CUVEC Club News

Hello everyone! Welcome to CUVEC! I would like to officially invite anyone in the Cornell community to join the Cornell University Viticulture and Enology Club this fall! CUVEC is a club that is devoted to promoting the appreciation and understanding of grapes and wine. We hold various events throughout the year such as speakers, social events, movie nights, field trips and more! This semester we will be having 2 Grape Stomps, our main event, in September.

I encourage you to come join us as we learn more about wine and help teach Cornell what it is really all about! Our first club meeting will be on Wednesday, August 31st at 4:45pm in Plant Science 114. Hope to see you there!

-Melissa Aellen

CUVEC President

Entrance to the tasting room.

Internship 1 complete! My last week of work was typical of all of the other weeks complete with bottling, sulfur dioxide testing and additions, and blending of wine. We received a shipment of fruit juice earlier in the week and it was my job to inoculate all of the juices with yeast. By the next day, the winery had so much CO2 in it that we were practically forced to open the doors to allow fresh air to enter. The winery smelled wonderful and I can only imagine how amazing the wines will taste when they are finished.

For my final post, I figured I would put together a list of lessons learned while working in Galena this summer.

1. Never bottle on a Friday afternoon. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And it will all happen at the same time.

2. When adding SO2 to a tank, do not leave the beaker containing a  400,000 ppm solution of SO2 on the top of the tank. When you climb down to move the ladder a bit, the beaker will inevitably fall and break, covering you in that SO2 solution.

3. Always top the tanks. This prevents the wine from oxidizing. Either top the tanks with wine or with an inert gas like CO2, nitrogen or argon.

4. Keeping the amount of molecular SO2 in the wine at around .8ppm at all times will help to prevent oxidation.

Glasses lined up ready for a reordering of the tasting list.

5. Taste the wine daily. Sometimes the wine can go bad overnight and the sooner it’s caught, the greater the chance the wine can be saved.

6. When blending wine, take time to make all the samples that you need. Don’t rush to any final conclusions because just adding a .1grams/gallon of something can really change the taste.

7. The best way to build a new winery, is to build it with low ceilings. This way the wine critics will have to bow down to you when the enter. (This was said by a friend of Bruce Zoecklein who owns a winery in France.)

I suppose that’s about it for this post. There are a few pictures that I added below that I couldn’t really fit in earlier.

This internship was everything I hoped it would be. I learned a great deal this summer and I had a wonderful time. Chris Lawlor is a very knowledgeable winemaker and I feel privileged to be able to have work with her. This summer taught me that there is a lot of more to winemaking than I thought. I had no idea about all the different processes that can change a wine. I was used to what I worked with at home, but know I realize that there is so much more! I am still eager to learn more about winemaking through classes and internships. If nothing else, this internship has most definitely confirmed that I love making wine and learning about it. I can’t wait to find out what I will be doing next!

My dad and Chris tasting wines.

The stone used to mix up tanks of wine.

A view of the cellar. The plastic tank in the foreground is used to transport the wine from the cellar to the bottling room.

The cross-flow filter.

The outside view of the winery. The bottling room and warehouse are on the right, the cellar is on the left.

The view from the back of the beach house.

Last week, I was invited to go on vacation to Door County, Wisconsin with Chris and her family, so of course I said yes. Door County, an island on Lake Michigan, is the ‘thumb’ of Wisconsin. Chris is a part owner of a beach house right on the lake and she gets 2 weeks a year there. I drove up with her daughter, Britt, on Monday and stayed until Thursday.

While I was up there, we toured 4 wineries in the area with Chris’ good friends, Bill and Sandy Schmiling. Bill and Sandy were the past owners of Von Stiehl Winery in Algoma, Wisconsin. Von Stiehl, the oldest winery in Wisconsin, is now owned and operated by their two sons, Brad and Aric.

The first winery we stopped at was Simon Creek Winery. We arrived just in time to take the 2pm tour. Simon Creek only has a few acres of grapes, so they purchase most of their juice from California. Many wineries in Door County purchase grapes or juice from the West Coast simply because it doesn’t warm

Simon Creek Winery

up enough there to produce high quality wine grapes. To make up for this, all of the wineries we stopped at produced fruit wines because other types of fruit can ripen in the cooler climate. The main fruit grown in Door County is cherries and almost all the wineries had a Cherry Wine. The wines at Simon Creek were good, but I felt they lacked originality.

