Home by sunset

Racking our Syrah means sipping (and dripping) too, and it’s better than ‘not bad’!

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.

From Team Vinegar: Mother, where art thou?

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).

High tech, low tech

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.

Sunset Syrah for all

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.

What's that smell? Our red wine's a stinker (but apparently that's a good thing)

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.

Hurry up and wait for the wine

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?!

When stomping and pressing grapes, purple reigns

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.

Pressing engagement

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!

Fermentation frenzy

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.

Crushing afternoon

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.

Harvest on Fat Buck Ridge

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.

We're ready to pick!

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!

Grape expectations

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.

Crush time

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).