Musings on Making Wine, Part 2
Four months later and I’m back to share a few more gems from my time in Oregon. There’s a feeling I can’t shake, and I want to tell you all about it. And I have a few more random musings that I think will be fun too.
It’s Called Gemütlichkeit
I told you in the first installment of my winemaking musings about that surreal first night with the Stuarts - where Suzy and Casee picked me up from the airport and amongst cheerful conversation, alighted me unto a rich feast at the Stuart’s, a superb meal surpassed only by the quality of the company. My heart and belly were full, and the laughter about was all full-bellied, too. I said aloud, “Now I understand what hygge is supposed to mean!” Hygge is a concept I have latched onto, like the rest of America, over the past few years - that idea of coziness borrowed from the Danes.
“Oh, hygge is so passé - it’s called gah-moot-la-kite!” Maria grinned at me. “This is the feeling we’re cultivating at R. Stuart.”
“Gah moot la- WHO?” I replied?
It’s a German term for conviviality, warmth, friendliness, coziness, and…good cheer! It’s all the goodness of hygge but with a clink of glasses, too. Now we’re talking.
Anyone who has ever met the Stuarts, or their crew of close friends, knows exactly what this word means: It’s welcoming with open arms, a delicious meal, hearty laughter, spontaneous sing-a-longs at the dining room table, rich stories, never ending grins, dancing to music blasting through the wine cellar, pats on the back, unlimited “seconds” on food and drink, an authentic casualness like you’re in your own home, and an excess of excellent wine to drink. Cheers!
Sounds nice, right? Don’t you wish you could bottle that feeling?
This honest-to-god mirth is behind everything the Stuarts do. So to share it with the world, they’ve bottled that feeling! As I was working with the Stuarts, they were working on a marketing campaign called Gemütlichkeit! They recorded one campaign video out around a bonfire in their backyard. They recorded another at a staff dinner. And another one around the dinner table with close friends. What was so cool about watching this from behind the scenes was that other than the presence of a camera-woman, there was almost no way to distinguish one of these “marketing” events from any other night at the Stuarts. The authenticity was palpable.
I left McMinnville, Oregon, with many great memories, but the one that will stick with me the longest is the sense of Gemütlichkeit that was fostered. Anytime I need a reminder, I’ll just pop a bottle of R. Stuart Pinot Noir and the feeling pours right out of the bottle and my cup runneth over.
“That feeling you get when you’re hanging out with people you love - eating, drinking, talking, and laughing. When everyone belongs and everything feels just right.”
On Corks & Choosing the Right Bottle for dinner
Have you ever given any thought to how your bottle of wine is stoppered? Maybe only when you break a cork in half with your corkscrew and spend the next twenty minutes fishing tiny brown pieces out of your glass of wine… Well, it turns out there are many different options for wineries to use to seal up their bottles and the pros and cons might not be what you’d expect.
Let’s start with the good old-fashioned cork. Cork is a plant — a tree really — that grows bark that is harvested as cork. I learned something new writing this post: that cork is a truly renewable resource! Producers don’t actually cut down the trees; they harvest the bark from the tree and then it grows back. Magic. The ancient Egyptians used cork to stopper amphora and corks became popular closures for thin-necked wine bottles in the 1700s. Nowadays, you can find wine corks made out of a single piece of cork or of compressed cork composite. The benefits of cork are: it seals tight so wine can’t leak out of a bottle, it allows small amounts of oxygen through to the wine which encourages bottle aging of good wine, and it’s environmentally friendly. Let me tell you a story about the cons.
Imagine you’re a budding wine student who gets the opportunity to work a wine harvest with an iconic winery in Oregon. You’re invited for dinner at the winemaker’s home and excellent wine flows freely. You decide to contribute to the gaiety of the evening and stop by the local market to pick up an interesting bottle of wine to bring as a gift. That night, they open your bottle amongst pleasant “thank you”-s and “oh this looks nice”-s and a glass gets poured for the winemaker, Rob. One sip of the wine and he pronounces, “Too bad. It’s corked.”
This is mortifying, and it’s a waste of a bottle of wine. I had spent decent (well…volunteer-caliber) money on that bottle and gifted it with love. I was trying to make an impression on the Stuarts with my ability to pick out a great food-pairing wine from a mediocre grocery-store selection. Instead of any good impression I had intended, my bottle produced scrunched faces, derogatory adjectives, and a lesson in wine closures. While it tasted to the contrary, I was relatively pleased to learn that it wasn’t the wine that was bad, thank goodness, it was that the cork was bad.
TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), also known as cork taint, comes from the icky combination of dampness and chlorine-based microbial cleaning solutions — a combination which is most often found in natural cork production. Once tainted, the TCA cork impacts the wine it was supposed to be protecting. Even a few nanograms of TCA can spoil a wine, though some drinkers are more sensitive to it than others. It’s harmless to ingest, but you certainly wouldn’t want to. Some “corked” wines (as wines tainted with TCA are called), are immediately recognizable as such because of a distinct wet cardboard/wet dog aroma that is extremely unpleasant. Others, like the wine I brought, was just not good. The TCA can actually remove the goodness from a bottle of wine!
“At lower levels, TCA taint merely strips a wine of its flavor, making normally rich, fruity wines taste dull or muted, without imparting a noticeable defect. This can leave drinkers disappointed in a wine without being able to pinpoint why.”
Rob said that in this case he could detect that wet cardboard essence, but most of the time his experience with cork taint was that it simply stripped the wine of its pleasant fruit flavors. It’s a risky move, he said, for a small winemaker to use natural cork, because if a consumer were to get a bottle of corked wine, most of the time they’d just assume the wine wasn’t good enough to buy again. They would have no idea there was a wine fault at play. That’s why other wine closure methods were invented and why they’re becoming so popular.
One method we see all the time is the screw cap. Commonly called a Stelvin after the original producer of these closures, for a long time it was an indication of “cheap” wine. You wouldn’t have found a Bordeaux with a screw cap, but you would find inexpensive Australian critter wine under screw cap. Nowadays, that’s changed as small producers are trying hard to protect their wine from cork failures, faults like cork taint, and to keep production costs down to make the wine inside more valuable. Now you can find excellent wines with screw caps and the technology is advancing quickly — wineries can now select a screw cap that allows exact amounts of oxygen to permeate to create optimal bottle aging of a wine, similar to a natural cork. So, they’re technical, inexpensive, and easy to use, but they still exude an air of nonchalance and triviality to many.
Another method for bottle enclosures is the glass stopper. I originally saw these on Provence Rosé bottles with bottoms molded like roses. The wine inside was fine, but my mom would save these beautiful bottles with their glass lids to serve chilled water at dinner parties, and she’s received many compliments from this strategy. These glass stoppers are what the Stuarts use on their bottles. Because everything must be named, these closures are called Vinolok. Not only do they lend an air of elegance to a bottle of wine, but they work, too. Rob explained why they chose Vinolok: if a small winery has perhaps a single chance for their wine to make an impression on a new consumer, you can’t risk anything less than 100% confidence that the wine inside will be pure. Vinolok prevents the possibility of cork taint while still providing a premier experience for the consumer. And, on the rare occurrence that you need to re-seal a bottle, you can just pop the Vinolok back in. Because the little polymer disk inside the Vinolok allows oxygen transfer similar to a real cork, you can store wines under these glass closures and the wine inside will age perfectly.
Did you know: when you’re at a nice restaurant and you order a bottle of wine, when the sommelier pours the host a taste before pouring the guests’ wine, it’s so the host can make sure the wine is clean, aka not corked. It’s really not for you to decide if you like the wine, but rather to confirm that you got a bottle with no faults present. Just sniff it, let the server know it’s okay, and then wait for your glass to be filled.
Harvest Fashion, an Info Graphic
The Art of the Pour Over
For the first few days, it was hard to see exactly what a winemaker did. Rob would pop between the cellar and the office, look at some numbers, nod like everything was okay, and then spend some time teaching me about various aspects of winemaking. I put my foot in my mouth early on casually proclaiming that it didn’t look like Rob was making wine at all! Wasn’t it just making itself?
I don’t mean to be flippant. I guess I imagined him running around shouting or to anxious and busy to be interrupted or some otherwise anxious and high energy work. We were making wine - shouldn’t it be intense! That’s not to say Rob wasn’t working. In my head, wine making was this labor intensive thing, and grapes were these persnickety fruits that needed constant attention. Surely it was like a witch’s brew with chemicals or stuff being added to a big pot and needing constant monitoring? Rob seemed so hands off, and when he mentioned a fermentation was not going as quickly as he hoped, he just hoped it would speed up. Very little interference was done to change the course of the wine. Or at least that’s how it seemed.
After about a week, I stopped being overwhelmed/up in the clouds/new to the whole thing so I was able to see more of the details that Rob and Emilie were doing. Turns out, I was so wrong about wine just making itself. It’s like that expression work smarter, not harder -- the winemakers were just working smart.
In general, wine does make itself. If you put a bunch of shmooshed grapes in a bin, the ambient yeasts will get to work on the sugar and will ferment the grapes into alcohol. That’s how wine was made before science knew exactly what was happening. If you don’t know what you’re doing, wine will still be made, but you may not enjoy the finished product. What winemakers have done over the years is a great big science experiment on hundreds of different aspects of what makes wine good. What’s so cool about R. Stuart wine is that his hands off approach is actually what makes the wine so good! Rob’s philosophy on wine is to let the wine speak for itself - his careful winemaking allows the wines to maintain their sense of place rather than over manipulating them in the cellar.
