Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 44: Final Fermentation

Hi all:

Well, the weather did cooperate on Saturday, nice & warm, but not on Sunday, when we had another storm front move in, bringing some slight showers, and plummeting cold temperatures! From advise of one of my blog followers, HB of Virginia (check out his blog!), I am going to resort to an external heater, of which I have some professional experience from my old days at Raychem Corporation. I am going to put a thin electric sheet heater on my fermentation barrel with aluminum foil tape. This should add a small amount of heat to the "Must". Hopefully, with a little heat, we can move along to the next step!

Spending way too much time under my house, than in my house, John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 43: Stuck Fermentation!!

Hi all:

My initial fermentation has been taking more time than expected. In fact, I have had the "Must" (grape skins & juice) fermenting for almost two weeks now, which should have only been about a week. According to:

www.Grapestompers.com

Wine yeast is most happy when:

• It's not too hot, and not too cold
• There's lots of food to eat
• No killer agents are present
• They live in sanitary conditions
• Oxygen is available (to kick off fermentation)

To make sure oxygen is available, I have been punching down the "Cap", the layer of floating grape skins, that forms on the top of the "Must". I have been trying to do this 2 or 3 times a day, once early in the morning before school (my work), late in the afternoon after school (my work) and once at bedtime. This circulates the juice, grape pulp & skins which should give more food to the yeast.

There is the possibility that the fermentation is "Stuck", which does not happen very often, but if it is going to happen, it will happen to me & I cannot rule it out. I have tried my best to be sanitary & there is not much I can do about past contamination, so that just leaves the temperature variable.

The temperature of my bubbling brew has not exceeded 68 degrees Fahrenheit (that's 20 degrees Celsius for you metric folk), which maybe is a little on the low side. It is suggested that one might warm the "Must" to 70-75 degrees to "Un-Stuck" a "Stuck" fermentation, which I hope will naturally happen with our bout of warmer weather we have had here for the last two or three days. I'll let you know how things progress over the weekend.

With alcoholic wishes & vinegar nightmares,

John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 42: Pressing Matters !!

Oh my, oh my!

My "Brix" (sugar content), which measured 25.5 degrees at the start of fermentation, is now measuring 9 degrees, but it needs to drop to 0 degrees to start the next step of fermentation, "Pressing" ! And my total acid level, which was low at 2.5 grams per Liter at the beginning of fermentation, has now risen to 8.25 g/L, a little higher than desired (6.0 - 8.0 g/L)!

Arrrrgh !!!! What to do, what to do!!!!!!

John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 41: Fermentation Frenzy

Hi all:

Here's a couple of shots of my must. The first shows the "Cap" of grape skins, which forms a protective layer over the wine. You can see my hand there with a military issue potato masher that is used to "Punch" down the cap a couple of times a day. The second shot shows the punched down cap. The bubbles are carbon dioxide and other gases given off during fermentation. In fact, the large wineries have to be careful when fermenting due to the large amounts of CO2 given off in the buildings.

For years & years, I have been driving by this little shop on the very edge of Los Altos next to Palo Alto, formerly called "Fermentation Frenzy" (now called MoreBeer!, MoreWine!, MoreCoffee!, More Flavor!, MoreSomething!, take your pick). One year, Kris bought me all the equipment and supplies from there for making beer. And for the last 3 or 4 years I have been popping into the place every once in a while to look at equipment and ponder winemaking. But this year, they know me by my first & last name, and they have also memorized my credit card number!

Well, it really hasn't been hugely expensive, but if I don't need another food-grade 10 gallon plastic fermentation barrel ($21), I need a pound of tartaric acid ($7.95) or just sage advise that I am doing things right ($$ priceless $$)! At any rate, between all the little things one does need for winemaking, these guys have it all, or at the least, they will have it by next Thursday! If you need anything for beer making, winemaking & now coffee roasting, checkout MoreFlavor! Plus they take their time with customers explaining & helping, which can be a double edged sword sometimes. Especially when you forgot to get enough tartaric acid that was suppose to be added before the wine yeast and you are the fifth customer in line!

Well, the crawl space under my house has been converted to a winery for the next few months. [I am actually planning on building (adding on) under our house in the future, so someday I will have a "cellar" or at least a place to store a lot of wine or vinegar.] As I had mentioned in my previous post, I have added the "Meta", and the "Yeast". But I hadn't mentioned that I had to add some tartaric acid to bring the acid level of the "Must" up to 6.5 g/L. And as things go, I hadn't bought enough acid to reach that level, so I had added the Yeast anyway just to get things going. And now I have just added more tartaric acid to bring it up to the desired level. Apparently, the acid protects the wine yeast from harmful bacteria that cannot tolerate that high of acid level.

