Keeping it Clean--Part One

As mentioned in a recent post (Topping Up), grapes want nothing more than to be vinegar, and our job is to stop that process, midpoint, at the wine stage, and keep it there. Keeping all of our vessels completely topped up to the brim is one way to ensure this. Impeccable hygiene is another. It’s a big deal, and a big topic, so I’m dividing it up into two posts. Here is part 1.

It’s no exaggeration to say that 90% of winemaking is cleaning. At least, that’s the story at Babcock. Our former Associate Winemaker, Ron Hill, came from a medical background, and introduced some new protocols when he took over. “Hospital clean” is what we aim for, and while we might not be ready to perform surgery in the barrel room, we have a sound cleaning regimen in place. Yes, we use chemicals to clean everything that touches the wine, but we rinse well with clean water, and no residue gets into the wine.

To clean parts and vessels that have had wine in/on them, we use a product called Proxycarb (basically, that Oxyclean stuff you see on TV informercials). It takes the colour out lickety-split (and we take some home to use on our wine-stained workclothes). Then we rinse with water, and then use a sanitizer. For us, PAA (peroxyacetic acid and hydrogen peroxide) is the drug of choice. It sanitizes on contact—we just dip the part/vessel in, maybe give it a quick scrub if there are crevices involved, and we’re good to go. If we’re not using the part/vessel immediately, we put it away with the PAA unrinsed. If we are going to use it right away, we rinse it off with water. This PAA is a brilliant thing. A few weeks ago, we ran out of it, and had to make do with the old way of sanitizing, using Iodaphor, an iodine-based cleaner. For this one to work, you have to have 2 minutes of contact. What a difference! It seemed like our workday slowed to a crawl while we waited for everything to be sanitized, and it leaves a yellowy film on everything. Made me think about the scientific strides made in hygiene in winemaking over the years, and how most wine probably didn’t taste that great a hundred years ago.

A big part of our daily activities is to monitor and maintain the hygiene on all of our barrels and tanks that are holding wine. Every day, we check the barrels by making sure the bungs are in good and tight, and by looking for leaks. There is a wicking action that happens at the bunghole, occasionally, leaving a wet stain of wine on the outer surface of the barrel. Strangely, this can happen elsewhere on the barrel too. The barrel could be completely sound one week, and then leaking (not onto the floor, but enough to make the outer surface wet) the next. These wet spots are a great place for bacteria/fruitflies/mould to thrive, so we spray wet areas down daily with a sulphur/citric solution that will kill all the bad stuff.

When we empty a barrel, as you can imagine, it’s difficult to clean. Just one small hole in the top, and hard to see inside. Barrels have been around for hundreds of years. Once again, I wonder how they ever got the things clean in the old days. I suspect they didn't. These days, we have a barrel washer that helps us out. There are more high-tech ones out there, to be sure, but below is a pic of what we use. We position the barrels' bungholes facing down and the prongs lift to go inside.

We use a forklift to load the barrels onto the white rollers on the washer. Then we can easily spin the barrels to give them a good scrubbing with the proxy carb, before we clean the inside.

Once we’ve scrubbed the outside, we turn the barrel so the bungholes are down and insert the prongs:

The washer spins like a dishwasher. Here it is without the barrel on top:

Then we clean it, and how we do it varies according to the barrel. If it’s an old barrel, we may hit it with 10 minutes of 180-degrees-F water. If it’s a newer barrel, we don’t want to be so harsh, and will just wash it until the water coming out runs clear. Whichever we do, after that, we have a container of the PAA hooked up, and we put that through the washer for a minute or so. Once sanitized, if it's going to be used right away, we rinse with cold water. If not, we leave the PAA in it.

If we’re done with the barrel and are not going to use it, we put it away in the barrel room. The last thing we do is to give it a dose of S02 gas to finally kill anything that might be living inside. Then we pop a Dixie cup into the bunghole to keep out insects ( and any birds who might wander into the barrel room and see this as a $1000 birdhouse!).

More on sanitation next time!

California Wines available in Ontario, Aug 20

I’m digressing here, from my usual topics concerning winemaking, to write a special post for winelovers in Ontario. Tomorrow, Aug 20, Vintages is doing a special release of wines from “The Other California” (i.e. NOT Napa and Sonoma). 12 wines are being released, the majority of which are from my current home, the Central Coast (the remainder are from Mendocino, north of Sonoma). Thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about some of the featured wines and wineries I’ve become familiar with in the past year.

