Monthly Archives: September 2007

Bonsai Vineyard Harvest Update

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Leon Millot Harvest - 9/26/07


I was on the fence about harvesting the Leon Millot. They were ripe or nearly ripe, but I wondered if they could benefit from a little more time. That was before I saw the weather forecast. It calls for a lot of rain, starting tomorrow, so I pulled in the Leon today.

9/21/07 : 3 oz (100 g)
9/26/07 : 2 lb 2 oz (975 g)

2007 Total: 2 lb 5 oz (1075 g)

That compares with 2 lb (just over 900 g) in 2006.

I started taking some Pinot Noir as well, but changed my mind after three clusters. They’re just not ripe yet, so I’ll leave the rest to face the rain. Those three clusters weighed in at 7 oz (210 g), and will be joining the Leon (and Price and Siegerrebe) in the freezer until I complete the harvest.

Why I Make Dry Wine

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I make wine out of many different fruits and vegetables – from raspberries to rhubarb and all sorts of things in between. That makes for a lot of trial and error as I learn how to consistently make a good wine using very different bases. Many traditional country wine recipes call for a small amount of fruit, a lot of water, enough sugar for 12% alcohol, and acid to balance. You can make (and I have made) good wine this way, and it’s a real money saver. Still, adding a lot of water bothers me and some of the wines I’ve made this way seemed to suffer for it.

That made me wonder what would happen if I used more fruit. What about all fruit and no water? I’m trying this with cherry wine right now, and the first problem I had was in managing the acids. The titratable acidity (TA) of my cherry wine will be high, and that’s something I’ll need to address the next time I make it. I’m working on some ideas, but in the meantime I’ve decided to sweeten the cherry wine. I’ll be trying to balance the acid with sugar and make a drinkable wine out of it.

Learning to make good sweet wine by making good dry wine

I wrote about how to rescue bad wine with sugar on Monday, and the reason this works is also the reason I usually make my wines dry. That might seem strange; if sugar can save bad wines, why can’t it improve any wine? Used correctly, it probably can. Sweet things taste good to all of us, that’s just human physiology. But sugar can mask faults in a wine, and that’s why I stay away from it while I’m learning and experimenting. I need to be able to see the problems in order to fix them. When I understand what I’m doing with a particular wine well enough to make a good one consistently, then I’ll think about making a sweet or off-dry wine.

Primary Fermenters: What size do you need?

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I’m excited about making red wine from grapes this year. It will be my first red, and I needed some new equipment. My largest fermenter has a ten gallon capacity, which is enough for five or six gallons of white wine, but too small for five gallons of red wine. Red wine is fermented on the skins, so you have a larger volume of must than for the same amount of white wine. All that skin and pulp gets forced to the surface, by CO2, forming a “cap.” So the fermenter has to be bigger than the amount of finished wine, to handle the skin and pulp and to contain the cap. How much bigger? A good rule of thumb is that every 5 lb of grapes require 1 gallon of capacity (0.6 kg/liter). For 100 lb (45.5 kg) of grapes, then, I’ll need a 20 gallon (75 liter) fermenter. My local homebrew shop carries 24 gallon (90 liter) fermenters. It’s ok to have a little more room than you need, but it’s a little messy if you’re short so I bought one. All I need now are some grapes!

Rescuing A Bad Wine On Short Notice

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When bad wine happens to good dinners

You’ve doted over the yeast, you’ve clarified and stabilized your wine, you’ve set it aside to age, and now you pop the cork. It looks great – nice and clear with great legs (we’re still talking about the wine) as you swirl it around in your glass. Maybe you can’t identify all the notes, floral? citrus?, but it smells wonderful. Next you take a sip, it’s only been a moment but it seems you’ve been anticipating it for hours, and … yuck! It can’t be. All that time and effort to make (or all that money to buy) a wine that can’t stand up to 2-buck Chuck?

