Making Wine is Morning Work
An excerpt from my first book - Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine
I’m in the winery early on this rainy September morning - a rarity for California, and one of those small challenges we face as farmers and winemakers as it can set back harvest schedules as vineyards (hopefully) dry out, and fruit (hopefully!!) doesn’t plump up too much - doing punchdowns and taking daily readings of fermentation tanks to make sure that things are moving in the direction they should. I love this morning routine; it connects me deeply to the annual mission of producing Beauty, and it usually sets me up for a productive day.
Following is an excerpt from my first book - Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in Calfornia Wine - describing the dawning of the day and the birth of the season in much greater detail.
Making wine is morning work. The heart of the winery is always beating well before the sun rises over the eastern hills as trucks carrying fruit from all over California arrive at the scale house. The fruit that was picked in the perfect cold blackness a few hours before is arriving now on a flatbed truck. Headlights dance in the cold air as tank trucks and pickups pulling trailers and trucks hauling twenty-ton gondolas samba slowly to the scale. The mechanical clatter of the crusher bats off the high masonry walls of the winery as Antonio and Joel, two of Wente’s small-lot winery crew, get the fruit-receival machines up and running. I head back to my workspace in the tasting lab with the weigh tags from the morning's load. Aidan is off-loading half-ton bins of fruit to the scales and Beth is readying the fermenting boxes. In harvest time at the crushpad, an unruly ballet is always in progress: forklifts zoom like
Once the yeast culture hits the juice it is like a needle of adrenaline to the heart. There is so much sugar there in solution to serve as food for the yeast, typically nearly 25% sugar upon which our strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae will dine, that it will engorge itself, budding and re-budding…
hummingbirds taking picking bins off trucks, those trucks heave out of the yard back to the vineyards to be loaded again, forklifts lurch through large swinging doors bringing full fermenters to the 100 room (the Wente Winery is divided up into separate work spaces and each is simply and clearly named), the winemaking team is racing up tank ladders carrying buckets of yeast redolent of the morning bakery, the foreman is yelling in Spanish and his words form curlicues in the cold mist of the morning. Beneficent chaos. And noise.
I blow on my hands and stop by our bins of fruit stacked like bars on a graph to look at the bunches and to taste individual berries. The fruit today is perfect. Small spiders meander over the shoulders and wings of bunches, and I flick them away as I throw a grape into my mouth. The fruit is cold. The juice is sweet but not too sweet. The skins are firm but not too firm. I spit the seeds into my hand and look at the color: mahogany. Perfect. If the pickers have done a good job in the middle of the black cold night, there will be few leaves in the bins. With the new equipment most of these will get blown away by little puffs of air and shunted to a bucket where the garbage goes.
In the lab I grab another cup of coffee and fill out my harvest book with the crucial information about each delivered load of fruit. Growers have to be paid, and the weigh-tag information I transcribe in my book will ensure the correct dun. I enter the vineyard name and block number, date and grape variety, the number of tons, and do the simple math that tells me how many gallons of juice I should have. If we receive more fruit than we expect, we add another fermenter to the line sitting at the end of the crushpad. Or we’ll take one away
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My phone is handy so my team can tell me when our fruit is about to be processed. One of my jobs each day is to walk through the growing garden of fermenters, lifting lids and smelling each to make sure that there are no “off” aromas that tell me there are problems with yeast. If you crush a vitamin and put a little of the dust on the tip of your tongue, that bloody, feral flavor is what troubled yeast smell like. Most of our fermenters are plastic boxes, and they hold about 1.5 tons of fruit. Deep into the season, we may have as many as 20 fermenters in varying states of done-ness lined up in the 100 room. The cellar in the winery is always about 55 degrees, which is warm compared to the temperature today at the crushpad outside. The 100 room is a concrete room with concrete floors that slope down from the middle to drains on both sides. It’s a hundred years old and where we do our fermentations. I take off my sweatshirt because it’s warm enough to, and I lift the lid off a Cabernet Franc box and feel the heat coming off the mounded fruit. I wave my hand from box to nose a couple of times and sniff. I smell the doughy notes of yeast and the sweetness of fresh fruit. What I don’t get – because I’ve gotten it too many times before – is a scalding lungful of carbon dioxide that shows fermentation is well under way. That’s why the hand-waving. I go up and down the rows, smelling each box, looking for colonies of mold that might have formed overnight and choosing which boxes are ready to be punched down. The mold used to scare me, but I was young then. The first punch down gets it.
One of my other jobs in the cellar is to prepare yeast to get fermentations started. If you’ve made bread from scratch, the process will be familiar. I choose a yeast strain that works well with the variety in the fermenter and rehydrate the freeze-dried granules with 105o water. After twenty minutes, I add some of the grape juice from
I smell the doughy notes of yeast and the sweetness of fresh fruit. What I don’t get – because I’ve gotten it too many times before – is a scalding lungful of carbon dioxide that shows fermentation is well under way. That’s why the hand-waving.
that fermenter to the bucket to feed the yeast and to lower the temperature of the solution. The fermenters are cold, and the difference in temperatures between the bucket of yeast and the fermenter full of must (unfermented grape juice and skins and seeds) needs to be minimized in order to give the yeast the best chance at a strong and problem-free start to fermentation. I add juice every 10 minutes for about 40 minutes; the vigorous bubbling of the bucket and the warm, doughy aromas are the proof that the yeast are multiplying and happy. I spread the yeast solution over the top of the cap of skins when the temperatures are right and throw a lid back over the box.
We don’t punch down the fermenters right away because we want to get the flavor and aromatics contributions from the yeast and bacteria that are stuck to the grapes when they are harvested. These strains start fermentation, then die when the solution reaches about two percent alcohol. This technique allows us to capture the ethereal organoleptic endowment of these “wild yeast” which help us build the complexity we are looking for. When the cap of skins begins to dry out and crack after four or five days, we start the punch-down regime.
Once the yeast culture hits the juice it is like a needle of adrenaline to the heart. There is so much sugar there in solution to serve as food for the yeast, typically nearly 25% sugar upon which our strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae will dine, that it will engorge itself, budding and re-budding until the number of uni-cellular inhabitants in our fermenter grows dramatically. The yeast’s growth translates itself from the realm of the unseeable to the clearly obvious across nearly all the senses. In barrel-fermented Chardonnay the hiss of carbon dioxide escaping through the fermentation bung sings a tune of yeasty imperiousness while that same CO2 in an open-topped bin hits you like a caustic physical wave. D254, a strain of yeast we use often in Cabernet Sauvignon fermentation, gives off a chocolatey note that is nearly identical to that of the Yoohoo I drank in college. And walking through winery doors into a room full of fermenting wine is to experience the aromatic equivalent of moving from silence into the practice room of a full-blown orchestra.
The number of different scents is nearly uncountable, and you can know a lot about the quality of a vintage just by letting that wonderful stink of fermentation wash over you. If things are progressing nicely, the yeasty transformation of fresh fruit into much more complex wine will dominate. The robustness of Cabernet Sauvignon fermenting plays a bass note, powerful wine inchoate, in notes of dark and black fruit. Sangiovese smells redder, the fruit more fragile and tenuous, an earthiness entangling itself with that fruit in an invisible helix of esters wafting ceiling-ward
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Each time I walk into my own fermentation room early in the morning, I am instantly transported to my childhood days working at the family winery, running through rooms filled with old redwood upright tanks aging wine and filling those rooms with a wonderful and somewhat foreboding perfume. Those rooms were full of mystery and full of something profound and delicious, even to an inexperienced 12-year-old. This connection to my youth seems ever more instructive and profound with each vintage. It is almost as if all that one would ever know or learn was already encapsulated in the body and mind of a child, and the passing of years and the doing of things one attributes to experience is really just a folded-back reflection of those times of innocence when the world was full and the joy, perfect.
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The bins have been moved from the cold room (a room where tanks of wine are lowered to below freezing to precipitate out excess tartaric acid and thereby increase
Harvest allows us the opportunity to tell multiple stories, filled with all the heart-wrenching tension and evolution of story that each separate fermenter contributes to the book of the season. With luck and perseverance, this book will be one of many volumes.
stability (nobody likes to see a bottle of white wine in her refrigerator with garbage resembling parmesan cheese submerged in it) to a warmer room (about 55o) where the wine yeasts then start getting active: multiplying their numbers and producing heat as a by-product of their activity. Fermentation follows a curve over the week or so it takes to get a bin of red wine dry. When fermentation is at its most active, you can see sugar drops of 7-8o Brix per day at first, then tapering off as the amount of sugar is diminished. All told, it takes about a week or slightly longer to get red wine dry (the condition in which wine has no or very negligible amounts of sugar left). Over the course of this vinous week, the juice is obviously less sweet but there are numerous additive qualities given over to the wine that would not exist without the destruction of the grape’s mojo and internal architecture. The wine grape is one of the sweetest fruits in the world and is ideal for producing THE greatest beverage in the world.
Fermentation is a magical process in which countless chemical reactions are occurring for the wine maker’s purpose of getting sugar to alcohol. In this chain of events, some pretty smelly things can happen. Our unicellular heroes – yeast – responsible for this transfiguration of the pedestrian to the sublime require certain nutrients to work at peak efficiency. If they don’t get the nitrogen they need, their malodorous protest makes it known. Aside from the issue of stink (which is easily remedied by the addition of diammonium phosphate [DAP]), the more serious side-effect of yeast malnutrition is the potential for ferments to get stuck – for a wine to get only partially dry (there is nothing worse, or less saleable, than a sweet Cabernet Sauvignon). The other common issue with early ferments, especially when the juice and skins have yet to truly begin the sugar conversion, is the presence of volatile acidity or VA. All wines have some volatile acidity, and it can take the aromatic forms of vinegar and fingernail polish remover (ethyl acetate). At its worst, too much VA turns a wine, through bacteria that are ubiquitous in wineries and often spread from one fermenter to another on the feet of fruit flies, into vinegar. At lower concentrations (there are legal limits to VA, but the derivation of that limit seems very arbitrary when taken outside a more inclusive chemical context), volatile acidity can lift a ponderous wine up a bit, can leaven overripe fruit, can make an older wine taste younger. The legendary 1947 Cheval Blanc, thought by many to be the finest wine in history, was illegally high in VA. That precursor to vinegar made a very rich, viscous wine harvested from a very ripe, hot year a little less so.
All this said, the best tools the winemaker has are the personal ones. Each morning we go through each fermenting bin, lifting the lid, and smelling for any aromas that aren’t what they are supposed to be. Hopefully, very early on in the process, you have the scents of fresh fruit and yeast. And we’ll also taste. In low-fill bins, this requires a small step ladder (¿Donde esta la esclarita? is how you find one). You want the juice/wine, so you dig through the cap of skins, which is usually about 12 inches deep in this kind of vessel, once fermentation really gets going, until you reach the liquid. Then you splay your fingers over the top of the beaker, leaving only the smallest margin between the digits so you get as much juice and as little of the solid stuff as possible. Armed with our senses and a notebook, we write down what our nose and mouth are telling us about sweetness, about fruit, about levels of tannin, about the heft and duration and complexity of the mid-palate of the wine, about the balance of acidity to fruit to tannin on the finish. These elements, these Knights of the Wine Table, are, at once, what the winemaker is trying to protect and what will allow the best of wines to protect good taste for years to come.
In all the screenplay writing books, they tell you that there needs to be tension, that the protagonist has to change over the course of the movie in order to be believable. On page 20, the [A thing] happens and on page 120, the [Z thing] happens, bringing a conclusion to all that came before it. Harvest allows us the opportunity to tell multiple stories, filled with all the heart-wrenching tension and evolution of story that each separate fermenter contributes to the book of the season. With luck and perseverance, this book will be one of many volumes.
The color of Chardonnay and Cabernet juice is the same. Cabernet is red because we ferment the juice with the skins. It is the skins that give over the color and tannin and flavor and structure. If you think of a Cabernet fermenter as a cup of tea, you’ll see how the repeated punching down of the grape skins under the surface of the fermenting must, like the dunking of the tea bag, will increase the color and tannic content of the liquid. In the plastic fermenters there are no valves, so we have to take a seven-foot-long metal pole, stand on the edge of the bubbling box four feet above the concrete, and punch down the cap of skins into the wine below.
Punching down is one way to get at the color and structural elements of the fruit. Pumping over is another. By attaching a hose to a bottom of a fermentation tank, you can pump that wine and spray it over the top of the cap. The wine, on its way back down to the bottom of the tank, will grab on to anthocyanin and other molecules leeching from the skins of the grapes and infuse them into it. During the week or so of primary fermentation, when yeast convert sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide, we punch down or pump over three times a day. With lighter red wines, the routine will vary, but with Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot (another hearty Bordeaux variety), for instance, we punch down or pump over every six hours or so.
The wine changes each day, but it is during extended maceration, after primary fermentation is complete, that the daily changes are ravishing. Extended maceration is a technique we sometimes use to build structure in our wines. Normally, we will press a wine off the skins soon after it is dry and pump it into barrels. On occasion, though, after tasting the evolving wine in the fermenter day after day, I believe the wine would be more complete and ageworthy if it had more tannin. By keeping the wine in contact with the skins and seeds for an extended period of time, the alcohol, which acts as a solvent, breaks down the physical material it is in contact with, leeching out more tannin over time. We continue to punch down every day, even when the cap has dropped under the surface of the wine, leaving only small atolls of seeds floating lonely on the purple-black expanse.
Extended maceration is all about feel, so there is no codified endpoint. It is the un-linear quality of day-to-day progression that is the most fascinating thing about this process. We get several days in a row where everything is moving beatifically forward. Tannins are broadening and becoming more defined, the fruit is moving from black cherry to cassis, and there is a general sense of fullness and ripeness to the wine. And the next day, it all goes in the shitter. The tannins are harsh, the finish is short, there is NO fruit – this wine is a disaster! What the hell are we going to do with this crap, it’s 200 cases of very mediocre Cabernet!? There is a next day, however. And, usually, the beast is beautiful again.
It would be reasonable to conclude that bins containing the same grapes but inoculated with different yeasts would begin primary fermentation at different times and would reach that golden moment of NOW and be pressed on different days. You’d
The tannins are harsh, the finish is short, there is NO fruit – this wine is a disaster! What the hell are we going to do with this crap, it’s 200 cases of very mediocre Cabernet!? There is a next day, however. And, usually, the beast is beautiful again.
think, though, that the same grape, from the same vineyard, inoculated with the same yeast would progress in lockstep with its bin-mate. More often than not, that is not the case. The minute differences in nitrogen levels from one fermenter to another, the slight temperature differences in different sections of the 100 room, the state of fermentation of neighboring bins (more mature fermenters throw off yeast, especially during punch downs, like a virus shedding itself) will all affect the kinetic curve and timing of primary fermentation.
I have been making wine since 1996 and didn't know anything back then. What I know now, I’ve gotten from reading a lot, and drinking a lot, doing a lot, and taking lots of notes. I only use a
TOPS Computation notebook with page numbers that is bound with a spiral so I can fold it over. This morning, as I do every day with every box, I write about how the fermenters are behaving. The notebook gets filled up over harvest and gets more and more stained. Past books look like murder scenes. I have a beaker and a wire mesh strainer that fits over it. I dig through the warm cap of skins and seeds that float on top of the wine until I hit liquid. I taste the wine and write down what I taste and how the wine feels. The feeling part is the most important. A typical entry reads like this:
LR-34. CAF. D254. Bit redder than yesterday. Herbal notes moving from fresh to dry, more persistent//dried chili flavors today, red fruit. Acid better today. More richness...acid in mp to finish more defined. Great length. Press in 2-3 days?
The way the wine tastes and smells, its organoleptic qualities, evolve more predictably and more slowly than its textural properties. I make pressing decisions based on the feel because I don’t want the barrel, that will make significant structural contributions, to overwhelm the way the fruit is expressed in the wine. If I get most of the way to the structure the wine demands in the fermenter, the barrel will play its proper role as a relatively neutral scaffold that supports rich fruit.
And the wonderful (and maddening) thing about this exercise (much like that of the making of wine itself) is that it evolves every day; with very young wines still in the fermenter, devolution often seems much more accurate a description. There is only one objective reality about wine: there is no point at which the wine is unmoving. What we are looking to accomplish here is to find that point at which there is harmony. We want richness of fruit and tannin; we want length and roundness; we want black fruit in balance with structure; we want those elements that will allow the wine to age with grace, but not too quickly. We note all of these things against an internal compass. With our finest Cabernets, we understand that this is only the first (and shortest) step on the journey (once we decide to press the wine off the skins, we cannot unsqueeze). The time aging in barrel is going to change this fledgling wine immensely, so we factor this into the decision about when to pull the plug on extended maceration.
The fermenting bin sits in a plywood frame so that we can get 1.5 tons of fruit into without it collapsing. The bins are made by a company in Fresno, and they cost about $350 each. Each fermenter has a plastic top that we can use to help regulate heat; we keep it on when the fermentation is on the cool side and take it off when the must rises to a temperature (as a physics problem dealing with the mass and heat transfer) that might harm the yeast. The bins are tall enough that I have to stand on a small step ladder to adequately punch the contents down each day. My younger crew can stand on the edges of the bin, like circus performers, the thin edge of wood and plastic taking the place of the wire strung between poles. They get more leverage, and punch down more efficiently than I. The fermenting bin is its own world; it is born, and it dies on its own scale of time. The bin is where the transformations happen, where the steps from potential decay to apotheosis occur. All of the interim aromas and flavors that separate beautiful wine from a rank container of volatile acidity occur in this small (though, philosophically – an infinitely large) box. These boxes, holding the work of the year, are our most intimate and valued possessions. As our most fundamental mission is to take care of people and to relieve them of even just a small amount of daily strife, the fermenter box is where the vehicle of that hospitality mission (our magic elixir) comes to, alchemically, be.
As with every other facet of wine, each fermenter is always in the process of articulating its own moment of apotheosis. It is the winemaker’s job to watch for that moment of becoming and to help it to fulfill that destiny, to be only – and exactly – what it is meant to be. Unlike the beer makers and the spirits producers, we only get one shot a year to make wine, consequently there is a ton riding on making sure things are done correctly. The higher the price of fruit, the more the ass puckers at any sign of malodor or sluggishness in the fermenter. The older you get, and the more boxes of fruit you ferment, the more you understand that there is, running beneath the veil of certainty that science is supposed to convey, an atavistic sense of time that is beyond measure but that is perfectly in sync with the needs of the must bubbling away in the bin. The secret to sanity (and quality), then, is to learn to let go of what cannot be counted and to trust in your benign neglect AND your watchfulness. It gets easier over time to let that clock, the one closely tied to all the preternatural things at the beating center of the earth, wind down according to its own wonderfully un-modern, anachronistic and perfect pace.
Aidan calls to let me know that our fruit is next in line for crushing. I put my sweatshirt back on and leave the quiet and warmth of the fermentation house for the cacophony and cold of the crushpad. Beth and Aidan are standing on either side of a conveyor belt that brings bunches of fruit from a metal hopper to the crusher-destemmer as I walk through the massive wooden doors to the crushpad. They are removing unripe fruit and leaves and broken pieces of vine, insects, the occasional
As with every other facet of wine, each fermenter is always in the process of articulating its own moment of apotheosis. It is the winemaker’s job to watch for that moment of becoming and to help it to fulfill that destiny
lizard, from the fast-moving carpet of grapes in front of them and throwing the garbage into plastic cans by their feet. Beth is blond and tiny and a dancer and strong. Her arms and legs are thin but all that’s there is muscle. She is smiling as she normally does, and her hands are moving fast. This is Beth’s first year with us. She grew up in Oregon but lives in Livermore now with her teacher husband, Patrick. An acquaintance was taking classes with her in the viticulture program at the community college in town and knew she was looking for a harvest job and that we needed the help. Aidan has headphones on, and he is moving a little to the silent music. I dodge the hoses and cords that litter the crushpad and climb up the ladder to start sorting fruit.
The grapes come in waves, larger clumps as a new picking box is first dumped into the hopper. I am focusing on flecks of green in an otherwise crimson carpet; this unripe fruit won’t help to make great wine, so it has to be thrown away. The fruit is moving fast. It takes a while to get used to the speed and to the stickiness of the sweet fruit, but you do. I take the emotion out and just let my hands move, clutching at as many leaves and green berries and pincher bugs as I can. I try to keep my vision in a small frame because moving your head too much can make you feel like you’re on a boat. Two hours after we start, the sun has breached the wall of the winery and shines down hot off the stainless-steel tanks and presses. The last knot of fruit goes by. I dip my hands in a bucket of water, dry them on a rag hanging from my back pocket, and drop down from the ladder. I steady myself, grab a slug of water and go off to the next thing. The fruit-receival part of the day ends when Aidan forklifts the last box into the 100 room. At night, hours later, when I take my last look around, the boxes are in rows with their lids on. The garden keeps growing.