First off, I have to represent for my AVA, Santa Rita Hills (or "Sta. Rita Hills" as it's officially written to avoid hatemail from Santa Rita Winery in Chile) established in 2001. The AVA is situated between Lompoc and Buellton in Santa Barbara County, and is a cool climate region. The reason it's so cool is the transverse valleys--running west-east from the coast, allowing cool breezes and fog to roll in, rather than the more usual north-south running valleys where the hills block the mists and breezes. 3 sets of hills are involved in the Santa Rita Hills AVA, all running east-west and more or less parallel to each other: the Purisima Hills to the north, the Santa Rosa Hills to the south and the Santa Rita Hills in between. Also running more or less parallel to the hills is the Santa Ynez River, a big factor in the microclimate. The marine layer (“sea smoke”) that rolls in every day follows the river’s path from the coast.

As well as both the north- and south-facing slopes of the Santa Ritas, the south-face of the Purisima Hills and the north face of the Santa Rosas are included in the AVA. There are only a  few wineries in the area, but lots of vineyards, with the grapes (specialties are Pinot and Chardonnay) being sold to wineries elsewhere in Santa Barbara and California. The wineries/vineyards are situated along 2 roads running east west and more or less parallel to each other: highway 246 runs between The Purisimas and Santa Ritas in the north and Santa Rosa road runs between the Santa Ritas and the Santa Rosas in the south. Got it? Here are a couple of pics to look at while the info percolates:




Taken from north side of Purisima Hills, looking south across hwy 246 at the Santa Rita Hills

 

 



I haven't drawn these AVAs perfectly, but this is close. Vandenburg AFB occupies the whole of the coast where we are. The city of Santa Barbara is just under an hour away from where I am in the westernmost part of Santa Rita Hills. And LA is another 1 1/2 hours beyond that. It takes about an hour to drive from one end of the Santa Ynez V. AVA to the other (including SRH and Happy Canyon.)

 

Taken from Seasmoke vineyard on the south face of the Santa Rita Hills, looking across Santa Rosa Road to the Sanford vineyards on the north face of the Santa Rosa Hills


 

 

The Pinots from along hwy 246 (where I am, at Babcock Winery) are generally a little lighter in style, with more perfume and minerality, whereas Pinots from the Santa Rosa Road are bigger with more intense fruit but less perfumed and minerally.

Whether they’re from north or south, Santa Rita Hills Pinot, in particular, is highly sought-after, and priced accordingly. Lafond Winery, situated on Santa Rosa Road, has a SRH Pinot in tomorrow’s release at a wallet-pleasing $26.95. This is their entry-level Pinot, from the estate. They also make several wonderful single vineyard wines that are, unfortunately, made in too small a quantity to ever be seen at the LCBO. The one on offer, though, the 2009 Estate Pinot Noir, is a good, solid wine and will give you an idea of what SRH Pinots are all about. It has a medium intensity with lots of upfront, ripe red fruit, and a slight spicy, floral hint. With medium minus tannin, medium body and medium plus alcohol, it’s a nice glass of wine.

Lafond also has their corresponding entry-level Chardonnay on the release. Also a deal, at $19.95, it has everything you expect from California Chard—oak, tropical fruit, rich gold colour—plus some nice minerality and welcome acid, due to the cooler climate. Both very good wines for the price, it seems Lafond knows what they’re doing. No surprise, since Pierre Lafond was the first to open a winery (Santa Barbara Winery) in Santa Barbara County back in 1962. Lafond’s vineyards on Santa Rosa Road were planted in 1971, and the winery opened in 2000.



Lafond's Pinot vineyard



Lafond Pinot clusters, Aug 12 '11, almost there!

