By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Hank Shaw in his garden, in front of a gigantic cardoon.

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta. (By the way, that construction site you see through the windows here will be a big outdoor kitchen, to be completed by June.
Come to our Celebration Weekend and see it for yourself.)

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Our chowder was packed with cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, and broccoli rabe,
plus a few potatoes saved from fall. On top: broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms.

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

We ended not with our original dessert—olive oil tangerine cake, which turned out to be a total clunker given we were destroying the original recipe—but with something that arose naturally from our short list of available ingredients, which included honey, eggs, "imported" cream, and tangerines.

Tangerine honey crème caramel.

We had a very nice afternoon.

Recipe editor Amy Machnak and researcher Elizabeth Jardina.

Test garden coordinator Johanna Silver in the middle of
what must've been a vivid story.

Me (at left) and copy chief Erika Ehmsen.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead—I promise.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.

If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.

The Guides:

How to Raise Chickens

How to Make Beer

How to Make Olive Oil

How to Raise Honeybees

How to Make Wine

How to Make Vinegar

How to Make Salt

How to Grow Summer Crops

How We Made Cheese

How to Attract Beneficial Insects (we threw this one in just for fun, and because it's helpful)

Send us your comments, if you like...and stay tuned for the launch of new projects as we head into spring.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Amateur winemakers are prone to first-timers’ mistakes. So it should be no surprise that we were bitten by bottle-shock not once but twice.

First off, what’s bottle-shock? If you’ve been following Team Wine’s blog, you’ll likely remember me and Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider talking about how our two wines have been alive from the day we picked and crushed the Syrah grapes straight through to bottling both it and our Chardonnay. And bottle-shock is literally the wine being shocked at being transferred into a new environment (the sterilized bottle) from the environment it was used to (typically an oak barrel; in our case, a glass carboy).

In response to this new environment, the wine gets shy and retreats into itself, tightening up, even acting a bit sour, for at least a few days (sometimes weeks) before settling down and remembering its true self—the wine we remembered sampling on the day we bottled it.

How and why does it happen at bottling? Here’s a definition of “bottle sickness” from the Wine Dictionary at Epicurious.

And it can apparently happen again when you travel with a bottle, getting it all shook up. Or when a truck rumbles a bottle too much on the way to a wine shop. I especially enjoyed this debate on Chowhound—I’d never heard “dumb” applied to a wine before.

What happened in our case? Our Chardonnay wasn’t quite ready to bottle when we hosted a series of One-Block dinners this past summer (to thank the people who helped us along the way, and to share our food and wine with like-minded locavores we admire). That's Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella (who sold us our Syrah grapes and pressed Chardonnay "juice") above, at left, with home winemaker Dan Brenzel (who loaned us his expertise and equipment), at our first party. Note that Michael's glass is empty; Dan said Michael refilled it several times that evening—a good sign that our wine was a keeper!

So instead of committing the wine to individual bottles, we filled up five 1-gallon jugs with Chardonnay to serve at the soirees. The following quotes are Sara’s impressions of our Chardonnay, from just after it we “jugged” it (her description matches what we'd thought earlier in the day, when we sampled the wine before transferring it into jugs) through a rough patch and back into glory.

Our Chardonnay's coming-out party, on the day it was "jugged"
“When we poured the Chardonnay the first day, for a party that winemaker Michael Martella came to, it was bright and vibrant, with acidity but in an elegant way. It had a softness and balance to it, so that the fruit flavors—racy citrus, green apple, and pear—were integrated. The wine was all in one piece; everything worked together.”

Eek, just a few days later
“When we poured it at the next party just a couple of days later, though, that great acidity was hanging out like an appendage or something—a part that didn’t relate well to the whole. The wine was in a phase that just wasn’t coherent and integrated. And in that stage, the fruit just isn’t as pleasant, even if it’s present. It needs to be in balance with the acidity and alcohol. Bottle-shock can knock it off balance for a while.”

Phew, a couple of weeks after that
“At a final party, the wine was showing well again, with an elegance that only comes from balance.”

And then the Syrah
You’d think that we would have remembered the slightly wrinkled noses as guests sniffed and sipped our Chardonnay at that second party. But that image apparently didn’t stick with us, because we were shocked by bottle-shock again a few weeks ago, this time with our Syrah.

We bottled the Syrah on a Friday, and the following Tuesday evening, Sara served samples of our yummy-at-bottling Syrah (and our Chardonnay, which is reliably back to being its dandy self) to some high-profile New York guests from our parent company, Time Inc.

What did they have to say? Well, the Chardonnay was well liked, but we heard that the Syrah did not show well … one taster said he preferred Sunset honey to Sunset Syrah. Well, kudos to Team Bee, but ouch, that stings. Bottle-shock was clearly in effect again.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

There’s no end of surprise in this winemaking process. Throughout cold soaking, initial fermentation, malolactic fermentation, and aging (even if in glass carboys), our wine has taught us, above all, that it’s a living product—minute molecular shifts along the way making huge differences in the yum factor in the glass.

And when we broke open our carboys to siphon off the Syrah, we were frankly a little astounded at the variation among the lot of them, considering that the dry young wine going in over a year ago had been from just one source: Fat Buck Ridge, a remote Thomas Fogarty vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Here’s a carboy-by-carboy rundown of our tasting notes, each shorter than the last—and that's a shot of Sunset staffers toasting our first carboy of Syrah.

Carboy 1: Caused spontaneous dancing in Sunset’s parking lot. “Great fruit and color; deep, brambly blackberries, turning to blue on the finish; leafy tobacco, mocha, and black pepper.” Now there’s a Syrah!

Carboy 2: “Slightly sweeter-seeming fruit, with a little molasses character; rougher tannins, but they smooth out with a little time in the air; still excellent extraction.”

Carboy 3: “Whoa! Tannins are a little rambunctious here. Pull these bottles out in about five years!”

Carboy 4: “Ahh, more civilized again; this one’s smoother and softer.”

Carboy 5: “Sweet, integrated fruit—a goodie.”

Carboy 6: “Hmm, a little stinky at first [that is, slightly reduced], but the sulfur blows off quickly.”

Carboy 7: No notes. Consumption got the better of us.

So we have not one, but seven, Syrahs to dip into, compare, and watch as they keep on living.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We did it—and on many levels.

In 16 months, we went from zero hands-on experience to getting out in the vineyard and cutting bunches of Syrah grapes from the vine, crushing and stomping and destemming them into pulpy grape juice, fermenting this must twice (first with the help of yeast, and then with the aid of malolactic bacteria), pressing the must into young wine, learning to siphon and rack, struggling to be patient and wait while our wine matured a bit, and, finally, this past Friday, sampling our finished wine (yum!), transferring all 35 gallons of it into 175+ bottles, and manually corking them shut.

It’s been a thrilling ride, and we’ve loved all of the sweaty, sticky, back-straining work along the way. But perhaps the biggest thrill came at the conclusion of our pet project, when Team Wine leader and Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider dipped a wine thief into our first carboy of Syrah and passed out samples.

I could try to re-create the moment, but I think you might enjoy seeing it for yourself—just click the video below to join us in our joy (I shot it in HD, so select "HQ" for an unfuzzy view).

Now that was only Carboy 1 (these big glass jugs + toasted oak cubes stood in for oak barrels in our humble winemaking endeavor). It, and Carboy 5, were amazing—Sara S. thinks they could command $75 to $100 a bottle. Yowsa!

But each carboy's wine had a fascinatingly different personality, as each has been feisty and unique along the way. We loved some more than others (Carboy 3, we won’t be seeing or sampling your bottles again for a few years—you’re still a bit of a stinker, but we’re pretty sure you’ll improve with age). But, as Sara S. said, we wouldn’t kick any of them out of bed. (For Sara’s complete, carboy-by-carboy flavor profile on our Syrah, tune in next week.)

After we sampled a carboy, it was time to drain it—by siphoning the wine into sterilized bottles and eventually into glasses (but not directly into our mouths, as tempted as we were by Carboys 1 and 5). Starting a siphon isn't that hard—for all the details, read how we did it with our Chardonnay. We were happy we had that practice with a white wine because while we knew our Syrah would be inky, it seemed jet black in the morning-shaded outdoor area where we bottled.

It was impossible to see the end of the siphon tube until the wine level within the carboy had dropped to just a few inches, a danger zone in which we risked losing suction—by gulping up air instead of wine—if the tube end accidentally turned toward the sky instead of steadily sipping (and we can't restart a siphon when the wine level gets this low).

So we developed a few tricks: Before sticking the siphon tube into the wine, we measured the sterilized tubing near each carboy's exterior (but not directly against it, to preserve sterilization), aiming for a length that was a couple of inches above the bottom. And as the wine level dropped toward the bottom, we titled the carboy, concentrating the wine into one "corner" (can a cylinder have a corner?) and nabbing as much wine as possible. After figuring this out, we were able to confidently transfer our wine via siphon and maximize our in-the-bottle yield.

We had quite a few cases of Rhône bottles, a tall style with sloping shoulders that’s traditionally used for Syrah. These were clean, label-less bottles that we paid nada for, thanks to nightly wine drinker and vigilant bottle recycler Dan Brenzel, our home-winemaking benefactor. But a quick headcount, just as we began sterilizing with bottle wash, revealed that we were going to be three cases short in our quest for 182 bottles (that’s 26 bottles per 5-gallon carboy, not counting samples and sips and spills).