You know, its just like cooking, you read the recipe for the first time, but you mix up the order or the ingredients or whatever and you try & correct it! And after you have made the dish a dozen times, you can make it by heart, and you might even experiment here & there. Well, I am still at that first stage, reading the recipe for the first time and making little mistakes & corrections. Having said that, wine is also very forgiving, so I still have a fighting chance to make something decent!

And the most wonderful thing is that this whole concoction is starting to smell like wine! Or at least it smells like that strange, wonderful smell I remember from my youth going on tours of wineries up in Napa, through all those caves & cellars, by the huge fermentation barrels on the way to the tasting rooms!

Things are happening very fast & we will be pressing the wine very soon, so we will have another post next weekend to keep updated on pressing matters (a very little joke)! As Nora Jones said in her song, Don't Know Why, "My heart is drenched in wine, ..., but you'll be on my mind, ..., forever."

Intoxicated from under the floor boards of my house,

John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 40: Pickin' 'N A Grinin'

Hey, where were you?

I know, I know, ..., it was Oktoberfest, ..., but we had baked goodies from Ester's German Bakery & Peet's French Roast Coffee!

I know, I know, ..., there was a soccer match, ..., but we had Dittmer's Deli Sandwiches & Izze's Sodas!

It's OK, but we really missed you. But as they say, "blood is thicker than water", and my brother, Mike, and his wife, Monica, really pulled through helping us harvest our grapes, a whole 185 pounds of grapes! Kristen & I owe you & Monica big time Bro'! At least a couple of cases! (And hopefully, not cases of vinegar!

Yes, we were "pickin' & a grinin'" (thank you Poco!) last Saturday morning and a fine "Indian Summer" day it was. A little windy, but that keep it cool! My brother and his wife came all the way from Nevada! Talk about migrant farm workers! And they came prepared, hitting the vineyard with their own hooked harvest knives, which they picked up in Lodi (made famous by the John Fogarty & Creedence Clearwater Revival and now a big Zinfandel region of California) at the vineyard supply store located there. However, Mike and I soon converted to regular pruning shears after a coupe of cut fingers from these traditional instruments! Obviously, dexterity runs in our family. (Look to the side bar for more pictures of "My First Crush"!)

It took about 5 hours to pick all the grapes, but to start the wine making process it took less than thirty minutes. I had rented a "Crusher/De-Stemmer" apparatus from our local beer & wine making shop, "MoreFlavor!" (formerly known as "Fermentation Frenzy"), located near Chef Chu's & Armadillo Wille's. The Crusher part of the machine replaces that age old technique of stompin' grapes (picture Lucille Ball in that wine vat!), and mechanically "pops" open the grape skins to release the juice and inner fruit. While the De-Stemmer part ingeniously separates the crushed grapes from the stems!

The crushed grapes, now called the "Must", was collected a plastic fermentation barrel resulting in about 25 gallons of must. Because of my inexperience, I decided not to use oak barrels this time around, due to their high cost and it is easy to ruin a wooden barrel. And, at any rate, you can add oak wood chips during the latter part of the fermentation process, an idea that was conceived by Professor Singleton, who taught my "Introduction to Wine" class in Davis in 1975, giving wine the oaky flavor that comes from barrel fermenting.

Sunday, I added a sulfur compound called "Meta", to the must, that actually kills off the naturally occuring yeast and any foreign bacteria that maybe present. The naturally occurring yeast can be used to ferment the grapes, but there is a risk of getting off flavors. So most winemakers use Meta allowing about 24 hours for it to do its thing and then add back a specific wine yeast. The "Yeast", that I added on Monday, is for bordeaux style wines, which Cabernet Sauvignon falls into. So everybody cross your fingers, ..., we will see how things progress from here!

Hey Hose Alert! - To borrow another blogger's surprise catch phrase: "Have I been living under a rock!" They are actually sell garden hoses that have the following warning labels on them, "Do not drink from hose & wash hands after handling as the hose contains lead." Is it just me or has the entire world gone crazy! Who in the hell would make a hose that you could not drink from, ..., let alone let your kids play in a sprinkler, ..., or fill a kiddie pool without worrying that you are killing neurons in your kids! My wife, Kristen, came across this as we were buying some new hoses. Now we have lead free hoses around our hose. Not too big an investment to avoid dementia!