The Santa Rita Hills AVA occupies the westernmost part of the much larger Santa Ynez Valley AVA. Being closest to the ocean, SRH is much cooler than points further east, and in fact, they say the temp goes up 1 degree (farenheit) for every mile you travel inland. I believe it. I’ve often gotten into my car in SRH, driven for 20 minutes, and gotten out in a different season—crazy! Within the easternmost part of the Santa Ynez Valley AVA is the brand new Happy Canyon AVA, less than one year old. Just as SRH is the coolest part of SYV, Happy Canyon is the hottest. Whereas it’s all Pinot and Chard at my end, over there, they specialize in Bordeaux varieties. A couple from Star Lane are on the release: the 06 Cabernet and the 05 Astral, the winery’s flagship Bordeaux blend. Since the 2 wines pre-date the new Happy Canyon AVA, they are labelled as Santa Ynez Valley. The 06 Cabernet Sauvignon is a deep ruby and is showing very little age on the nose and palate. Blackcurrant in spades, along with a welcome hint of green, some coffee, licorice and dried herbs. Medium plus body, medium plus alcohol and medium or better intensity on the palate. I think this will age quite nicely for another couple of years. $37.95 is a lot to ask for a California Cab without “Napa” on the label, but I think these Happy Canyon people may be on to something.

The 05 Astral is the first vintage for this wine made from vines planted in 1997. 99% Cab and 1%Petite Verdot, it was aged in 100% new oak for 2 years. Not surprisingly, it’s a monster. The aged bouquet is gorgeous: licorice, mint, surbois, dried fruit, coconut and marzipan. It’s very soft on the palate with only medium tannins but with a pronounced intensity of flavour, and long finish. Should continue to evolve for a few more years.

Star Lane's tasting room on Drum Canyon Rd off Hwy 246





Wes Hagen, winemaker at Clos Pepe in the Santa Rita Hills, remarks that SRH is for the Burgundian grapes, Happy Canyon for Bordeaux, and Rhone Varieties in between. Rhone varieties are certainly in abundance in the central part of the Santa Ynez AVA, but occasionally they wander into the western and eastern extremes of the AVA as well. Santa Rita Hills Syrah has a distinctly cool climate character to it—more northern Rhone than Barossa Shiraz. You can taste an example of this in the upcoming release, in the Ampelos Gamma Syrah. Ampelos winery is a small, (3,500 case/year) enterprise headed up by Peter and Rebecca Work. They planted their SRH vineyard in 2001 and had their first harvest in 04. Ampelos is the first U.S. winery to be certified organic, biodynamic and sustainable. The name, “Ampelos” means “vine” in Greek. The Works got married on a Greek island and opened a B & B there of the same name. In keeping with the theme, their wines all bear the names of Greek letters—for the Syrah, it’s Gamma. 06 was the second year for this wine. It’s deep ruby with a medium plus intensity on the nose of lifted, black fruit, some mineral, and a hint of perfume. It has surprising acidity, medium plus body, and intensity with spice, and a little dustiness on the palate. The tannins are beginning to soften, but otherwise there’s not much sign of age. This might continue to evolve until 2015 or later. As the climate dictates, Northern Rhone is what one is reminded of. This is right in line with Peter’s European roots (he’s Danish). Other interesting Ampelos facts: Peter and Rebecca’s son, Don Schroeder, is winemaker at cult Pinot winery, Sea Smoke, just down the street; for a Hollywood connection: actor, Kurt Russell, makes his wine at Ampelos.

Other wines on the release hail from further north in Paso Robles. Of all Central Coast wine regions, Paso definitely has the best marketing. There are events and festivals there all the time, and it seems all the wineries are gung ho when it comes to getting the word out about themselves and their neighbours. For me, Peachy Canyon was the first Paso Robles winery that came up on my radar. They specialize in Zinfandel, but it’s the 07 Petite Sirah that Ontarians will be enjoying after tomorrow. With a deep, dark hue, nice lifted nose, some smoke, and lots of black fruit, $19.95 is a good price. I was there this past spring during the Zinfandel Festival. It was a lively day in the tasting room there, and I'd met winemaker, Josh, before. He and his brother Jake, make and market (respectively) the wines of Peachy Canyon, started by their Dad.

These days, the sons have their own venture, also in Paso Robles, where I first met them. Chronic Cellars is not your average winery. They cater to a specific demographic. The day I visited, back in February, the folks in the tasting room--both staff and patrons--were quite a bit more mohawked, tattooed and pierced than what one generally sees at a winery. The tasting room and labels are garishly coloured and adorned with skeletons. The wines have names like "Sofa King Suite". If that doesn't seem too "out there" as a wine name for you, try saying it out loud--to your Grandma.

