Blog

Last year on the Wine Spectator Forum and Wine Library Forum a young college student put up several postings looking for an internship in a winery in California. Many posters recommended that he contact me, which he eventually did.

We set him up for several weeks working in the vineyards, helping at events and cleaning in the winery. He left having learned a lot and with a new appreciation for what it takes to make wine.

This Winter an email went out to the local grape growers group about another young college student looking for an internship. I responded and set up ‘Intern v 2.0’. We liked having an intern last year, so I thought we’d give it a try again. We are definitely leaning towards candidate who are overqualified to be farm workers.

Rajiv, last years intern, is now a senior at Princeton majoring in Chemical Engineering. Rachel, this years intern just graduated with honors from the University of Georgia with a degree in Micro Biology and she starts Medical School in the Fall.

I’ve added a link to follow Rachel’s blog as she’s here in California and will be posting updates at:

http://tv.winelibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27124

We had posted before about an event this weekend:

http://stefaniawine.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-local-events.html

We will be pouring our latest wines and pairing them with dishes we cook especially to match the wines.

The evening starts with light snacks, cheeses, caviar and some bubbly.

The first course will be a spring salad with fresh berries, feta cheese and candied walnuts, paired with our 2007 Pinot Noir. Next up will be a soup of fresh mushrooms, Manchego cheese and wild flowers paired with our 2007 Syrah.

The main course will be bison rib eye steaks done kabob style with spring veggies and truffled mac and cheese. There will be two dipping sauces, a cherry reduction and a mint sauce to pair with our two Cabernet’s; Uvas Creak Vineyard and Santa Cruz Mountains. We will wrap up with a selection of pies and coffee.

Saturday night is sold out already but there are four seats left for Sunday. Let us know if you’d like to attend.

Both pouring events this weekend went well.

Traffic on Saturday to Santa Cruz wasn’t even too bad and we arrived early enough to have a bite to eat and a Margarita.

Sunday we visited the Crimson Clover vineyard. We wanted to check on how the vines are doing and the progress the owners are making.

We’re going to ask them to turn on the water for a bit this week to help some vines in the upper part of the vineyard. There are also some active gophers they’ll need to deal with. Other than that things looked really good and it looks like there will be a healthy yield this year.

The rows look a little shabby at this time of year. The vines aren’t tucked up into the wires until after they flower. When that happens the base of the shoot hardens off and it’s ok to move and bend the shoot. If you try to do that now the shoot will break. By the time summer touring season arrives though the vines will be tucked up nice and neat.

Here you can see the tiny clusters and a few just starting to flower. One thing I noted yesterday is that the little valley Crimson Clover is in is much cooler than the surrounding area. The temperature dropped from 89 to 84 as we entered the valley and vineyard site.

That was about all we did outside yesterday. Temperatures peaked at 101 at our house and we mostly hid inside waiting on cooler weather the rest of this week.

We will be at VinoCruz tomorrow afternoon pouring 5 wines:

http://www.vinocruz.com/events.htm

Stop by and visit. It should be a good day to get to Santa Cruz and enjoy the weekend.

We only have one more public event planned for the summer so this is just about the last time we’ll be out pouring wine. We won’t be doing the Family Winemaker’s in San Francisco, and since we only have 7 bottles of Pinot Noir left, we can’t pour at Pinot Day’s either.

If you come by tells us if you like the new blog layout.

Results were posted yesterday on the CDP website. I passed all four tests I needed to take. The hardest was something called the QAL test which included questions about aircraft spraying of pesticides, requirements of pesticide dealers and about 120 other questions on things I’ll never have to deal with.

In fact there was just one question about grapes, and that was about spraying a chemical rated ‘Danger’ with a re-entry of seven days, from an airplane. I’d never use a ‘Danger’ chemical, anything with a seven day re-entry, or spray from an airplane, but I think I got that question right anyway.

This is the same license the huge pest control companies have, and after talking with a private instructor and the state office, I actually didn’t need that level of license. They both say I got bad advice from the local county office. Still, it’s not bad to have I suppose, just in case I would need to use it. I also passed the new test to use SO2 gas in the winery. Something else we don’t do, but again good to have just in case I need to at some point.

There are still a few follow up things I need to do and I’ll try and get those done today and tomorrow, but one more of government things behind us.

We got a pretty leisurely start to the day yesterday and didn’t leave the house until 10 AM. We made a few stops on the way to the winery and picked up sandwiches for lunch at Robert’s Market. We finally arrived at the winery at 11 AM.

We’re dog sitting this week so we had a special visitor. Jazzy was a little timid at first in the winery but she got comfortable pretty fast and even spent some time chasing Sophie in the vineyard.

