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Winemaking at Clos Pepe Estate: "Vintage is a Promise."
Written and Updated: 7/26/2011 by Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager and Winemaker
Clos Pepe Vineyards: photo: Jeremy Ball 2010
Vintage: Characterized by excellence, maturity, and enduring appeal; classic.
The 'vin' of the English word vintage comes from the French word for wine. All ideas of vintage can be traced back to the craft of wine and its unique ability to take us back to the time and place where it was grown and made. Wine from a great vineyard,a great vintage, and aged to perfection is truly the only time machine that will ever work....at least with flavor as the engine.
To us, vintage is more than a word, it's a responsibility. The word 'vintage' (or just the year on the bottle) is a jacket cover for a book that promises what is inside will take us on a journey--a journey of weather, of wind and fog, a journey of craft that extends and represents an entire year's farming. Most wines made in the New World, and many in the Old World, don't need a vintage designation any longer. Those wines represent a homogenized attempt to make a tasty and easy-to-enjoy beverage that speaks more of 'market pressures' and a 'popular style' than the riskier and craftier attempt to try to bottle the essence and quality of a viticultural season. Many factors can suck the vintage out of a wine. One is overt ripeness. Another is an overly zealous owner or marketing department pushing a winemaker to produce 'points' or manipulate their wines toward a certain demographic. But this raises a difficult question for us: 'Is our insistence that Clos Pepe Estate wine represent the time and place where its grown any less of an affectation of style?' One could argue it is just another brand of manipulation: the non-manipulation manipulation. But now we've fallen into a sticky pit of epistemology. Let's agree to define Clos Pepe Estate as a small, family brand that is driven to make wines of vintage and a sense of place.
"Wait!," you may be saying. "Lies! I was told by a reliable wine geek that California doesn't have vintages like great European wine regions!" There is a bit of truth to that assertion. Clearly the weather patterns of the Central Coast of California are much more stable and predictable than in Burgundy, France. Clearly their hope for a vintage is ripeness, while ours is an extension of hang time. But the same way that their vintage may be impacted by rain, weather and cultural practice (humans doing stuff in the vineyard), ours can be too. Napa Cabernet may have less vintage variation than Pinot Noir because of the nature of the varietal and the consistency of Napa vintages. But still the differences show to those who pay attention!
To tell the difference one must have a passion for wine and be trained to know what to look for in color, body, flavor, attack and finish, but even within the amazing level of consistency in Santa Rita Hills wines, the vintages do take on a personality of their own--speaking of coolness, warm spells, cold nights, picking decisions--an amalgam of human influence and the natural world that makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to tell where manipulation trumps provenance or vice versa.
Our family believes that great wine is produced by farming the right grape in the perfect location with a crew that is trained to perform farming tasks that maximize the 'somewhereness' and 'somewhenness' of our vineyard and the vintage.
Coaxing greatness out of Clos Pepe is both simple and complex: simple in the sense that this IS the right place for Pinot Noir--the climate, soil, geology, aspect and marine influence combine to allow us to grow amazing winegrapes here in the Santa Rita Hills of California, but the process is also complex in the sense that grapes do not produce themselves, even in the perfect spot. With a great site comes great responsibility in the world of wine. The same way that a journeyman player feels great responsibility joining a championship team, I feel a great responsibility in my professional capacity as vineyard manager and winemaker here at Clos Pepe Vineyards and Clos Pepe Estate Wines. If I perform competently, the vineyard shines and wins the hearts and palates of a legion of fans. But if I screw it up, an entire year of labor and nature's providence (or wrath) can be circumvented by one bad choice of when to spray, when to harvest, when to turn on the frost protection.
Yes, I lose sleep over these things.
Only one crop of grapes, one vintage, can emerge from a vineyard each year. That means my success or failure for an entire year's labor comes down to whether the Clos Pepe wine smells and tastes good. And I'll tell you, the first pour, sniff and taste of any Clos Pepe wine gets me excited. It's the distilled essence of 52 weeks of my life. Making a wine is much like writing a novel. It takes an entire year to grow a crop, a year or more to make the wine, and then another year (or so) to take it into the world and sell it. Each wine becomes a part of who we are at Clos Pepe, and each vintage is an expression of who I was and what I did for those few years. Approaching my mid-40's, I see a limited amount of vintages left in my life, and I would like to make a wine that approaches perfection before I hang up my boots--a wine that is my craft statement to the world. This is Clos Pepe Vineyard, and this is the perfected wine the way I like to age and drink a bottle.