Peachy Canyon tasting room

Vineyard along Peachy Canyon Rd in early spring

Also on the Zin weekend, I visited Eberle (EH-bur-lee). Gary Eberle has been around since the early 70s and planted the first Syrah in California way back when. His Chapoutier clone is widely used still. He's a lovely big bear of a guy, and so enthusiastic about his wines. He poure several at the California Wine Fair which made its way through Ontario this spring, but what’s on release tomorrow is the 09 Estate Chardonnay. I won’t lie to you about this wine. Paso is hot (no transverse valleys here), and the Chard is a buxom, oaky, mouthful, full of spice and vanilla.

  

patio and vineyard at Eberle



Sadly, no Babcock wines on the roster. In fact, they are few and far between anywhere in Ontario—though that may change soon, fingers crossed. In the meantime, here are a few places you can at least try our White Syrah (a rose), called Identity Crisis:

Ottawa: Brookstreet Hotel; Hy’s Steakhouse

Toronto: Cosmopolitan Hotel; Quinns Steakhouse

Lindsay: Pane Vino Wine Bar

Richmond Hill: Marlowe Wine Bar





Full of It: Topping Up

Grapes want nothing more in their life than to be vinegar. That is their final destination. The job of the winemaker is to halt the process midway and keep it at the wine stage. Sanitation is the key to this, and a big part of keeping out the nasty bugs that will make our wine vinegar (or spoil it in other ways) is to keep every container  absolutely full to the brim so there's no room for the nasties to move in and set up shop.  To do this you need a large selection of different sized containers. We're never sure exactly how much of a particular wine we're going to have. We may have a 1500 gallon tank we're planning to fill with this year's Merlot, but we may intially have 1623 and a half gallons. So we'll need our tank, plus 2 60-gallon barrels, plus a 3-gallon glass carboy and a few 1-litre bottles. The selection of available containers at Babcock is as follows: besides our various tank sizes from several thousand gallons down to 120 gallons, we have: 60-gallon (225litre) barrels, 15.5- and 13.5- gallon kegs, 6- and 3-gallon glass carboys, 1-gallon jars, and 1-litre, 750ml and 375 ml bottles (with screwcaps).   60 gallon barrels, then (l-r) 3-gal carboy; 6-gal cb; 375ml btl; 3-gal cb; 13.5gal keg; 1 gal jar; 1-litre btl; 750ml btl; 15.5-gal keg So, once we have all of our vessels topped up to the brim, it would seem we could just leave them to mature until bottling, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. The volume of the wine fluctuates for various reasons, and wooden barrels are the worst culprits. The wood is naturally porous, so air passes through, and the maturing wine soaks into the wood. This is an integral part of the process and the reason wood barrels are used in the first place. With this process, however, you get evaporation, and a portion of the wine just disappears into thin air. Known as "the angel's share," the losses of barrel-matured wine can amount to about 1 litre/week per 60-gal (225litre) barrel. So if we have a 9-barrel lot of Cabernet, for example, we may be anticipating about 225 cases, total. But, after 18 months of aging, over 40 cases will go to the angels (with all that free wine, you'd think the angels might be more motivated to help out with the weather or grape prices or something else within their jurisdiction!). And those numbers don't include the losses we incur through racking (see last post, "Rack 'n' Roll") or other processes, like filtering. All in all, for any particular lot of wine, we may lose up to 1/4 or even 1/3 of the initial volume, by the time it makes it to bottle. Sad as it may be to wave "bye-bye" to the angel's share, the task at hand is to keep those barrels--and other vessels--topped up. Most wineries have a schedule for topping up the barrels. Anywhere from once/week to once/month is common. At Babcock, we try to top barrels every second week. At that frequency, when we go to top them, the barrels will often look like this: with the wine level down about 3/4 of an inch. Ideally, after topping, it will be up into the bunghole so that when the bung is put back in, it will make contact with the wine, leaving no airspace. As well as the porousness of the wooden barrels, other issues come into play with other vessels: Temperature is huge. Wine actually takes up more space when it's warm than when it's cold. When it comes to our large tanks of our more everyday wines, we constantly have to monitor where the fill level is and adjust accordingly. If we're cold-stabilizing, for example, (refrigerated jackets on the tank cool the wine down to almost freezing for about 2 weeks), the wine is going to shrink up, leaving a big headspace in the tank, which we'll have to top up. Following this, we may heat the wine (to over 60 degrees F), using the jackets, in preparation for bottling. Now, we have to deal with the wine expanding and maybe overflowing from the top of the tank. If we're not using artificial heating or cooling, we have to deal with this same issue due to weather conditions. At the height of summer, tanks may regularly overflow, no matter how many gallons you take out to try to even things out. Several days ago, we racked a tank that had been cold stabilizing (refrigerated) and put it in a tank outside to warm up before bottling later this week. As always, we filled the tank to the brim. A couple days later, it was burbling out through the top. We know it's going to increase in volume, but we don't know how much, so, out of the 5,000 gallon tank, we removed about 10 gallons, hoping that would be enough. A few days later, it was spouting out the top again, so we had some losses there.  As disheartening as it is to see over-rambunctious wine spilling out from the top of the tank, it's truly heartbreaking to see the glass carboys succumb to the weather. The outside tanks have to deal with the elements as best they can, but within the barrel room, we hope for better. For the most part, the room stays at a nice cool temperature, and the barrels, being wood, are not so susceptible to temperature fluctuations. The glass carboys are a different story. Like everything else, we want to keep them topped right up. A rubber bung goes into the top and we keep it tight, tight so no air can get in, but still, the volume can fluctuate. At best,  the seal between carboy and bung will look like this: with the wine level right up to the bottom of the bung. If the carboy cools down a bit, it may look like this: You can just see daylight between the wine level and the bung. If we see this, we'll want to top it up. Sometimes, on a hot day, our nicely topped up and tightly sealed carboys will get too warm and break because of the pressure of the expanding wine. That's a real heartbreaker when you hear that "crack!" from out on the crush pad and rush in to see the wine puddling out from around the crumpled carboy, like a gunshot victim. Often it's one of our best wines that may sell for $50/bottle. It's sad to see a 6-gallon carboy go down like that, when there's nothing you can do but watch $1500 go, literally, down the drain in a matter of minutes. Most winemakers, I think, very wisely refrain from thinking of the wine as a saleable "product" until it's actually in the bottle. Otherwise, between the angel's share, racking and filtering losses and the vagaries of the weather, they may have cause to weep on a daily basis. Much better to think of it as just the cost of doing business. Joke of the day: a winejob website had a listing written by someone for whom English is not their first language. They were looking for a winemaker without a "pre Madonna attitude." LOL. So, no Elvis impersonators, I guess?