Rob monitored the grapes and made small decisions that could have big impacts on the wine. Pick now or wait a couple days? Stay up all night de-stemming or leave the grapes in bins for a few more hours? Use a pied de cuve or inoculate with custom yeasts? Blend these two lots or leave them as single vineyard? I’m not going to pretend that I know everything that Rob was doing, so I’m going to focus on the stuff the rest of us were doing. While Rob was the “work smarter” part of the expression above, the harvest interns were the “work harder” part. We were the physical laborers, the ones to put into action the intricate decisions Rob was making.
live action photo of a punch down in the forefront with a “stomp down” in the background!
Every morning began with punch downs. The technical term is pigeage but that sounds far too pretty for what the term means. You stand over a fermenter with a glorified plunger in your hands and smoosh the grapes on top (the cap) under the surface. Or, like “I Love Lucy",” you stomp on the grapes in a giant bucket. Different means to an end, but we used a plunger (most of the time). Regardless, it is a work out. Remember, these Oregon cellars are very chilly in the damp fall mornings, so while I may have done my first punch down in a sweatshirt and jacket, I was easily sweating through a tank top by the last bin. As the grapes begin to ferment, Carbon Dioxide is released from the chemical process and pushes upward on the cap of dried grapes at the surface. When we come along with our plungers, we’re not only fighting the physical barrier of a thick layer of grapes, but we’re also fighting against the CO2 pressure trying to escape. Punch downs are essential because they help extract color and flavor from the grapes. Also, by mixing it all up, yeasts become more evenly dispersed and help jumpstart fermentation. We did punchdowns every morning and every evening, and with a crew of people, it took at least a couple hours to get through the cellar. But, this was the essential calorie-burning part of the day that made it possible to indulge so heavily in Maria’s heavenly dinners, so it was extremely worth it.
a “pour over” aka pump over
Another option for tending to fermenting grapes is the pump over. We did pump overs on the huge stainless steel tanks of grapes whereas the punch downs were for smaller fermenters. Basically, you climb a ladder and hold a HUGE heavy hose over the top of the cap. A pump is attached and you pump juice from the bottom of the tank over the drying grapes on the top. This process is more gentle than a punch down and Rob has us do this for about 15 minutes per tank, morning and night. As I stood staring at flowing juice each morning, I couldn’t help but make a comparison to an artful coffee pour over. The purpose is pretty much the same, too - using liquid to saturate pieces of a solid to extract the essential flavors and components inside. The difference, however, is that while you want to stick your nose over the filter as you’re making a pour over coffee to inhale all those yummy coffee flavors, we had to have several fans blowing the aromas of the fermenter away from us. As the wine is circulating, the CO2 from the fermenting wine is released and can quickly cause a headache or worse. Apparently several people around the world die each year from inhaling CO2 off the top of tanks during pump overs. Despite the possibility of death from asphyxiation, the similarities to coffee were strong. I made the mistake of referring to this task as a “pour over,” and the term stuck - with me at least - and I get a little grin each time I refer to it incorrectly as such.
Sometimes our morning task list would show délastage for a certain batch of wine. This is another wine term that sounds much prettier than the associated work - it’s basically a pump over on steroids. If Rob determined that a fermenting wine needed a little more TLC - we’d pump all the liquid juice off a batch of wine into a fresh container. Then, we’d pump it all right back in. This required pumps, hoses, filters, shovels, extra vats, 2-3 interns, several hours, etc. And then you had to clean all the tools you used! This was an extraordinary amount of effort for what seemed like a Sisyphean task. Why take it away just to put it back? Part of this process, however, included removing the grape seeds which would come out the pump with the juice and would be sieved out and thrown away (actually, sent to farms for animal feed!) Although removing the seeds seemed like an afterthought of the process, it was actually a major reason we did délestage in the first place. Seeds contain bitter tannins that can cause unpleasant bitterness in wine if not properly managed. By removing some of the seeds, Rob was ensuring that the resulting wine would be smoother and more well balanced. Also, since I was in charge of the data collection while I was there, I could see the wine changing after our délastages. The alcohol would rise, the flavors would be richer and smoother, and the temperature would go up meaning fermentation was cruising.
These aren’t all the ways we labored behind the scenes while Rob was orchestrating the intricate wine making, but they were some of the most labor intensive. We definitely indulged in the work hard -play hard mentality, and even grueling work is fun when done in good company. What I learned was that it takes a lot of work to make wine, even when you let the wine speak for itself.
filling barrels