Of course we work for nearly a year before harvest on the pruning, farming, tending, organizing, etc. So don't forget to go over and check out the section on 'The Vineyard', which details our cultural practices and vineyard philosophy, perhaps more important to the final quality and expressiveness of the wine than the simple and natural process of crushing, fermenting, aging and bottling.
If all goes well in 'The Vineyard', the crop from an acre or two of Chardonnay or Pinot Noir is hand picked in the cool of night, and the fruit is delivered to the winery (either a clients' or our own) as the sun is rising or the fog becomes visible, like a blanket reminding us of the sleep we've missed.
At this point the winemaking process begins.
While it might seem odd to provide our 'recipe' for winemaking, we don't see it as a trade secret. Some wineries thrive on secrecy and an insistence that what happens behind the cellar door is a magical process with French elves and Italian sprites sprinkling fairy dust over the fermenters, but we don't see it that way. Winemaking is a simple process for preserving the integrity of the fruit, the site and the vintage. Again, the magic is in the site, and we'd rather show a refreshing level of transparency in the way we farm and make wine so our customers, and those who visit the website, feel that they can clearly understand and intuit how we treat our fruit and wine, and how simple the fermentation and aging process can be.
Production of Chardonnay at Clos Pepe
Freshly Harvested Wente Clone Chardonnay is Loaded for the Winery
Revised July 26, 2011
I like to say that Clos Pepe Vineyards is a Chardonnay vineyard that is famous for Pinot Noir. What I mean by that is that the Sta. Rita Hills AVA, and Clos Pepe in particular, may provide the New World's best source of Chardonnay grapes. While Pinot Noir was the star of that funny, but misguided cinematic romp called 'Sideways', and even though red wine always seems to get more love than white, Chardonnay is the real star at Clos Pepe and in the SRH. It may take a few decades for it to be recognized. Chardonnay is one edge of ripeness in the Santa Rita Hills. Sometimes it can't get as ripe as some would like it, and it certainly isn't perfectly suited to make the rich, (over)ripe, (over)oaked style that became the norm of California Chardonnay in the 1980's and 1990's. Style is changhing quickly, and Chardonnay is beginning to take on some varietal character in the New World again. This vineyard produces Chardonnay wine that can age as gracefully as a great Premier Cru Chablis or Burgundian chardonnay. The wines also have a similar acid structure, an also shows that emerging minerality that separates a sipping Chardonnay from the vaunted white wines that are collected and aged by collectors. What can't be argued is that the most sought after and collectable wines in the world are grown on the climatic edge of where the grapes may or may not get ripe. This means that the fruit hangs for an extended period of time and develops flavor profiles and layers and a depth of complexity that can't be hurried by overt heat and fast ripening. Our family fell in love with Chardonnay in Burgundy and Chablis. That does NOT mean we are trying to imitate those wines in our production at Clos Pepe. Quite the opposite. Chablis and Burgundy taught us that wine is meant to represent the time and place where it is grown. So we try to make Clos Pepe taste more Clos Pepe-esque. Stylistically, we may pick a little earlier and try to make ther wine balanced in acidity, flavor and alcohol for the long haul in the cellar. You could argue that this is a Continental, or even Burgundian, affectation. We are not impressed with overripe flash, the same way I am not impressed with breasts enhanced with silicon bags. Well..at least not for more than a few moments... Overripe wines charm us with their overtness the same way a Big Mac and a chocolate milkshake are designed to entice us with salt, sugar and fat. But perfect wine, or perfect food (or a perfect mate) requires us to dig deeper into character, be more patient in our judgement of character. The greatest relationships become fruitful and meaningful after a decade or more of camaraderie and understanding. We think wine is the same.
In the world of Chardonnay Viticulture, this is NC-17 rated.
Here is a short ode to Chardonnay I wrote last year, entitled: 'Why Chardonnay is a Schizophrenic Bitch':
Chardonnay is a grape varietal that is provably schizophrenic. She is both a rock star and a charlatan, a soft spoken ballerina and a brazen harlot, generic as a white label with a blue stripe across it and as expressive as a zealot. Why is this varietal so likely to cause both passionate debate and bored indifference? I’m going to try to make the suggestion in the text of this short article on growing Chardonnay in your backyard, that it has to do with where its grown and how it is made.