Rack 'n' Roll

Natural methods of clarification are preferred in winemaking. Anything we can do to avoid harsh filtration will result in better-quality wine. Racking is one of these techniques. Simply put, we let a container of wine sit for a period of time, so that the stuff floating around in suspension will eventually settle to the bottom. Then, we draw the wine off the sediment into another container, leaving cleaner, clearer wine. The process may be repeated several times during a wine's lifetime. Red wine in barrel, for example may be racked 3-6 times in the course of a year.

Every type and size of vessel we use has to have this racking capability, so that requires some specially-designed equipment. Take a typical wine tank, for example:

The best tanks have 2 doors (plus a hatch on the top), and 2 valves (plus a small valve for taking samples, seen here on the upper left just below the temperature gauge). The upper door in this pic is the racking door, and the upper valve, just below it and to the left is the racking valve. The lower valve is the transfer valve, and we use it when we're simply moving wine, and not expecting any sediment on the bottom (after it's been filtered, for example). To rack a tank, we attach the hose to the racking valve and pump the wine out down to the level of the valve,at which point the pump will start sucking air. Then, it's safe to open the racking door. We detach the hose from the valve, sanitize the end and stick it in through the door and into the wine, just below the surface, and start pumping. We manually move the hose down with the level of the wine, keeping it as close to the surface of the wine as possible so as not to suck up any of the stuff on the bottom. We may have anywhere from 1 to about 6 inches of "stuff" (lees, tartrates, bentonite--depending on what stage of the winemaking process we're at). The sediment is usually quite a different colour from the wine, so it's easy to see where the wine ends and the sediment begins and shut off the pump accordingly, leaving all the goop in the bottom.

