CRUSH 2001 or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well hello there. My it’s been a long, long time. How am doin‘? I guess I’m doin’ fine. Having just completed our 2001 crush I can honestly say that I feel like Willie Nelson looks. As many of you know, this is our first year of conducting the entire crush, wire to wire, at our winery. This meant ordering six new tanks, a glycol chiller, a de-stemmer/crusher, a press, a receiving hopper and having a cement crush pad designed and poured to house all this stuff. In standard how-come-it-always-happens-to-me fashion, the equipment came on time, the crush pad was late and the grapes were early. We held the equipment deliveries off until August 31 then put everything on barely dry cement just in time to crush our first lot of Sangiovese (which rocks by the way). If you think we were a tad stressed out, you’d be right.

Thanks to the early harvest, we quickly realized why we went to all of the trouble and expense to furnish our own crush facility. It’s all about control, baby. First with harvesting grapes, then in winemaking. And though I’ve spent most of my life without it, my wife says control is good. I have sooo much to learn.

My Dad turned what could have been an impossible harvest into a well managed effort. In addition to the 84 tons sold to us, Dad sold grapes to 14 other wineries. This could have seriously messed up our ability to pick what grapes we wanted, when we wanted them. Fortunately, Dad & Linda have beefed up their vineyard staff enough such that their five-man crew picked all of the grapes for our winery. In fact, Dad’s crew harvested most vineyards in sections for us, picking only what was ripe on two or sometimes three separate days. This dissecting of the vineyard is difficult for a grower. If we had suggested it to any other grower, we would have gotten the same disgusting look you get from the produce department guy when you ask him to go in back to see if he has any bigger, nicer looking Romaine.

The grapes arrived at the winery, as clean as could be, and we finally got the chance to play with our new toys. Now, as Dusty Baker would say, we needed to put our grapes in a position to succeed. Having our own facility enabled us to keep each separately picked lot separate throughout fermentation and aging. We gave each lot a 4 to 6 day pre-fermentation cold soak (good for color and nice tannins) and the usual twice daily punch downs or pump-overs during fermentation. Some of our Syrah lots got the more intense fermentation aeration, delestages. Delestages is French for "drain and return" unless you ask our new friend Sebastién, who will tell you the real translation is "pain in the ass." While these techniques are by no means revolutionary, we were not always able to use them as a custom crush client at another facility. None of this added control matters without good people. This year we were fortunate to have Sébastien Pochan, former winemaker at Christopher Creek and James MacPhail, formerly of Quivira, controlling our crush.  Sébastien has not only taught James and I a thing or two about winemaking, but he shares my interest in the wines from the Rhone and Provence. These two guys demonstrated a considerable amount of patience with me during the entire ordeal, which couldn’t possibly have been easy -- just ask my editor.

Now that everything is in barrel and resting quietly to the sounds of Keith Jarrett or Charlie Hunter (its important to serenade wine in barrels) my life can resume a measure of normalcy. But if I hear another comment about the glamorous life in the wine business or how you make a small fortune with your own winery...I swear I’m gonna snap.

Almost everything about this wine goes against my nature. It’s a flamboyant, international style (meaning copious amounts of fruit and oak) we have come to associate with Super-Tuscan wines. The ’99 Sangiovese had such great depth, color and structure, we wanted to see if it would stand up to the mega-barrique aging used to make highly rated Super Tuscans. This portion of the ‘99 Sangiovese was aged in two new French oak barrels for 11 months then racked into never before used new French Oak barrels for two more months (cleverly referred to as 200% new oak aging by some Burgundian producers.) The very thought appalled me, but it was worth finding out. Well, I don’t know if it was the extra time in oak or the type of barrels, but Dad and I were amazed when we opened our first bottle. The fruit refused to be suffocated by oak, rather it took it in stride. So for all of my claims of appreciating subtlety in wine, alas, I’m a sucker for showy wines, too.

Unfortunately, we only made 42 cases of this wine. In an effort to be fair, we’re limiting purchases to two bottles per mailing list customer. And if you miss out, don’t worry, the 2000 Sangiovese will be available by early Spring of 2002.

Ichiban Unti!

A friend of mine returned from a trip to Japan to inform me (with glee) that Unti means something similar to "shit" in Japanese.* This, of course, prompted my wife to add (with glee) "It means that here, too." Our Japan importer admits it is quite a conversation piece when presenting the wine to restaurant buyers. It isn’t like we hide the name in small type on our label.

My Dad tells us that Unti means "anointed" or "descended from royalty" in Italian. Unfortunately, anyone else who speaks Italian says it really translates more closely to "greasy" or "oily". Again, the "It means that here, too," comment from the still gleeful wife.

*Our apologies to families with kids who will find this laying on the kitchen table and harass you for a week about getting letters with swear words in them. Explain to your children that those Unti people are just being good reporters in giving us the unvarnished truth.

The 2001 vintage is shaping up to be much better than I thought it would be. After a warm spring, when we were suffering through several summer heat waves, I kept looking toward the sky shaking my fist and saying God Heck! (a little saying I learned from my four-year old) thinking that an early harvest would mean insufficient hang time and less developed flavors. While our grapes were high in sugar by mid-August, we didn’t panic and waited until the flavors caught up sometime in mid-September. Easier said than done when your neighbors are frantically harvesting and you are pacing wondering if they know something you don‘t. Fortunately, we had ideal harvest conditions (moderate, dry days and very cool evenings) which allowed us to gamble. And lo and behold, almost everything we have in the house from 2001 is big, dark, full, rich, juicy, hedonistic, a tour de force, must see TV, don‘t leave home without it…. Clearly the best vintage of the new millennium!

We have several new varietals and different clones this year thanks to some entrepreneurial planting three years ago by my Dad. We have Grenache Noir and Mouvedre with a little dry Rose from each; a Primitivo clone of Zinfandel; Dolcetto; three new clones of Syrah; and enough Petite Sirah to bottle some separately which should satisfy you kooks who love the stuff. (Who wouldn’t want to walk around all day with black teeth?) All tolled there are 23 separate lots of wine in our crowded little winery and we’re not sure what to do with it all. Most likely we’ll make a southern Rhone blend, and potentially up to four different Syrahs. Perhaps some of the new Italian varietals may go into their own blend– a SuperCalifornialisticTuscanAlladocious. We didn’t intend to become one of those wineries with way too many small production wines, but it appears we may be on our way. We promise not to name any of them after our daughters, dogs or anything in Latin.

Look at the website after the first of the year and I’ll write up some more particulars on each wine and what we might do with it. But until then, I have to detox from harvest and focus on the important things in life, like what Champagne to order for the holidays or whether the A’s will sign Jason Giambi.

4 2 0 2   D r y   C r e e k   R o a d  -  H e a l d s b u r g  C A  9 5 4 4 8          -         t e l  7 0 7 -  4 3 3 - 5 5 9 0  /  f a x   7 0 7  -  4 3 3 - 5 5 9 1

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