Two pieces of good fortune: 1. Former Sunset photo style coordinator (and constant Team Wine member) Sara Jamison had been rinsing out empty bottles for the last year and bringing them to the office. 2. We had expert label scrubber-offer Dan Brenzel on hand, and Sara S. set him up with a tub of sudsy water, a tub of plain water, a grill brush, and a paring knife. (That’s a shot of Dan attacking a label with a knife—no matter the glue, and there are many different ones adhering labels to bottles these days, it was no match for Dan.)

So Carboy 7 and half of Carboy 6 ended up in a hodgepodge of bottle shapes, colors, and slightly different sizes, which made for some occasionally tricky wielding of the bottling rod, as the bottles all seemed to have different widths and heights of punts, that indentation in the bottom of the bottle—it projects into the bottle interior, where you’re fumbling in a tight, slippery space with the bottle filler. Here’s a little footage of our bowling alley of bottle shapes—check out that nearly clear one at the end of the line (we decided not to fill it … we weren’t sure it would keep the wine safely cloaked from light). Note Sunset recipe retester and Team Wine member Sarah Epstein’s calm, efficient siphon-starting technique—she doesn’t spill a drip while slipping the bottling rod onto the siphon tubing. (I, on the other hand, managed to splatter poor Sara S. and tattoo my hands again.)

But we managed to fill (and, in some cases, slightly overfill) all of those extra bottles. And then it was back to our trusty and slightly rusty floor corker to seal the deal. When we were researching corks, we decided to go with “First” quality ones for our Syrah, as we knew we’d want to cellar them for a while. For our Chardonnay, which can’t age like a red wine, we went with “Grade 3” corks, and we thought we got a pretty good deal at 100 corks for $36.

Just to check, we poked around on eBay and Craigslist, honing in on First quality “seconds,” overruns from Napa and Sonoma wineries, which can’t put a 2003 cork in anything but a bottle of 2003 wine and therefore hand off most of their extras to recyclers to put out on the market for reuse. And they were cheap! Only $19 for 100 corks.

We figured that if these corks were good enough for commercial wineries, they’d be good enough for our Syrah. Just look at this shot of the major players that are capping off our Syrah. And is that a bottle of Ravenswood or Sunset Syrah? Guess we’ll have to slap our label on the bottle to prove we made it—which means I’ll be back in the labeling game soon. Uh-oh.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Our Syrah is only 1 year and just about 4 months old, yet we can barely remember life before it. We’ve known it since the day it was “born,” when Team Wine spent an early October morning picking dusky dark grapes high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, paused for lunch, then crushed, stomped, and destemmed the literal fruits of our labor.

This Syrah consumed our lives for all of October ’07, then we worried about it all winter and into spring, when we racked it off its lees. But it’s been in hibernation since this past summer, when we last sampled it, savoring each sip and wondering how long we’d have to wait till it was ready to bottle. We decided that late January ’09 would be perfect.

Our wine’s time has arrived: This Friday—meteorologist willing—we’ll take to our parking-lot workspace and siphon our 35 gallons of Syrah into 182 bottles, give or take a few that we end up “sampling” (we’re quite scientific) along the way.

We’re counting on our experience bottling and corking our Chardonnay this past fall to give us the speed we’ll need to fill and seal close to 200 bottles in just one workday. Wish us luck, and check back next week to see video—novice videographer (me) willing—of our latest adventure in home winemaking.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

My mom once told me that hanging wallpaper is the ultimate test of a marriage. So I’ve stuck to paint.

But then I tried my hand at labeling Team Wine’s Chardonnay. And I feel like I need some counseling: Home winemakers, homebrewers, paper crafters, scrapbookers, and bookmakers, what am I doing wrong?

One of the magazine’s designers used Adobe Illustrator to create labels for all of our One-Block “products” (here’s a beauty shot of them). For our 2007 Chardonnay, she used our lovely, scripty Sunset logo, a solo grape leaf, and the grapes’ place of origin: Thomas Fogarty Estate Vineyards in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Santa Cruz Mountains (practically in Sunset's backyard). And then she printed them on Avery 5265 labels, which she, being the crafty type, expertly, neatly, and evenly sliced with an X-Acto knife on a self-healing mat. She was so confident, I was sure I could replicate her motions without trouble.

Wrong. First I learned that my own craft mat is too compact to accommodate an 8 1/2- by 11-inch sheet of labels. And then I discovered that my craft knife is a little dull. So I of course mucked up the first sheet of labels.

Cutting my losses, I decided to switch to the trusty industrial paper cutter in our office. It’s old but reliable—so much so that we collectively scoffed at a new paper cutter that was positioned next to it for months, collecting dust and scraps of trimmed paper from our favored cutter. (Someone finally took pity on the younger one and found it a new home.)

But I didn’t think about what the adhesive hidden beneath each label would do to our beloved paper cutter. It wasn’t pretty. The first slice wasn’t bad, but just that one exposure to the labels’ gummy glue noticeably dulled the slicing blade, and suddenly a sticky scrap was flapping around on the blade edge. From there on out, my cuts weren’t straight. And, then through my frustration, I realized that I’d potentially wrecked Old Reliable.

So I ran away from the paper cutter with my one somewhat decent label and tried positioning it on an empty bottle that I’d practiced my corking on. (It was my job to guide Team Wine in bottling and corking, and I studied up.) There’s no drawing a straight line with a ruler on a rounded bottle, so I figured that unsticking one corner of the label, affixing it to the clean glass surface, and then reaching under the label and continuing to unfurl the paper backing was the way to go. I’d (seemingly) figured out the where and how, so I decided to go for it. And … sigh.

At least when I’ve crookedly stuck an address label on a holiday card or birth announcement, I’ve been able to mail it away. But a wine bottle lingers on. A wine bottle you (should be able to) proudly display. Not only is my label slightly askew, it has a crease and a bubble in it.

So I humbly ask for your help: If you have experience with beer or wine labels, or if you’ve worked with adhesives and learned how to apply paper straight and pretty, please post any and all advice in our Comments section. I’ll report back with what managed to straighten me out.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

I'm hoping you've finished all of your holiday shopping by now, but if you're like me and need a deadline to really get motivated, perhaps Team Wine's sleuthing can help get you to the finish line. We started with stocking-stuffers, then moved under the tree. In this final installment of our wine-loving gift guide, we present the splashiest gifts—ones that dance like sugar plums across our wildest dreams.

Act like a pro—put your wine in a barrel
When our wines were fermenting, Team Wine used glass carboys and added oak chips for complexity because we didn’t have the budget for an oak barrel (they’re spendy—see below). But if you can afford not to compromise—or if you think that St. Nick will remember that you’ve been a really good boy or girl this year—read on.

French oak is considered to be the gold standard in barrels. E.C. Kraus, a reliable retailer of quality home winemaking goods, offers four sizes. There’s an impish 5-gallon barrel (that’s 26 bottles of wine) for about $330, all the way up to a mondo 28-gallon barrel (145 bottles! 12 cases of wine!) for about $775.

Staying true to our local theme and our Western roots, I looked into Oregon oak barrels too. Oregon Barrel Works of McMinnville, Oregon, has taken the art of French cooperage (barrel making) and applied it to local oak. The staves (long strips of wood) are hand-split, air-dried for a minimum of three years, hand-coopered, and slow-toasted. These beauties go for $645 … and they’re sold out at the moment, but OBW encourages inquiries about availability. Old World purists, note that the company also offers handmade barrels of imported oak from four different regions in France ($945 to $1,100 each).

Trick out your garage—turn it into a winemaking facility
We’ve been reading about the WinePod “personal winery system” for about a year, and Sunset wine editor (and Team Wine leader) Sara Schneider and I even thought about trying one out at Sunset (alas, we couldn’t find the right spot for it in our ranch house). Before I elaborate on how much the owners of one of these space-age self-contained fermenters love theirs, you need to know that the WinePod is a splurge supreme:
From $4,500 for the standard set-up to $6,350 for the Complete version, which includes the computerized stainless steel fermenter plus a choice of five grape varietals (frozen, so you can start your wine at any time of year), a French oak barrel (and you now know how much those cost), and all the accessories, including bottling materials. (Shipping? That’s $400 to $600 more.)

But oh the fun you could have. Just ask Paul and Paula Cooper (pictured above with their WinePod) of Marin County, California. They contacted us to rave about their experience (and they tout how good their wine is in this 45-second WinePod video), saying, “We sincerely believe you would be doing your readers a good turn by checking out the WinePod.”

So I emailed them for details. Here’s what I learned: The Coopers got their WinePod this past spring, and their first wine was a Cabernet from frozen Napa-sourced grapes (chosen as part of their Complete kit). The computerized fermenter’s software allowed them to choose their own adventures along the way, and it always kept the wine at a consistent temperature, like a professional tank system but on a much smaller scale.

How does their first Cab taste? Since they made it in their garage, Paul and Paula joke that the wine has “high notes of Lexus,” then give it some serious compliments: “We just finished bottling, and though young, we think it’s already as good as the premium wines in our collection. We must think so because we are bottling this for our daughter’s wedding next June.”