Racking barrels is a little different since there' s only the one hole at the top. For this we need something called a bulldog:



It's a wand we put in through the bunghole down to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is drawn in through the holes at the pointy end (shown in the first picture) up through the wand, and through the attached hose to its destination. There is an adjustable spike at the bottom that rests at the bottom of the barrel,  so we change the level at which the wine is drawn in, keeping it above the sediment. Since we can't see into the barrel to see the exact level of the sediment, there's a bit of trial and error. At the other end of the wand (shown in the second picture) there is a sight glass which helps with that. As we slowly (so as not to disturb the sediment) lower the wand down, we use a flashlight to watch in the sight glass for any murkiness or blurring. If we see that, we know our spike isn't long enough to keep the holes above the sediment. The only thing we can do, then, is hold the bulldog off the bottom and try to keep it above the goo. It takes about 5 minutes to  empty the barrel, and it's pretty heavy to hold it when it's attached to a hose full of wine. After doing one barrel that way, we may adjust the spike for the next barrels.

When we get the level right, it looks like this:

This is not as exact as racking the tank, because we can't see what we're doing, so we often lose some good wine along with the sediment. In the case of the lees left in the tanks, we pump it out and it gets distributed in the vineyard. For the barrel lees, we want to get any of the good wine that's still in there. Once we've emptied the barrel, we roll the barrel over and dump out the sediment/wine mixture that's left and put it into glass carboys. We let it settle out again, and then rack the carboy, putting all the various leftovers together to eventually become a basic blended table wine.

To rack these small vessels, we use a siphoning hose. It's a bit of a trick to learn this technique and usually involves inhaling some wine the first few times.

Here it is, done right:

We use this racking technique when we're topping barrels, as well, but more on that, next time.



Blending In

In California, labeling laws require that if a geographical area or AVA (AmericanViticultural Area) is stated on the bottle, then a minimum of 85% of the contents must be from that area. If a vintage is stated, the minimum is 95%, and if a grape variety is stated the minimum is 75%. So, that bottle of 2009 Merlot from Santa Barbara County may be 25% cabernet, 5% 2008 and 15% from San Luis Obispo.

At Babcock, for our high-end wines, we don't mess around with any of this stuff. Everything is 100% across the board, and usually from a single vineyard. Some places will top up their barrels (when natural evaporation occurs) with a different wine than what's in the barrel, but we don't. Where we do take advantage of blending opportunites is with our more everyday wines that we produce in very large quantities, relatively speaking--say, 15,000 gallons as opposed to only 350 gallons for our top, single-vineyard bottlings.

Doing anything with such large quantities of wine is a daunting task. In order to blend it, you have to move it, and that takes hours and hours. For our blending project this week, though, we used a neat trick that saved a heap of time. We had a 12,000-gallon tank that was full of one thing, and a 1,000-gallon tank that was full of something else. We wanted to blend them together. The obvious thing would be to pump them both into a 13,000-gallon tank. Unfortunately, we don't have a tank of that exact size. We have a 16,000-gallon tank that we could have pumped them both into to make the blend, but we couldn't leave it in there because that breaks a cardinal rule of winemaking--every vessel has to be completely full to avoid spoilage (more on that in a future post). So, we could have used the 16 to make the blend, but then we'd have to pump the whole 13,000 gallons back to their original tanks afterwards, and we really would have been there until midnight.



early morning in the vineyard

 So here's what we did: with 12,000gls of one thing and 1,000gls of another, one thirteenth is different, right? So we took the 1000gls and moved all but one thirteenth temporarily into another tank. Then we filled the 1000-gallon tank from the 12,000-gallon tank. Now we have the exact blend we want in the small tank. Finally, the larger amount from the 1,000-gallon tank that we took out in the first place, got pumped into the 12,000-gallon tank, topping it up and giving us the exact blend in that tank too. The whole project only took a few hours, and we blended 13,000 gallons by moving under 3,000 gallons. Easy-peasy, Gary Sinise!

