2020: A Pictorial Year in Review

Vintage 2020: December Weather Highs and Lows

When is a single dandelion worth taking a picture of? When it blooms on December 3rd.

We have been working in the vineyard during the month of December. On December 3, we were still rolling and tying up the netting in preparation for winter. The weather was a balmy 48 degrees and it was good to be outdoors and working.
We finished rolling and tying up the netting on December 11 and took in the clothespins and secured the ends of the netting.

This is probably the earliest that we have managed to roll up the netting in the entire vineyard. Truth be told, there are still a few clothespins out there that need to come in.
In between working in the vineyard, when inclement weather was on the radar, we were in our basement preparing to bottle our Chardonnay, which we did on December 12.
On December 17, we had our first major snowstorm of this winter, although we did have a snowfall on October 30, which didn't really stick on the ground. This time we had a decent amount of snow, perhaps 6 inches, which was on the low side of what the forecast was calling for (6-12 inches).
We weren't able to go to the vineyard, but our hunter sent us these photos:

Looking at these photos from our hunter brought to my mind the Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
          Whose woods these are I think I know.
          His house is in the village though;
          He will not see me stopping here
          To watch his woods fill up with snow.
The snow on December 17 was washed away by the rains and winds that came on Christmas day. Only three more days left in December, 2020. The forecast looks uneventful.

The Most Expensive Wine

Recently, I felt the need to search the Internet for what the most expensive wine in the world might be. I was not disappointed. The 2008 Aszú grape, sells for $40,000 a bottle. This article in Fortune details why the wine is so expensive. The Tokaji Essencia is made from grapes grown in the Carpathian foothills of northeastern Hungary. The wine is made entirely from the Aszú grape, each grape must be harvested by hand, it can take more than 400 pounds of grapes and 8 years for the fermentation to produce one bottle of this precious liquor. In addition, it's not just any Aszú grape, but grapes that have attained their high concentration of sugar due to the attack by the botrytis cinerea mold leading to "noble rot" that goes into the Essencia.

(Aside: In 2018 we let our grapes hang too long hoping for an increase in Brix and then the rains came. When harvest time arrived, we lost 2/3rds of our crop and the bunches that were left had a serious amount of rot which lead our friend to call this "ignoble rot". Funny guy!)
Given all the conditions necessary, in addition to cooperation from Mother Nature, the 2008 vintage yielded only 18 bottles of Tokaji Essencia. If you are ever served a 2008 Tokaji Essencia, don't expect to drink it from a glass, it will be served to you in a crystal spoon!
Why was I so interested in the most expensive wine in the world? Well, recently, we harvested our wedding bags that we put around part of our Chardonnay which we couldn't harvest. Our intention was to harvest these wedding bags so that we could make a late harvest wine like we did in 2019 Last Harvest of the Year, which took place on November 19, 2019.
Well, one thing lead to another and we weren't able to get out to the vineyard until December 11, 2020 and we lamented that we were probably one month too late to harvest these wedding bags. In October, the grapes looked beautiful in the wedding bags, but what we harvested was anything but. They were shrivelled, some were totally raisined, not at all promising.

But, waste not, want not, so we put all of the grapes from the wedding bags into a mash bag. We might have had about 5 pounds of grapes from 6 lugs of wedding bags, or approximately 300 bags of shrivelled grapes.

I was in charge of squeezing the mash bag. It was like getting liquid out of rocks, but in the end there was some juice that I could recover. What juice that was squeezed was put into a dessert bottle which we had nearby since we had been bottling.
The juice was almost black in color. I apologize since I didn't take a photo---what was I thinking? I put the juice in the refrigerator and when I looked at it the next day the larger particles had settled and the juice had clarified. That's when I took the Brix reading of the juice and it was off the scale of the refractometer. What I did was to carefully dilute a drop of juice with a drop of water and now, I had a reading of 19 ^oBrix. Since the dilution was one-to-one (this is by no means scientific!) I doubled the Brix to get a reading of 38 ^oBrix for the juice.
Next, I "racked" the juice from the dessert bottle leaving behind the heavy lees and put the clarified juice into a sparkling style bottle. Before putting the juice into the bottle, I sprinkled in a bit of QA23 yeast that we had lying around. Here is what I am now seeing:

The juice is definitely being fermented and the aroma from the "fermentation lock" is definitely honey sweet. It's an interesting experiment. If this isn't quite Tokaji Essencia, it's at least got to be Felix Felicis.
References;
1.Clay Dillow, Fortune, 2008 Tokaji Essencia, March 9, 2019.

