Dover Canyon Winery

Bottling Montage: The 2009 March Bottling

Bottling day is very exciting.  Months and even years of preparation come together in a few short hours—the wines have finished primary and secondary fermentation, they've been racked, tasted and tested, the final blends and single vineyard choices have been made, the wines have been adjusted, lab-tested, and freshened with a little SO2.  Labels have been designed and ordered, glass bottles chosen and ordered, foil capsules chosen and ordered, corks tested for quality and ordered.  Large trucks have been pulling up to deliver our bottling supplies.  The generator needed to run the bottling line has been delivered and parked.  Everything is stacked in rows in the order in which they will need to be pulled.  The wines have been moved into tanks to make delivery to the bottling line fast and easy.  Hoses and equipment have been sanitized, and everything is in readiness. 

The night before our scheduled bottling date, the bottling service delivers the "truck"—the mini-factory that will bottle the wine.   A courageous driver backs the semi and trailer down our steep vineyard road and up to the wine barn.  Early the next morning, the line crew will show up before dawn to run water through the hoses and equipment, sterilize the line with hot water, and prime the fill bowl for the pump which will gently pull the wine into the bottles. 

Dan lifts pallets of glassware onto the back of the truck, delivers labels and foils to the side of the truck when needed, and switches hoses from tank to tank as the line segues from one release to another, in a tightly choreographed dance of attention and timing. 

After the crew leaves, there's cleanup to be done ... picking up the trash, washing the tanks, rinsing and putting away the equipment.  But in the quiet hours after the bottling line leaves, we also get to enjoy the deep satisfaction of opening a fully made wine—a wine that we have attended from conception to delivery.

Related articles:

A Rude Awakening

Bottling Day

Accuvin Wine Analysis for the Home Cellar

I recently ordered some Accuvin test strips to play with. These little strips test wine for pH, sugar, acidity, lactic acid, malic acid, and free SO2. They don’t display an exact number, but a color that is matched to a range of measurements. I tested some against wines from our production and they were reliably accurate. They’re designed for the home winemaking market, but I also recommend the pH, residual sugar, and acidity test kits to serious wine aficionados.

The Accuvin tests are fairly expensive. They range from $40 to $49 per 20-unit kit. This means it costs the user $2 to test for RS, $2 for acidity, and $2 for pH. So to test one wine sample for all three measurements costs $6. Still, if you are spending some serious cash on wine acquisitions, they are a useful tool for evaluating wines with an eye to cellar aging.

What is "balance" in a wine? Perhaps it is indefinable, and a point of balance different for each individual. Learning about the relationship between acidity, pH and sugar in a wine helps a serious taster learn exactly which ratios he/she gravitates toward and prefers. A good number of today’s heavily extracted, purple powerhouses have significant sugar (+/- 1.5%) in order to balance the high alcohols. A little sweetness and a high pH will give wines viscosity and softness to buffer the "hot mouthfeel" that would otherwise result from high alcohol. This results in a wine that is inky, seductive, and impressive at a young age and in mass tastings. But for anyone serious about cellaring their wine acquisitions, a cautious review of a wine’s pH and sugar is advisable.

Just Desserts: Serving Stickies for the Holidays

Dessert wines - Many people just pour them over high-quality vanilla bean ice cream with fresh berries or shaved dark chocolate atop. But a quality dessert wine is so much more than just a sweet pick-me-up or a syrup for frozen milch. During the holidays you should have a few bottles on hand.  Don't be shy about using them as after-dinner digestifs enjoyed in a tiny glass, as the basis for meat marinades and vinaigrettes, to splash into Spanish cava or champagne for a festive flair, and to accompany holiday desserts.  At the end of a meal, a complex, layered dessert wine is both dessert and digestif, particularly if you serve it with some crisp fruit and mellow cheeses. Some dessert wines, particularly whites, are mellow enough to be served with roasted quail and other savory treats. During the holidays, a good dessert wine makes an instant course for a quickly pulled together dinner, and can even be used as part of the preparation.