Bittersweet Bottling

As you might imagine, bottling wine is pretty satisfying. You've crushed and pressed the grapes, seen the juice through its fermentation, coddled it through its maturation period, frequently touched, tasted, and examined it, and maybe stayed up multiple nights worrying about it, and now it's time to release your baby into the world. The only thing standing between you and freedom from care over this particular batch of wine is the bottling process.
In the early days of Babcock, bottling consisted of a series of steps, all done by hand: filling the bottles, corking, capsuling, applying of labels, and loading into cases. These days, all the same steps are involved, but it's all automated. Like the majority of wineries in the world, we enlist the services of a mobile bottling line. A bottling line is perhaps the most expensive piece of winemaking machinery out there, and with all those moving parts, maintenance and repair can be a nightmare--better to have the whole thing roll in on the back of a truck, all ready to get the job done, and operated by experts. We use Bottlemeister from San Luis Obispo, just to the north of us. The downside of outsourcing the job is that you want to have a large enough quantity of wine to bottle to make it worthwhile to bring out the truck, which usually means having them there for 3 or even 4 verrrrry long days straight. This week, we bottled over 5,000 gallons in 3 10- to 12-hour days.

We start bottling days out arriving at work with the sun at 5:30 am. There are some things we have to prep before the truck arrives at about 6:00, and backs up to the warehouse. Even in May in California, it's pretty chilly at that hour,(about 11 degrees) and we had rain to deal with as well. Nice.

After hooking up all the hoses and pumps and prepping and sanitizing everything, the line finally gets rolling about 8am. We have a crew of about 8 vineyard guys who look after the beginning and end of the process--loading the empty bottles on to the line at the start and then casing up the full bottles and loading them onto pallets. Putting the full bottles into the cases is the most backbreaking job, as you have to bend your back over the line and heft the full bottles to keep up with the pace of the conveyor belt.

Two guys who come with the truck oversee the line and keep it stocked with corks, labels and capsules. The only other manual part is putting the capsules on the bottles prior to them being "shrink wrapped" on. This takes two people to keep up with the speed. It's a hard job to keep at for the number of hours required. The bottles go by at about 2 per second, which means you have to stay focused and you can't even look away or take the time to scratch your nose or take a drink of water. Standing in one place for so long is hard on the lower back, too. Even just being on the truck is fairly tiring, since with all the machinery running, and clanking bottles, the noise is nothing short of cacophonous, and you have to yell if you want to talk to anybody.

The empty bottles are loaded on to the conveyor where they're drawn into a vertical wheel where they'll receive a dose of nitrogen prior to filling. The bottles then go on a jolly ride on a series of "merry-go-rounds". The first is where they get filled. Ever wonder how "short fills" (bottles that come off the line not quite full) happen? Usually, it's because of a little flaw in the neck of the bottle--unevenness in the glass or a little indentation. The filler on the line has a sensor that senses a bit of splash when the wine level is getting near the top. If there's a flaw there in the glass, the splash starts a little sooner and the sensor shuts off the filler prematurely. It's the capsulers' job to try and spot those short fills as they come along and take them off the line. If we miss it, off it goes to the case and ultimately, to an annoyed customer.

The next carousel is the corker where the corks get squeezed and then jammed into the bottle with a punch. Generally speaking, synthetic corks go in nice and smoothly and neatly. Real corks, because they're not so perfect, can have some problems--sticking out of the bottle, or pushed in too far. The capsulers have to watch out for this too.  The capsulers then put on the loose-fitting capsules and they go through the next carousel where spinners press them on tight. The labelling is cool. The labels are on a big long roll, and alternate front and back labels. The bottles get herded into a little narrow passage on the conveyor with sides that press against the bottles and cause them to rotate. As they rotate, they roll over top of the labels which come along with the bottles on the rest of their ride to the cases.

The whole process looks like this:

Things can go wrong. Incompatibility problems with bottles, corks, capsules and labels can make the whole process a lot more painful and time-consuming. Trying to make the packaging cost-effective means experimenting with new suppliers of the various components, and that can lead to problems--capsules too long for the bottle, so they won't go on neatly; labels that don't work with sloped bottles, etc. Sometimes, you can have 3 in 10 bottles with unacceptably wrinkled labels. When that happens, we pull them off the line, soak the bottles in water so we can scrape the labels off and then run them through the labeler again, with our fingers crossed. The bottling guys can make adjustments to mitigate these problems, but even so, we often have to have somebody standing watch to pull any bottles off the line that aren't perfect.  A couple of hours as the "watchman" can leave you feeling a bit dizzy and sleepy, especially with the rhythmic thrum of the line. Ron, the Associate Winemaker, remembers one of his first bottlings, as a cellar rat, when he was assigned to keep watch, and actually started to fall asleep, accidentally leaning on the emergency stop button.
With all the moving parts and potential for fingers to get caught--and removed--drowsiness isn' t recommended on the bottling line! Thankfully, everything went relatively smoothly this round, and the bottling is done for another couple of months. Looking forward to some normal-length workdays and toasting our efforts with some newly-bottled wines.