Americans were some of the last to plant Chardonnay, and some of the first to take it for granted. In the 1960’s there was less than 1000 acres planted in California, and most of it was mislabeled as ‘Chablis’, which of course is a region, not a varietal. So from the get go Californians screwed it up, doing more damage to the noble wines of Chablis with our unfair mislabeling as any devious ad campaign could have. Innocuous, cheap, uninteresting, flat Chardonnays from California stole the name from Chablis—and Chablis is still used as a name for the generic white wines that come out of large grape production areas of the Central Valley of California. Shame, as the REAL Chablis produces some of the most beautiful, long lived, and expressive white wines (100% Chardonnay, as always) in the world. There is currently about 100,000 acres of Chardonnay under cultivation in California, three times the amount that is bearing in Burgundy and Chablis, the Homeland of Chardonnay, and arguably the world’s greatest terroir for producing white wine. (Notice I only use the term terroir when it applies to French wine regions with Centuries of history and pedigree. We don’t have the history to use the term yet, in my never-to-be-humble opinion.)
Other regions (besides California, and specifically Sonoma Coast, Santa Cruz, Anderson Valley, Mendocino, Chalone, Monterey County, Santa Barbara County, and specifically the Santa Rita Hills) that have shown great promise with the Chardonnay grape include Margaret River, Australia, Oregon, Washington (especially in the Columbia River Gorge), New Zealand and New York . Of course as soon as I think I’ve tried wines from all the areas that can grow world-class Chardonnay, a wine arrives in my glass showing me just how generous the varietal it can be. Like Pinot Noir, I believe Chardonnay suffers no fools, but unlike Pinot Noir (a very distant relative of Chardonnay), Chardonnay can take a lot of manipulation by the winemaker. It’s a varietal, as a famous winemaker once told me, that ‘you can hang a lot of clothes on’.
That means that the treatment in the winery can dictate the wine’s final style almost as much as the appellation of the sourced fruit. Oak treatment is famous in Chardonnay production. During America’s undeniable love affair with oaky Chardonnay in the 1980’s and 1990’s (a trend I’m happy to say is dying slowly in most regions), some producers (even in France!) bragged that they were using 200% new French oak in their Chardonnays. That means the wine would be fermented and aged 6 months in a brand new barrel, and then racked into another brand new French oak barrel. While some would call this a ‘luxury cuvee’, putting almost $10 of new oak in every bottle of Chardonnay is like drenching a beautiful prime ribeye in A1 sauce. It may taste good to some, but to most of us it seems a waste of quality base product, and will surely obliterate the uniqueness of flavor either in a well-bred Angus steer or some nice coastal Chardonnay fruit. Malolactic fermentation (which is not a true fermentation but more accurately a bacterial process of decarboxylating malic acid into lactic acid by leuconostoc oenos) is another process by which Chardonnay can be stylized, and the buttery style (as distinct or combined with oak treatment) still has many fans in the white wine world. It can be argued that the combination of malolactic treatment and oakiness made Chardonnay in the 1980’s and 1990’s so recognizable, that Chardonnay, as Jancis Robinson once famously quipped, “Virtually became it’s own brand”. It became synonymous with white wine.
So now that the tide is turning stylistically in Chardonnay, what is the varietal today and what direction is it moving? Of the hundreds of Chardonnays I taste judging international wine competitions each year, few remain the big, buttery monsters of the late twentieth century. Chardonnay is losing weight in the new Millennia, becoming more yoga and less elephant, more like a crisp green apple rolling on earthy river pebbles than caramel and butter popcorn absorbing the aromas of a French lumbermill. As a true believer in the varietal, I couldn’t me more pleased. Chardonnay has a flavor of its own—one of the few wine varietals that screams place and represents the vineyard where it was grown, and seeing the wines become more transparent to the pedigree is always a step in the right direction from my perspective as a wine lover and educator.
Beautiful Clusters of Wente Clone Chardonnay in early October, 2010
And without further delay, here is a step-by-step description of how we produce our Chardonnay wine. For details on how we grow Chardonnay, head over here: 'The Vineyard'. And remember, this doesn't mean nearly as much without some of our wine in your glass. To buy wine, head over to The Store!
We truck our own fruit from the vineyard to our production facility in western Lompoc. The first few bins usually roll in around 4:00 am, and we finish harvest around 6 am.
Grapes are hand harvested, usually at night, and trucked to the winery in 1000 lb. 'macrobins'.
