Bottling #2

More corks arrived on Wednesday so we tried bottling the last of the Adamo 2007. However, the sediment got kicked up so we had to abandon the effort since we were not willing to filter the wine.

We did find other stuff to do though. We finally transferred the last of the wine out of secondary fermentation into ageing. The last of the wine is the Trovato 2008 (sangiovese and pinot noir).

Another activity is finalising labels for 2007's wine. We're going with the same labels again, just changing alcohol levels and year on back. We also need to get the new label and name approved for the pinot noir we're doing.

Saturday will see a few people popping over to see us. Maybe they'll allow us to post pics of them - maybe they're on facebook. Do check out the facebook account - become a friend.

Photos at last!

A few photos for you. There's been a dirth of images lately, so here's some to make up for it.
And just because we don't grow the grape, doesn't mean there isn't more labour involved with our heritage process and there isn't left craft. Thankyou.

But first, our 2007 grapes are still making soap. Latest batch for sale arrived. Contact us for purchase. Thanks

Pump Out Free Run.

Well, Strictly speaking, free run should come out under its own steam...but that's modern day corruption for you. We still have primary fermenters (the blue drums) with taps on to let it out, from the days everything was done by foot (excluding this year's foot stomping of the merlot), but we pump it out now.

Press Out the Second Wine.

The wine that's pressed out of the skins and seeds after the free run has been taken is traditionally used as a second-grade wine to drink pending your first drinkable wine in the New Year. I don't think any winery does that any more as it's all money. We use this to top up the headspace in the ageing barrels during ageing - any left goes into its own barrels when the vintage is totally bottled and we keep tasting it until we decide what to do with it.

Second Wine Storage

The second wine is storage in demijons. Since the 2008 merlot had to pressed by foot, we thought it appropriate to store and manage it in one of the original old boys from Tuscany - who's pushing 120 years old by now. Look at him go!
By the way, the wine is sealed with virgin olive oil. It floats on the wine and doesn't let air in whilst letting fermentation gasses out. See if you can find a photo of the tool used to extract the olive oil in an earlier posting.

Secondary fermentation Underway.

Free run wine now in secondary fermentation in these blue drums. See some of 2007 wines ageing in french oak barrels in background.

2007 Grapes are in Soap Again.

Here they are. Order some - order them all!

Now for Some Fun.

There are many items of very specialised and costly equipment in the winery, that only trained personnel can use - only kidding, just common sense and a lack of fear is all you need. There are also good luck charms in operation too - winemaking t-shirts are worn, luni-head necklaces are worn, and so on. However this year it was like super-hero-dom in the winery with special appearances of that dynamic duo Mermaid Man and Apron Boy, with dandy yellow gloves of imperviousness and apron of skirtness.

First time yellow gloves have turned up , 'cos it's obvious what would be said, but the apron's been around since the beginning - see if you can count how many pictures through this blog it appears in (hours of fun).
Unfortunately we cannot divulge the identities of Mermaid Man and Apron Boy.

We Stomped - Again

GET WINE

Friends

Thanks to all those of you who turned up on 10/11 and to those that helped out. We hope you stayed for food later on in the day and enjoyed the now traditional bonfire.

(above - the start - all clean - rollers prepped to take bins of grape to wooden tippers that feed the crusher's hopper with grapes)

The day did not go as smoothly as we had hoped as we had machinery issues with many a tear down. This was particularly annoying since we had replaced the main bearing on the destemmer's axel only a couple of night's earlier and hoped for clear running.

Also, some grape varietals just turned to a jam in the collector and refused to go through the pump to the fermentation vats, so there was a lot of reverting to Plan B which meant crushing into open top tubs that were then carried to the fermentation vats.

As if this wasn't frustrating enough, on Wednesday 15th we decided the Merlot was just like concrete so we reverted to Plan C which is foot stomping. We stomped by feet 2,160lbs of Merlot that night to free up the juice and produce a must capable of fermentation.

We're not called Via Vecchia (the old way) for nothing!

Needless to say, none of us found time and energy to take photos, although we hope to get some from Kay and Dan who were filming us again for The Documentary. Actually, I think Carrie posted some, but I lost the link... can you please provide again, thanks?
All in all 13,500lbs of grapes were crushed that day.
We did Sangiovese, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah.

Again, thanks to those that persevered with us on the day... Special mentions to;

Holly, you are an excellent stand in for Joe S;
Carrie, your enthusiasm amazes;
Nick & Joan, your apron appreciated your return visit;
Mr & Mrs H, what can we say, STARS!

But Mike H, you mean to say Colorado's got something better to offer?

And for those requesting it, here's Cynthia's Pasta Recipe. The veg and basil was picked from the garden that day.

