Wine Writing

posted by Dan in Snooth, Guest Bloggers

It’s Tuesday, the night before my blog is to be posted. And although there is always scintillating things to talk about regarding the wine world, I have to share some thoughts about wine writing.  T.S. Eliot wrote while reviewing a playwright and his work, “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”  So, I steal a few words from some writers I have read these past two weeks since my last post.

First, I was reading Eric Asimov’s blog, The Pour, regarding his attendance and participation in a wine writers conference in Napa Valley last week.  I was shocked with a snippet that Eric related from a writing coach who said; [in today’s media environment] you need to ‘chunkify.’   After re-reading the post and being a self-confessed internet illiterate when it comes to the Twitter nation, I made a negative assumption of what that means.  (I still don’t know what it means.)  But then, in my comments, and even today, I still feel that wine writing needs to be one part savage, two parts verve.  So, I quoted, in my comment, the advice from the late, great Auberon Waugh,

“Wine writing should be camped up. The Writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him. Bizarre and improbable side tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear.”

When I started out pursuing wine as a hobby, I found such that in the texts (er, books) of Jay McInerney.

Jay’s wine writing gets better with age and/or more drinking. Jay’s wine doesn’t have the ubiquitous “‘je ne sais quoi’ this wine reminds me of,” it has the poetic praise of wine.  Frequently comparing wine to everyday vices like tobacco, coffee, truffles, Viagra, chocolate and leather; and to everyday, omnipresent music and movies; and to the odd references of tuning forks and samurai swords. Jay’s books, ‘Bacchus and Me’ and ‘Hedonist in the Cellar‘ are must-reads for the wine educated and the amateur drinker. Hopefully it will engage you and excite you, like it did me, to look at your glass of grape juice in a new ‘Bright Light.’

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Another book I have on the bed side night stand is ‘Everyday Drinking’ by Kingsley ‘Lucky Jim’ Amis.  I do recommend this book, a collection of essays Amis wrote that were compiled and are now out of print.  There are many classic quotations on every page as Amis leads you through the world of drinking.  He dedicates a fair amount of space to being a proper host of a drinking party.  Reading the work, although dated, it is a term paper for throwing a raging good party on a budget (especially important during these economic times).  Most of his insights are the cynical noshings on “the field of booze, with all its snobbery and true and false expertise.”  There are one or two pages (153 and 154 in the hardcover, First Edition) that left me laughing my way to sleep.  Amis “borrowed” some advice from Stephen Potter who wrote about wine one-upmanship or what he called “winesmanship.”

Lifting from Potter, Amis rallied off advice on how to enliven your tablemates with the power of suggestion,

“It’s partly what you do – pretend to fetch the bottle from your cellar, take forever uncorking it, keep staring at it before you pour – and partly what you say – “Over the top now, of course, but still with a hint of former glories.  Keep it in your mouth a moment… see what I mean?”  At this, the other fellow will start thinking that the flavor of carbolic he thought he’d noticed is actually rather interesting or even pleasant.”

And then how to shutter even the most arrogant,

“As soon as he mentions tannin or chalky soil or the ‘79s coming on fast – or slowly – shush everyone else and say: “Listen chaps, here’s a chance for us all to learn something.  Carry on, Percy” – the equivalent of dropping him on his head…. When he is finished, which should be pretty soon, ask a lot of questions, the more elementary the better, like: “Does that make it good or bad?”  Then having wrung him dry, say: “Fascinating!”

Another fascinatingly fun read.  Go on, log on, buy it, pour a glass of your particular brand of vodka and read it.

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.

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.