Fruit is unloaded, weighed, and brought inside the winery as the crew and interns set up the press. The press preparation includes rinsing and ozonating every part of the press until it is basically sanitized and has no material, residue or aroma. We like a medical level of santation during the production. Every part of the press is either stainless steel or food grade (inflatable bladder that 'pushes' the fruit against the perforated canister of the press).
Once the press has been checked and double-checked, it is plugged in and we run it through a series of tests to make sure it is functioning perfectly before loading it with Chardonnay fruit. Once the press is plugged in, we have very firm and specific safety rules to stay away from moving parts of the press.
The 'bin dumper' is put on the forklift, which is a large metal contraption that allows us to pick up 1000 lb. bins of fruit and tilt the bin slowly so the fruit falls slowly and carefully into a stainless steel hopper that directs the clusters into the press cylinder where the pressing takes place.
The press is loaded with around 1500 lb. of fruit of it's 2000 lb. capacity, and then we lock the press, do one last check of the press pan (where the juice falls), make sure the hoses are absolutely clean, take one last look inside the barrels that will accept the juice with a flashlight, and then we start pressing the fruit and pumping the juice into the barrels: French oak for the Barrel Fermented program, and into 55 gallon stainless drums for the 'Homage to Chablis.
We do not settle the juice in tanks or chill the juice beyond the chilliness that is provided from a very cold night pick. The juice usually comes out of the press around 45degrees.
2010 Chardonnay Juice, Cold and Fresh from a October Morning Pressing
The juice is pumped into barrels, about 40 gallons in each 55 gallon vessel(so it has room to foam and roil).
The juice is tested for sugar (Brix, which is roughly percentage of sugar by volume) as well as pH (hydrgoen ion activity that gives us an idea of acidity and mouthfeel). Our target is around 23.5-24.0 Brix (which will make a finished wine about or just under 14% alcohol by volume) and about 3.1-3.25 pH. That's very 'structured' or fairly high acid for domestic Chardonnay, but we are attempting to produce a long-lived and elegant style of Chardonnay. We have no interest in producing soft and buttery Chardonnays--there's plenty of those in California, and the Clos Pepe fruit begs for restraint and tautness.
We stir in some yeast nutrient (Fermaid K at about 1 gram/gallon), stir in some SO2 (to about 22 parts per million to clean the juice up and retard oxidation) and then finally we slowly add the yeast. Yeast needs to be rehydrated from its dry form in hot water and a bit of Go-Ferm, and then we allow it to wake up and foam a little (for maybe 30 minutes) before we slowly pour the yeasty liquid directly into the juice in barrel. By pouring slowly we allow the yeast to form a colony on the top of the cold juice. We do not stir the yeast in. Our favorite yeast for Chardonnay, and the only yeast we've ever used in Chardonnay production, is CY3079.
We tape clean, sterilized black plastic screen that would be used to replace screen doors over the opening (yes, the bung hole) in the barrel so the vessels don't pressurize and blow wine to the roof. The screen keeps out fruit flies while allowing the fermentation to breathe.
Here's a video of Chardonnay production from 2010:
There is usually a 'lag phase' in the ferment from a few hours to a few days. If we do not see an active fermentation in a specific barrel in 48 hours, we mix up a fresh batch of yeast and try again. The reasons for a barrel not starting ferment could be that the juice was too cold and 'shocked the monkey' so to speak, but out of a dozen barrels that we may fill in a morning, one or two usually need a little more coaxing.
Shining a flashlight into the juice should reveal a creamy, foaming 'head' on the wine. A sniff near the barrel's opening should also cause the sniffing nose to sting from the great volume of CO2 gas being produced by glycolysis--the process of sugars being consumed by yeast and giving off the byproducts of ethanol (ethyl alcohol), and carbon dioxide.
We do not chill the juice during fermentation, rather we prefer to allow the ferment to occur naturally and without manipulation. The wine is usually dry 48-72 hours after ferment begins. Less than a week after picking, when the wine is dry but still hasn't clarified (at this point it smells like apples, peaches and pineapple and has the color/clarity of grapefruit juice), we 'rack' the wine. Racking is the process of sucking the clean wine on the top of the barrel off the heavier sediments. We usually put all the wine in a sanitized, stainless tank, flip the barrels to empty them of their sediment (vineyard dust, a few grape skins, yeast protein and the like), then we blast the barrels with 150 degree hot water, and then ozonate them to get them very clean. The barrels are then realigned on their racks, checked visually (and sniffed) to ensure sanitation and soundness, and then they are filled almost full (an inch or two shy to allow them to continue the last bits of ferment).