Cynthia writes,
"I didn't get to all the guests on Saturday, and many people like the
sauce. So if you'd like to email them a thank-you with the recipe or
post it on the blog that might be fun.

Crush 2008 Fabulous Pasta Sauces

Fry 2 diced onions and 6 cloves crushed garlic in a good quantity of
olive oil. Then add 5-6 quarts of quartered fresh tomatoes, a bunch of
flat-leaf parsley, and an eighth cup of finely chopped basil, and a
teaspoon of finely ground rosemary. Simmer with 1/2 bottle of wine for
3 hours, and salt to taste.

Heat your serving plate in the oven. Then layer pasta, sauce, and
grated Parmesan cheese in about 3 or 4 layers for your average
platter. Makes about 4 platters.

For sausage sauce:
Cook 3 packages of nitrite-free hot sausages (Kroger is best), cool
and cut into rounds. Fry chopped mushrooms in olive oil, add diced
sausages and simmer until mushrooms are floppy. Add basic sauce and
simmer. Serve over penne layered as above onto a hot platter.

Yum!"

Thanks again. Next piece of work is transfer to secondary fermentation,

Just a Few Things...

As we creep ever nearer achieving that most excellent event of seeing our wine in its bottle, fully dressed, there are events going on that heighten this excitement and serve to douse it somewhat. In short, we're experiencing a decidedly mixed bag of emotions right now. Its effect is seen in how few the posts to this blog has become.
So this post will be plain and just go through some high and low lights of the past few weeks. It's ameasure of things when we really only have one low, but it is of such fundamental importance, it seems to dominate and negate all else.

Highlight 1 - Soaps and Recycling Grape & Seeds.

This is so cool. Lucia of Zen Tree Soaps found a use for our grape skins and seeds. She makes soaps and all manner of our related products. When she came by to see us transfer from primary fermentation to secondary fermentation she went away with about 3lbs of each grape varietal we had - taken right from the fermentation bins.
Within a week she had returned to show us her Pinot Noir soap. A soap with our pinot noire grapes in it. Paolo has been using this for two weeks now and reports the bar is at the stage where the grape skins are really poking up and so as you soap yourself they act as an exfoliant.

Highlight 2 - Recycling Grape Sediment (Lees).

Still with Lucia, we gave her about a cup of lees from which she is experimenting with a face pack. The lees are a great anti-oxidant and we know from our own experience, that if you smear it on your face, as it dries it really cleanses your skin.

Highlight 3 - Candle lab

Curt of The Candle Lab stores visited. They make custom candles and they run candle making parties. he likes our wines and is looking for a way to introduce them into the business. State laws, such as they are, do not simply allow him to sell our wine, or readily include them as a private event party beverage.

Highlight 4 - Maca's

Michelle (of Mamapalooza fame in prior posts, and partner in StarfFish Clothes), called us from Maca (a Tapas Bar in Powell, no website) . She had got the owner interested in our wines. So we went down with some wine for him to try. This was very nerve-wracking as it turns out that Norm, who was a basketball player for Barcelona (No.15), Spain, was taught how to taste wine by the winemaker of Chateaux Margaux.
Long and short of it was that he liked it, said we were doing the right thing, and that it was amazing that we turned out a nice wine as he thought we had a big handicap other winemakers don't (our shipping of our grapes).
So he wants the wine. And again, State laws being such as they are, this is not as simple as it sounds due to minimum markups etc. But we'll get there.

The Abyss - 1

Our label approval is a grind.

Federal laws being such that they are, means that because our State of Ohio does not touch California, where we get our grapes, means we cannot claim the California appellation. Fine. However, if you want to state the grape varietal on your label, you need the appellation, so we are prevented from stating the varietal on the label. And, without the varietal stated, you cannot put the year.
So, even though , we do get our grape from California, we do use sangiovese etc, and we did produce our wine from the 2006 harvest, we cannot say any of that at all, anywhere.
All we can say is Red Wine, state alcohol content and give the blend or varietal a fanciful name.
We were not allowed to state that we don't sulfite either, or use minimal sulfites, or sulfites below the organic standard.
At one point we were prevented from using "produced" even though we do produce the wine - that got sorted out in our favour - eventually.
We feel penalised. We cannot state what we have done on our label. we cannot state truth. In fact, during one enquiry of the Feds, we were accused of doing something illegitimate because otherwise we wouldn't be querying their rules and trying to find loopholes to get the true information on our label!
How does this serve the public, when we are prevented, through regulation, from stating truthfully on the product's label what is in the bottle so that the consumer can make an informed decision?
Whatever, we'll get there. If anyoen has some helpful industry advice, it would be very welcome.

Columbus C.E.O. Magazine Article
Yeah, we'll talk about this later. Lessons learned in journalism, we guess.