Yours from down in my wine cellar (well, actually in the crawl space under my house),

John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 39: Crush Alert !!!

First thing is first,

Sorry for the last minute notice, but "THE CRUSH IS ON, BABY !!!!!"  We are going to be picking our first major harvest of grapes this:

* Saturday, October 3rd

* Coffee & Mornin' Food 8:30 a.m.

* Pickin' Begins  9:30 a.m.

* Wine Makin' 10:30 a.m.

Bring your own hand shears and gloves !!!

I been using the old methods of determining the time to pick, which are touch, taste and seed color.  And although I usually can tell which tomato to buy in the grocery store, there seems to be a little bit more to it in the vineyard.  The sugar in grape is predominately glucose, which is about half as sweet as cane sugar or sucrose. Therefore, the sweetness difference is very subtle.

Anyway, to be sure, I bought an instrument called a refractometer scope, which uses sun light and refraction to determine the percent sugar content (by weight) of a liquid like grape juice.  You know how if you put a spoon or a pencil in a glass of water it appears to be bent.  That's refraction!  Light gets bent (actually slows down) in different mediums like water, glass or grape juice.

Well, someone calibrated the amount refraction (light bending) that occurs with the amount of sugar by weight in water, which they measure in degrees brix.  The reflectometer has a glass platform to place a couple of drips of fluid on. And when you look through thru the eyepiece, thru the glass platform, you see a scale super-imposed on the field of view.  You first calibrate the scale with a sample of distilled water (no sugar there).  My scope was right on right out of the box, O% sugar!  Then you try a sample, in my case, grape juice.

So, I walked through the vineyard today and grabbed a sampling of grapes from different vines separately smashing them in different plastic bags.  I found that the brix for all my grape juice samples ranged from 23 to 24 degrees or 23 to 24% sugar.  The typical range for ripe grapes in brix is 20 to 24 degrees!  So, it is time to pick, but the earliest I can do it is next Saturday!

Anyway, I have to hit the books, learn how to make wine and find all the necessary equipment & supplies to crush, de-stem & press the grapes. Not to mention the fermentation container(s), buckets, etc.!  Pray it doesn't rain!

Wishing you well from down in the vineyard!

John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 38: Autumn Approaches, But It's Indian Summer In California!

Hi all:

With the change in our weather, the cool mornings are sashaying with the warm/hot afternoons, and the grapevines leaves have turned from that bright verdant green of the Spring & early Summer to that more mature dark green color of the late Summer & Fall with a leaf of maroon thrown in here or there. The new season's growth of canes have turned from bright green to a reddy-brown as we start the Autumn season. The grapes, once little green balls, are plumper now, mostly a deep purple color. They are a little sweet, but they are not yet quite ripe with the stickiness of their sugar on the outside. The neighboring vineyards have put on their bird netting to protect the sweetening grapes from the birds. The birds will certainly know when the grapes are ripe enough to eat!

Yes, we are nearing the harvest time. School has started and so goes my cheap child labor! I too am otherwise pre-occupied by being employed now, re-hired, thanks to an exodus of veteran teachers who are leaving my district in record numbers, probably too frustrated with the constraints of teaching under severe budget cuts. So, I will have my hands full with the new alternative education program that I am entering. And, therefore, my efforts in the vineyard will have to be relegated to an occasional weekday late afternoon or weekend.

We still have our Young Oak Vineyards Spring Honey available in two sizes:

6 oz. for $4.50    &   16 oz. for $9.00

The bees have been busy and our summer honey will probably come in late September or early October. And if you are interested in getting your own hive, our bee man, Alan, claims that you only need a small area of the typical backyard. (I feel safe at a distance of about five feet.) Alan has placed several hives in south Palo Alto homes. Here is Alan's website again: www.getbees.net

From down in the vineyard, wishing all you out there, the blessings of the approaching autumn season!
John

Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 37: Summer Doldrums!

Hi all:

Hope you are all having an enjoyable summer!  The grapes keep basking in the sun and only require a little water about once a week.  Which is good, because I am recovering from my hip surgery, I am only able to do a little around the house.  I actually can do the dishes & clean the kitchen, but I have to be careful!  I have advanced from a walker to crutches to the cane in record time!  Now my therapist is now having me walk without the aid of anything.  After I have re-mastered walking, I hope to be able to do some serious projects around the house, but unfortunately, I can't rush things.  It typically takes about three months to recover from this type of hip surgery.

