, all accompanied by wines produced by members of the Sacramento group. Across the board every wine was truly lovely, & in all honesty every bottle tasted would have been a hit in a so-called commercial winery. So if any of you have been thinking about trying your hand a home winemaking, the Sacramento bottles are proof positive that you don’t need to join the priesthood in order to make a very successful & enjoyable wine. A point of warning however: my host Neal has built an entirely separate building in his back yard to house his barrels & wine collection, & his obsession is starting to eye the living room for possible expansion. Donna is not giving an inch, but is clearly concerned. This too could happen to you. A fine obsession for sure.

Following our buffet, the meeting of the Sacramento Home Winemakers was held at a lovely old social club somewhere in Sacramento, but I know not where since I was being chauffeured about. There was a grand turnout for the evening, I think about 80 members of the group, & lots & lots of very good questions in response to my presentation on making wine without use of sulfite.  Such was the wealth of questions that my assistant Robin Graham & I have plans to collaborate on a paper describing our technique, with Robin providing the science to counterbalance my own nonsense.

In closing on Sacramento, I want to sincerely thank everyone who participated, & especially those of you who did so much to orchestrate the evening. It was also fitting that a grand old drinking establishment happened to be located directly across the street from the meeting hall, & it was especially gratifying to have so many members of the Sacramento group insist on buying me night caps.

I did not rush back to Paso Robles. Instead, I chose to take a mini-vacation of sorts by wandering about through the Sacramento River delta. What a wonderfully wacky & lovely area this is, with curious little villages filled with people who appear to have no visible means of support. In the tiny town of Locke (built by Chinese immigrants in the early 1900’s) you can dine in style at Al The Wop’s restaurant. A bit further down river in Isleton you can gamble, sleep & eat, all under a single roof, at Rogelio’s whose restaurant “specializes in Chinese, Italian, & Mexican cuisine.” I spent my last night’s outing in Rio Vista where I was befriended by the two cousins pictured below. They were fine gentlemen, & it was an honor to find myself in the company of such knowledgeable indigenes who could fill me in on all kinds of esoteric detail & hidden history about the delta:

The following week, on January 26^th, Mary & I drove to Death Valley for an Elliptical Society Wine Dinner & Weekend at the remarkably beautiful Furnace Creek Inn & Resort. Here is a view looking west from one of the room balconies:

And here we have the palm gardens leading down to the swimming pool which is itself constantly fed & refreshed by a giant running spring, a spring that is the true foundation for this oasis:

Mary chortling at Friday night’s wine reception:

Chef Mike serving one of the hors d’oeuvres at the reception. Actually, “hors d’oeuvres” is a misnomer because the wine reception was truly a movable feast:

A point of politics clearly being made:

The bar appears to have filled with Elliptical Members following the reception. Imagine that!

Mary & I stayed on at Furnace Creek through the following Wednesday in order to conduct very important business discussions which have officially been titled the “2012 Shareholders’ Meeting." A business expense, for sure. Sundown on our last evening gave us this view looking west from our balcony:

And this view looking east:

Moving forward to the present, we held our Spring Elliptical Society Pick-Up Party this past weekend (Presidents’ Day). The weather was perfect, & the almond orchards were in pink-white bloom making the view from atop our hill that much more spectacular. Several hundred Elliptical Members & their guests took advantage of the glory of it all to visit & taste the Spring wines, each accompanied by a separate hors d’oeuvre prepared by Chef Laurent Grangien of the eponymous Bistro Laurent here in Paso Robles. The camera was more or less on vacation, but events coordinator Dana Matterson did manage to snap a few shots of Saturday night’s wine dinner in our home, also prepared by Chef Grangien:

And lastly, here is a photo of the finished patio taken this morning. A fine place to sit, & soon the oak will leaf out to bring us shade:

Here the toms are all doing their mating dance while being totally ignored by the hens:

The patio area is moving forward quickly. Planting is almost complete, & we hope to have pavers in place in the flat area beneath the oak within 2 or 3 weeks, which in turn will provide you with a serene place to sit while contemplating the larger meaning of life . . . glass in hand of course. Though everything finally seems to be coming together, I must admit to lying awake during the dark hours of the night, my mind’s eye filled with bleak visions of sex-addled turkeys uprooting every newly planted young shoot & stem:

As for the Wine Library, here is a shot looking down the hall towards the tasting area:

Each of the shelf “bins” seen in the above photo will hold roughly 48 bottles, & there are 190 bins, which means that (with some adjustment for smaller corner bins & consideration for the vagaries of some deviously sized bottles) there is storage for 9,637 bottles in the Library.