Transfer to secondary fermentation

Over Friday 12 and Saturday 13 we transferred the wine from primary fermentation to secondary fermentation.
Deciding when to do this was mostly driven by the finger method, but had to include some allowance for the must rising and peaking, then falling back into the wine. Whatever.
The transfer is a hard slog. We had a guest staying, Roger, who was here for a spiritual healing event he'd set up, but he soon found himself helping in the winery.

Here's Roger being plied with food and drink, prior to the forced labour.

The transfer is roughly divided into two processes.
1. Free Run
Up until 2 years ago, free run for us meant opening a spigot and letting the wine flow out of the primary fermentation vessel. Now it means what we pump out. With free run we pump the wine from the primary to the secondary fermentation vessel until it's full, then seal it with an airlock of olive oil.
2. Press
After we have got the wine out of the primary, we then take the grapes and seeds (marca/must/cap) and press these out. We collect a lot of wine this way, but it's a bit more silty. This we separate into demijons and use it to manage our barrel losses whilst ageing and also to keep the secondary vessels topped up. The silt will settle out quite effectively without use of chemical or mechanical filtration.

Here's our press. It's all manual. We make it a bit of fun too as you can work the press like a ship's capstan, so obviously we stand around the press and sing sea-shanties as we pull and push the lever on the ratchet. Before the press really "bites" into the grape the ratchet spins quite freely on the central screw, hence the capstan effect. When the press has bit, then one person cranks the lever, end of capstan.

This part of the operation takes a while and is monotonous. Long into the Sat's early hours, Roger listened to us singing sea - shantys. We are pirates, you know.
Sea shanty's are great as you can take it in turns to make up your own verses...you can but imagine.

After the wine is pressed out, you dismantle the press and you get a compacted "cake" of grape and seed - see below.

Another piece of fun was pressing Mike's cap. Here you see a short (and dark) video of him finding his cap.
[video to come - fed up of waiting for yahoo video to process it]
Now we did have some labour saving device this year int he form of that conveyor that you saw us use during the crush itself. Now you see the conveyors on the floor providing a great way to get heavy drums of pressed grapes out of the pressing area and into the area where they're staged to go out of the winery.

Oh, did I mention this was messy?

Next post about how we have collaborated in the community to use our waste grape skins and seeds and how we're going to reuse the silt that settles out of the wine.

Punch Down Tool & Stomping

Recent activity on this blog reveals an interest in Punch Down tools and Stomping Grape by foot. Luckily, Via Vecchia, always authentic, can offer you true grit on both topics. When we say we do it by hand and it's crafted, it is. Where else could you see punch down using your arms or stomping by feet?

1. Truly hand (arm) crafting the wine.

From last year check out this most manual of punch downs where it's literally all elbow-grease.(you may have to scroll down a bit).

2. Evolution.

From this year, see evolution in action as we learn to use a tool, which is a highly specialised stainless steel disk on a stick.

See it in operation as it punches the grape skins and seeds (the "must" or "cap" or "marca") down into the wine, which is becoming less like grape juice with each passing day.

3. Stomp Grape by Foot.

Now for stomping. We always do a bit of this, and here's a photo. Maybe if there's still enough interest we'll do a compilation of foot stomping over the years. And of course, stomping is communal, as demonstrated by N&J below, who are incredibly good sports and were such a lot of help.

Other Matters.

Of other matters, we transferred from primary fermentation vessels to secondary fermentation vessels over friday evening and saturday. More of that in a later post.

Bursting Wine grapes.

We took delivery of the following grapes from California.
SanGiovese
Pinot Noir
Cabernet Sauvignon
Merlot
Syrah
[here we are with some of our grapes]


These grapes are then transferred to our stainless steel crusher and destemmer. We handle the cases of grapes across roller conveyors and sorting tables, and eventually they end up on a rig that tips them into our crusher.
Sorting. By this we mean we go through each case of grapes to remove all leaves, dried out grapes, green grapes and moldy grapes. This year's grape was very clean, even by our picky standards and although there was more leaf than expected, there were virtually no bad grapes.
[here's Mr.H on sorting duty. Stirling work as always]


Crushing. This is done by our crusher. Actually, it should be called bursting instead, since the rollers through which the grape passes are set such that they burst the grape and do not crush it flat. All we need is for the juice to become loose so that nature can start the fermentation.

Our crusher also has a destemmer which removes the stalks from the must that ends up in our fermentation drums. This year was different in that the usual handful of stalk did not make its way into the fermenter.

[here's Mike at the rig with the stainless steel crusher in the middle. The black sorting bins go in the platform to Mike's left. thius platform is then raised to tip the grape into the crusher. Notice juice and grape in the rig. Mike has his hands in the crusher's hopper - do not try this at home]

Next post will talk about the food we served up.