Some easy pairings for late harvest and port-style reds:

• Dates stuffed with cream cheese and topped with a raspberry
• Small puff pastry circlets topped with cream fraiche, berries, and shaved chocolate
• Sesame glazed walnuts
• Slices of pear and apple
• Savory cheeses—Gorgonzola, Stilton, Manchego

Quick pairings for white late harvest and dessert wines:

• White chocolate brownies
• Puff pastry cups with fresh peaches, crème fraiche and toasted almonds
• Baklava
• Fruit and cheese quiche
• Tapioca or pudding topped with fruit and crème fraiche

While most people instinctively pair a sweet with a sweet, the oils and sugar in chocolate and dessert dishes coat the palate and subdue the layered flavors of a great dessert wine. When I want the wine to star, I serve nuts, cheese, and savory bites.   

Try basting a quail with a dessert white or red while roasting, and prepare a long-grain rice stuffing with fruits that have been steeped in a cup of the wine—dark fruits for a red dessert wine, white fruits like apricots and blood oranges in white dessert wine. The savory elements of the fowl and rice are a great marriage with dessert wines. Look for dessert wines that are not too rich and pruney—they should have lifted acidity and clearly definable varietal flavors.

The Tannin Factor

Wine is such a mysterious beverage. We sniff it, quaff it, swizzle it, and then come up with all these wild descriptors: cassis, meadow, leather, mushroom. Where do all these elusive aromas and flavors come from? Partly from the grape, partly from aging in oak, (partly from our imaginations) and partly from tannin.

Tannins are a group of chemicals that occur in the bark of many trees, cinnamon is an example, and in fruits, including grapes. Tannins are also present in black tea, and cause the astringent, drying effect that you experience after several cups of strong tea. You'll also notice a dry, sandpapery effect in your mouth after eating a whole bunch of table grapes. The tannins in grapes are a woody substance in the skin and seeds.

The pulp of a grape is mostly juice, as you can see if you slice a grape open. This is why wine grapes are generally small and round. Table grapes seem to get larger, longer and more seedless every year (and in my opinion, a little more tasteless.) Wine grapes, unattended in rich soil, can also become quite large. I have seen bunches of zinfandel grapes as long as my forearm and as heavy as a small salmon. But this is exactly what winemakers do not want. Smaller grapes have a higher skin-to-juice ratio, resulting in wines with color, flavor and tannin.

Some grapes, like syrah, nebbiolo and cabernet sauvignon have naturally higher levels of tannin than other grapes. Winemaking styles also preserve or delete some of the tannins in wine.

Tannins, which are insignificant in white wines, quite strong in young reds, and softened in older red wines, have a drying effect on the palate. I've often encountered wine tasters who claim that a completely dry wine tastes "sweet" to them. What they are tasting, however, is a dry, fruity wine with very little of the drying astringency contributed by young tannins.

Pairing Wine and Food

Wines are generally paired with food around two criteria—weight and flavor. It sounds odd at first to think of wine as having weight, but wine does have a certain heft on the palate. Some of that heft is due to tannic structure—cabernets and syrahs, for instance, have plenty of tannin, while pinot noirs are generally lighter. A wine’s weight also depends on its alcohol content. Higher levels of alcohol give wine a thicker mouthfeel. Wines with a higher alcohol content cling to the glass more, having thicker legs, and considerably more weight on the palate. Swirled water, for instance, has no legs—but swirled brandy has drips like cake frosting.

To choose a wine for a particular dish or meal, I consider the weight of the food before anything else. If it’s light fare, such as heirloom tomatoes, light pasta dishes, salad, or pale meats, I would choose from a spectrum of wines that might include whites and light-bodied reds. If a dish involves red meat, heavy sauces, and comforting carbohydrates like mashed potatoes, I would gravitate toward heavier reds like cabernet, syrah, and zinfandel.

The second pairing criterion is flavor . . .

The Big Chill

When the weather is warm, we think nothing of chilling our white and rose' wines, but what about those reds?  How can we keep them at optimal serving temperature?

Chilling reduces the movement of volatile molecules in wine. In other words, it suppresses aroma and flavor temporarily. Also, the shock of a chilled beverage hitting the palate closes your senses to flavors. If you want a wine to show at it’s best, it should be about 50-52° when you serve it. If the bottle feels very cool to your palm, the temperature is perfect.

However, if it’s 80° outside and you take your bottle of fine red wine directly out to the table, it’s going to quickly become warm. Very warm. Therefore, it’s perfectly all right to chill wines slightly, both white and red, when you plan to dine outside in warm weather.

