While on lunch, sitting under the coal black dark skies of an unusually cool September Sonoma night, a veteran lab tech took off his nicotine patch, cuffed his weathered beaten hands close to his face and lit a short filter-less Camel. Before he could fully exhale, he wrapped the same leathery hands around a perspiring can of Bud Light and exclaimed, “It takes a lot of shitty beer to make good wine.”

Ed pulled hard on his cigarette and regaled us young aspiring winemakers cum cellar rats on the intricacies of the business, but mostly lambasting past and present winemakers who were also his bosses. “It sounds very sexy”, he says of wine making. “If you don’t know any better, it is easy to romanticize”. We laugh and all nod in agreement, our necks soar and stringy from carrying hoses and gamma jets around the vineyard all day. “I mean you meet a girl at the bar and you tell her you work in the wine business and it sounds mysterious and interesting. And she asks where you work and being mysterious you reply, Sonoma. And you can tell from her smile and her unforgiving gaze that she is truly interested. And she wants to know what your work actually consists of, so you tell her that you run lab tests on wine, checking ph levels, inoculating yeast strains, measuring brix, and occasionally swirling the glass and sometimes swallowing but mostly spitting. And she smiles half wittingly as you say this. And you tell her you are a Sr. Lab Tech and of course being from Northern California herself, the girl has a friend or an ex or a neighbor who is … was a lab tech. And as her smile fades you know that she knows that you make around 50k a year.”

Ed lights another cigarette from the butt of his Camel and passes around the beers. “I should have stayed in pharmaceuticals.” The magic ceased to be magic. Ed confirmed what I had suspected to be truth. I already knew I would not go with the rest of the guys to work the 2010 crush in New Zealand. I did not know too much about Ed..that he worked more harvests than most people at the winery, that he had two kids, that he may or may not have been divorced once…twice, that he had a small place in Santa Rosa that he may own but probably rents. I liked Ed and I liked wine but I knew I did not want to become Ed. And no one plans to become Ed, but the more and more time I spend hanging around Sonoma, the more Ed’s I meet.

I looked down at my own hands, which were hard and dry and stained with juice, and felt glad I was holding a cold can of beer in one of them. I sat perched on top of the old wooden picnic table in silence taking in large breathes of Sonoma earth mixed with recycled Camel carbon. While I watched the bats fluttering around against the speckled mountainous backdrop, I thought hard about what they might look like in New Zealand.

My online dictionary defines “Inoculation” as: To introduce a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into (the body of a person or animal), especially to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease….

If we dig even deeper in the world of wine wonks, we find:

A winemaking technique of adding an active yeast culture or malolactic bacteria to juice, must, or wine. Winemakers often inoculate their must with known strains of reliable yeasts to activate the primary fermentation and achieve their desired results. Although malolactic fermentation will sometimes occur naturally, many winemakers prefer to manage this phase by inoculating with a properly prepared malolactic bacteria starter.

And so my first inoculation follows. Virtually all of the Pinot we have pressed is fermenting according to plan. However, one tank is mysteriously stuck…the sugar is high and the alcohol low…

Yesterday we took 50 gallons of the non fermenting pinot and mixed it with fifty gallons of beautiful malolactic bacteria from our estate Chardonnay. Yes, we just mixed Pinot with chardonnay. The malo from the chardonnay will work its magic and if all goes peachey will spur the fermentation in the pinot…once this culture begins, gets tested and passed via the lab folk, the 100 gallons will go back in to 3000 gallons of Pinot.

It was interesting mixing these two totally different varietals…We pulled the pinot first, then the Chard…and as the two mixed the fragrance was fruity, fresh, violet, and a tad vulgar…French in short. The blend, on the nose at least, was completely reminiscent of gamay noir, aka Beaujolais…

However, once this culture passes and gets put back into the Pinot, the taste provided from the chard ML will really be quite negligible….no gamay…

Macguyvering a Venturi & Heating Wine?

Today I made my way to the pinot tanks for pumpovers expecting the usual, only to be surprised yet again by the wine making team at CSJ. To speed up fermentation and/or get the juice to a desired temperature faster…we are using a glycol heater during pumpovers. First off, all of CSJ tanks are temperature controlled…as easy as going from 60-65 on a chilly fall morning…however this apparently doesn’t happen fast enough…thus heating the wine with glycol…yes I said heat.
To conceptualize, the setup looks something like this. Wine out of tank into cart, out of cart into glycol tubes (which is hooked up to a portable heater), out of glycol tubes into pump, juice out of sprinkler back into top of tank.

Now I am not a winemaker, nor a scientist, but I have taken a few chemistry and physics classes in my day…enough to know a sliver of thermodynamics…well I suppose probably less than a sliver, but enough to know that heat rises and the correct way to heat something is from the bottom. Pumping a few hundred gallons on top of 6000 gallons to warm it “faster” seems unnecessary…I guess this is where you could get into the whole art vs. science fiasco…

Needless to say, the juice was heated from 81 to 83 after the glycol heated pumpover. This 2 degree change could easily be attributed to the fermentation itself and the endothermic process of sugar turning to alcohol and water with heat being released. But you never know…
Another device used to help speed up fermentation is called a venturi. This is not to be mistaken with the newest oenophilic rage of using a venturi like glass pourer to superficially aerate wine…whats wrong with a good old fashioned decanter?

In all fairness, this consumer venturi acts in much the same way as the venturi we use during selected pumpovers.
The name venturi comes from a physics effect apt dubbed…you guessed it, “The Venturi effect”. This is basically a complicated equation to show the how gain in velocity, drop in pressure, and gain in energy, occur in a tube or cylinder..yeah yeah yeah…

In winemaking we use a venturi to hook up to the sprinkler in pumpovers. The juice comes through the hose, passes through the venturi, then into the sprinkler. The venturi adds oxygen to the juice and yeast thus speeding up fermentation. Quasi interesting…it was more fun trying to build one from materials laying around the winery…

In a massive effort to complete pumpovers, we had 5 teams knocking em down side be side and not a venturi to be spared…I thought I had an idea on how to quickly mimick the venturi out of a T bar with a fire hose lever slightly opened on top…
The cellar approved, I gave it quick test…when it gave the same choking gurgle and spit some wine from the top, I knew I was in business…