Within a few weeks the last bits of cloudy 'fine lees' will settle out into the bottom of the barrel, the wine will clarify, and then we will top the barrels up to complete fullness every 10-14 days. Each time we top the barrels we also stir the lees into the wine to help keep the wine stable and to add the 'sur lies' minerality and richness to the wine for its full 11 months of aging.
So to sum up, we treat the 'Homage to Chablis' and the 'Barrel Fermented' Chardonnays exactly the same--same yeast, same aging regime, same fruit and picking dates, same sections fo the vineyard. They are both aged sur lies for 11 months and the only difference is whether they are aged in 'neutral barrels' (at least 5 years used), or in stainless steel casks.
After 11 months the wines are racked again off thre fine sediment and then filtered through Diatomaceous earth to ensure clarity and stability in bottle for long term aging. After bottling, the wines are cased, palleted, and stored in a temperature-controlled, cool cellar for about 5 months before release.
Clone 76 Chardonnay, Headed to the Press for 2010 Clos Pepe Estate Wine, October 2010.
Pinot Noir
Commentary by Clos Pepe Winemaker and Vineyard Manager, Wes Hagen. 7/28/2011.
You could say that Pinot Noir is my reason for living. There's other things that I'm passionate about. The love of my life and wife, Chanda. My family. My dogs. Coffee (I roast my own). Salt (I evaporate my own). I love craft beer and Anejo Tequila. Scotch and good rum. Artisinal cheese and good crusty French bread. I love great cuisine, whether it be a taco truck, Kansas City BBQ, a funky Thai joint or Alain Ducasse. I can be awe-struck by the simplest act of nature, an amazing painting, the intellectual depth of James Joyce, or taking a breath on a planet that is spinning 76,000 mph through space.
But my professional life is dominated by the pursuit of Pinot Noir. Pursuit means much the same thing to me as it does to a racing greyhound. We chase the rabbit like a heroin addict chases the dragon's tail. We want the perfect vintage, the perfect harvest, the perfect high. And the true craftsman never attains what he hopes he or she can. Pinot noir is Quixote's windmill and Duke Philip the Bold's legacy, it is both a fool's errand and a king's crowning glory. It is the fool who speaks wisdom and the king who decides if the fool gets to cavort another day. Below is my commentary and 'recipe' for making pinot noir, and an admission that pinot noir is very, very easy to make when the fruit is right. The hard work happens in 'The Vineyard'.
This is what it's all about. That's about 300 bottles of Pinot Noir in fruit form.
From the outside, the life of a Pinot Noir winemaker seems far more romantic and enviable than from the inside, the reality. Now don't think I'm complaining--I do live a wonderful, meaningful, authentic and enviable lifestyle. But considering the ways nature, bugs, gophers, birds, mildew, rot, or the other innumerable things that can ruin an entire two years of my professional life in scarcely the time it takes to wriote this entry, there is a lot of anxiety and sleeplessness that accompanies this vocation. If you love it, you feel respoonsible, and if you farm a piece of land with as much potential as Clos Pepe, that responsibility should be profound.
Here's a snippet of a piece I did for the Burgundy Report a few years back that sums up my initial fascination/obsession with pinot noir. If I was in a comic book as 'Pinot Man', this would be the moment that I get bitten by the radioactive phylloxera:
"I remember the exact moment when I was initiated into the higher wisdom of all things Burgundian. It was January 11, 1999 and I was visiting Bourgogne for the first time. Bill Clinton was being impeached live on CNN, and if we weren’t knee deep in delicious food and wonderful Pinot Noir we might have cared. On that fateful evening Steve Pepe, my mother Catherine and I were dining at the Rotisserie de Chambertin, This was my first meal in Burgundy, and our host (the owner) spoke wonderful English and quickly found out that we owned a Pinot Noir vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills of Santa Barbara California.
This is Wes Hagen in 1999 paying homage to one of the greatest vineyards in the world. Even Napoleon made his troops pause to salute the vines.