Thanks to my Number One Son, Scott, his good friend Frank Gage and two wonderful young ladies visiting from Finland, the vineyard is looking really well groomed!  Scott & crew hand pulled, roots & all of most of the insidious weeds from the vineyard!  Scott has headed back to his current digs in Helsinki, Finland to work away in the Nordic sunshine.  We look forward to his next visit very soon!

If you are wondering what's with all the girls with goats pictures, in the quiet of the late morning this past July 29th, with everyone out and about on errands & such, Ellie started her delivery.  We lost one little one, but two little guys survived.  Still un-named, I went for the obvious like "Salt & Pepper", "Blackie & Whitie", however, I have been vetoed as to just being lame!  I have really enjoyed having the goats as part of the vineyard management.  However, we need to curtail our growing numbers (i.e.:  Big Mac gets fixed!)!

On the bee front:  Hey, we just received our first installment of honey, about 20+ pounds!  This represents the work our bees have done this Spring.  Our beeman, Alan, has placed another "super" on top of our hive, sort of a top box condo with frames for the bees to store even more honey.  We should see another 20 pounds or so from the summer months as well.  Since bees range about 2 mile in radius, the type of honey is considered to be a "mixed flower", but that would include pollen from my cabernet grape flowers, my bottlebrush, the star thistle & other weeds about, my pepper tree, not to mention my neighbor's eucalyptus and many others.  So this is a great mix of all the local pollens that would really get your allergies going, especially if you live near us!  If you are interested in trying our honey, drop me a line!

With delicious sticky fingers on my keys,
John

Young Oak Vineyards - Volume 36: YOV Toasts the Fourth of July!

Hi all:

Hope you all had an enjoyable Fourth of July! We are popping out with all kinds of leafy growth up here! Our grapevines are loving this moderate, coastal, cool, summer weather pattern. Great for long term summer growth!

That is generally the idea behind our vintage producing California wine regions.  Along our California coasts, on the eastern side of the Coastal Mountains, are many areas that get evening & morning cooling from the coastal climate.  Imagine Carmel or the Mendicino coastline with its fog, moderate ocean breezes, etc.  A little ways inland we find areas like Napa, Sonoma, inland Mendocino, the Livermore Valley, Santa Cruz Mountains, Solvang (remember the movie "Sideways"), inland Santa Barbara, etc.  But our California Central Valley just does not get that coastal cooling, because it is too far inland and it is generally hot there all summer long.  Therefore, the grapes in the Central Valley tend to ripen quickly without slowly developing further complex flavors.  Think of 100 degree Fresno heat, Seedless Thompson's, the Raisin Capital of the World!

However, I just had a Central Valley 2007 "Old Vines" Zinfandel (Zymmestry, Lodi, CA), courtesy of my good friend Tim Chou, that was just fantastic!  (Not to mention Tim's Fantastic North Carolina BBQ & Sue's amazing cole slaw & potato salad!)  The 2007  California Zinfandel harvest is being heralded as the best ever over the two recent 2006 & 2005 best ever award winning years, making for a perfect "trifecta"!  So, that begs the question, how are they growing such complex, flavorful wine grapes in Lodi, CA, smack dab in the middle of the Central Valley, not to mention other areas like the Sierra Foothills and even Fresno!  

Tim's zinfandel was grown on "Old Vines", which has two different meanings.  One is that the grapevines are old, 25, 50, 100 years old or older.  Mind you, there is no regulation of how old "Old" is in the wine industry!  At about 50 years old, grapevines output diminish, but the quality of these grapes tend to be very high.  Some large production vineyards would consider replanting these vines at this point to maintain the high volume output of a younger vine.  Interestingly though, there are many small vineyards dotting California's Central Valley, that were planted by California's European-Americans' need for wine in response to our 1920 - 1933 U.S. Constitutional Prohibition of Alcohol.  Originally for personal wine consumption (which was legal), many of these vineyards have survived, have been re-discovered and are now producing very high quality wines today.

Another aspect of these personal Prohibition vineyards was that they often used un-grafted rootstock (the original European grapevine rootstock), another definition of the term "Old Vines".  These grapevines have survived Phylloxera, because our little soil louse doesn't like the poor sandy, rocky soils that these Prohibition vineyards were typically planted in.  There are some in the industry that say these un-grafted European rootstock produce better wines than the American grafted rootstock, citing wines of un-grafted rootstock still producing in the American Northwest (Washington, Oregon), from Chilé and from the California Central Valley! (See Young Oak Vineyards:  Volume 4 - Rootstock, for further information regarding Phylloxera.)

