We’ll be posting a piece on the CB blog (italltastesthesametome.com) tomorrow morning that documents our carbonic maceration winemaking experiment. It was fun, and since it was my first try at making wine, a rather surprising one. I’ve been thinking since about what I learned from the project – or at least had powerfully reinforced. Here are my three big (as we say today) takeaways . . .
When you make wine you worry a lot. I kept the carboy by my desk for the first week on the off chance it might start smoking or maybe actually combust. It did neither, and when I felt a little more secure about it I brought it into the wine shop. I did this less out of a desire to put it on display as to put it into a place where it could draw inspiration from the wine on our shelves. “All these fabulous wines started out as grapes just like you,” I furtively whispered. “You can do this.” But I wasn’t really sure. After Maureen’s very capable crush, I worried that the yeast wouldn’t start up; then fretted it wouldn’t keep going. I had bacteria anxiety. Then there was the mother of all fears: it would taste off, weird, not nice enough to drink. There wasn’t a lot at stake in this project, so I can hardly imagine the level of anxiety experienced by someone doing this for a living. It must be nerve racking at times.
Wine in the making is wine on the move. Once fermentation was well underway, I dithered over whether to let it go to dryness or stop it with a little RS still in the bottle. The fact is that once the process gets started it moves with some rapidity and decisions have to be made. In this environment, refraining from deciding is also deciding. I had the feeling that the wine would be a little more charming with a trace of RS and lower alcohol, but feared that leaving an unfiltered wine in possession of the power for additional fermentation was a dangerous idea. While I mulled this over the wine just kept on going. Before long the question was moot; while I stood still, the wine moved on. Clearly it had leadership abilities.
It’s not much harder than cooking. Really. The only piece of specialized equipment involved in this was the carboy, graciously lent by Turtle Creek’s Kip Kumler. It did take three weeks, which is generally more time than you want to spend making supper, but honestly, anybody could do this. So why hasn’t home winemaking taken hold? I see no reason why New Englanders couldn’t, assuming a supply of decent grapes, make something AT LEAST of a quality comparable to, say, the Montemelino currently on our shelves. I have to believe we’ll see it.
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My series on the 2013 vintage at three New England wineries got started this week. The first installment is posted here. I hope you’ll look it over. One of the winemakers working with me on this is Deidre Heekin of La garagista in Barnard, Vt. When I asked her for a few words on her winemaking philosophy, she threw in the following interesting story at no extra charge. (Note the reference to nerves):
One of my mentors, Bruno de Conciliis of Campania, gave me the assignment of doing everything the old-fashioned way for my first vintage in 2010. He said, do it all by hands and feets, nothing added. Do it the way the old Italian farmers did/do it. Then, if you want to make wine differently than that, you can, but it’s important to know the basic rules before you break them. just like in anything. So that‘s what I did that first year: we hand harvested, hand detemmed, crushed by feet, used no sulphite except at bottling.
I did use some cultivated yeast my first two years as I was concerned with two things: we also make cider, and I wasn’t sure if the wild yeasts from the apples (our cider is fermented on only native yeast) would play havoc with the wine, and not all of my fruit is from our parcel and I didn’t have complete control over the farming of bought fruit (that we harvested ourselves, but I wasn’t involved throughout the season with the cultivation plan–however, I am now…).
For my first “commercial” vintage, I was nervous, I wanted to be sure everything worked out okay. We’re not like France, or Germany, or Italy here, there aren’t all these beautiful wild yeasts floating around wine making areas because we’ve been making wine for thousands of years here. So I would let the wines begin to ferment on their own, then add a neutralcultivated yeast to help proliferate the good yeast colonies I had going. I also did test batches with only native wild yeast to monitor what was happening in the yeast department. If you have a healthy vineyard, you have healthy yeast. By my third vintage, we relied on only native wild yeast.
I love making wine in this hands-on, simple way, and even though we have plans to grow our size, I want to maintain as much of this small scale style of work in the cellar as possible.
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If you haven’t yet read enough about pruning, you might want to look at this piece on Le Champion Tailleur du Monde, Michel Duclos. His approach is so sensible and so clear you’ll wish you could apply it to everything in your life.
Bet you didn’t know there was such a thing as World Champion of Pruning . . .
That’s it for now.
-stephen