We ate eggs poached in day-old Chambertin, we ate delicious snails and fresh crusty bread. For our main dish we all shared a huge cut of blood-rare Chalonnais beef—which is the equivalent of Grand Cru AOC cow. The food was honest and delicious, but the monumental moment was a wine: the first Burgundy that ever made me cry. Pundits throw the word ‘epiphany’ around with little respect for the true power of the word, but I am here to tell you that my life was changed as a result of what I tasted that night. There’s not many wines that you can isolate in your memory and say THAT bottle made me decide to dedicate my life to Pinot Noir. Maybe you remember with similar clarity the first wine that struck your head and your olfactory sensibilities with an undeniable, complex profundity. I will admit sincerely that when I swirled that (slightly brickish) garnet-colored potion (a.k.a. 1972 L. Trapet Chappelle-Chambertin) and deeply whiffed its bouquet, I suddenly realized that there was some deep truth in the hyperbole and hoopla surrounding the Cult of Pinot Noir—and more specifically, the Cult of the Perfect Bourgogne.
‘Harmonious nose suggesting the deeper secrets of Burgundian terroir--opened up with both the sternness of solid acid and the muscle of seriously intense fruit and perfect cellaring. In the mouth: plum and dry spice, understated game and leather--this wine, if needed to be categorized, was light of color and mostly feminine in taste profile--light extraction, super-fine sediment with a texture of velvet and a flavor like smoke rising from a stone. Spicy roundness that builds with bottle-aged fruit flavors, violet and rose petal in the nose and mouth, building into a massive feminine beast still hinting of vanilla, oak and herb. After tasting the wine with us, our host at the Rotisserie de Chambertin said two things: (On opening the bottle): 'This wine waited for tonight to be perfect.' (on finishing the bottle): 'The last drink is like saying goodbye to an old friend. The man spoke with a nearly religious intensity and regaled us for an hour with stories and anecdotes about the region of Chambertin.'
So when I returned from Burgundy in 1999 and met up with some of my winemaker cronies, they asked what I learned in Burgundy that would help me make better wines. I thought for a second and replied, ‘Nothing really. I think we should leave Burgundy in Burgundy.’
It’s a daunting task to develop a new mythology for the Santa Rita Hills, but we have had a few good prophets early in our short history. What I learned in Burgundy is that we are babies in their world. We struggle to understand how to best grow and ferment Pinot Noir in our little part of the world. Burgundians grow up in a culture dominated by a deep respect for food and steeped in their own regional Vine Myth. We still live in a culture more interested in Red Bull and McDonalds than cuisine and the craft of winemaking. We can only hope that, eight centuries hence, that each American Viticultural Area will have its own mythology, and that we will have learned that emulating Burgundy can only divert our attempts to create a true regional identity."
The greatest secret in winemaking is that Pinot Noir is very, very simple to make. If the fruit come from the right vineyard, picked at the right moment, and delivered cool and sound, there's not much to do.
Do field samples (see the video below). Take tasting notes on the juice, noting the fruit references at varying levels of ripeness. I find these references (cranberry, cherry, raspberry, blueberry, strawberry) emerge in an order that allows me to understand what flavors and style will emerge in the wine if it were picked immediately. I keep these reference 'juice notes' in a separate notebook and take notes on the finished wines on the same page to give me a flavor reference before and after fermentation and barrel aging.
Field Sampling Pinot Noir in September, 2010. How is Fruit tested for harvest?
Harvest the fruit in the middle of the night with the help of a solid dose of caffeine. (See the video below of our first 2010 Pinot Noir harvest for Joe Davis at Arcadian.)
Truck the fruit in 1000 lb. macrobins in the early, early morning to our winery facility in west Lompoc, CA.
Unload the truck with the forklift.
Weigh each bin and stack them in the winery before the sun comes up.
Switch the forks on the lift truck to the bin dumper.
While Wes is doing this, the interns are busy washing and ozonating the stainless grape hopper which will be positioned above the crusher/destemmer machine.
When the hopper and crusher have been cleaned, positioned and tested, we position a fermentor under the crusher/destemmer and we are ready to crush/destem pinot noir.
Each bin is carefully lifted and tilted until the fresh, cold pinot clusters begin rolling (and being pulled) into the hopper. The fruit drops into the crusher destemmer where it is moved along a cylindrical path by rubber-lined paddles. The paddles knock the berries off the stems and continue to move the stems to the end of the cylinder, where the stems are ejected into a collection bin for composting. The berries fall through circular holes and through a device that gently breaks the grapes' skins through ribbed rollers. These rollers can be adjusted (or removed) to allow a certain percentage of whole berries to pass through. I generally like 80-90% of the berries to be crushed.