So you take another sip. Well given some more aging, that bitterness might soften. And that tartness will mellow out. And while we’re at it, maybe that … that bizarre flavor will go away too. Wines that age well are often unpalatable when young, so it just might. I’ve seen huge changes, usually for the better, in the course of a year. But what do you do right now? You’ve just sat down to dinner and you’ve got this open bottle of wild plum (at least you’re hoping that fruit you picked were wild plums) wine in front of you.

Is there any way to save a bad wine?

Before you pour the bottle down the drain, and grab another you might try aerating and/or sweetening. You’ve heard that some wines need to breath? I remember chatting with a gentleman at a wine tasting who tames ruffian wines by putting them through the blender. I didn’t do that when my 2006 Apple wine proved too harsh, but a little sugar did wonders for it. I started out by dissolving 0.5 tsp sugar in a wine glass. Marsha and I noticed an immediate improvement, but we still weren’t happy with it. It turns out that 1 tsp per glass was about right. It saved the wine and it saved the dinner.

I’m not going to tell you it works every time, but it’s worth a try.

I Started Harvesting Grapes

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Dark purple grapes, still on stems, set inside a bowl.

The incursion into my bonsai vineyard on Wednesday knocked some grapes to the ground. I gathered these up, ate some, discarded some, and froze the rest. This was the official, if unintentional, start to my grape harvest and it totaled 3 oz (100 g) of Leon Millot. At that point, I decided to bring in the Siegerrebe and the Price. They’re both early ripeners and they seemed ripe when I tasted them. I hand destemmed, lightly washed and froze the grapes. So in addition to my Leon, I’ve got:

11.5 oz (375 g) of Siegerrebe from 1 vine
17 oz (500 g) of Price from 2 vines (I have three, but one didn’t bear this year)

After harvesting three of the eight vines that will bear this year, I have 9.5 oz (290 g) per vine. If that’s the yield I get for the Leon Millot and the Pinot Noir, then I’ll get 4.75 lb (2.3 kg) total this year. Um, that’s a bit less than the 20 lb (9 kg) I wanted!

Critters In The Vineyard!

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Bird netting saved most of the grapes

Marsha was frantic and ran to wake me up this morning. I was still groggy, so it took me a while to figure out that all the grape vines had been knocked down. We didn’t see what happened. Nobody and nothing was about. I think it was an animal, probably a raccoon though. I have bird netting over the vines, and that did two things – one good and one bad. The good thing was protecting most of the grapes. Whatever it was only got two small clusters. The bad thing was binding all the vines to each other, so that when one was knocked down, they all went down.

Pinot Noir cluster on 9/19/07. Black bird netting is clearly visible in front of the grapes.

As you can see in the above photo of a Pinot Noir cluster behind it’s protective bird netting, order was restored. I remember how surprised I was at just how many different kinds of bird netting there is but, as with most things, you can keep the birds out on a budget or opt for a higher end product. I opted for the affordable option.

Planning for the future: Bird netting on a frame and a temporary greenhouse?

One improvement I could make would be to string the netting on some sort of external frame, rather than draping it over the vines an I do now. As birds, raccoons, and other small animals try to get at my grapes, they would jostle the frame instead of the vines. That would make the vines much less likely to tip over. I’ve thought about building such a frame before; I could also hang plastic sheeting on it, turning it into an impromptu greenhouse, in early spring and late fall. That would extend the growing season a bit, and might allow me to experiment with grapes need a warmer climate.

Harvest time is almost here, in fact I may make a point of speeding up the harvest for the earlier varietals, and after that I’ll have all winter to think and plan.

Buying Grapes To Make Wine

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White wines are easy but some reds are worth it

I ordered wine grapes yesterday – 100 lb (about 45.5 kg) of Chardonnay and 100 lb of Merlot. That should yield about 5 gallons (19 liters), each, of finished wine. This will be the third time I’ve ordered wine grapes from my local homebrew shop, but the first time I’ve ordered red wine grapes from them. That’s because I’m relying on them to crush and press for me. Since I’ll be pressing the red grapes after they’ve fermented for a few days, I’ll have to load up the fermenter, all 100 lb of it, and haul it back to the homebrew shop to have it pressed. This two step process makes red wine more of a hassle than white, but this year I decided that the high-maintenance red was worth it.