The Memory Garden

"How do you come up with all these aromas and flavors?" is a question I am frequently asked. 

Last fall, as I was barrel sampling the 2005 Alto Pomar--our grenache, syrah, and mourvedre blend from Alto Pomar Vineyard--a particular scent eluded me.  I knew I had encountered it before, but where?  I finally found it in the pantry of my "memory garden"--it was the yellow-ish green lace that is found on whole nutmeg cloves:  mace.

Based loosely on the concept of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, I have created a memory garden that I visit when seeking the scents and flavors in a wine.

First, I visit the berry patch, with its tidy trellises of marionberries, blackberries and raspberries, flanked by rows of strawberries (three kinds) and ending in a sawdust-covered mound of blueberry bushes.  In a neglected corner, there is a straggly gooseberry bush, and in another corner is a water feature--a tiny pond filled with cranberries.

Wine and Health

Ah, the pleasures of life. Vegetables harvested from the garden, fresh cooked rice, tenderly basted meats, an alluring bottle of wine, and the glowing faces of friends and family.

Drinking wine does not in itself equal good health any more than living on twinkies or caffeine. But in a balanced, healthy lifestyle, wine is an enjoyable accompaniment to excellent cooking and special occasions.

The Wine Institute conducted a study which now reports that not only is wine good for the heart, "it can also help prevent the harmful effects of bacteria and aid digestion." The study goes on to note that "red and white wine efficiently wipe out bacteria responsible for food poisoning, dysentery and diarrhea."

New studies continue to search for the reasons behind The French Paradox. Phenolic compounds in wine such as catechin and quercetin have cancer-blocking properties, according to the American Society for Enology and Viticulture, and wine also contains heart-healthy compounds such as reservatrol.

Sulfites ~ Nothing to Sneeze At

"Do your wines contain sulfites? My friend is very allergic and she'll go into shock if she drinks wine containing sulfites."

That’s enough to scare me silly. All I need is to have a gasping, cyanotic customer on the floor. "Well, uh," I stammer, "then perhaps she'd better not have any, just in case." And I pull the glass back.

He hangs on to the glass. "So your wines do have sulfites, then?"

Sulfites, I explain, are a natural fruit by-product, actually found on the dusty skin of grapes before they are washed. Winemakers are allowed to use sulfur dioxide as a natural disinfectant and preservative. Sulfites are a natural by-product of the fermentation process and a necessary ingredient if wine is to age properly because they retard oxidation and microbial growth.

Many people believe it's the sulfites that give them headaches when they drink red wine. Although this may in some cases be true, it could be the tannin content which creates a histamine reaction. Tannin, an aldehydic substance naturally found in grape skins and seeds, is also a natural preservative, and is found in greater quantity in red wine. (Remember Boris Karloff as "The Mummy," craving his daily dose of tanna leaves?)

Red wines are macerated and fermented "on their skins" to extract color, flavor and tannin from the pigment-rich skins. As wines age, the tannin molecules connect in long strings, a sort of decomposition in the bottle. Therefore, we wine geeks say the tannins are "softer," or "earthy" in an older wine. Young wines with fresh tannins can taste very astringent. Compare it to eating a whole bunch of red table grapes. In spite of the wonderful juice inside, grape skins and seeds will leave a dry, abraded feeling on your tongue. People who are sensitive to products like nuts, tea leaves and cinnamon bark will often be sensitive to the woody taste of tannin as well.

Tannins in Wine

Wine is such a mysterious beverage. Wine geeks will sniff it, quaff it, swizzle it, and then come up with all these wild descriptors: cassis, meadow, leather, mushroom. Where do all these elusive aromas and flavors come from? Partly from the grape, partly from aging in oak, (partly from our imaginations), and partly from tannin.

Tannins are a group of chemicals that occur in the bark of many trees, cinnamon as an example, and in fruits, including grapes. Tannins are also present in black tea, and cause the astringent, drying effect that you experience after several cups of strong tea. You'll also notice a dry, sandpapery effect in your mouth after eating a whole bunch of table grapes. The tannins in grapes are a woody substance in the skin and seeds.

The pulp of a grape is mostly juice, as you can see when you slice a grape open, and the pulp is generally white or pale pink in color. This is why wine grapes are generally small and round. Most of a grape's flavor, and all of the pigment, comes from the skin and the fibrous layer directly under the skin.