Not so Good

We tasted the wines last week, and our initial hope for drinkable wine was perhaps flattened. The Chardonnay seems rather nutty, and the Pinot just odd. The plan is to re-rack the wines this weekend. I may even take a sample of each to my students at the NW Viticultural Center to see if they can identify the flaw(s).

I didn't go into this project thinking I'd make something drinkable -- it was a "learn on the job" science experiment. I've learned one thing for sure, Huey Family Winery will not be increasing production until we can get a vintage straight.

Our Wine is Fine!

By fine, I don't mean finely rated. But we are happy -- in fact quite pleased, with their progression. Just before Christmas, we had family in town and decided to give it a taste.

I had been worried about the Chardonnay, which looks pretty brown in the eight gallon jug where it's currently aging. Not only does it have a nice straw yellow color once removed from the jug, it's tasting like very young Chardonnay -- citrusy and quite acidic. By the next racking in early 2009, it should be looking a lot less like apple juice and more like the wine it's becoming.

The Pinot has been sitting quietly since we last racked. Given my foot treading before pressing, the color is quite dark. It's thrown quite a bit of sediment and tastes just dandy -- lots of cranberry, bright cherry and zippy acidity.

Mind you, neither are drinkable right now. We're just happy to see that there are no discernable flaws... at least not yet. This coming year I'll be taking two courses, introductions to viticulture and enology, which should help for harvest 2009.

Saved from the Freeze... Nature's Cold Stabilization

As of tonight I have new office mates: our Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The temperatures are dropping below freezing this weekend, so we had to bring our "children" in from the garage. (Wine popsicles aren't part of our production "plan", at least not this year.)

Both seem to smell pretty normal. I know I should be fretting over them right now, doing testing and taking samples, but between managing new and current clients, finishing a school quarter, preparing to teach and learn during another and getting ready for a trip and visitors shortly thereafter, our vinous babes are fairly low on my list. Add these challenges to the fact that I at most view this as a fun chemistry experiment and I think I've come up with a pretty good set of excuses for our neglect!

The good news about the wines' few weeks spent in dark isolation in the garage crawl space is that they've benefited from "low impact production" and been cold stabilized by "nature's decreasing temperatures". The carbon footprint is so far very low so I feel really good about that.

Patrick asked me today about re-racking and I let him know that it's on my calendar for early 2009 -- thank goodness for Outlook.

Rack 'em!

Our little wine project has been a bit dormant over the last week while waiting for fermentation to finish. Now that it has stopped, we needed to rack the wines to continue promoting clarity.

Racking does this by leaving the sediment behind while the clearer juice is poured off into another container. It's pretty interesting to see how murky the wine is that's left behind. (Patrick definitely didn't want to accept my dare of finishing the sediment-filled wine, but he did agree to pose with it.)

The Pinot went from eight-gallon buckets to a carboy; the Chard went from a carboy back into an eight-gallon bucket. Both are smelling pretty darn good!

So what's next? Well, we wait to rack again -- this time a month or so...

Carboy

As we won't be racking either wine for some time and are therefore in a more dormant time, I decided to find out the origin of the name, Carboy.

Wikipedia says it best:
"In brewing, a carboy is also known as a demijohn. It is a glass or plastic vessel that is often used in fermenting beverages such as wine, mead, and beer. Usually it is fitted with a rubber stopper and a fermentation lock to prevent bacteria and spoiled yeast from entering during the fermentation process. During the homebrewing process, a primary carboy is used for fermentation. Once primary fermentation is complete, the beer is either transferred to a secondary carboy for conditioning or it can be transferred directly to bottles for conditioning. (This process of transferring is usually called racking.)"


Our wine is going from Rubbermaid carrier (Willamette vineyard to Camas, WA residence) to eight-gallon secondary fermentation vessel to first racking into Carboy. We'll rack again back into the eight-gallon tanks and then again into Carboy. Back and forth until we're done promoting clarity. At least that's how I understand it tonight...

Rack 'em!

Big night tonight! We pressed the Pinot and transferred it to eight-gallon "tanks" and racked the Chardonnay into a Carboy.

The Pinot was pretty easy given Patrick's new expertise: he'd pressed the Chardonnay a week before while I was teaching wine marketing...

The first step was collecting the must and juice from the Rubbermaid "fermenters" and adding it to the press. We got a lot of juice; in fact, we didn't use much of the pressed juice given how the amount of free run. (I had read earlier today that winemakers don't tend to use all of the pressed juice (or any) given how tannic it can be. Thank goodness for a few extra minutes on the treadmill -- I had gotten through my general business reading with 10 minutes to spare for wine information!)

After we finished pressing the Pinot, we racked the Chard into a Carboy. At first, I was a little frustrated because we don't have a kitchen funnel and the thought of slowly pouring eight gallons of white juice into a small hole seemed inefficient at best. Then, I thought of the beautiful pewter Port funnel used as a Symington gift and I couldn't resist -- too perfect. We sanitized it along with the pitcher and therefore had the perfect tools with which to rack our Chardonnay!

Our juice easily filled its six-gallon capacity. I hated to dump a pitcher of extra Chard, but it had to be done, as our new vessel was full! All parties are now resting peacefully in a warmish crawl space off of our garage.

Reading this, you might think: "I wonder why they didn't plan this in advance?" You're not alone, as my lack of planning and fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approach to winemaking is most frustrating to my "enologist" husband, Patrick! In short, if I'd done all the reading about what might go wrong, the time required, etc., I probably would've put the project off another year.

The worst thing that could happen is that we "wasted" a fabulous fall day in a vineyard picking grapes and subsequent time enjoying each others' company in a new way, after a good bottle of wine, of course. So I figure it's an experiment well spent :)

To Age or Not to Age... in Oak, That is

Fermentation is still in full swing and I'm thinking ahead as I don't want to be caught off guard again as I was with the Chardonnay press. The next phase will be racking the Chardonnay into a Carboy and the Pinot into eight gallon containers. Then, the Chardonnay will be re-racked and the Pinot will go into a Carboy. For the next round of racking, we have a decision to make regarding aging. Does this wine want to go into oak barrels? Do I want to pay for it to go there? On one hand, why wouldn't you give it some nice barrel age. On the other, there are SO many things that can go wrong - dumb newbie mistakes and spoilage, that buying barrels is perhaps not a good financial decision for a first round.

New six gallon barrels are $150 apiece. And I'm not really interested in having new oak flavors in either of them. The problem is that if I go the significantly less expensive used route (which are harder to come by in OR and WA than in CA), the barrels might be tainted with TCA, which would lead to the wines being "corked", rendering them undrinkable. The project wouldn't be a waste of time -- there was fun and learning along the way, just a disappointment.

Time to make some phone calls to other wine guides for some professional opinions!