Merlot: Red wine with a home state connection

There were several other choices of red wine grapes, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Lemberger, and Syrah. I chose Merlot because it’s become associated with Washington state in a way the others haven’t. Just as Oregon is becoming known for it’s Pinot Noir, Washington is making a name for itself with Merlot. What other grape would a Washington Winemaker choose for his first red?

Chardonnay: A white wine grape that grows in the Puget Sound AVA

As much as I’ve been taken in by the promise and allure of a good Merlot this year, I couldn’t bring myself to halt my affair with white wines. They’re easier, cheaper, and terrific when young. Don’t be fooled, though, a well made white can age gracefully into a sophisticated and elegant wine. I could have chosen many different white wine grapes too. I passed up Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, and Gewürztraminer for Chardonnay. I’ve made Sauvignon Blanc twice before and loved it, and I’m curious about blending it with Semillon. Gewürztraminer is a parent of Siegerrebe, which I grow in my bonsai vineyard, so I’d like to try that one day. I chose Chardonnay because it is grown commercially in the Puget Sound region, and I intend to grow it myself.

Merlot, and Chardonnay – the choices are made and the grapes have been ordered. Now all I have to do is wait.

Join The Club!

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I don’t know too many winemakers personally, so most of my interaction with other people, who share my interest, is online. I’ve thought about joining a club every so often, but never pursued it. Well, I was at the Puyallup Fair the other day, and I ran into a wonderful lady named Peggy. She was running a booth for the Puget Sound Amateur Wine and Beermaking Club. They put on the Puyallup Fair wine and beermaking competitions, arrange bulk purchases of wine grapes, and host events like wine tours and a holiday party. Maybe they don’t get points for coming up with a catchy name that distills down to a clever acronym. Mingling with my fellow winemakers sounds pretty good, though, and I think I’ll drop in on them.

Colony Collapse Disorder: A clue

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I last wrote about Colony Collapse Disorder back in May. That’s when I made the case that CCD would not squeeze honey supplies too much and cause a large price run up. With honey prices up about 10% since then, I think my analysis was about right. I’m still anxious to learn about the impact on colonies this year, but I haven’t seen any good data on that. In fact, I hadn’t seen much in the way of new information at all until a few days ago.

Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus linked Colony Collapse Disorder

The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health announced a study linking CCD to Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. I haven’t found a link to the study itself, which is published in the journal Science, but ScienceDaily has published a summary. The authors of the study claim that the presence of IAPV predicts CCD in a colony with 96% accuracy. In other words, if someone selected a honey bee colony in the US and all they told you about it was whether or not it had IAPV, not how big it was, where it was, what kinds of bees they were, you could tell them if it had collapsed or not. If you did this 1000 times and had average luck, you’d be right 960 times.

But we don’t know if it actually causes CCD

That kind of accuracy is pretty amazing and makes IAPV a “significant marker” for CCD, but it doesn’t mean that it causes CCD. It might even be the other way around; CCD weakens a colony that was otherwise able to fend off IAPV, allowing the virus to infect the colony. Or something else causes both CCD and facilitates an IAPV infection.

Did IAPV come from Australia?

The study also fingered Australia as a possible source of IAPV because they found IAPV in Australian honeybees and live bee imports from Australia began close to the time that beekeepers started reporting CCD. It’s possible, but this strikes me as the weakest part of the study, and not just because we don’t really know if IAPV causes CCD. Finding IAPV in Australian bees isn’t the same thing as establishing that Australia was the source. Do we know for sure that the US was free of IAPV? Was Australia the only source of live bee imports that might have carried IAPV? To my knowledge, no and no.

Where do we go from here?

