Vino Meza - Whole Foods

VINO MEZA
48 N. State Street
Westerville, OH
614-259-3101

For those of you East of Columbus and perhaps a little tired of travelling in to Whole Foods on Sawmill to get your fave bottle of Via Vecchia wine, or even travelling out to us in Powell, note that from Tuesday 10 March, Vino Meza (Westerville) will be carrying our Adamo (cabernet franc and sangiovese blend) and Trouve (bordeaux blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot blend).

Whole Foods
Sawmill,
Columbus

And for those of you trying to get your Trovato (sangiovese and pinot noir blend) from Whole Foods, we delivered more Trovato to them this morning. They also have the Trouve.

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,

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.

Last of the 2005

Today was, in retrospect, a watershed. It passed almost without significance and yet, it marked an end to making wine outside the "bubble" of the bonded winery status of Via Vecchia Winery. Why? Well, today saw the breaking of the last remaining barrel of our Bordeaux blend (Truove) from 2005 which was not produced under bond. From here on in, any bottling of personal use wine will come from the bonded 2006 barrels.

We leave you with images of that last barrel, a stack of wine cases duly receiving their bottles, and Michael standing proud beside his quarter share.

Well done all.

More Wine Goes Into Ageing

Saturday - and we put the Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc into ageing in their French Oak barrels.
The pump played up again. Nothing to do with the impeller - Paolo repaired the torn blade and it held all day - but the motor itself. Seems like the motor wants to turn over, but there isn't the "kick" to start it off. We checked the load on the drive wheel, the tension of the drive belts and they were fine. It's just that the drive wheel didn't turn even with no load upon it. Anyhow, since it was making noises like it wanted to go, we resorted to "kick-starting" it. This was achieved by running the pump with the drive exposed and Marty hand cranking it until it 'caught". This worked all day long and we got through it fine.
However, since the pump is meant to be both self-priming and self starting, this is not good. We believe the starting capacitor is "fried".

Paolo designed a dip-stick to measure off how much wine was being pumped. This was needed to roughly gauge when we had enough of a Varietal in a barrel, essential when wanting to achieve the different percentages of each Varietal in each barrel. It worked fine.

Topping off the Bordeaux blend barrels was done by siphoning out of the demijons we had racked in December for the Cab Franc. We left the Cab Franc until last because it is the smallest percentage in our Bordeaux blend and our pump cannot pump with the responsiveness needed to be shut off in time when the barrel is full. There is a device that can be bought that senses the change in pressure at the barrel full point and shuts the pump down there and then.

The Bordeaux blend dealt with our Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. We had enough Cabernet Franc to make up its own barrel. Anton reminded us all that Cabernet Franc is the father of Cabernet Sauvignon, and for my money, at this stage, it seemed better in many respects. The remainder of the Cabernet Franc went into storage in a bag from FlexTank that will keep the wine safe for up to two years -you place the bag in a 60gallon drum.

Only the SanGiovese and Pinot Noir to go.

[l to r - Paolo, Marty (holding drum), Michael in back of drum, John in front of drum holding red funnel]
Here we're carefully pouring off the last several gallons in the drum into a demijon. We don't pump out all the way to the end as we do not want to suck the sediment (lees) back into the wine - remember we rely on natural sedimentation as our filtration method as we do not mechanically nor chemically filter our wines. This wine will be again siphoned into the French oak barrel.



This is Anton siphoning out of the demijon the Cabernet Franc into the French oak barrel.


This is Micheal diligently tagging the Cabernet Franc barrel.

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Where's The Stuff #2 - Barrel Update

[no pics for the mo' - so here' s something we initially threw in with a file on images we associated with Via Vecchia Winery - it's someone waiting to get into the Galleria Degli Uffizi in Firenze. My nephew Stephen knows all about that because I took him there when he was about 12 years old and I made him queue for about 1 and 1/2 hours and I remember saying, "...because it's the Uffizi and you'll be grateful I made you stand in line to see the stuff inside when you're older." ]

The French Oak barrels are in Chicago. Will they get here tomorrow - Tuesday - ? We've been hit with some cold weather, so any excuse to delay shipment. They closed the schools here today because it was 5F / -15C and poor kiddies couldn't wait for their buses. I don't know, when I was a lad....blither, blather, rant, rave...what the world's coming to!

All I can say is I'm glad I buy the engine oil that's good for up to -20C below otherwise the engine would be very hard to turn over in the morning and probably wouldn't. As it is my gearbox is a bit stiff for the first few miles, so I guess that oil's not as tolerant of the cold.

I actually had ice form on the windows inside the car today despite the heat turned all the way up and on the second highest speed.

Anyway, enough of that. Hopefully we get the French Oak tomorrow and we'll get them into the winery. We'll let them "sit" for a day and then on Wednesday we will blend into them the Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot. That will probably do, then on Thursday we will do the Shiraz and bag up into storage the excess Cabernet Franc, if we don't bag it up on Wednesday.

The Sangiovese and Pinot Noir will have to wait the arrival of the flextank maturation vessels. Still looking to ship out on Feb 9th (not good, not good).

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