Pinot Noir coming out of the crusher-destemmer. Stems fly out the end of the machine and the stem-free fruit falls into a 2500 lb. open-top fermentor for cold soak and fermentation. The haze in this picture is the dry ice in the bottom of the fermentor chilling the fruit for cold soak and producing vapor.
As the three bins of fruit are systematically dumped into the crusher/destemmer, additions are made to the fruit as the fermentor fills. S02, in the form of potassium metabisulfite, is added to bring the 'must' (grapes and juice) to around 55-60 parts free S02 per million. This kills (or at least stuns) the native yeasts on the grapes, and makes sure the fruit won't start spontaneously fermenting before cold soak is acheived. It also protects the must from oxidation or the production of volatile acidity.
Each picking bin is washed and ozonated immediately so they go back into the truck and back to the vineyard clean, sanitized and ready to be filled as soon as needed. Picking bins that leak or crack are designated and marked with spray paint as 'stem bins', and these are used to bring the stems (or pressed skins) back from the winery to compost for the vineyard.
If the fruit is warmer than 50 degrees, we will liekly add food grade dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide pellets like you would use to make spooky Hallowe'en punch) until the must hovers around 40-45 degrees. Cold must won't ferment until it warms up.
Once the fermentor receives 3 bins (around 2500 lb. of crushed berries and juice), and is properly cooled and sulfited, the crusher is turned off and we pallet-jack the fermentor to the area where the fermentors will be lined up during the cold soak, punch down, and fermenting process. It's very important to allow at least 12"-18" of empty area at the top of the fermentor so the 'cap' on the fermenting grapes won't spill over.
Colored duct tape (about a 12" strip) is applied to the outside of the fermentor, where we write the varietal, clone, block, date of harvest on the tape. A winemaker or an intern should never be without a Sharpie permanent pen--and if an intern is caught without one, they are suitably heckled or punched in the arm.
When the bins have all been crushed and destemmed into fermentors, the crew begins to clean and sanitize the equipment. We never leave any type of mess for the next day. Even though the equipment is left clean enough to use without further cleaning, we always clean and sanitize it again the next morning before use. Again, we only have one chance per year to make great wine, and proper sanitation habits are critical to respecting the 11 months of farming that goes through that equipment.
As the crew does 'the dishes', I begin lab work on the freshly crushed grapes, and use the long piece of colored tape on the fermentors (red for pinot, white for other red varietals, green tape on the fermenting chard barrels/casks) to record the date and the Brix/pH for each lot. I also mark how many grams of S02 were added. Any addition made to the fermentor (yeast food, DAP, yeast, etc.) is noted carefully on the tape and in the harvest notebook.
After testing the freshly crushed lot of pinot noir, I will do Brix/sugar testing (and rarely pH) on all lots that are already fermenting, and make sure the level of sugar is reducing each day listed on the tape. If a fermentor 'sticks' for more than 24 hours, I would consider restarting the fermentation with the same yeast, and if that fails, with a more aggressive strain.
The freshly crushed fermentors are punched down/mixed twice a day during cold soak, a period that is believed to bring out more color and extraction than firing up the fermentation immediately. This process was 'invented' and promoted by a great Burgundian winemaker named Henri Jayer, who died in 2001. (/raise glass) Cold soak usually lasts between 2-5 days.
Every winemaker has a slightly different way of determing when cold soak is over and the yeast should (or should not) be pitched. I like towait until the corners and sides of the fermentor warm noticably and start to bubble with the first signs of native/feral fermentation. I figure that if the feral yeasts are starting to get busy, the must is really ready for the commercial yeast to be added. In general, commercial yeasts will take over the feral yeasts, so we may lose 1-2 Brix from feral ferment, which I always like to believe adds some special Clos Pepe complexity.
At this point the winemaker decides whether to allow the wine to ferment on it's native (or what I call feral) yeast, or to use a specific, commercial strain. I rarely use feral yeast ferments, but every few years I go back and allow a small lot to ferment indigenously so I can continue learning about the process.
Commercial (dry, encapsulated) yeast is mixed with warm water, Go-Ferm and (for good luck) a few 100ml's of sweet pinot noir juice to get the party going. The yeast is pitched into the fluid and mixed with a sterilized paint-stirrer on a variable speed electric drill until the mixture is uniform, frothy and about 100 degrees Fahrenheit (what the label suggests). Usually by this time the sun is warming our parking lot to a nice 80-90 degrees, and my habit is to put the yeast mixture (in a tall bucket) out in the sun for about 30 minutes to get the yeast charging and multiplying in whatever private, microscopic orgy that they prefer. The instructions say that rapid foaming is not necessarily a sign of good attenuation, but most winemakers know that's bullshit. Foam is good. That's C02, and nothing says yeast orgy like some good C02 production.