The next step for these researchers is to try and cause CCD. They’ll do this by introducing IAPV, by itself and in combination with other things that stress honeybees, into healthy colonies. The thinking is that if IAPV is the culprit, it’s not acting alone. One possible accomplice is the varroa mite, which already plagues honeybees. It’s known to suppress bees’ immune systems, so it could pave the way for IAPV to do it’s dirty work. If they can reliably cause CCD in this way, then IAPV could graduate from “significant marker” to “cause”. If not, well science has a lot more red herrings and blind alleys than it has breakthroughs. So we take what we learn from this, add it to what we already know, and keep moving forward.

Update 3/9/08: Beekeepers have staying power

The USDA’s 2007 honey report indicates that the number of producing honeybee colonies rose in 2007 by 2%. This is encouraging news and shows that beekeepers have been able to make up their losses from CCD for the second year in a row. Read more here.

Update 3/9/2009: Honeybees hang in there for another year

The 2008 Honey Report indicated that managed colonies in the US fell by only 6%. Honey production and per colony yield rose. It’s looking more and more like Colony Collapse Disorder is not a catastrophe.

Restarting a stuck fermentation

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Don’t panic!

It happens. Sometimes, after a promising start full of froth and vigor, the yeast tap out and leave a partially fermented must/wine. It’s not drinkable and you certainly shouldn’t bottle it, but it’s also vulnerable to spoilage. So how do you get the yeast going again? I’ll explain how I do it, and use my oregano wine as an example.

Find out, and correct, the problem

It’s not always apparent what went wrong, but it’s worth the effort to try and find out. If there is some underlying problem that is inhibiting the yeast, then just adding more yeast, even a vigorous starter, won’t help. This is where good measurements and careful note-taking pay off. Nobody ever plans for things to go wrong, and that’s why good habits should become habits. My oregano wine suffered from a pH problem, and that brought fermentation to a halt. I suspected the pH after reviewing my notes, and confirmed it with a measurement.

Other potential problems that you might consider are temperature, preservative in store bought juice, nutrient deficiency, or lack of oxygen. Review your notes, take measurements, and do your best to discover why your yeast stuck.

The yeast began fermenting again, albeit very slowly, after I corrected the problem. It probably would have fermented out, eventually, if I had left it alone. A long slow fermentation like that is risky, however, so I decided to treat it as though it were stuck and hurry things up a bit.

Gradually add the stuck wine to a vigorous starter

After fixing the underlying problem, you should make a starter. This builds up a large population of actively growing yeast. Add some of the stuck wine to the starter. I like to double the volume every four hours or so, and since my starter was about a cup, I added a cup of wine to it. Four hours later: two more cups. Four hours after that would have been well into the wee hours, so with about a quart (close to a liter) of fermenting wine, I went to bed. In the morning I added another quart.

Nutrient: Not too much, not too little

Without enough nutrient, the new yeast may have trouble growing and fermenting the wine. If there’s more than the yeast can consume, some nutrient will remain in the fermented wine. That can cause off flavors all by itself, and it can also support spoilage organisms. So there’s no way I can tell you how much, if any, nutrient to add at this stage. The best way to decide is to measure the available nitrogen in the must, but it’s pretty unusual for home wine makers to run such an involved test.

If you haven’t got a chemist and a state of the art lab handy, gather up all the information you have about how much nutrient was in the must, how much you added, and how much yeast activity there was. Did I mention the part about good notes? If you started with a lot of nutrient and the yeast didn’t get very far, then you shouldn’t add much (or any) nutrient. If, for whatever reason, you’re starting nutrient level was low then you should add some. I realize that “a lot”, “much”, “low”, and “some” are a little vague, but the only way to get precise answers is with that chemist and the state of the art lab that we haven’t got.

My Oregano Wine recipe called for 1 tsp/Gallon of diammonium phosphate, which isn’t a lot. Since the must was basically a sugared oregano tea, it had virtually no nutrient except for what I added. So I decided to add another tsp of DAP along with the yeast starter.

I’d like to say that you won’t have to deal with stuck fermentations, but if you make wine regularly you’ll probably have to face an unmoving hydrometer sooner or later. Your best bet is to start dealing with it before it happens with good procedures and meticulous note taking. If you do that and use your head, you’ll have a good shot at saving your wine.