And here is a view of a part of the Library tasting area with our tasting table in the foreground. I think that the table will seat 10. This is all hard to envision without a wide-angle lens to capture this room in its entirety:

Next we have a shot of the progress on the wine library shelving. In this case the photo was taken standing in the library room itself while looking back down the hallway towards the entry door. Each shelf defines a storage space, or bin, 25 inches wide by 20 inches high, & each bin will hold between 46 & 53 bottles depending on bottle size. Thus, the hallway alone will accommodate somewhere in the range of five thousand, seven hundred & fifty-nine bottles. What a lovely promenade that will be!

And builder Scott West building the wine library shelving:

In any event, my blog spoke of the large gathering of turkeys, & indeed of a flock of over 100, but I could produce no proof of the event. Thus, for those who have accused me of the occasional exaggeration, here are some photos of the flock taken this morning. It would have required a larger camera than I possess to capture the entirety of the mess of birds, but here they are nonetheless:

This first photo shows the patio layout with the future paver area to the left, & stone work beginning to form up on the right:

Next is a look at wall work in progress. The walls are being build “dry stacked,” that is, without use of mortar:

And here is a shot of shelving in progress in the Wine Library. I’ve calculated that the Library will hold slightly in excess of 9,000 bottles, or enough wine to provide me with the pleasure of 1 bottle per day for the next 24.9972603 years. A burden that must be born:

In any event, with the last press load at hand, I decided to capture at least this final part of the fermentation process, & I have done so via a series of photos below. Ultimately (AKA, “in the sweet by & by”), we will have an entire section on the Le Cuvier web site devoted to describing all aspects of our winemaking, from vineyard pruning right on through to the cold dregs of the year when wines go dormant . . . or at least that’s the plan. And here we are with a start, even if the start is at the end, but fair warning: unless you are an absolute Wine Geek, or a gearhead who enjoys instructional videos, you may find what follows singularly boring. No matter.  Here will be revealed all of the steps we go though on the day grapes are pressed off to barrel.

Virtually all wineries ferment their wines to dryness on the grape skins. That is, they want all of the grape sugars used up & otherwise metabolized by the yeast before pumping their young wines to barrel or tank for aging. In large part this is done in the interest of extracting as much color & character as possible from the grape skins. In our case, since the early 1990’s, I have been draining & pressing our fermenting wines to barrel when the sugars are still way up around 15%. Given that we pick our grapes when the sugars are in the range of 25%, this means that we drain & press off our juice to barrel when it is less than half way through the fermentation process. The reason? I find that the mouth feel & breadth of expression in wine made this way is much grander, both for reds & whites, when they complete a major part of their fermentation in barrel. Surely there must be a scientific theory somewhere that elucidates why this is so, but I have not discovered it, & personally don’t have a clue. Trial & comparison has simply shown me that this level of added richness only comes from this process. So this first photo shows the very actively fermenting Cabernet being drained into a grape bin from an open top fermentation tank:

The next shot give a clearer sense of the mechanics of the setup. Wine is drained via the big hose on the left into a bin that has itself been modified with its own valve at the bottom front, through which valve the wine continues on its way by virtue of the mystical force of gravity directly into barrels down in the barrel room below:

I should have included a view of the set-up inside the bin before I began draining the juice into it, but I didn’t, so here is a shot of the strainer-like contraption we have in the bin to prevent grape berries from following the juice down into the barrels:

And the hose trails off & drops down a hole in the floor:

With very actively fermenting wine, you can only fill barrels 2/3 or so full because otherwise you will lose a great deal of wine as it foams & churns in an attempt to escape. The photo in the heading at the top of the page captures a barrel foaming over, meaning that some days you just can’t win. However, within a week or two after going into the barrels, the fermentation will have largely run its course, & the wines will settle down. At that point we can top up the barrels, but that’s later, & here comes the hose down into the barrel room where Robin is set up with his filling wand:

in this photo little or no wine is still draining from the big hose so I’ve removed a few of the door clamps along the bottom lip in order to allow the last of the fermenting juice to drain into the bin. Occasionally, the big hose valve will become plugged with grape skins giving the false impression that the tank is empty of juice, so it’s rather important to first determine that the tank is indeed empty of juice before removing all of the door clamps . . . that mistake is generally only made once:

Normally, a fermentation tank is designed to be tall because a tall tank will (obviously) be able to hold much more fermenting grapes than a short tank, given the same tank diameter. Thus the taller the tank, the more efficient the use of floor space & the greater the processing “throughput” during harvest, but that efficiency comes at a price because skins float. The taller the tank, the thicker the floating “cap” of skins, & the more difficult it is for the fermenting wine to extract color & character from the skins. In the interest of being able to process more grapes within the limited floor space available, wineries tend to buy tall tanks, but of consequence they need to keep forcing their fermenting juice into contact with the grape skins. This is done through various forms of manipulation which attempt to either push the grape skins down into the juice, or by pumping the juice over the top of the skin. The process of pushing and pumping continues until the fermentation is complete, & often beyond that stage, because otherwise there is not enough contact time for the juice to extract good color & character from the skins. One is assured, however, of gaining a fine degree of undesirable coarseness in the wine through this process.

By comparison, here is a shot of our tank with the door off. Before draining the tank, the level of fermenting juice in the tank would have been just above the upper lip of the door, so you can get a sense of how the skins & berries are in full contact with the juice. Think of it this way: fill a water glass 2/3 full with water & then add a couple of inches of BB size floating beads on top. That would illustrate a typical fermentation tank with a thick cap of floating skins, made all the more buoyant by CO2 gas given off by the fermenting wine. Now take that glass with floating beads & water & pour it all into a broad soup dish. Now you will have a thin layer of beads on the water & an illustration of how our tanks achieve sweet intimacy between skin & juice without the need to trash everything about. Though the way we use our tanks represents a very efficient & gentle way to extract the essence from the skins, it is all a terribly inefficient misuse of floor space, & I fear that we will never be awarded an industrial medal for maximized throughput. Indeed, we dump a maximum of 3 tons of grapes in our tanks, tanks that can comfortably accommodate 7 tons. But if we attempt to ferment more than 3 tons of grapes in our tanks, we begin to quickly see the wine’s intensity & character diminish:

Robin shoveling. I’ve lost my license to shovel:

A shot off the shovel just because it is beautiful to behold:

And here is a close-up of what is going to be dumped into the press. At this stage we have already extracted about 85% of the juice via gravity draining to the barrels directly from the fermentor tank, but as you can see here, many of the berries are still round, plump & lascivious, & are clearly in need of being encouraged to give up their goods:

Viewed from the fermentation tank, you can see our grape hopper across the room with the discharge end centered over the opening of our grape press on the right. The grape hopper will feed the shoveled bins of skins into the press:

Study of bald headed man on forklift dumping fat, juice filled skins into the hopper:

The grape hopper has an auger, essentially a giant screw, which turns slowly & in so doing gently pushes the still juicy skins towards the press:

The business end of the grape hopper feeding skins into the opening of the press:

Here the press has received all of the skins & berries that were shoveled out of the fermenting tank into bins:

Now a shot of the press with doors in place & sealing the opening of the press:

Deep, dark, lovely, luscious, the fermenting wine is seen draining from the press into an aptly named “drain pan” below the press:

And one again you have the hose, the same hose draining down through the same hole to the barrels waiting below, but this time draining from the press pan:

The press having done its job, & the press pan removed, bins are placed under the press to collect the pomace (pressed skins):

Then with the doors off & with the press rotating, pomace drops into the bins:

Here is a view of the inside of the partially emptied press through the door opening.  The press is essentially a horizontal, drum shaped sieve that closes when filled, & which has a diaphragm or bladder that pumps up with air from one side, thus putting pressure on the skins on the other side of the diaphragm, & thereby squeezing out the juice. The diaphragm can be seen to the left & top in its retracted position. It is retracted via a vacuum pump that sucks the bag up against the solid half of the press drum. Slit-like perforations can be seen on the other side of the drum (bottom & right) through which juice drains down into the press pan:

Ah, yes! Here we have pomace being shoveled into a garbage bag. Why is Robin doing this? Because at the end of harvest we embed some large pieces of gamey flesh deep into the pomace, there to marinate for a week or so in the fridge. To do this one needs first remove non-essentials like milk & greens from the fridge to make room. Since we have pressed off the grapes at the height of fermentation, there will be ongoing activity from those skins, residual juices, fruit smells & alcoholic fumes, all of which transmute the flesh into something wondrous when roasted. In this case it was a leg of lamb & a haunch of goat.

The bins are used again to take the pomace via forklift out to our composting pile:

And here a lovely view of pomace (purple) & stems (brownish green) from the earlier de-stemming process seen as the last of the day chills towards what I believe is called “the gloaming”:

And finally, the wild turkeys mentioned at the outset. Unfortunately, I did not capture them by photo in full flock where you would have (without exaggeration) seen a grouping approaching 100 in count. The reason the above pomace pile looks in disarray is because it is, & that is the case because the turkeys have discovered the pile, & have taken to kicking about to uncover whatever morsels turkeys favor. They have also discovered that they enjoy alcohol, for the pomace is decidedly alcoholic. The photo I failed to get was of a large group of about 30 toms running about in circles, leaping into the air to bump chests in a drunken display not unlike what you can see at any local sports bar of a Saturday night. Interestingly, the drunken turkeys were all toms. You can tell toms by the single feather hanging lose at the base of the neck. Who knows where the hens were, but there seems some good evidence here to the effect that the males of various species, whether feathered, fur covered, or smoothed skin, all display a similar predisposition for the puffing out of chests accompanied by a certain swagger when gathered together to enjoy a little drink:

Today being Thanksgiving, I am giving thanks by giving turkeys a break, & am making my own little feast with a few more of the chanterelles. Here is what remains of yesterday’s bounty:

Then into the sizzling pan with a few lovely chunks of pork:

Next a few clippings of thyme & oregano, a grind of pepper & salt, & a single cayenne pepper from the garden sliced into thin rounds:

Now I wait with the pan simmering, & soon to the table with a glass of Enfant du Pape (actually a bottle), 2 small candles & a big rose in the vase. It is darkening outside with a fine chill in the air, & soon it will rain.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING . . .

Cabernet Sauvignon, were the grapes. The date of pick was November 10^th. A very, very late year. Now to ferment, or foment as the case may be, & then to slide into barrel; the last of it for 2011.

Most people view yeast & other beasties (AKA, microorganisms) as being more or less a catalytic participant in the making of wine. Not so. They live the seasons, & sense the shortening days, & hence to bed, to sleep, & perhaps to dream until sap rises in the Spring. I suspect that last night’s Cabernet will only complete a portion of its journey, its transmutation into wine, before the beasties decide it’s time for slumber. Sweet juice in barrel, but I’m confident that the party will begin anew with the new year’s bud break.

A mirror of the transition can be seen, appropriately, in last night’s de-stemming of the grapes. The dark scene:

The final bin being dumped:

It was supposed to be raining by morning, but the dawn broke with glory:

With a view towards the north-east through the trees:

Rain this afternoon, they say, & that too seems meet, fit, & appropriate.

Then, as construction progressed & the peculiar vision emerged from the cavern cut into our hillside, a suspicion grew that madness had perhaps taken hold of the dangling ganglia, & wasn’t there an old auntie that they had to shut away some years back? Genetics. Surely this sort of thing runs deep through the bone, & not a few people nodded agreement saying “the old fart’s surely gone & done it this time!” So you can vouchsafe me a touch of trepidation as we approached the day when we would finally have visitors visiting the New Place.

