From Vine to Wine
Part 2: From Kits to Vineyards
By
Steve Trabun
By day, Steve Trabun is a Project Consultant
with Avista Corporation. In his off-time,
he and his wife Dana have been making a journey-to vineyards far and
wide, seeking fellow "wineaus" (others who appreciate fine wines),
and toward their own "perfect bottle." It's a hobby that is hard to
beat when it comes to sharing the fruits of your labor with friends
and family. We invite you to follow along on the trip as we present
the first installment of this ongoing series.
Part 2
From Kits to Vineyards
Dana and I visited Sonoma and Napa Valley during the autumn of
2001. During one of our many stops (we were definitely marathon wine
tasters), we found that Kendall Jackson Wine Estates provided the
opportunity to walk through their vineyards to learn more about the
many wine grape varietals. No longer did we have to put our rental
car into "stealth mode," pull off the road and secretly run into
some farmer's vineyard to pick a single bunch of wine grapes so that
we could taste them!
And so it began: the idea and the discussion to make our own
wine, not from kits, but from actual grapes. We had missed our
window of opportunity for the 2001 harvest, but we were determined
to line up grapes for the following year. So, late in the summer of
2002 we started our search for wine grapes.
There are actually many options for acquiring grapes. The
Internet, Home Winemaking magazine, and even our dentist (who was
growing concord grapes in his backyard) were all options for us.
Dana found a couple of colleagues at work that were home winemakers
who were also interested in making wine from grapes this year. As a
result, our network and search for grapes expanded even further.
As usual, we went back to Bob Ketcham at Jim's Home Brew, who
provided us with information on a grape grower in the Columbia
Valley. Without hesitation, I contacted Harold and Janet Pleasant in
Prosser, Washingon, and they were quick to let us know that in
addition to selling their grapes to a dozen or more wineries in
Washington and California, they were also happy to sell grapes to
the home winemaking community as well.
So we had found our primary source for grapes, and mid-October
would be the timeframe for our process to start.
But wait: in September, one of Dana's colleagues at Lukins and
Annis had orchestrated getting a pickup-truck load of grapes from
the Lodi region of California. Although we had lined up grapes for
our merlot and sangiovese (san-gee-oh-vay-see) from the Pleasants,
we thought that this new opportunity could be a great way to
practice our new process ahead of going to Prosser.
It's worth noting that we don't have any of the fancy equipment
for wine making, such as a stemmer, crusher or grape press. For
fermenting, we have the usual plastic containers. (Note:
Snyder's Bakery is a great source for inexpensive food-grade
plastic barrels-they sell empty 50-gallon raisin juice barrels for a
very reasonable price.) For aging the wine, we have carboys (big
multi-gallon glass bottles, you know, like the water bottles the
Culligan man used to deliver). Oh, and did I mention that we
purchased Jon Iverson's book,
Home Winemaking Step by Step at Jim's? Since "follow the
instructions" was so deeply ingrained in our brains after making
wine from kits, we definitely needed some instructions to follow for
making wine from grapes. It proved to be an invaluable investment
and one of our best sources of advice.
When the Lodi grapes arrived in September from California, our
challenge was to do a little research to find out more about the
variety, unfamiliar to us, called "carignane." We found that this
red grape was originally grown in Spain, but was planted in Italy,
France and eventually California. Today this variety is generally
blended with other varietals like Syrah and most of these vines are
being replaced. So, without any grape expectations, we began.
One hundred pounds of grapes yields about six gallons of finished
wine, resulting in about thirty bottles. So, with one hundred pounds
of carignane, we started the manual (and slightly laborious) task of
crushing them by hand. And being complete novices, not to mention
meticulous, we washed the grapes and plucked every grape from every
stem and crushed them with a potato masher in a small white bucket.
Although we had talked of stomping the grapes with our son's bare
feet, we couldn't actually convince ourselves to crush them like the
grape growers in southern Italy that I grew up around. (I always
attributed their cloudy wine to their grape stomping method.) After
crushing about a gallon of grapes at a time, we transferred the
contents to the larger fermenting container. The entire process of
stemming and crushing took us about two hours, and in the end, we
had filled a twelve-gallon plastic container with about eleven
gallons of crushed red carignane grapes.
Our laundry room would be our makeshift winery for the
fermentation process, and we would learn a very valuable lesson
about the effects of fermenting grapes in the coming weeks (more on
that in Part 3). We "pitched the yeast" the next day. This is the
process of adding yeast, which converts the sugar in the wine
grapes into alcohol. Within a couple of days, the fermenting had
kicked into high gear...
Part 1
| Part 2 | Part 3 |
Part 4
The Trabun's journey "From Vine to Wine" will continue next
month!
Click here to send any comments or questions to Steve.
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