Update on the Fate of Our Chardonnay Experiment

On September 28, 2019, with the help of our friends, we harvested a small amount of Chardonnay. We thought we had about 290 pounds of grapes. Our friends helped us to stomp on the grapes which we put into mash bags as whole clusters and collected the juice as gravity flow into the kegs waiting in our basement. When this process was done, we had juice in three kegs. The largest amount went into a 15 gallon keg and we thought we had around 12 gallons of juice. The remaining juice went into two smaller kegs each containing around 6 gallons of juice.
The experiment we conducted with this small amount of juice was to see how three yeasts, X16, D47 and CH9 affected the aroma and flavor profiles of the resultant wine. We inoculated the kegs on October 3, 2019 and the fermentation took over three weeks to come to completion. While the X16 and D47 inoculated wines were in a temperature controlled fermentation chamber, the CH9 was fermented outside of the chamber since we didn't have enough space for it.
I blogged about the properties of these three yeasts on January 11, 2020 in a blogpost called Chardonnay Fermentation Experiments. In May, we checked the sulfur dioxide levels of the three kegs and added some potassium metabisulfite where necessary. The wines sat on the lees until November 18, when we took the numbers for the finished wine:

Chardonnay/Yeast	pH	TA	SO2
Chardonnay/CH9	3.11	6.0 g/L	27 ppm
Chardonnay/D47	3.00	7.9 g/L	11 ppm
Chardonnay/X16	3.07	7.3 g/L	41 ppm

On December 8, 2020, we racked the wines off the lees into clean kegs and let it warm to "room temperature" in preparation for bottling. My husband then cleaned all of the components of the bottling line. Sanitation is key to good bottling! My husband also calibrated the filler to accommodate the different bottle types that we were using.
We bottled our Chardonnay on December 12, 2020. Here is the setup of our bottling line.

In the above photo, we used argon gas to push the wine that was in the keg. The keg coupler when open allowed the argon into the keg to push the wine into the tubing which went to the 1 micron filter. The pressure gauge was there to ensure that the appropriate amount of pressure was going to the filter. If the filter got clogged, the rising pressure on the gauge will indicate that problem. Next, my husband opened up the top of the filter to allow the first of the wine to flow out and ensured that there were no bubbles trapped in the filter. Prior to bottling, we blew compressed air into the bottles to get rid of any particles if they were there. Once everything checked out we were ready to bottle.

We could fill 6 bottles at a time. I filled the bottles and my husband corked the bottles. It was a smooth 2 person operation. When all the Chardonnay was bottled, we had the following:

Chardonnay/Yeast	Number of 750 mL bottles	Number of 375 ml bottles
Chardonnay/CH9	21 bottles	0
Chardonnay/D47	20 bottles	0
Chardonnay/X16	3 cases	2 cases

So, what did our experiment show? The Chardonnay fermented with X16 and D47 had great aromatics. The X16 smelled like apricots and orange blossoms while the D47 had an aroma like pineapple. My husband and I both didn't detect any aroma from the CH9 and we think it may be related to the fact that the fermentation occurred outside of the temperature controlled fermentation chamber. The next step is to see what bottle aging does to both the aroma and the flavors. Can't wait!

Our 2020 Harvest at a Glance

Last year, I wrote a blogpost called Our 2019 Harvest at a Glance, so I thought that this year I would continue the tradition.