Crush prep" 2007 - part 2

More preparation for the upcoming grape harvest and crush.
This week we did the foll0wing;
Took all our primary and secondary fermenters outside for a clean.
Made safe the sharp edges all over the grape crusher
(Anton cleaning crusher)


Collected more fermentation barrels and rinsed them out
(Marty cleaning out a couple of the new ones)


We also took delivery of a few more bits and pieces since the grape crushing operation is swinging around to the other end of the winery this year. This meant an extra 10feet of hose and more electrical cable. Included in this was a punch down tool that may be a tad long, but we'll cope or grow into it, and a mystery item.
This is a picture of the mystery item. Can you guess what it is? As a clue you may want to access this photo from last year.


For those of you interested in Carbon Miles, here's some interesting notes on our primary and secondary fermenters. The blue barrels/drums you see us use are food grade drums that we have donated to us by James. If he didn't do this, they'd end up in a landfill, or be taken away for more processing involving more energy. We collect these drums and reuse them so no carbon contribution apart from the 50 mile round trip to get them. We do not count the carbon contribution of the energy that went into making them either because that is counted by the original user of the new drum - we're re-using what already exists and no extra energy goes into them.
So, we can say that our primary and secondary fermentation comprises carbon neutral equipment. Not bad.
Here's us turning a drum into a primary fermenter by cutting top of and then making safe the rough edges - photos from 2006 prep in this blog.
Here they are in action - primary and secondary fermentation, courtesy of 2006 blog.

Alcohol Levels

Here's the latest on the wine's alcohol content. Now, remember, we don't chaptalise; we don't add sugar to the crushed grape and juice to give us the alcohol we want; we let the wine get on with it.

Of course, it's not THAT easy. There's a fine balance between the timing of the transfer from primary to secondary fermentation so that you a), don't kill fermentation and b), don't let the wine oversteep in its skins. A fine balance that doesn't prejudice the naturally occurring yeast's abilty to eat the sugar that's naturally present and convert it to alcohol.

So, given no sulfiting and no sugar, relying on experience and intuition, this is what our grape gave us:

a) Bordeaux Blend - 11.5% to 12%.

b) SanGiovese - 11%

c) SanGiovese/Pinot Noir - 11%

d) Shiraz - 12.5%

e) Cab franc - 13%

This is the high end, if not the pinnacle, of what you could hope for without artificially adjusting the fermenting wine.

This is wine alcohol levels (let's ignore the Cab Franc) that you can comfortably drink with a meal at lunchtime and return to work sober on. On a hot day, what better than a wine with a cool lunch that won't knock you for six.

The Cab franc. Remember we reported it had kicked up again? Well this is what it was doing; creating an (I would say) impossible 13% for a wine with no artificially added sugar. Go figure. We don't run a laboratory so we'll live with it.

Topping Up

There are many who claim to have fun with what they do, and yet... and yet you look at what they post to their web sites and blogs and they all look so serious and well, not having fun. I know we have been accused of just having fun, but frankly, since when does having fun lessen the importance or credibility of what you do? And that's not rhetorical, you can answer and debate that one with us if you like.

So anyway, today's fun was topping up the barrels. We also had the pleasure of Mike coming over to visit and help. We haven't seen enough of him lately and it was good to have him joining in the fun - or should I say, work.

We topped up from our reserves in the demijons. All hand pouring no less, with lots of sampling. We have some video of that, but can't post it here as some of us got a bit colorful in our comments.
The Cabernet Franc had kicked up again! We won't interfere with that though and we'll let it burn itself out. We do not want high alcohol wine but that Franc may well push it for us, so we may actually withhold it from sale this year and blend it with something next year.
We also tried a 50% Cabernet Franc and 50% Syrah mix - too early too tell what it would be really like, but it was pretty much alright, good even, anyway, we drank it.

So now to pictures.

This is our hand crafted process in action. Careful pouring to top up the barrel. Please note that there you see direct evidence of our natural filtration process - note the sediment at the bottom of the gall jug? well that has settled out and will not go into the barrel. The same happens in the barrel. When we siphon the wine out of the barrel the sediment will be left behind. In the meantime it's a lesser form of a sur lees method of winemaking. The lees are reputed to be natural antioxidants too, and is why we are able not to rely on sulfiting.


This is our board room. Very serious, as if!

This is us under the watchful eye of Bacchus. A gift from Katrina, who Michael (white shirt) proposed to.


Finally, we got the 2005 Winery Year DVD out - we have two versions 1, the fast cut/lively music version and 2, the sepia toned/Italian folk song soundtrack. As those of you who have seen these productions of prior years, I hope you'll agree they're just full of fun. But then, we do have fun, as I said.