Thus it was that I approached last weekend, Harvest Festival Weekend, with a mixture of anticipated fear & squirming pleasure, an effect not unlike watching a very good horror film. What would our Elliptical Society think; how would our club members react?  Would they truly miss all of the twisted, rusted & broken hulks scattered about the old rented property, & would they really pine for that glow-in-the-dark toilet we left behind? And too, expecting around 300 Elliptical members & their guests, there was an added level of hysteria in the air as we attempted to get the new tasting room & kitchen ready for the BIG weekend.

So here is the sequence:

• On Friday the 21^st, we received our 2^nd Certificate of Occupancy for the new winery, this one being particular to the tasting room & kitchen level. To be exact, we received our Certificate a 10 AM on Friday, with the tasting room area still filled with all kinds of construction rubble, & with all of the furniture, etc., stacked outside. A bit tight, the timing, but still doable.

• So we continued to do our wine tasting down in the wine library area on Friday where we were also dealing with incoming grapes.

• At the same time, between tasters & grapes, everyone was running back & forth up & down the hill attempting to pull the tasting room & kitchen together for a grand opening on Saturday.  

• Saturday morning & a whole mess of stuff still to do. Indeed, we were still installing toilets at 10 AM. 

• At 11 AM the floodgates opened. We were wrong on our estimate of visitors. Instead of 300 we ended up with well over 400 people checking out the new place over the three-day weekend.

• And of course on Saturday night we had our Harvest Festival Wine Dinner in our home, adding a new level to our frenetic dance. To complete the cycle of madness, Robin & I were up early on Sunday pressing off a tank of grapes before the Sunday crowd started rolling in.

All in all, a most enjoyable weekend, & though the jury remains out on the question of inbred madness, there did appear to be generalized joy & pleasure exhibited by everyone, staff & guests. So here are a whole slew of photos from Saturday alone, starting with the opening which somehow seems appropriate:

Next, chef Laurent Grangien with staff in our new kitchen getting the production of hors d’oeuvres started:

A different hors d’oeuvre for each wine:

Mary ready to greet:

Our first guests to the new tasting room, & a reaction that warms my heart:

Then the crowd, but never overwhelming, just wonderful:

The view will be grand once the straw bales are replaced with boulders, seating under the trees, & a few bits & tufts of green things growing:

Mo claiming bragging rights for selling the last two bottles of Syrah:

Robin leading one of many tours down into the production area:

The stairs down to the barrel room on tour:

And then the barrel room itself:

But of course the day continued late into the night with our wine dinner at our house which itself lies a grand distant fifteen feet away from the new winery. Here is the sequence for the dinner . . .

Two of tables set:

Glasses ready on the patio for passed hors d’oeuvres:

The patio by night:

Bourbon while waiting for the guests:

Chef Laurent Grangien bouncing pans on the stove:

Dining:

The chef answering questions at dinner’s end:

Chortling:

And finally to bed, perhaps to dream, & hopefully not to dream of mathematically impossible barrels.

So are we done with construction? Not at all, but we do have our Certificate of Occupancy for the production levels of the new winery, which is where we will be tasting our wines for the next couple of weeks. Proof:

If you come out this weekend you will be tasting wines down in the Wine Library area, & will also be able to tour the future tasting room & kitchen which (we hope) will be complete within another week or two.

Tile floors are done:

Kitchen is close to complete & is scheduled to be certified tomorrow:

The views are fine:

Beyond this, lots of detail. Actually, lots & lots & lots of detail, as well as landscaping still to be done as we grind through crazy harvest 2011. More on the grapes to follow.

Last Monday, a week ago today, we crushed our first grapes at the new place. We had already crushed some fruit at the old winery, & then brought over the fermenting bins to complete the process here. This was to assure us of importing our lovely culture of wild beasties that has grown to permeate the old place over the years. Some photos as usual . . .

Robin driving the first bin towards the hopper:

Dumping into grapes into the hopper:

Mo & Diane cheering the successful dump:

Fermenting Petite Sirah going into an open-top fermentor with all the lovely beasties in full foment:

At the end of the day, the rain clouds that brought the rain that might rot the grapes. Ah well, such is life, & it is quite lovely nonetheless: