Winter Winemaking

posted by Dan in Snooth, Wine Industry, Wine, Guest Bloggers

It’s February in Napa Valley.  It’s cold and, sometimes, wet outside.  In the cellar, the wine work is slow and steady.  It’s an important period for two vintages – the 2007 wines that have been aging in barrel for 15+ months and the young, 2008 wines awaiting attention.   For the previous vintage, 2007, we are thinking about finishing the wines (the final racking) and prepping (filtering) them for bottling.  The 2008 wines have been recently tasted and decisions are being made for racking and blending.

2007.  Returning to the winery after the New Year, we tasted the 07 wines with great enthusiasm.  The wines have been stellar from the start – an ideal growing season begat a moderately light crop of balanced grapes and effortless fermentations.  The young wines evolved elegantly – lush fruit and silky structure.  The first two rackings (a process that extracts the wine from barrel for clarifying purposes) took place in the first six months of the New Year, 2008.  The first racking is to remove the wines from their fermentation lees (sediment) and the second racking is to blend the wines.  We’ll blend as early as possible (even during the first racking) in order to allow the wines to marry and harmonize during their maturation in barrel.  On a monthly basis we will ‘top’ the wines (a process of adding wine to eliminate any headspace, or oxygen, in the barrels that is a result of natural evaporation through the pores of the wood or the bung hole).  We’ll also check the wine’s sulfur* levels and maintain an acceptable amount of sulfur in parts per million (ppm). The addition of sulfur will not only help prevent any microbial growth that can develop flaws in the wine, but also act as an antioxidant which helps preserve the wine.

When we tasted the wines last month, we immediately realized they were ready.  We want the wines to be bottled exactly as they taste now.  During the course of Cabernet’s maturation we’ll typically rack the wine four times – as noted above, the first, post fermentation; the second for blending.  The third racking is for clarifying and the final racking is for bottling.  So, for now, we are eliminating the third racking and I will write more about the 07 wines as we start to prep them for bottle racking (in April and June).  Until then we will continue to top the wines on a monthly basis as we are ordering our bottling supplies – glass, corks, capsules and labels – and setting bottling dates in May and July.  (More details to come in the upcoming months.)

2008.  We also tasted the 2008 wines after the holidays and were pleasantly surprised.  An extreme growing season (drought and roller-coaster heat waves) dealt us very low yields.  The positive is that low yields will provide you with fruit concentration balanced with tannin structure.  And thankfully, that is what we are dealing with - the potential for another great vintage, albeit, not a lot of it to go around!  Our first task is to begin the initial racking.  Last week we decided to blend two-thirds of our Estate Cabernet with the first racking.  The process went smoothly and the early read on the young, 08 Cabernet blend is pleasing – a medium bodied wine with elegant power, full of pure, intense fruit, herbaceous depth and finesse on the finish.  When we tasted the wines last month, we had to start ‘ranking’ them, a process that inevitably begins during pre-harvest (grapes on the vine) and fermentation.

I hate to say we ‘rank’ our wines, because we treat every cluster on every vine and every grape in every fermentation exactly the same. But because we have a vineyard of great diversity – from soil types (natural) to rootstocks and grape clones (human intervention) we are afforded the opportunity to make four diverse red wines.  Two Cabernets, a nationally distributed wine and a reserve style for mailing list customers and two blended wines, a Merlot based wine and a Cabernet based wine.  With 20+ wines having been fermented and isolated in barrel, last week we chose eight Cabernet lots and a parcel of Cabernet Franc to be blended into what will become our core Cabernet (our nationally distributed Napa Valley Cabernet).  In the weeks to come we will finish racking the 2008 wines, leaving the individual parts alone.  We will taste the wines periodically over the next couple of months and then proceed with blending trials before the next racking and blending this summer.  Again, I will be writing more about the winemaking process as it pertains to the development of these wines in barrel.  But for now, if there are any questions or any visitors to Napa Valley in the months ahead, drop me a line and stop by for a taste.

[Notes on sulfur: One (1) ppm is the equivalent of one (1) milligram in a liter; a liter being 1,000 grams.  If we bottle a wine with 25 ppm of sulfur, it is the equivalent of a quarter of a gram per liter of wine.   For those of you who are weary of sulfur in wine, note that you are probably consuming more sulfur while eating a couple of pieces of dried fruit than you are in a sip of wine. During a red wine’s maturation we’ll keep the sulfur levels at around 35 ppm.  As noted, at bottling, the sulfur will be roughly 25-28 ppm, but each winemaker will differ in their use of sulfur.  For example, in Sancerre, on a recent trip, we spoke with a Sauvignon Blanc maker who will bottle his wine with 60 ppm of sulfur.  That level of sulfur is to help preserve the wine throughout its early bottling and to age it slowly.  We drink Sauvignon Blanc like most people consume Beaujolais, early.  In France, some of the best SB is three, five, seven years old.]

Dan Petroski is Assistant Winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley. Dan has an MBA from New York University and worked as an Ad Exec in New York for several years, before switching it up and trading his suit for a move out west.