Die-a-toe-What?

We’re prepping for a bottling run here at the winery, and there are a few things we need to do in order to get the wines ready. While our very best wines are lovingly produced in small quantities and without any filtration required, we also make some more everyday wines on a much larger scale, and these we have to filter to ensure their stability once they’re in bottle. One filtering medium often used in winemaking is diatomaceous (die-a-toe-MAY-shus) earth, or DE. Lompoc, where I'm living in California, is a large centre for diatomaceous earth mining.   Also known as kieselguhr, DE is pretty interesting stuff with all sorts of uses. In addition to filtering wine and other food products, it’s also used to filter water in swimming pools and fish tanks. Yum! You’ll find DE in other common household products as well, like cat litter--and dynamite. Is your mouth watering yet? It’s also great for killing cockroaches and bed bugs, and cleans up toxic spills like nobody’s business.  If you’re not already out the door in a mad rush to get some DE-filtered wine for yourself, consider what DE actually is: coffin-shaped fossils of hard-shelled microscopic algae. All the exoskeletons link together to make a complex labyrinth for the wine to pass through with bad stuff getting left behind along the way. It starts out as a very fine powder but has very sharp edges (think ultra finely ground glass) so you have to very careful not to breathe it in in its powder state as it's a major carcinogen.. The sharp edges allow it to cut through the hard shells of bugs, making it an exterminator's best friend.   More Detail (for wine students--and wine geeks!) For DE filtering of wine, we use a plate and frame filter--a series of heavy metal frames interspersed with plates and filter pads that we force the wine through.     Each frame holds a DE "cake" about 2 feet square and and inch and a half thick. How does the cake get into the frame? Well, from our big tank of wine that we're filtering (in this case, 6,000 gallons--that's about 2500 cases) we put about 700 gallons into an open top tank that has a high platform around it so we can access it from the top. We use a big long stainless steel "spoon" to stir the wine from above like a big cake mix. Once we've got the wine rolling, we dump in about 25 pounds of the powdery DE.     We stir and stir, (and my aching back can confirm that that big spoon is heavy!) while pumping it into the filter housing where it clings to the pads and forms layer upon layer of stuff until a cake forms in the frames. Frame before filtering Frame after filtering, with "cake" You have to keep up the stirring because the DE is a lazy beast (well it IS dead, after all) and wants nothing more than to lie on the bottom of the tank. We stir it to keep it in suspension and on its way.   Once we've got our cake in place, in a perfect wine world, the subsequent wine zips right through, leaving all its bad stuff behind, and coming out clear, and we get through 6,000 gallons in one very long day. Hmmm. I haven't actually seen that happen yet. While DE filtering is interesting, it's no day at the beach and not my favourite thing to do at the winery. The setup, before we even start filtering, takes about 2 hours--to get everything in place and sterilize the whole system. We hope (at this point in an optimistic and gung ho kinda way) that once we're going, we'll be able to continue on for at least a couple of hours. Wine turbidity (amount of thick stuff in it), though, plays a huge part, and ultimately, it's always a trial and error kind of situation for each wine. This is why I won't wax poetic about the joys of DE filtering. It can be hell. Set up for 2 hours and then it all breaks down after 45 minutes--too much pressure in the filter housing, not enough powdered DE put in, too much DE, more turbidity than we expected in the wine-- the variables are many. The pump slows to a funereal pace and the output of the wine through the housing is at a trickle. Then we have to break it all apart and set it all up again (which takes another hour and a half, at least!). Soooo frustrating. Whatever happens, we have to be there til it's all done, and that sometimes means 10pm or later.    Once we're done with the set up, between rounds, or at the end of the day, breaking it all apart is a messy business. We scoop out the sodden DE, which is now like soft strawberry ice cream (if it's a red wine) with sand in it. You can still feel the sharpness of the DE, and it can irritate the hands. We load it all into a bin to be dumped in the vineyard. Then we spray everything off, coil up the hoses and drag our weary bones home to our beds for a night of diatomaceous dreams.