from vine to wine

This weekend Golz Family Cellars bottled our latest offering, Mix, a red table blend. The original plan was to craft a singular cab varietal completely from grapes but due in part to the nature of harvest this year in Washinton, and my novice status and limited connections, I was only able to procure a small amount of those grapes. As such the concept for our blend was really born. In the end, we paired  grapes from the vines of Gifford Hirlinger (a family winery located in Walla Walla) with concentrated Australian Shiraz juice and a small lot of finished Petite Verdot from Jenna’s dad.

Getting our hands on grapes was an adventure. Our friend Mike is the winemaker at Gifford and offered to sell us some of his grapes during Passport to Woodinville the year prior. I took him up on it with the goal of pulling 200-250 lbs of fruit off his vines. The process started back in September, during crush. Mike called me to let me know they were ready to pick the grapes and I needed to head down within the next day or two before seasonally bad weather moved in, risking frost or ice in the vineyard. He let my fruit hang a week or so longer than his main harvest, which yeilded me some great grapes with good starting sugars due to some extra sun exposure. I ended up making a 4 hour drive out on a Saturday morning to pick up 2 rows of fruit, with an immediate return trip following 30 minutes at the main winery – a considerable amount of driving, but well worth it. Due to the growing season this year, the two rows produced less fruit than average and I walked away with just over 100 lbs.

The next day, I rented a de-stemmer/crusher from a local wine supply shop, and Jenna and I spent the day extracting the juice from our grapes. Essentially, you tumble the bunches in the de-stemmer to separate the fruit from the bitter stems, and then you press the fruit to pull away the juice and the skins – together referred to as “crush” or “must”. This is the foundation of all wines and it was a ton of fun doing this work for the first time. For pictures of first crush, click here.

Following the crush, the must went through two stages of fermentation, separation from the skins after they imparted the tannins that red wines benefit from, and months of fining, stabilization and clearing. To reiterate – winemaking is all about patience. There’s always an element of “hurry up and wait” in everything you do, and the waiting is always the hard part. I started the Shiraz at the same time, begining with a round of chaptalization in which I upped the starting sugar level to produce a finished product with slightly higher alchohol content. This adds more bite on the tongue and some elements of percieved acids, without actually increasing titratable acid in the wine. It also gives the wine more of a foundation to mature on in the bottle aging process.

After a couple months, we had two very clean and very young wines ready to blend. After recieveing our shipment of Jenna’s dad’s 09 Petite Verdot, I set to it. I had to buy my largest container yet – a 12 gallon blending vessel. Pulling together the varietals, smelling the changes in nose as they combined, and finding the balance between the three grapes was fun and very educational. There is an art there and while I’m certainly not practiced or skilled, I think we hit on something that really works. The final percentages for Mix are 52% cab, 44% Shiraz and 4% Petite Verdot. And while the new blend spent another 3 months stabilizing and clearing again, we’re guessing that it will need to bottle age for at least another year before it’s really “ready”. For now it’s tasting pretty good really and we are excited to see how it changes over the upcoming months. We have 54 bottles, and we’ve set aside 6 of those for bi-monthly development assessment.

In other GFC news, we have our first “business” agreement! We will be making a wine for our friends’ upcoming wedding reception this summer. We started the process a couple weeks ago and will be making an Italian Pinot Gris, currently called “Revelrey”, which means “merrymaking” or more simply “celebrate.” Our Sweet Girl was the inspriation for this one and we’re doing a small lot which is about a month along at this point. We’re shooting for a light colores, smooth drinker with notes of citrus and a crisp finish.

We may or may not try and get another white underway for the late summer season again, but that’s to be seen in the next couple weeks. Keep an eye out for updates on the Mix – it’s our best yet!          <matt>

Advertisement