The way we do racking is pretty straight forward. The wine is removed from barrel and transferred into a tank. The barrels are then cleaned and left to dry. Three rinsing is usually enough to get out all the gunk that has settled to the bottom of the barrel, but I do four just to be a little extra clean. Argon is then added to the tank to protect the wine from oxygen.

During this process Stefania takes readings on sulfur present in the wine and we make any additions that are needed. She takes two readings. First Total Sulfur tells us how many parts per million (ppm) are in the wine and then she takes Free Sulfur. Free Sulfur is really the key. Sulfur will bind to oxygen at a molecular level, and once it does that it is no longer ‘free’. Free Sulfur is what kills any bacteria, so the Free reading is really key. The amount of Free Sulfur needed to keep the wine free from bacteria is related to the wines pH. The higher the pH, the more Free Sulfur is needed.

Our wines are generally lower in pH 3.4-3.6, so they need less Free Sulfur than many California wines. The tricky part in the entire thing is you can’t add Free Sulfur. You can only added total sulfur. The process of mixing the sulfur and adding it to the wine will cause some sulfur to bind with Oxygen and no longer be free. It’s a little bit of a crap shoot to get the numbers right. It may take 20ppm of free sulfur to get 10ppm of Free Sulfur or it may take 15ppm. You just don’t know until you do it.

The other tricky thing with adding sulfur is that it tends to just sit in one spot. You can’t just trickle it in, or it won’t get through the entire wine. The way I do it is to do any additions about half way through the racking. That way the process of adding the other half of the wine will mix it, and the sulfur all together.

Free Sulfur and Total Sulfur will reduce over time as the molecules bind with oxygen, so the testing and additions have to be done fairly regularly to maintain a safe and bacteria free wine. Yesterday, all our sulfur reading were in a good range, and we actually did not add any additional sulfur.

I decided to let the wine settle for a few days. Some times we will go directly from the tank, back into the barrels. This time we’ll do a long racking. That will let the wine settle for a longer time and more of the gunk / lees can settle out. When we go back into barrel in a few days, the wine will be pretty clear of any cloudiness. This will allow us to do shorter rackings in the future and avoid the need to do any fining or filtering before bottling next year.

This sounds like a lot of work, but really most of the time is spent cleaning up the barrels, floor, tanks, hoses and pump. It’s probably 4 minutes of cleaning for every 1 minute of work. The picture below is a little blurry, but this was my view most of the day. Barrels on the cleaning rack.

We were able to take a nice break for a couple of hours and do some tasting for visitors. We finally wrapped up and headed home about 6:30 PM.

We did get all the wine loaded on the truck ok, and it’s now sitting safely in storage at California Wine Transport in San Jose. That’s time for a big sigh and finally letting the stress of bottling go.

Stefania spent yesterday cleaning up the garage and trying to recover from bottling. The garage gets pretty mucked up in the spring as we use it for storage of things like labels, corks, new vines coming in and the occasional decommissioned wine barrel. It’s all back to normal now.

I finally gave the blog page an update with a new template and matching color scheme. It was time for the green to go! I also added a link to our sign up page for our mailing list. You’ll see a networked blog link now from Facebook as well as information on adding us as a friend.

We didn’t do a ‘fan’ page for Stefania Wine. We’d rather think of everyone who buys wine from us as friends, not fans, so the link is to Paul’s page, which Stef mostly updates 🙂

Let us know what you think of the new look. Next on our list of things to update is our website, and that should be coming soon.

We’ve just finished. Everything except the scary part. Me loading $100,000 in wine on to a truck. That should happen in 30 minutes.

Stefania with a big smile as we finish up.

Jerry prepping the ‘red bucket’ to clean the hoses. First we run 5 gallons of water through the pump and houses to get all the red out. Then it’s cleaned with a citric acid and water mixture.

The last few cases coming off the line

We only needed a crew of three on the truck, this was a very efficient bottling truck.

Empty glass in place and a pallet waits for the final 30 cases or so.

The last bottle off the line. This is actually ‘waste’. We keep the first 2 cases on and last two off as unsalable items.

The sun breaking through on the vineyard. The fog will hang on the mountains in the back all day while the vineyard is in bright sun and that keeps them temperature on a day like today at 63 degrees.

Red wine rolling through the truck now.

Ingrid cleaning the tank.

And rows of now empty and clean barrels.

My view waiting for a pallet to be finished.

I loved Tetris as a kid, who would of thought it would become a crucial job skill? The area to work in is very small and pallets and boxes have to be stacked everywhere to make everything fit.

A full pallet being wrapped and getting ready for me to find a spot for it.

I’ve also got to keep the truck supplied with empty glass at the same time.

And manage on slopes and gravel.

Ingrid cleaning barrels. As soon as I’d get things arraigned outside, I’d run inside to move barrels around for Ingrid. More Tetris in a tight space.