We’ve finally hit a small lull in the winery, so I thought I’d update you with what’s happened since our harvest party way back at the beginning of November.
We are slowly making progress in setting up our partnership with Sunset Cellars, which will have us featured in the Suisun Valley Co-Op tasting room. It also means we’ll be able to combine forces for bottling, which has a lot of advantages for a small operation like ours! We’re still aiming to bottle the 22 Zinfandel, the 23 Rose and the 23 Muscat in the spring. Once we can get the final details worked out with Sunset, we’ll be able to submit our labels to the government for approval, and we’ll be off to the races.
On the winemaking front, we’re in the final stages with our 22 Zinfandel – the oak is pretty dialed, and we’ve completed fining trials and fining, and are now just looking at some possible final blend tweaks. On the 2023 Muscat and the Rose, they are being a bit sluggish in getting to bed- the rose is still *slowly* fermenting its last few grams of sugar, and the Muscat is being a bit recalcitrant about finishing MLF (more on that in a bit) but they’re getting there. At this stage, it’s mostly a matter of ensuring they are macrobiotically stable enough to bottle (you want all fermentation to take place before you bottle, unless you’re making pet-nat!), but they are already *very* tasty.
This is a bit of a nerve wracking period in winemaking, right after most of fermentation is done but before the wine is ready to be “put to bed.” While the wine is actively fermenting, it is protected from a lot of mischief – say, from opportunistic spoilage organisms looking to turn your lovely perfect wine into vinegar, but as fermentation tails off, you enter a period where the wine is very vulnerable.
There are a lot of organisms eager to consume various nutrients in the wine, and a lot of winemaking is about trying to make sure that favored yeast and bacteria are given a leg up on the competition. A great number of wine flaws are a product of when unfavorable organisms win the race. A wine can be astoundingly wonderful on press day, but if the wrong yeast or bacteria take hold, you can end up with a wine that smells and tastes like nail polish remover (acetobacter), manure or wet bandaids (brettanomyces), sauerkraut (lactic bacteria), dirty socks (pediococcus). When fermentation is complete, and malolactic fermentation finishes, most of the nutrients have been used up, so the wine is a bit protected there, and you can stick it in the cellar, which is nice and cold, which a lot of spoilage organisms do not like. You can also throw some sulfur dioxide in there, which most of the bad bugs cannot tolerate at all. The reason the final stages of fermentation are so risky, though, is that your good bugs are also really sensitive to the cold, and hate sulfur dioxide, so until everything is finished, they must be monitored *very* closely.
For the experimental lot (i.e. the wines in the garage) they have safely made it to the bulk aging period. They’ve completed fermentation and MLF, they’ve been racked nice and clean, they’ve been given some sulfur dioxide to keep them safe over the coming months, and other than maybe a bit of fine tuning and an additional round of racking, the only thing left to do is bottle. So we have that to look forward to!
On a fun note, we had an absolute blast at Groundfloor San Francisco, where we hosted an educational wine tasting and made a lot of friends (including several new founder’s club members!). We are looking forward to hosting more events like that in the future.
Whew! That was a big update. Until next time!