So, although these Central Valley grapes are ripening faster due the heat, their "Old Vines" may be imparting high quality flavors to these grapes either because they are "Old" in years and/or because the grapevines have original European rootstock!  Check out some of these California "Old Vines" for yourself!  They are delicious!  And thanks again, Tim & Sue!

I wanted to take some pictures of my vines for this blog post, but I am still on crutches after my hip replacement surgery and I cannot get down in the vineyard just yet.  Hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July weekend!  Best wishes to all your families and friends for a great summer!

Regards from up in my bed, flat on my back, John

Young Oak Vineyards - Volume 35: More Summer Fun!

Hi all:

Well, summer is in full force here at Young Oak Vineyards! That means almost everyone has "flown the coop", leaving only Kris & I to tend the vines. Suzie, our youngest, is currently at Camp Full Belly Farms, an organic farm up in the Capay Valley near Davis, California. Katie, our older daughter, is making up for past sins at summer school in between runs to the beach, a couple of summer concerts and hangin' with friends. Scott, our oldest, visiting from Finland for a friend's wedding, has extended his holiday stay stateside for a couple of weeks playing "Man Versus Wild" at survival camp in Utah! Can't wait to hear about gutting the sheep with his new Laplander knife and then roasting mutton under the stars!

Goat Update:  As you probably can tell, Ellie is pregnant, again!  Yes, Big Mac has had his way with Ellie and we are expecting the arrival of another batch of goats in July or early August. We have currently separated Big Mac, so as not to impregnate the little ones, which are 7 months old now, old enough to be very young mothers! I will be talking to our vet about tying some tubes, so we can avoid this in the future. We are going to limit our herd to 6 (or even less), so if you are interested in a pet goat, give me a hollar!

I'll be going under the knife tomorrow for a hip replacement (some congenital developmental joint problem), so wish me luck!  My daughter, Suzie, has put a great positive twist on my situation as I have let my beard grow out a bit for the summer and I will be using a cane for a while after my operation as I limp around.  Given my ascerbic sense of humor, I can play "House", that is "Dr. Gregory House", the grumpy, insolent diagnostician we all know & love!

Wishing you a great summer, John

Young Oak Vineyards - Volume 34: School's Out For Summer!

Hi all:

Happy Summer everyone!  You'll never meet an happier person than a teacher after the last day of school!  And especially one that is not teaching summer school!  Woohoo!!

Well, lookey here! My hand is behind a couple of baby bunches of verdant grapes!  And every grapevine in the vineyard has dozens of them as well!  So, it looks like we will be getting a substantial amount of grapes this Fall, assuming we protect them from the birds! Hey, this means there maybe some grape stompin' at our Oktoberfest!  But what we really want to happen this growing season is for our newly established grapevine trunk to put out those lateral cane shoots we call "cordons".

If you didn't see it, my good friend, Keith Newman, posted a comment on my last post about goats & vineyards.  Keith says, "Michel-Schlumberger Vineyards in the Dry Creek Valley hires a shepherd with pygmy goats/sheep for weed control. The animals are too short to reach the cordons, so leave the grape vine undamaged. When Stacie and I took the vineyard tour we found some little tufts of wool snagged on the grape vine stems."  

Hey, thanks Keith!  I love it!  It sounds like they planned the whole scheme.  I do see that big commercial vineyards tend to construct their trellises very tall, over six feet high to increase the vine growth volume.  We got our goats as an after thought to starting our vineyard.  And unfortunately, I had already installed our trellis's first wire only three feet off the ground.  Also, my so-called "pygmy goats" can reach branches that are four feet or higher off the ground by standing on their hind legs, jumping, climbing on top of each other or on their poor mother's back!!  (I can never get my camera fast enough to catch one of the kids standing on all four on top of Mom!)  I'm just going to have to play with this idea a bit more!  Hmmm!!!  Might have to get taller grapes, ..., or, ..., shorter goats!

From down in the vineyard, Maaaaaaa!!!!  Hey, get out of here you pesky goats!

P.S. - My good friend, Keith Newman, is training for a marathon team to help raise money & awareness for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS).  Keith is well on his way towards his goal, but every penny helps.  If you can help out, please use the link below to donate online and to learn more about the great things LLS does for cancer research, patients and their families:

Team in Training

Perhaps your employer has a matching gift program?  If so, please consider that option as well.  Donations to LLS helps accelerate finding a cure for leukemia, lymphoma & myeloma. More than 823,000 Americans are battling these blood cancers!

Thank you, John