Next up for the Coopers: a Cab made from Robert Mondavi rootstock (yum!), as the two were original IPO shareholders in the Mondavi Winery. Paul and Paula only have two vines in their yard, so the grapes used to end up in homemade Cabernet ice cream. But the WinePod’s from-frozen-grapes option is going to allow them to freeze two years’ worth of harvest and “honor the man and honor the vines by making wine.”

If you’re interested in this set-up but gasp at the WinePod’s price tag, perhaps its new kid sister is a better fit: The smaller and lower-tech (no Brix monitor or temperature control) Garagiste sells for $2,000.

Or you could grab a trashcan and some cheesecloth and a few supplies from a home winemaking store, then make your own wine by hand—and, of course, foot—a la Team Wine.

Happy holidays, all!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Team Wine is back with more ideas for wine-centric gifts. This past week, we presented our favorite stocking-stuffers. Here's what we think wine lovers will want to find under their tree. Coming soon: Splurges worthy of writing Santa about.

Get the party started with a wine-blending kit—and prolong the fun with a can of wine preserver
At a party, I’ve always loved drinking some wine (who doesn’t?) and testing my palate by trying to ID its aromas with a bunch of friends and a wine bouquet kit. But last Christmas, I discovered the Fusebox, which takes the concept to the next level by letting you blend wine to your own satisfaction. I can’t imagine a better way to spend an evening with friends: 7 bottles (375 ml. each) of Napa-sourced wines: 2 Cabernet Sauvignons, 1 Merlot, 1 Petit Verdot, 1 Malbec, 1 Cabernet Franc + 1 “mystery wine” (a palate tester!). Plus pipettes for measuring out specific amounts of wine and a graduated cylinder for mixing them together. And, of course, there’s an aroma card to help you ID what blends well together. Buy a Fusebox for $120, two for $199 (until January 11).

If you have a half-bottle left at the end of your blending—or after any evening of sipping—make sure you have a bottle of wine preserver handy. It lays down a blanket of inert gas (typically nitrogen or a nitro blend) that keeps the oxygen in the headspace from touching the wine and spoiling it; I’ve found that it keeps a red wine tasting like you just opened it for up to a week. A $5 to $10 lighter-than-air bottle (seriously, it feels empty) of Private Preserve or Wine Life will save 120 bottles of wine—a total deal.

Get your friends to make you wine—give a wine kit
All the basics are in this $105 wine kit—from a fermenter and airlock to corks and a corker. Just add a varietal grape juice (like this $74 Cabernet Sauvignon kit) and start saving your empty bottles to refill with your own wine. Warning: Winemaking is addictive.

Wrap up a pair of books for budding winemakers
The Wine Maker’s Answer Book ponies up 384 pages of advice from WineMaker magazine’s “Wine Wizard” columnist, professional winemaker Alison Crowe. When we had a question along the way, this was a quick way to find a concise and helpful answer. It retails for $15, and it’s just over $10 at Amazon.

The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home, by Sheridan Warrick, a home winemaker who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His book was our go-to guide as we made our own Syrah and Chardonnay this past year. Lists for $22; support your local bookseller, or grab a copy from Amazon for just under $15.

Join a wine club that pairs wines with recipes—ours!
Every few weeks, Sunset wine editor (and Team Wine leader) Sara Schneider and a bunch of staffers get together to taste Sunset recipes alongside wines from around the West for the Sunset Select Wine Club. Then each month, subscribers get one red wine and one white—or two different reds—plus the matched recipes, tasting notes, and winery info. The regular monthly fee is $35, but your first month is $20 and includes an extra bottle of wine. Plus, members get invited to club events, like special wine tastings and tours, and are even offered taste tickets and a Sunset cellar tour at our annual Celebration Weekend open house (June 6–7, 2009). Subscribe—or give a gift membership.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

As promised, Team Wine has come up with goodies for the wine lovers on your holiday list—no wineglass charms or bottle-toppers here. We’ll start with stocking-stuffers (today), work our way under your tree (this weekend), then offer up some splurges you’ll want to write Santa about (next week).

Take your wine's temperature
This stainless steel band (above) with a thermal strip looks like a mood ring but works like a charm, slipping over a standard 750-ml. bottle and letting you know when it’s at the perfect serving temperature. The cuff lists a number of grape varietals and wine styles. It’s temporarily out of stock at Uncommon Goods (one of my favorite gift catalogs, and where I bought a few wine-temperature cuffs last Christmas), where it retails for $10. But Catching Fireflies has it for the same price.

Pop out the cork with an “Ah So”
This is my go-to “corkscrew.” Before getting to know this two-pronged puller, I was a habitual cork mangler. Never used one? Check out these photos or this video to see how easy it is to pull out even the remains of a split cork. Great for lefties too! Wineries sell ah so’s for $5–$7 (I got mine in Sonoma at Chateau St. Jean’s amazing wine shop), and so does Amazon.com; if that link’s store is sold out, just search Amazon for “cork puller.”

Gadget purists: Check out the original German Monopol Ah So. Made entirely of steel, it retails for $30.

Stop juggling with these wine clips
No more awkward fumbling of plate in one hand and wineglass in the other, and fewer broken dishes. Nubby little rubber grips gently pinch onto a plate and provide a steady hold on your wineglass, freeing up a hand for refilling that plate and glass. An Amazon.com retailer is selling sets of 6 for $17.

Spray away stains with Wine Away
Wine editor Sara Schneider spritzed this on a sweater that I’d inadvertantly tinged purple during a Syrah racking adventure. I thought the sweater was a goner, but this stuff is magical. Phosphate- and bleach-free, Wine Away gets its power from fruit and veggie extracts. And it’s made by a family company in Washington State. Buy a small bottle for about $8 at BevMo and quite a few grocery stores and wine shops. Sur La Table even carries a tuck-in-your-purse mini three-pack ($9), for the accident-prone who chance dining out.

Subscribe to WineMaker magazine
On the one-year-and-counting quest of Sunset’s Team Wine to make our own Syrah and Chardonnay, we’ve consulted WineMaker articles and advice columns many times. It’s the magazine for home winemakers—from working with kits to raising and crushing your own grapes to experimenting with fruit wine, WineMaker has that wannabe winemaker in your life covered. While you’re at their website, get a sneak peek of the magazine’s second-annual amateur winemaker conference (May ’09 in Napa), where attendees swap bottles and glean advice from pros. A one-year (six-issue) subscription is $25—roll up an issue and tie it with a bow.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Cork. The final frontier for our Chardonnay (and, sometime in January, our equally beloved Syrah too).

Last week, I told you how Team Wine sterilized dozens and dozens of Burgundy-style bottles with bottle wash, stuck them on a spiky plastic tree to dry, then started a siphon and began filling those bottles with wine—click to see the full details and even videos of how we set up and started a siphon.

Or just skip ahead and watch the below video, in which Sunset’s managing editor, Team Wine member Alan Phinney, uses a spring-loaded bottling rod attached to a siphoning tube to fill a bottle with Chardonnay. Toward the end of the video, you’ll get a glimpse of our creaky old floor corker as Team Wine’s Sara Jamison loads it up with a sterilized cork and places a full bottle on its spring-loaded platform.

On the recommendation of the experts at our local winemaking shop, MoreWine in Los Altos, California, we switched our cork choice from “First” quality 1 3/4-inch-long #9 corks to “Grade 3” ($36 for 100 corks). Why the quality switch? Well, white wines don’t keep for decades, and therefore we don’t plan to try cellaring them. So there was no need to pay for higher-quality corks—if we can afford them, we’ll use them next month on our Syrah, whose inky, fruity, bacony yumminess we will cellar and lusciously savor for years.

The 1 3/4-inch length is one of the two standard options (the other being the slightly shorter 1 1/2-inch length) for a traditional 750-ml. bottle. We used #9 (a sizing guideline that refers to the cork’s diameter and its resiliency under compression) because it’s the best width for sealing a bottle with a floor corker. Here’s a handy chart (click that link, then scroll all the way down) that shows different cork sizes and their recommended uses (like a #8 if you’re using a hand corker, and a #7 if you’re bottling a split).

Our all-natural corks were punched from cork trees in Portugal. We didn’t choose plastic or “agglomerated” (bits of cork pressed together and bound with an epoxy). We got the good stuff.

But even though they’re natural, corks still need sterilizing before being put in contact with wine (which remains alive, even when bottled). So Sara J. and I prepped another sanitizing solution of water and potassium metabisulfite (the exact equation is in our free downloadable how-to guide) in a nonreactive stainless steel bowl. To keep the corks from bobbing up in this solution (and to keep us from having to constantly jab them down to ensure sterilization) we nestled a smaller nonreactive bowl on top of the bowl of corks, then only poked them every 5 minutes or so.

After 20 minutes of being dunked, the corks were ready for use. Instead of draining the solution and risking some bug or dust latching onto the corks as they dried, we left them bathing till we needed them, and we placed the bowl at the base of the corker for ease of access.

A floor corker is amazingly simple and complex at the same time. It’s physics and mechanics in action. You simply place a full bottle on the spring-loaded platform, place a sanitized cork in the jaws of the “compression chamber” or iris, then brace the corker with your foot (if it’s a rickety one like ours) and use your hands to pull down the handle. In one fluid motion, the cork gets squeezed on four sides and a metal rod comes down to plunge the compressed cork into the bottle. Check it out in the video below.

Once in a bottle, the cork has just enough room to expand in the bottle neck, creating a tight seal and keeping the wine in and oxygen out. Because any SO2 you added during the winemaking process is still bubbling out of the wine at this point, and because wine is a living thing that needs time to adjust to its new environment, you’ll want to place the bottles upright (cork side up) in the case for 24 to 48 hours. After the bottles de-gas and adapt, flip them upside down in the case or store them horizontally, either in a wine rack or simply by tilting a full case of bottles on its side—choose whichever method you’d like as long as it ensures that the wine is staying in contact with the cork (which could wither if you leave it hanging high and dry above the wine's slight headspace, which you’ll notice when a bottle is standing upright).

Now your bottles are ready to be labeled and shared with friends (or hoarded—you know who you are). But don’t drink them right away—beware bottle-shock.

I'll post details on how to label and the truth (it’s not a myth!) about bottle-shock soon. In the meantime, we’re gathering gift ideas for winemakers, wannabe winemakers, and wine fans in general. Cruise by next week to see what we unearth. And by all means, please leave your own ideas in our Comments section!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

A year of waiting and worrying and almost kind-of nearly losing an eye has passed, and it’s time to roll out those barrels (ok, carboys) and flashback to 325 A.D. Yep, we’re doing it all by hand—with a little help from my mouth, as I’ve somehow become a confident siphon-starter (this wasn’t always so).

No automated assembly line of motorized fillers and pneumatic cork compressors for Team Wine. Just a bunch of friends ready and willing to work for a few sips of Chardonnay along the way. Here’s part 1 of how it all went down (next week, I’ll tell you how to stick a cork in it—no offense, of course).

We picked a finally cool fall day for bottling our Chard, to be easy on our wine and on ourselves, as we had three 5-gallon carboys of Chardonnay to transfer into 78 Burgundy-style bottles, a half-day of what would have been super-sweaty work in this year’s long-lingering Indian summer.

Fellow cellar rat Sara Jamison and I headed for our parking lot “work area,” as it’s paved and has a drain and a hose-rigged spigot for easy cleaning and clean-up. We dragged out a hefty work table (sturdy enough to hold up a heavy glass carboy); nonreactive (so not aluminum)  stainless steel bowls for sterilizing our siphon tubing, bottle filler, and corks and for mixing up bottle wash*; two bottle rinsers (aka Vinators); and our Charlie Brown–esque “bottle tree” drying rack—check it out in the video below. *Whip up your own batch of bottle wash (potassium metabisulfite dissolved in water) and get a complete list of materials you’ll need by downloading our free PDF. We've updated it with full bottling details.

And then we dragged out 6 1/2 cases of empty bottles. Home winemaker and retired chemist Dan Brenzel, our major benefactor and advice giver (and hubby of Sunset garden editor Kathy Brenzel), had run them through the dishwasher sans detergent (we didn’t want any chemical remnants leeching into our wine). But then they sat in boxes for months.

So to make sure they were wine-ready, we gave each one a rinse with bottle wash: Two pumps on one spring-loaded bottle rinser to wash away any dust, then two pumps on our second rinser to complete the sterilization (some home winemakers—like Dan—dump SO2 into their wine before bottling to really keep the bugs out, but Team Wine likes to keep interventions to a minimum). Then onto the tree for 10 to 15 minutes of drying.

We got a good rhythm going, and before we knew it, the tree was full of clean bottles, ready to fulfill their destiny. At this point, the rest of Team Wine had broken away from their desk jobs to join us. And since I’ve now had a bunch of practice starting (and failing) siphons, I was easily convinced to unstopper a carboy and fill our first bottle.

Starting a siphon is all about sucking it up: You stick one end of plastic tubing way down into a carboy (as close to the tiny amount of remaining sediment as you dare), then put the other end in your mouth. Pretend like you’ve got a giant flexy straw in your mouth (mmm, remember those mondo Pixy Stix?), and start sipping. The wine will quickly start flowing, so keep a hand near your mouth to quickly and firmly pinch the tubing before wine tumbles into your mouth (this is not a beer helmet, people).

Holding up the tubing end that was just in your mouth, grab your bottle filler (a plastic or metal rod with a spring-loaded tip that controls the flow of wine; I like the clear-plastic one I'm using in the above video). Gently but firmly slide the rod onto the tubing, and you’re set. As long as you keep the rod end lower than the carboy that’s up on the table, your siphon is ready whenever you are. And in the meantime, no runs, drips, or errors—this ingenious invention is liberating! (At least it is for someone who had trouble racking, as I did.)

When you’re ready, take a bottle off the tree and place it at your feet. Then squat down and poke the bottle-filling rod into the bottle. As soon as you depress its tiny tip, the rod will allow wine to pass into the bottle. Fill the bottle till it’s approaching full, pausing to let the wine foam as needed (this is normal—it’s just the SO2 bubbling off), then gently lift up and remove the rod when the wine crests the top of the bottle neck (a quality rod neatly displaces the perfect amount of headspace for your cork). You have just filled a bottle of wine—almost as easily as you’ll drain it when you’re ready to share it.

This is when having a couple of friends over will come in handy: Ask them to start a bottle brigade. One of them can be in charge of placing an empty bottle at your feet and taking a full bottle to the person working the floor corker. (Dan likes to fill a whole case of bottles at once and heft it over to the corker, but we found this to be far messier, spill-inducing, and disaster-tempting than we were comfortable flexing our muscles for.) At the end of each carboy, rotate jobs to see what they’re all like.

Curious about corking? Tune in next week for video of the beloved but rickety floor corker that sealed our Chardonnay’s fate.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Team Wine watched crush come and go this year, dipping in nary a toe (a far cry from last year). With the economy seemingly suffering from a stuck fermentation, we didn’t dare try to squeak hundreds of pounds of grapes into the company budget. So we’re contenting ourselves with bottling our wine (video coming soon—really!) and peeking at what other home winemakers are doing.

It was in googling around that we discovered our new favorite blog: NYTimes.com’s The Crush. This fall, NY-based wine writer Alice Feiring has been in California’s Sonoma County, furthering her passion for wine by making it for the first time.

In working with the little-known Italian red varietal Sagrantino with Kevin Hamel of Pellegrini Family Vineyards, Feiring’s initial experience very much mirrors our own: She picks the grapes herself, then jumps in feet first to stomp and crush them.

But that’s where our paths diverge: The girl’s going wild!

We got our ICV-D80 yeast from Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella, trusting his judgment instead of doing much research (and our wines are fantastic, so thank you, Michael!). But Feiring is sticking to completely natural yeast—whatever was on the grapes as they were harvested, and whatever gets into the fermenter.

And wow how it works. Here’s how Feiring describes the wine’s initial ferment: “A spongy collection of grape skins and pulp had pushed to the top. Underneath by a good 14 inches lurked the foamy, vibrant, magenta fermenting juice. Those yeast were stuffing themselves silly on the sugar, like a teenage boy on Thanksgiving turkey.”

At the core of this vin naturel approach is Feiring’s belief in organic, sustainable, biodynamic farming, a philosophy we at Sunset share.

And she likes her wines pure, with little or no interventions. We totally remember the worries along the way and the tough choices about sulfur and oak, but we were never faced with adding water to wine. This approach to lowering super-high alcohol levels and unsticking a potentially stuck fermentation lit up The Crush’s comments section.

If you don’t have anything in a barrel—or glass carboy—this fall, live vicariously through wine bloggers like Feiring. You might pick up a few tricks along the way. (In one post, Feiring professes to have been “a terrible chemistry student,” then handily tackles Brix, clearly defining it and readily dabbling in it.)

Have a food, wine, or local-eating blog you tune into? Please post those links by clicking "comments" below.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Fall is in the air, and winemakers are getting antsy to pick, crush, and start fermentation on grapes that are hanging heavy, dusky, and delicious on the vine. And you don't have to take a backseat to the action—wineries have a set number of tanks they can fill with grape juice, and many sell their excess tonnage.

In California’s Sierra Foothills, the El Dorado Wine Grape Growers Association is posting wineries with available grapes, from Barbera to Zinfandel.

And on the message boards at MoreGrapes, well, more grapes are being added every day. (Yes, there are $3,000/ton Napa Cab grapes on there. Undoubtedly yummy, but leave those to the pros and start with something like a nice Merlot from a smaller AVA for 40 cents/pound.)

You might even find a U-pick vineyard near you. (Or, hmm, apple wine?)

Before you get clipping, check out WineMaker magazine’s handy “10 Tips for a Successful Harvest Day.”

What to do once you have the grapes at hand foot? Sunset's Team Wine has been blazing this trail for you, and we've collected our year of winemaking experiences into a downloadable guide to both reds and whites. Got a garage and a garden hose? Consider yourself on your way!

That’s how we got our start, and in two weeks we'll be marking the one-year anniversary of picking our Syrah grapes and bringing home our Chardonnay juice. But in order to crack open a bottle of our wine and celebrate, we need to do some bottling, and that’s exactly what we plan to do!

So check back in early October for more adventures in winemaking … possibly featuring some video. Just think: slippery glass bottles, tubes squirting Chardonnay, a hand-cranked corker squeezing and punching wet corks into bottle necks, and other merry mayhem caught on camera. We can't wait.

At last, after much trial and error, we eat! See how our crops became a summer feast. | Jump to the recipes.

Coming up next: How we're eating from the garden every day.

Veggie-garden primer | Sunset guides to growing edibles

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

There’s a certain amount of character that a wine can glean from resting on its lees, those exhausted (but undoubtedly happy) yeasty-beasties and other sediments that drop out of the wine as fermentation wraps up. But leave a wine on its lees too long, and those previously helpful yeast cells can turn on you, rotting and taking your wine with them.

If you’ve been keeping up with our One-Block Diet blog, you’ve likely heard the word “neglect” tossed around by other teams. To echo food editor Margo True’s recent Team Vinegar post, we have busy lives (and exciting spring and summer issues of Sunset to concoct—keep an eye on newsstands to see what we do in our desk jobs!).

We confess: We’ve been bad wine parents. It had been a month since we last rolled our Chardonnay or checked up on our Syrah. We got around to rolling the Chard this week, and it was okay for that wine to sit and wait for us—last month, we shut down its malolactic fermentation by adding SO2 (in the form of powdered potassium metabisulfite; about 2 teaspoons per 5-gallon carboy), protecting the wine against oxidation and vengeful microbial spoilage. The rolling is just to add some character and round out any sharp flavors.

But on our Syrah, we were pushing the limit on the lees, risking all of our hard work. High time for the next step: “racking” (transferring) the wine into clean carboys and leaving all that fermentation muck behind. Time to call in our local expert: home winemaker extraordinaire Dan Brenzel, a retired chemist, Sunset garden editor Kathleen Brenzel’s doting husband and home chef, and incredible ribber of yours truly (“Watch, everybody! Erika’s gonna booger it up!”). He’s provided us with all of our equipment—from the hefty and spendy crusher-destemmer and bladder press to the glass carboy fermenters and the chemicals to sterilize them with—and countless chemistry lessons. Dan reminds me of my chemist grandfather, just a bit more sassy and clearly much less of a teetotaler.

Before we got started, Team Wine had another big decision to make: oak or no oak? Dan is a firm believer in oaking wine, oaking it some more, oh, and oaking it again. Wine editor and Team Wine leader Sara Schneider has been thinking that our big, juicy Syrah could use some oak to round it out, but she diplomatically put it to a vote. The measure passed, and we weighed out 26 grams of toasted oak chips for each 5-gallon carboy.

Besides the kitchen scale and sack of oak chips, our racking setup included: a card table to elevate our full carboys of Syrah, two 6-foot lengths of plastic tubing to transfer the wine (we kept one sterilized at all times), and a bunch of empty 5-gallon carboys on the ground. Plus lots and lots of potassium metabisulfite (SO2), to clean our equipment and to vaccinate the Syrah in its new carboys.

We also needed a garden hose with a jet sprayer, so we pulled everything out into a Sunset parking lot that gently slopes to a drain. (You may ask, “Is it safe to flush the SO2-tinged H20 down the drain?” Dan the chemist thought it was fine, and we’ll be drinking the tiny amount of sulfite in both of our wines.)

We didn’t use an auto siphon or racking-tube holders (check out this video to see them in action), but it looks like they would have made racking easier. Or maybe I just should have paid more attention to Dan’s instructions.

I was too excited to get started and didn’t see exactly how Dan got the siphon going. I understood the general concept, so I simply paced while waiting for my turn, completely missing that he’d slipped his finger over the bottom end of the tubing to control the flow and ease it into a fresh carboy.

Dan handed me some sterilized tubing and, before I could get my bearings, shone the spotlight on me with his aforementioned “Erika’s gonna booger it up” prediction. Lack of focus and total self-consciousness paralyzed me; I was doomed. Plus, before we’d started racking, I’d admonished everyone to be careful not to spill our wine, and suddenly I knew I’d be the first one in the splash zone.

So I rushed ahead, not pausing to think about the mechanics, sucking the air as you’re supposed to do to start a siphon, then nearly gulping down the Syrah as it came streaming toward me, much faster than I’d expected (people do this to steal gas? ugh!). I yanked the tubing out of my mouth and wildly tried to stuff it in a clean carboy, gravity-fed wine splattering it, the blacktop, and me.

Yes, I boogered it up.

And then Dan turned up the heat: hand-eye coordination. I had to watch the end of the tubing in the top carboy (to keep it from dipping into the mucky lees we were racking the wine away from), watch the rapidly filling fresh carboy that I was topping off, and keep my hands on both ends of the tubing to make sure that the top end didn’t dip too low and that neither end squirted up and out the top of its carboy.

Nervous, I messily stopped the siphon with two slippery fingertips (I should have used my thumb) and transferred it from the topped-off carboy to another empty one, of course dribbling more wine down the glass exterior. (Always thinking, Dan brought sponges, undoubtedly with this klutz in mind.) Still jittery, and with the wine level dropping ever closer to the muck, I jerked up the tubing a few seconds too early, wasting a couple sips of wine because I couldn’t restart the siphon with so little liquid left. More ribbing, of course.

Thankfully, Ben Marks, editor of Sunset’s California Wine Country, emerged from our Books division to check on us, cup in hand. He claimed this cup was just because he was drinking some water, not because he was looking for a handout, but we gave him a sip.

“Not bad, huh?” nudged wine captain Sara Schneider, fishing but always modest, and perpetually wary that our Syrah might have turned.

A big grin lit up Ben’s always-friendly face: “It’s better than ‘not bad.’ It’s lovely!”

Gleeful toasting all around, then quickly back to racking. Because as Dan soon proved when he was siphoning from a sky-high 12-gallon carboy into a ground-dwelling 5-gallon carboy with just 6 feet of tubing, it’s easy to lose focus when you’re chatting.

I didn’t tease him, just dove to reinsert the lower tube end, licking my wine-stained fingers because I really didn’t want to lose more Syrah!

Team Wine members were all feeling pretty sensitive about our seemingly dwindling Syrah supply after food editor Margo True showed up to represent Team Vinegar, requesting 5 gallons of our labor of love to feed to her mother. (Have you seen these things? Very Little Shop of Horrors meets The Blob.)

We grudgingly set some wine aside for her. It’s going to make a lovely vinegar.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

When Team Vinegar huffed its way to the Sonoma mountaintop home of renowned cookbook author Paula Wolfert in February and procured pieces of her precious, 40-year-old mother, we had every intention of being good caretakers of that weird but precious stuff. We meant to feed it with fresh red wine regularly, closely monitor the temperature, and sniff it now and then to make sure it wasn't starting to smell like furniture polish (the death knell, according to Paula).

Reader, we are guilty of neglect.

Hey, we have busy busy lives! Shoot, we've only fed it — by my haphazard records — four times since it came to live with us. Correction: Me. The jars sit in my office, in two cardboard boxes. I have to keep telling visitors that the strange smell isn't my feet, it's the vinegar.

Vinegar is supposed to be fed, according to Paula, every 1 1/2 weeks. Yikes. We last fed it on April 1. Here are some photos from that time.

Where are the mothers?

Now, if a developing vinegar is properly fed, the mother will appear on the surface as a thickish, solid layer. She is made up of pure cellulose and acetobacter — a nifty bacteria that converts alcohol into vinegar. By the way, the mother is completely harmless, if kind of slimy. When we're ready to use the vinegar, we'll just strain her out.

But I digress. As you can see from our 1-gallon mason jars above, no mother is to be seen. Failure! So many things could have killed this mother--too much wine poured in at one time (thereby "swamping" it), long periods of starvation, we just don't know.

Then we pulled out our other two jars. These are humongous 3-gallon things we found back in our dusty storeroom. They are very wide, and maybe that is why — as you can see below — the mother has formed a healthy pink presence:

A well-established mother.

At least two mothers have survived out of four, against the odds. But sometimes the dead spring back to life (at least when it comes to vinegar). We'll see...we'll be feeding them soon (the guilt is becoming too much to bear).

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The numbers are in. Our immensely helpful consultant, Michael Martella, took our wine samples up to Thomas Fogarty Winery to analyze for pH (which is in indirect proportion to acidity) and TA (total acidity). Here’s what he reported.

Our Syrah
    pH: 3.8 (a little high; Martella thinks it will still come down)
    TA: .64
Our Chardonnay
    pH: 3.2 (low, which means our acidity is high, which is an excellent thing)
    TA: .68 (great)

His evaluation: “I think you’re still on track. It’s going to be very good wine.” Phew!

And advice: Let the Syrah go another couple of weeks, then send him more samples. But the Chardonnay is “done,” meaning that both fermentations are complete. Douse it with meta bisulfite (in, as he does, a ratio of 1 pound per 1,000 gallons of wine! For us, that translates to about 2 teaspoons per carboy and would give us about 60 parts per million in the end—a good goal for sulfites). And start stirring the lees, to soften up the wine and add some complexity. We have two choices: Buy a ridiculously expensive machine that stirs the lees magnetically from the outside, or turn the carboys on their sides and roll them once a week or so.

The choice might have been a no-brainer, but nothing’s as easy as it sounds. We couldn’t roll the carboys with the ferm locks still in place; we had to put in some solid corks and secure them with duct tape, to avoid spilling wine all over Sunset’s courtyard. The rolling itself went without incident, even if the layers of lees were so compact that we had to manhandle the carboys vigorously. But untaping the corks was a little bit of an adventure—Erika Ehmsen (copy chief) almost lost an eye when one came shooting out. We learned to finesse it, though, and now have a weekly regimen.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

Well, here’s a bizarre twist in our year of wine at Sunset—a cautionary tale for anyone planning to do this at home!

We’ve had our stash of glass carboys filled with Chardonnay and Syrah lined up in a breezeway behind one of the buildings on our campus here in Menlo Park, with some smaller containers of the same wines alongside—intended for topping-off the bigger vessels as we pull wine out for tasting and analyzing. But when staffers in that building came in to work the other day, they found a stranger—from all appearances homeless—passed out beside the lot. He’d drunk an entire magnum of our Syrah. Generous evidence of the fact was smudged all over his face. Conflicted on all fronts, we called in the police. Their parting message to our plant manager, as they escorted the man to their car, was, “Tell whoever made that wine that it must be good, because this is one happy man!” A chuckle and a painful head shake all in one. Needless to say, we’ve moved the rest of the wine to an inside courtyard, where it’s thriving. Next up: a chemical analysis—pH, TA (total acidity), all the really exciting details.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We've been confident about our Chardonnay--both with and without oak chips--for a while now, and we'd been starting to joke about how fun and easy winemaking is (I can't say that I enjoyed high school bio and chemistry nearly this much). But if we'd had daydreams of entering and sweeping a home winemaker competition, our recent Syrah tasting knocked us down a few pegs.

As wine editor Sara Schneider mentioned in her Valentine's Day post, there was stunned silence from Team Wine when we sampled our first carboy of free-run Syrah. Finally, food editor Margo True offered, "It's like it's cinched with a belt."

Okay, so that carboy's Syrah was a little uptight, but the nose on the next one got us really worried, as did recipe editor Amy Machnak's comment after her first sip: "It's not awful, and it could have been."

And it just got worse from there, with our third carboy producing descriptions that seemed more akin to Chinese fast-food condiments: "sweet and sour" and "mustard." Eek!

We bought our Chardonnay as professionally pressed juice, but Team Wine picked and crushed the Syrah ourselves, a few of us even venturing into a (clean) trash can to stomp a few bushels of grapes. So I had to wonder, with tasty Chard and stinky Syrah, were my feet to blame?

It was clear that we needed professional help, and possibly some clinical analysis to diagnose whether our Syrah was "stuck" somewhere in its malolactic fermentation (MLF). Thankfully, Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella answered my plea for help. As you might recall, back in October he sold us his Chardonnay juice and let us into his vineyard to pick Syrah grapes. He's raised these grapes since they were just baby vines, and he knows their personalities, from when they're feisty young wines to when they grow up and can be trusted to drink. Who better to give us advice? (We just hoped he wouldn't be appalled at how his grapes were turning out in our hands.)

Zipping down from the hills in his vintage Fiat convertible, Michael arrived at Sunset HQ on a sunny but cool Saturday morning. We ushered him into our courtyard and showed the way to our dusty carboys, sitting in a shaded corner. We'd told Michael our theory about MLF being stuck, and he took note of the cool outdoor temperature: "Well, the ideal temperature for malolactic is 63°. It wants to be 60° to 65°. Any lower than that, and malolactic doesn't like it" and pretty much stops. We could have grabbed our thermometer to confirm our carboys' undoubtedly cool temperatures, but we had Michael's trained palate on hand, and the man was here for "a sip and spit."

He laughed as Sara pulled out our trusty turkey baster "wine thief," then related that Dr. Fogarty, a cardiologist as well as the founder of Fogarty Winery, "used to use a syringe, so this is better."

We started with the unoaked Chardonnay, and here's what Michael had to say:
"Hey, this is pretty good. Big acid, pretty creamy too--could be done." Then, after a second sip, "I'm pleased with that." (I think all of Team Wine silently cheered, Hooray!) "Malolactic often gives wine a little oily feeling, and this is a bit oily," he said, then suggested that we stir up our wine to clean things up. "Have you added any SO2?" (Sulfur dioxide is widely used to protect wine from bad bacteria and oxidation, but we haven't felt the need for it yet, plus it would stop MLF if it's not already done.) "I don't use any either. You can get by with less by leaving the lees [spent yeast] in there. You know what, this could be ready to bottle!" (This time, we did cheer out loud!)

On to one of our "oaked" Chardonnays--Michael, like most pro winemakers, oaks in a barrel, but we couldn't get our hands on one (they were a bit spendy for our little winemaking project), so our oaked Chardonnays just have a few handfuls of oak chips floating in them, likely not touching the wine in the bottom half of the carboys. Another good reason to stir our wines.

In Michael's words: "This doesn't seem as far along in malolactic." (Meaning the malic acid was still tingling our tongues and hadn't yet been converted into more mellow lactic acid--think of a lemon drop vs. a vanilla milkshake.) "I can't really detect the oak. And it's not as fat as the other one, so the malolactic isn't as far along. Its nose is more closed. And there's a tiny bit of stink on the nose, but that could be the toasty-burnt character of the oak chips." As a remedy, he again suggested stirring things up a bit: "Right now, I'm going through and stirring my Chardonnays two times a week."

Our Chardonnays have the same birthday, so we clearly need to get stirring soon. But how? Michael's first suggestion was a magnetic stirrer, but that kind of scientific equipment seems like a big (and somewhat clinical) investment. Switching into a home winemaker mindset, Michael suggested giving our wine the red carpet treatment: "Put a big strip of carpet on the floor, put a cork--a good, sturdy cork--in the carboy, duct tape it down, and start rolling it." (Ah, the fun of winemaking.)

With the Chardonnay tasted and passing inspection, it was time to move on to the Syrah. (Gulp.) We tried the free-run first, sampling from carboy 2--the smelly one. Michael concurred on the smell, and our hearts sunk.

But then a bit of unexpected news: "Stink is just a varietal character. And a young Syrah's character tends to have a lot of stink." (From P-U to Phew!) "Malolactic could be still in effect, but it smells pretty normal. Nice extraction. It tastes better than I thought it was going to taste." (Hey, is there an echo in here?)

Moving back to carboy 1 of the free-run Syrah, we were a little worried about Michael's take on its nose: "It seems a little gassy." And then the first sip: "It's a little spritzy." As we discussed "micro-oxidation" to open the wine up, Michael practiced a little micro-oxidation of his own, rapidly swirling his glass of Syrah as he advised that we "let the wine splash when racking" it into bottles to introduce oxygen. And by the time he was done swirling and sipped again, we got more good news: "It's excellent now. It's alive, and it's a young wine, but it's going to be excellent."

At this point, Team Wine was positively giddy--we could handle carboy rolling and introducing some oxygen to keep things on track.

But then we discovered one potential problem child: Unless we donate carboy 3 of free-run Syrah to Team Vinegar's "mother," we're going to have to clean up its "funkyness," as Michael termed it, politely saying, "I would be inclined to blend."

We might have halted primary fermentation too early, unleashing MLF before the yeasty-beasties gobbled up the sugar and got it down to 0° Brix.

Could Michael diagnose this by taste alone? He was pretty sure there was a bit of residual sugar left, but "I always do chemical analysis. Especially with malolactic. It's so hard to tell (when it's done), especially when it gets down low."

On the sugar front, Michael suggested a real home test: "What you should do is go to a pharmacy and get a blood-sugar diabetes kit: 0.1% is what you're looking for, but 0.2% is pretty good." But before we could fully digest this option, and because a drug store wouldn't have an over-the-counter test for malolactic, Michael offered to take samples back to Fogarty Winery's lab.

So we loaded him up with zip-locked plastic bags of wine (hey, we're home winemakers), which Michael safely stowed in his Fiat before zooming back into the hills. Any day now, we should get his scientific ruling and officially know which course to take.

Photographs by Ron Ehmsen (thanks, Dad!)

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The wine for our ultra-local feast is pressed off and sitting there all murky and brooding in its glass carboys. We’ve topped each with a “ferm lock”—a cool rubber-and-glass stopper that allows bubbles out (the wine’s last gasps from fermentation) but no air in. All the books say to stand by.

The yeast might take a little while to eat up the last dregs of sugar, and the malolactic bacteria might take even longer—weeks? months?—to transform the harsh malic acids into creamy lactic ones. Until the bugs eat their fill, the wine might taste strangely sweet and sour (scary, considering our investment in the grapes).

And it does—the Syrah, at least. Team Wine’s most recent monitoring mission—i.e., barrel tasting (make that carboy tasting) produced a few worries. A squirt of wine from our turkey baster (which turns out to work even better than a wine thief for extracting samples from carboys) into everyone’s glass wipes out any concern about color. It’s a rich, dense, blue-ish red. The cold-soak we gave the must before we started the fermentation clearly did its job, extracting serious color and flavor from the skins and seeds.

But when we taste it en masse, nobody says a word. There’s big fruit flavor in there all right, but with a funky, tangy edge. Is that the aforementioned okay funk? Or has some of the alcohol turned into acetic acid that the books also say can happen if the wrong bacteria have gotten into your wine—on little fruit-fly legs, say?

The Chardonnay, on the other hand, tastes wonderful. The version we didn’t put any oak chips in is crisp and full of green apple and pear flavors—“Asian pear skins,” says food editor Margo True, and we know she means that in a good way; “a cross between a Mason Sauvignon Blanc and a Talley Chardonnay,” says food writer Amy Machnak, and there’s no possible negative read on that.

The “oaked” version is a little softer, a little rounder. And both are amazingly clear; the lees have settled to the bottom. Exciting stuff.

The surprise to us across the board is that every carboy tastes different. The same wine in separate vessels is living a different life.

Time to call in the expert: Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella, who sold us the grapes and juice in the first place. He’s agreed to come taste with us this week to trouble shoot. Can this wine be saved?!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Winemaking is a full-body experience. Sure, the nose knows a good bouquet (at least wine editor Sara Schneider’s does). And swishing and swirling wine across your palate definitely makes the mouth feel good.

But for weeks, I’ve been sporting purple tattoos from my own contact with the grapes. With all the Willy Wonka–like crushing and pressing equipment around and my purplish feet and hands, I’ve been feeling a bit like Violet Beauregarde (“Violet, you’re turning violet, Violet!”). Red wine definitely stains more than clothes.

When we brought in our quarter-ton of Syrah grapes, most of our coworkers didn’t think food editor (and One-Block Diet doyenne) Margo True and I would seriously jump in and get stomping. Neither of us had really thought through the logistics of what we’d stomp in (functional and clean but not Italian-villa-glamorous trashcans) or how we’d clean up afterward (an icy-cold jet of water from a sadistic garden hose). We just kicked off our shoes, donned shorts and grins, and clambered over the cans’ wobbly plastic sides into whole clusters of grapes piled 2 feet deep.

At first I just stood there, letting the sensations (and my feet) sink in: gently prickly stems and firm, round berries that silently popped and released cool juice as gravity pulled me into them.

Trying to wriggle my feet loose and start stomping in earnest, I lost my balance and grabbed hold of the top of the trashcan, which threatened to buckle (and since we’d borrowed most of our equipment from home winemaker Dan Brenzel, I had his teasing “You break it, you buy it” warning echoing in my head).

I realized that I was going to have to jog in place while remaining as upright as possible, which, now that I think about it, is a bit like using our gym’s stair climber without the benefit of my hands. Oof.

I tried to be methodical about stomping every berry that I could discern, but then researcher (and Team Chicken member) Elizabeth Jardina prodded, “You do realize that Margo’s lapping you, right?” and I got competitive, kicking my legs into overdrive and asking Elizabeth to dump more grapes on my feet. (I got in touch with my abs too: I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time, and I felt it the next morning.)

It was quite the workout, and I resembled a giant bouffant of cotton candy afterward, but that fuzzy stickiness came out of my fleece jacket, and the splashes of purple juice washed off my legs, leaving me with what looked like bruised soles—the trademark tattoo of pressed grape skins, coloring me like they would our wine in the weeks to come.

They got me again when we pressed our wine, taking it off its cap of skins. After many round-trips on the bucket brigade (not as messy as it sounds—we were careful not to slosh our precious Syrah), I paused for a few sips from the press’s spigot. I wanted to compare the gravity-fed “free run” wine to the “press run” that Dan had coaxed the cap into releasing; he accomplished this by using a garden hose to inflate his basket press’s hot-water-bottle-like bladder to a fairly gentle 15 psi. (Verdict: The free run was jammy boysenberry, but the press run's more vegetal quality made me pucker—we may want to add oak to that batch.)

Then photo style coordinator (and Team Wine sanitation guru) Sara Jamison and I dug into the cap, now packed tightly against the walls of the press, plopping huge handfuls into still more of Dan’s buckets so he could use our “pumice” (the pressed-dry skins and seeds and, admittedly, a few stems) to press off the red he has going in his garage.

Sara J. was smart enough to slip on gloves, but I hadn’t learned my lesson. When my bare hands emerged from scraping the last bits off the press, they were royal purple. And again remained lavender-tinged for weeks, despite quite a few scrubbings.

Ah well, que Syrah Syrah.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The back parking lot at Sunset has gone from crush pad to pressing station.

Once the sugar levels in our wine got down pretty close to zero (okay, the hydrometer still read 1 degree Brix, but with Syrah, fermentation can finish up after pressing), we called our thoroughly equipped friend Dan to pack up his old Italian bladder press and come on over.

He appeared with a dizzying array of glass containers—besides two 12-gallon carboys, many smaller versions and even a collection of empty magnums. As I found out later from Laurie Hook, winemaker at Beringer in St. Helena, in winemaking, “You can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too many small containers.”

It turns out that even when the pros press, they don’t end up with an amount of wine that conveniently fits into their available barrels. They need to keep smaller amounts to top off the barrels as the wine levels drop, from evaporation and sampling. And we needed the right combination of containers to be able to fill everything to the top. We knew that, because Dan kept chanting, “Once you press, oxygen is your enemy.”

We rinsed everything with a metabisulfate solution, organized a bucket brigade from the spout of the press to our carboys (taking care to have funnels in place), and started scooping the must into the basket of the press. Our Syrah flooded out the bottom—almost all of it before we even turned on the water to fill the bladder and do some actual pressing. Free-run, it’s called, and considered superior to later batches that have been firmly pressed off the skins and seeds.

Dan had warned us of how fast the process can deteriorate into a Keystone Cops routine if you don’t concentrate on smoothly switching out buckets under the spout—or drink too much too soon—so we staunchly resisted the urge to consume large quantities of the inky, yummy-looking stuff.

But only for so long. We happened to have plastic cups standing by, and they slipped under the spout of the press awfully easily. I tell you, this wine might be a work in progress, but it has the potential to be very good! It’s dense and full of dark fruit—a Syrah Michael Martella up at Thomas Fogarty (source of our grapes) just might be proud of.

That’s counting our chickens, though, which is outside Team Wine’s union contract (this one-block feast has another team for that). So we reined in our enthusiasm and got busy cleaning up the parking lot, which we’d once more turned into a red zone. With carboys topped up and fermentation locks in place, we can only wait now until the malolactic fermentation is completely done before sterilizing the wine again and letting it settle down.

Postscript: A few days after we pressed, Jon Priest, winemaker at Etude in Carneros, asked me how our wine was coming along. I didn’t quite want to make a judgment call about it in front of so talented a pro, so I said, “Well, it’s dry anyway …”

He surprised me with, “Congratulations! That’s the whole battle right there.” And he added a tip that might get our wine through the winter: If you sample out of a carboy, lower the surface level, and don’t have any extra to top it off, just sink some marbles in the wine to fill up the space. Those real winemakers—they have a few tricks up their sleeves!

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

I don’t know how winemakers get any sleep in the fall, what with worrying about birthing their wine—because it’s alive. I’ve never realized before what a seething mass of molecular interaction and chemical processes a vat of juice turning to wine is.

Things happen, whether you act or not: Color and flavor compounds start leaching out of the skins and seeds, and you have to decide whether you want to maximize or minimize that. Bacteria can start growing; how do you control something you can’t see?

I woke up in a panic at 3:00 in the morning three days into cold-soaking our Syrah (holding off fermentation to extract color and flavor before there’s alcohol in the formula), sure that we’d gone too far—that the breezeway where our drums of wine were are just too warm, and we were either going to end up with an over-the-top fruit bomb, or a stinky mess from bacteria that took it south. And then there was that e-mail I got from a friend, forwarding a winemaker’s opinion that cold-soaking in general destroys any chance of capturing terroir in a wine. Too late!

So we inoculated it the next day with yeast to get our fermentation off the ground. Simpler than making bread! You just sprinkle the granules into warm water to wake them up, then drizzle the slurry over your must. Our mentor Dan Brenzel’s advice was to not stir it in immediately, considering that we had doused the vats earlier with sulfur dioxide. What was meant to discourage bacteria could also kill yeast; we needed to let it acclimate. But as soon as the yeast began eating the sugars in the top layer of must (fermenting, in other words), we mixed it in.

Then, as the carbon dioxide created by the process began pushing the skins and seeds to the top, we started a regimen of punch downs to keep that cap from drying out (which can launch a whole new ecosystem of unwanted microbes) and to extract more color and flavor.

Nothing’s simple, though. Punching down the cap is straightforward enough, but how many times a day do you do it? Is your fermentation generating enough heat to extract a healthy amount of whatever it is you want from those skins and seeds, but not too much? More lost sleep.

And as it turned out, our fermentation was agonizingly slow. We measured the sugars daily, looking for them to drop from a starting point of 27 degrees Brix to zero, but they just inched down—24, 21, 19 … And we were a week into this. Convinced that the breezeway was just too cool (even though it had seemed too warm while we were trying to cold-soak), we moved our vats into the building and turned up the heat in that corner. Better—our fermentation temperature hit almost 80 degrees.

And in the middle of this primary fermentation, we had to think of another—the malolactic fermentation that red wine (and some white) needs to go through to change its harsh malic acid into softer lactic acid.

To start that, we made another run to the winemaking shop for some ML “bugs,” or bacteria. Strange, adding bacteria to our wine when we’d gone to great lengths to keep bacteria from growing in it until now. Some are good; some are bad …

In the end, it was a good two weeks before our sugars were down to 1 degree Brix. The malolactic fermentation was still raging, but that could finish in the carboys. Time to press.

By Sara Schneider Sunset wine editor

When you pick grapes, it turns out, your day has just begun. You have to do something with them. When Team Wine came down off Fat Buck Ridge with our Syrah (and 20 gallons of Chardonnay juice we snagged from Michael Martella at Fogarty), we met our now-indispensable advisor, Dan Brenzel, and his old Italian, hand-crank crusher-destemmer, back at Sunset. Lug by lug we dumped our Syrah into the hopper, cranked the handle, worried stuck clusters through with a pole, caught the grapes dropping out the bottom in plastic bins, tried to keep the stems spraying out the end under control, and generally turned the back parking lot into a riotous, sticky mess. In the end—okay, after opening a few bottles of wine from my office (for inspiration)—we took off our shoes and stomped on the last couple of lots that we’d brought down from the vineyard in trash cans, because we didn’t have quite enough lugs. What all the stomping legends don’t tell you is that you have to somehow pull out all those stems after romping in the grapes. (We just ran the juicy mass through the crusher-destemmer—defeating the purpose of the stomping, of course, but it was worth it for entertainment value alone.)

The must (crushed grapes—skins, seeds, pulp, juice, and all) went into a 55-gallon food-grade plastic drum, plus a clean trash can for the overflow. We added some sulfur dioxide, to keep any lurking bacteria from growing, covered the drums with cheesecloth to keep the fruit flies at bay, and left our Syrah to cold soak to extract as much color and flavor from the skins as possible before getting our fermentation going. Michael soaks his a whopping five days, but he has controlled conditions … Decisions, decisions.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

We had way too much fun picking our Syrah grapes up on Fat Buck Ridge on Thursday, the 4th! There’s a managing editor, a food editor, a garden editor, a copy editor, a style coordinator, a recipe retester—and a wine editor—around here who are ready to quit our day jobs to tend vines and vats.

We loaded up the old Sunset van with lugs, small pruning shears, and a cooler full of cheese and bread, and wound up to Thomas Fogarty Winery. But that wasn’t the end-run. Winemaker Michael Martella led our caravan way into the Santa Cruz Mountains, where we came out onto the aforementioned ridge—a sweet, sweet knoll with sweeping views to the west, planted with Syrah that Fogarty happens to get more than $50 a bottle for (no small challenge for the sister wine we intend to make).

Our first decision: to pick from the sunny, south-facing side of the slope or the shadier, cooler section? I tried to get an opinion out of Michael about whether the warmer side produced fruitier Syrah, à la France’s southern Rhône Valley, and the cooler side leaner, more herbal qualities—maybe even blueberry flavors—as in northern Rhône Syrahs. He just laughed at my wine-writerly stab at analysis. (I have to say, though, that we walked the length of a row, eating berries all the way, and they changed noticeably with the amount of sun they’d gotten.) We chose the shady side, and took two hours to pick our 500 pounds—not a pace to earn a place on the real picking crew, but hugely satisfying.

Then, because the sun was behaving in that slanting, golden way that it does in all great fall-vineyard stories—and because Fogarty team member Anne Krolczyk had very generously laid a table and left a cooler of wine for us—we pulled out our bread and cheese and had a picnic. One of the bottles, it turned out, was the Fogarty Syrah from that very same Fat Buck Ridge—the prototype, the goal … the competition.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

We just got the call—our grapes are ripe! They hit 25 degrees Brix yesterday, so we’re picking on Thursday.

Turns out the decision about what kind of wine to make wasn’t so easy. Winemaker Michael Martella offered us a laundry list of grapes from Thomas Fogarty’s sources, but everything had pros and cons. Pinot Noir would probably be the best red for our veggie-heavy one-block menu, but it’s notoriously hard to make … Sauvignon Blanc would be a great white match, but the Santa Cruz Mountains region—our local source—doesn’t grow it so well.

We went with Syrah for red, partly because it’s not a bad red choice for our earthy, herby menu and partly because I’m getting really interested in Syrahs from cool regions (which these mountains are), but truth be told, mainly because we might have half a chance of making a decent wine out of it. We decided to make some Chardonnay too, because we really want a white wine with our feast. But we may make it completely without oak (chips, in home winemaking terms, unless you want to spring for an $800 or $900 French barrel).

In the meantime, I descended on Dan Brenzel, husband of Sunset's legendary garden editor, Kathy Brenzel. He’s been making wine for years, and what a resource! Dan had pulled out all of his equipment—hand-cranked crusher/destemmer, press, food-grade plastic fermentors (i.e., garbage cans), glass carboys, thermometers, hydrometers … He’s getting ready to make wine too this year, but he’s working with different varietals, so we can probably juggle equipment. We thought we’d have to buy, beg, and steal, but he’s generously letting us borrow. Serious dollars saved there.

Here’s the plan: On Thursday morning, we take the old Sunset van up to Fogarty. With only two front seats and zero padding, it has plenty of cargo room and wouldn’t be bothered by a hosing down after the job. Michael will lead us to the vineyard, where we’ll pick 500 pounds of Syrah. (Note to self: Get some of those plastic binlike things that restaurant-supply stores sell, to pick into, and remind Team Wine to bring their garden clippers from home, because Mike’s staff will be using all of his official hooked grape-picking knives—must find out what they’re called.)

Then we’ll have a picnic. Team Wine is all about enjoying every part of this project—just not too much, because the real work will be looming: an afternoon of crushing at Sunset. Stay tuned to see if we go the mechanical route or foot it!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

It might be dinner, but it’s no feast without wine. And food editor Margo True and Team Kitchen are planning a feast.

Our test garden grapevines are leafy and lovely (see below), but their fruit won’t be wine-worthy for at least three years. Where to turn for local grapes? Practically our own backyard: The nearby Santa Cruz Mountains, an appellation known for its Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

We narrow our focus to this local AVA, and we feel the end-of-summer heat to put dibs on grapes soon because the fall harvest is approaching. But who would sell to us, first-time winemakers still debating red vs. white? (I Love Lucy–style grape-stomping appeals to all of us on Team Wine, and we’d love to get our hands—and feet—in on the action with some red grapes, but Margo’s menu is leaning toward a white, which would mean buying white grape juice—instead of whole fruit—that’s already been pressed to get the color-giving grape skins away from the juice as soon as possible.)

Thankfully, I knew someone. Or rather, my dad did: Way back in the early ’80s, my dad worked with Dr. Thomas Fogarty, the renowned cardiologist. Dr. Fogarty was interested in wine’s positive effects on the heart, so he bought some land in the Santa Cruz Mountains and founded Thomas Fogarty Winery. One of my earliest road-trip memories is of driving up from Southern California so my parents could attend Dr. Fogarty’s 50th birthday party. Such a gorgeous piece of property—tendrils of fog sneaking through ridgetop woods. I doubted Dr. Fogarty would remember that gangly freckled kid, but since my dad still sees him at conferences, I thought he’d at least recognize my last name.

So I emailed winemaker Michael Martella (who’s been producing award-winning varietals for Fogarty Winery for more than 25 years), told him what an impact Fogarty Winery made on my young self, and asked him if he ever sells excess grapes to local winemakers. (Or wannabe winemakers—it’s hard to believe that, if we’re successful, we’ll be able to call ourselves winemakers!)

A couple of days later, my phone rings—Michael is interested in our experiment. He asks me a few questions, likes what he hears, and starts firing off possible grapes: “You’re interested in reds? I’ve got Pinot, Cab, Syrah, Malbec, Cab Franc, and Merlot. How much do you want to buy?” And if we go the white route, our options expand to Chardonnay and Gewürztraminer (a floral Fogarty Gewürz was one of the first wines I ever bought).

Hmm, decisions, decisions. Time to get together with Team Wine to discuss our path—over a glass of wine, of course.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

Sure, I’ll make some wine … Yikes! Words are easy; crushing and fermenting and racking are … somebody else’s job—but a pretty darn-near irresistible challenge. What does a wine editor do when she’s asked to put her money where her mouth is, so to speak? Find a book on home winemaking (words again, but they are the stock in trade around here).

The first one I hit on I highly recommend already: The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home, by Sheridan Warrick (published by the UC Press just last year). Chapters 1 and 2 alone, full of specific detail on the equipment and kind of space you need, have practically launched this project. And as luck would have it, Dan Warrick used to be the executive editor of one of our sister magazines, Health (he’s a senior editor at VIA now), and—unbelievable coincidence here—he’s a great friend of my neighbors! A Saturday night dinner around their kitchen table, over a couple of bottles of his wine (good stuff, especially the dry Riesling), clinched his support. We’re going to have Dan on speed dial come late September.

And maybe a few other pros. I haven’t been able to stop myself, telling every winemaker I’ve crossed paths with in the last few weeks that I’m going to try my hand at it this year (calculated humble swagger there, just begging to be crushed). When I described the project to Tony Soter, who founded Etude winery in Carneros (very yummy Pinot Noirs) and has consulted on many, many top Napa Valley wines, the first thing he said was, “I’ll be your consulting winemaker!” Now that would be a coup. Unfortunately for us (fortunately for the wine-drinking world), Tony has moved to Oregon to start another winery, Soter Vineyards. Still, there’s speed dial …

And lots of concrete details to take care of—find some grapes (before they’re ripe!), figure out where to make this stuff (where there’s lots of water available to keep everything clean, says Dan), and beg, borrow, and steal equipment. This isn’t a one-person job—the best Sunset talent has joined Team Wine (Team Chicken, what do you really need to do besides keep the little critters alive?): Erika Ehmsen, copy chief (with impressive winemaking connections; more later); Lauren Swezey, special projects editor in the garden department; Irene Edwards, executive editor; and Sara Jamison, style coordinator (this, above all, is going to be stylish wine).