Sonoma Wines!

Sonoma County, California Oct. 11-14, 2016

Learning to pick California wines …

I drink French wines. Having lived in France the better part of a year, I can read a French label and know what I’m getting pretty well. The system is well developed, well controlled, and reliable.

I can’t read a wine label from California. There are tens of thousands of wineries and the labels are all marketing. My attempts to select California wines have resulted in far more failures than successes. So driving down Rt. 1 in California I realized I was in Sonoma County and took a 5 day detour touring wineries, tasting wines, and talking to everyone I met. In the end, I joined two wine clubs and bought 10 bottles of wine. I’m not sure any will make it home! But now I have an idea of what to buy so I can re-stock as desired.

On the chance that some of you are old enough and interested enough, here’s what I found out. (Warning – this is a very long post. Maybe even 2 posts if I start to confuse myself!)

Sonoma is Wine Country

They announce it along almost every road.

The vineyards dot every roadside.

Tasting rooms are everywhere – but bring money. $10 – $25 for a tasting session, applied to a purchase IF you join their club or buy 2 or 3 bottles on the spot!

It gets crazy.

And they are very, very good at marketing!

Still, people arrive in droves.

Organic? Estate?

Certified?

And a lot of bragging!

So I started with a little vocabulary. In France, Chateau wines must be grown and processed in the immediate land around the chateau. In California, Estate wines can be grown miles away as long as the selling winery owns the remote vines. You can get some wild blends that way.

Wineries generally take organic, sustainable and other terms pretty seriously both as the grapes are grown and when the terms are incorporated into the marketing. I never did sort through all the words but saw many very significant practices of good growing techniques. I’ll point some of them out in my pictures.

Hand selected is simply marketing. In America, every good winery hand picks the grapes.

Every good winery dumps the grapes on a conveyor belt and removes over-ripe, under-ripe, and damaged grapes.

The words old vines on the label does mean something. Vines planted before about 1970 were done the old way – they were not trellised but were individual plants “head pruned” like the vines above. These are probably about 30-40 years old.

The vines above are said to be 70 to 80 years old! They produce the finest grapes. But head pruned vines are expensive. The grapes on the top of the vine get too much sun – they look like raisins and spoil the wine. To avoid wasting plant energy on these worthless grapes, workers are sent out very early in the season to pick the grapes and throw them on the ground! Sometimes another picking is done to remove grapes on the bottom of the vine because they won’t get enough sun to ripen in time. Only the middle grapes are picked and used. Thus many grapes are wasted and a lot of labor must be used to get only the best grapes.

In the 70’s and 80’s, in New York where the grapes were harvested for jelly and juice the accountants complained. So grape trellises methods were developed and refined. All modern production is done this way. Here is a field prepared for new grape vines.

This is a science …

The winery decides on a root stock that is hardy and resistant to soil-based disease and insects. The winery chooses a grape varietal that will produce the specific grape flavor and is well-adapted to the soil and the microclimate of the wine fields. This order is placed and a scientific/research/production facility grafts the varietal and the root. These are grown inside and then shipped to the winery for planting. The above vine is about a year old.

Here is a newly planted field. Note the drip irrigation system in the previous two pictures.

Here field workers work to train the vines onto the trellises properly.

After a year, two lower branches are trained onto the first wire.

By the second year, four shoots on each side are trained to rise to the second wire. By the third year, some grapes are produced. Many of the best vineyards won’t use those grapes.

Here are mature vines with nice grapes.

The knot is the graft site.

So good vines,

give good grapes. Note the uniform height and shading of the grape bunches.

Thus all grapes receive uniform amounts of sunlight. They can be picked quickly and efficiently. By the way, these workers are paid by the hour not by weight because the workers do a quick initial sort in the field. Paid by weight, the workers include more lower quality grapes – which must be removed during the conveyor inspection & selection.

Again, note the efficiency of the entire system. If you look carefully, you can see a bunch of grapes next to the pockets of the brown pants, just above the knee, as it is dropped into the tray.

The grapes are delivered to the waiting tractor

and pulled to the winery and poured onto the conveyor shown earlier.

This machine separates the stems and gently mashes the grapes just prior to fermentation.

Stainless steel vats like these are used for fermentation! They generally have open tops so the mast can be stirred and grape skins that rise to form a cap can broken and mixed into the wine.

Throughout these processes air is the enemy. Oxidation introduces unwanted tastes. All processes move the wines through hoses that prevent air from reaching the wine.

Part two …

After fermentation, the clear wine is drawn off – many times into more stainless tanks. The remaining liquid-filled skins are gently pressed to capture more wine. This wine from pressing is often mixed into the original clear wine – but in a very judicious manner to maintain quality. Wine from other grapes can be blended to provide the tastes the vintner desires. Once blended, the wines may be transferred into oak barrels.

The barrels are stacked in fours and bar coded.

From then on barrels are continually moved!

Inside the winery

Now lets go inside the winery. The heart of the processing now proceeds in stacks and stacks and stacks of barrels!

Stainless tanks are used for wines that are still fermenting.

Initially, the wines off-gases carbon dioxide which must be released without letting air in. This simple bung does the job.

Later, a sealing bung is used. Over the next months and years, that bung will be removed and replaced over and over and over again.

Stacks of barrels are moved to a conveyor.

These barrels will be unstacked on the conveyor, moved past the workstation, then restacked and returned to the proper location.

At the processing station the wine may be gently stirred to break up any cap, or additional wine added to top off the barrel to prevent any airspace from forming above the wine.

An earthquake two years ago showed that the barrel stacks were unstable. Luckily the quake occurred at 3:00am so no one was killed as the stacks collapsed. Now many wineries are re-engineering the stacks. Here the structure for the new stacks is built so that the transition can take place soon.