The way I was taught to pitch yeast is by pouring an entire 500g block of active, frothy rehydrated yeast slurry in each ton-and-a-half fermentor. That's about a gram of encapsulated yeast per gallon. I pour the yeasty mixture slowly and carefully in ONE CORNER of the fermentor only so it can build up a population overnight. At this point we stop punchdowns on that fermentor until the corner we added the yeast rises up almost to the edge of the vessel. This shows the yeast has become happy and is fermenting happily. At this point we give one punch down (usually the day after pitching the yeast), and then begin real punch downs the next day. Slow uniform integration of the yeast colony to its new environment is the goal.
This is our stainless punch-down tool doing it's job: giving the must air and mixing the skins and juice.
(Above) Video from October 6, 2010. Some harvest vibe, a rare October rain, and off to the winery for punch downs and barrel work!
Punch downs are acheived with a safety partner while standing above the fermentors (with fans running to make sure the C02 coming off the ferments do not overwhelm the 'puncher') on a wide plank of lumber striped with skateboard grip tape. This device is called the Plank of Pain, and is inscribed with the wise words from the Navy Seals: 'Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body'. A series of proper punchdowns should leave you sore, moist and exhausted. Some wineries pump their juice over, but our harvest t-shirts say 'Pumpovers are for Wussies'. Except the phrase is far more alliterative than what is listed here. Three punch downs a day are the rule while the wine is fermenting. When it slows down we may go down to two per day, or even one if we want to extend the maceration. We give a light spray of S02 water during cold soak and as the ferment winds down to protect the skins from oxidation or unwanted bacteria/yeast. We also clean the sides of the fermentor after each punch down with a clean towel and S02 solution.
Once the must begins to test dry (under 1 brix), we have a few days' window for pressing the must. French oak barrels (only Allier, Bertranges and Troncais forests are used in Clos Pepe production) are rinsed, tested and aligned in the cellar for press day, and as we prepare the press, we pump the 'free run' out of the fermentors to make them lighter for lifting and dumping, and to separate the free run into separate barrels for aging. Generally, 'free run' wine is a little more fruity and juicy, and pressed wine (wine that needs to be liberated from the skins by pressure in the press, is a little more tannic, dry and 'chewy'. The two are generally gestalt for my palate: the blend is usually greater than the parts. Check out the video below of the pressing process:
A Video from October, 2010 showing how we press Pinot Noir here at Clos Pepe.
Once the pinot noir is pressed to barrel, we allow a few inches of head space to allow fermentation to complete without overflow, and then when the wine starts to clarify (and stops making popping noises), we begin the process of topping the barrels to full every 10-14 days. The wine contracts when it's colder in the cellar, and expands a bit when the cellar warms.
Malolactic fermentation is iniated with a ML bacteria culture (ML Alpha or Beta strain depending on the wine's alcohol and acid content) after barrelling down.
Tests are conducted periodically to keep free S02 levels at a practical level that will protect the wine, but not inhibit the completion of alcoholic or malolactic fermentation.
Barrels are never racked during the 11 months of aging unless the lees start to produce off aromas.
Barrels are stacked single high in the center of the winery, and are never stacked. Stacked barrels never get the same love as barrels on the ground. Those that argue that they do secretly wish for the floor space to keep their barrels single-high.
After 11 months of topping, aging, testing and tasting, we assemble the final blends, run them through a very wide and loose diatomaceous earth filter for clarity (not sterile), and bottle them.
Bottled wine is cellared for 5 months before release.
These two pictures show the influence of cold soak and maceration in Pinot Noir.
The picture above shows Pinot Noir wine that spent 11 days soaking on the skins, which we call maceration. The color compounds and flavors that exist in the skins are absorbed by the juice during fermentation. The photo below shows Pinot Noir fruit from Clos Pepe that was pressed off immediately after harvest for the production of dry Rose' of Pinot Noir. The light pink/salmon color contains much less color, tannin, richness because it did not have the opportunity to soak on the skins during fermentation. The rose' is produced just like white wine: press the grapes immediately, and then ferment in a barrel.
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