Variety	Harvest Date	Weight - Pounds	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois*	9/17/2020	1670	120 gallons	19 19	3.06 3.07	7.01 g/L 8.01 g/L
Chardonnay	9/24/2020	1136	75 gallons	23.4	3.0	10 g/L
Chenin Blanc	10/11/2020	8201	655 gallons	23.3	3.09	12.1 g/L
Cabernet Franc	10/22/2020	872	70 gallons	23.5	3.05	10.2 g/L
Cabernet Sauvignon	10/22/2020	888	70 gallons	22.4	3.08	10.7 g/L
Barbera	10/28/2020	110	9 gallons	23.4	3.05	12.0 g/L

The table shows that the Brix for all of the varieties, with the exception of the Auxerrois was very respectable. Our experience with Auxerrois is that if we want to harvest a grape that is in balance with respect to Brix and acidity, we need to harvest the Auxerrois when it is around 19 ^oBrix. This variety is always the first that we harvest. ^*The Auxerrois went into two stainless steel barrels and a sample from each barrel was taken so the numbers differ slightly.
When the grapes were brought into Jonathan Edwards Winery, both the Auxerrois and the Chardonnay were pressed as whole clusters. Since there was a bit more Chenin Blanc, that variety was destemmed and pressed. Our preference as we begin to think about configuring our winery is to do whole cluster pressing for all of our white varieties.
The rest of the varieties have Brix and acid levels that are unusual for our area, reflecting the exceedingly hot summer that we had along with a drought. The titratable acids for the red varieties are also very acceptable and may reflect the use of malic acid as an energy source (respiration) during the hot summer.
We were thrilled this year to have at least one barrel's worth of both the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Cabernet Franc. Currently, it both are undergoing malolactic fermentation.
Our Barbera came online this year with a very small harvest of fruit that we turned into wine. It too is currently undergoing malolactic fermentation.

Vintage 2020: Barbera Racking

On November 21, 2020, I blogged about Vintage 2020: Our Barbera is Wine. The last line of that blog was: Our next step is to rack the Barbera and squeeze the wine from the grapes and put it into a stainless steel keg for a bit of aging.
The problem we had was one of logistics. How do we get our Barbera which we fermented in a food grade Rubbermaid trash container into a stainless steel keg.
On December 1, 2020 with the logistical challenge partially worked out we decided that it was time to rack the Barbera into a stainless steel keg. The impetus that shifted our inertia was when we discovered that the mash bags that we purchased to separate the wine from the grapes fit perfectly onto the stainless steel transfer tank. (A little side note about mash bags: We have used mash bags as a substitute for a press. Our first time we used it was in 2015 when we pressed our first harvest of Chenin Blanc.)

We envisioned that once the grapes were put into the mash bags, the wine would flow effortlessly into the stainless steel transfer tank. Not so. Some of the wine did accommodate us and flowed into the tank but the mash bag full of grapes had to be shifted to allow the juice to flow into the 15-gallon keg. Fortunately, we had food grade plastic bins nearby so that we could take the grape filled mash bags out of the stainless steel tank so that the wine could flow into the keg.

This process took approximately 90 minutes. Part of the time was dedicated to squeezing the mash bags to get all of the juice out of the Barbera. Fortunately, I had gloves on but my husband used his bare hands which resulted in him having purple hands for at least 2 days. After 90 minutes we were done! We did manage to glean all of the wine that were in the bottoms of the various bins that we used and it filled a 300 mL dessert bottle that we had nearby. My husband will dispute this but I think that we left at least one gallon of juice in the Barbera grapes. On December 4, we inoculated the Barbera with VP41 to begin the malolactic fermentation.
On December 6, it rained all day so my husband spent the better part of the day making a lamb ragu. He also made the pasta for the ragu as well. (I know, I am a lucky girl!)

To pair with the lamb ragu, my husband brought out a 2018 Mati Barbera d'Asti and our Barbera that we had put into the dessert bottle. A side-by-side comparison of the wines in glass showed that we had good color on our wine (our Barbera is in the glass to your right.) Our wine had some nice blackberry flavors but also packed an acidic punch at the end. We hope that some of the acidity will mellow out with the malolactic fermentation.

Biochemistry Glossary by Dr. Linda Bisson

Quick Blogpost: I recently came across a link to an online biochemistry glossary released by Dr. Linda Bisson, from the University of California at Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology.
Here is the link: Biochemistry Glossary.
It's a handy document to have and once you download it, it is searchable.