From Vine to Wine
Part 3: To the Vineyard and Beyond
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 3
To the Vineyard and Beyond
The Trip to Prosser
As harvest time quickly approached, I called vineyard owners Harold
and Janet Pleasant every week to establish the perfect time to pick
up our grapes. Truth be known, although the grapes needed to contain
a certain sugar content to make the best wine, it was hard to
wait-we were very eager to get our grapes. We established that
Saturday, October 19, 2002 would be the date, and Dana and I would
take our kids on a "road trip" to Prosser, Washington. We had
learned that the Pleasants had multiple stemmer-crushers available
for our use and we would only need to bring fermenting pails in
which to carry home our purplish-red ambrosia.
We arrived at the Pleasants at around 9:30 in the morning on
Saturday. (Amazing technological side note: Our Microsoft MapPoint
software directed us right to their home located on a dirt road in
the middle of a large vineyard. On my typical business trips to
Seattle and Portland, MapPoint fails me miserably, so the fact that
it actually directed us to a specific location in the middle of a
vineyard was an astonishing experience!) Much to our surprise, we
weren't even the first to arrive that day. In fact, small world that
it is, the first arrivals were a couple of guys from Spokane-and one
of them was James Dodds, an old work colleague of mine.
Greeted by Harold and Janet, we began receiving our grapes, then
used their electric stemmer-crushers to separate the stems and crush
the merlot and sangiovese grapes. We purchased one hundred pounds of
each variety, and within about fifteen minutes the stemming and
crushing process was complete. What was eye-opening for us was that
James and the other winemakers streaming
 in that
morning were purchasing 1,000-pound loads of grapes or more. While
we were filling 12-gallon containers, they were filling huge
industrial-strength containers the size of large garbage cans. Oh
well, maybe next year.
It was a beautiful morning in Prosser, and after we completed the
stemming and crushing of our grapes we enjoyed conversing with the
other winemakers who had been arriving at the vineyard. Harold and
Janet brought out crackers and several bottles of wine.
Additionally, with every arrival of another winemaker came bottles
of wine that they had produced from the grapes they purchased from
the Pleasants last year. Everyone began sharing their stories and
techniques, and the wine was actually very good. We could have
stayed there all day, but we needed to get home so that we could
begin focusing on turning our grape juice into wine.
Fermenting Our Wine
We actually ended up with more crushed grapes than would fit in our
twelve-gallon fermenting containers, so we combined the overage to
create what I'm sure will be a very unusual blend of merlot and
sangiovese that we named merlovese (mer-low-vay-see).
In addition to our two varietals and our batch of custom blend,
we became the lucky recipients of sixty pounds of chardonnay grapes,
hand-picked in Othello, Washington, that same weekend by Jed Morris,
a colleague of Dana's at Lukins and Annis. After the painless
process of stemming and crushing the red grapes in Prosser, we again
had to resort to the manual process (originally described in last
month's installment) to prepare the chardonnay grapes for
fermenting.
With white wine grapes, you actually press all the juice from the
grapes and discard the skins and seeds prior to fermenting. Using a
mesh cloth, we strained the white grapes and squeezed the remaining
juice from the skins by hand.
With four pails of grape juice ready to go, we moved them into
our laundry room for the primary fermentation process. (Since the
temperature needs to remain between 65 and 75 degrees for optimal
fermenting, we didn't have many options for our fermenting room.) We
placed each pail in a wooden box, and thankfully, we thought to line
the boxes with garbage bags. We "pitched the yeast" into all four of
our wines and the fun began. As the red grapes began to ferment, the
dark color of the skins turned the juice a deep beautiful red. The
grape skins also rise to the top of the container and form a "cap."
The winemaker's job during the primary fermentation phase is to
punch the cap down so that it stays mixed with the juice (an
impossible feat to keep up with). And did I mention that we had lids
on top of the fermenting containers? You see, air is not a good
thing when it comes to winemaking.
You can imagine what happened next-with lids on the fermenting
containers and yeast activity very high-the red grape skins began
swelling and expanding and only had one way to go. Upwards. The lids
were bowing up and the grapes began spurting their juice
horizontally out the sides of the container tops, resulting in a
very interesting and intense red spattering all over our walls. I
think we may have actually invented a new shade of paint. (Perhaps
Martha Stewart or our own Columbia Paint and Coatings could use a
new color?) All kidding aside, there was no use trying to clean it
up, since this yeasty eruption would continue on for the next five
days.
Then there was the on-going challenge of punching the cap. We
used something that resembled a very clean wooden baseball bat. Each
time one of us walked by the laundry room, we would take off the
lids and punch those red grape skins. In a way, we were punishing
them for the mess that they were making (at least it made me feel
better).
At the end of the process (about seven days that felt like an
eternity), the fermenting had slowed down and we began testing the
alcohol content. The sugar level in all four of our wines was
reduced to the optimum, and it was time to press the red wine
 and
transfer it into the glass carboys...
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.
|