The next stop was Door Peninsula Winery. They recently opened a new expansion that cost $2.2 million to build and it was nothing less than impressive. They make over 60 wines of all styles and types (they even make a Mango Wine!) along with wines made just for the holidays, like Hallowine and a wine in a Nutcracker bottle.  They also sell and have tastings for balsamic vinegars, oils, and homemade fudge. Their gift shop was extensive and seemed to include just about all the wine related gifts that there are. Part of their new addition included a small restaurant that serves lunch and

The three main rooms of Door Peninsula Winery: gift shop, wine selection, and gourmet food selection.

dinner along with private paired tastings. Three days before we visited, they had a grand opening of their new distillery. So far they only have vodka out, but they are planning on expanding their line in the future. We went on a tour of the winery later in the week. The tour included a short video narrated by a talking cherry then a short walk through the winemaking facility. For $3, I would have liked to have had a little more narration by a human than a cherry, but the transition between the video and the guided tour was well done. Overall, the atmosphere at Door Peninsula Winery was wonderful, but I did not find any wines to my liking there. With such a wide selection, I thought I would be able to find one that I liked. They were good, but nothing extraordinary.

The third winery we visited was Harbor Ridge Winery. Harbor Ridge is owned by Von Stiehl, so their all but two of their wines are made by Von Stiehl. The two that they make on their own, one white and one red, were very delicious. The Von Stiehl wines that I tried there were the best wines that I tried on the entire trip. They were wonderful! Aric Schmiling, the winemaker, is really doing a great job.

The next day, we visited Lautenbach’s Orchard Country Winery where we tasted a few wines and picked 7lbs of

Lautenbach's Orchard Country Winery

cherries. The winery was more of a country store than a winery. They had trolley tours, cherry picking and homemade desserts. The wine wasn’t terrible, but again, it wasn’t impressive either. The cherries, however, were delicious!

On our way out of town on Thursday, we stopped by Von Stiehl to say hello to Aric and tour their facilities there. They recently opened a new winery across the street from their tasting room and it was gorgeous. They had some new tanks, new scaffolding and a new warehouse. Luckily enough, they built too big for them

The old cellar of Von Stiehl that will now be used for private events.

right now, which leaves plenty of room for expansion. We had a short tasting of a few of Aric’s favorite wines and they were excellent! Definitely the best winery we visited on this trip.

Britt and I made it back on Thursday to find a flooded Galena, with the flood gates shut and everything. Apparently, there had been a massive storm that dumped 15 inches of rain in Galena and surrounding areas in only 10 hours! Many houses were damaged, including Chris’ parents house. Fortunately, the clean up doesn’t look like it will be too bad.

This was my first real chance to go out and be an industrial spy on other wineries. It definitely got me thinking about what it would be like to have my own winery some day and how I would like it to be. We saw the cute farm-house style wineries and the massive large-scale wineries. I don’t know which one I would like to be yet, but I have learned some pros and cons of both that I can start thinking about.

On Friday, I was back at the winery running the end of the month analysis on all the wines. This month we are running complete analysis including SO2, pH, TA, brix, and alcohol. I made it through the first  11 on Friday, and I finished the rest of them today. Tomorrow, I will be adding SO2 to the wines to ensure their microbial and oxidative stabilities.

Only 8 days of work left in Illinois. I can’t believe how fast  the time has gone! I am determined to get the most out of the next 8 days as I can!

The past two weeks have been very busy. When I try to remember what I did each day, it seems like a blur. There was a broken bottling line, a festival, a heat wave, and some bottling in there somewhere I think. Let’s see what I can remember.

On Thursday, July 14th I had the biggest accomplishment of my career so far. I saved Galena Cellars $37,000 by fixing the broken labeler on the bottling machine. As I had mentioned previously, the labeler would not label bottles if the labels were printed on brown paper because the sensor could not read through the paper to determine where the label ended. It was broken for about 2 years and they were just getting ready to buy a new one when Chris told me to go take a look at the labeler and see what I could do. Since I know very little about electronics, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to fix the machine that countless had tried to fix before me. After about 20 minutes, I was able to get it up and running like never before. Ends up that the sensor needed to be adjusted big time and a few dead light bulbs needed to be replaced. I was so happy when I figured it out! I was so proud of myself. Maybe one day I will be proud when one of my wines wins a great award, but for right now I am more than pleased with fixing a labeler.

The next day, I left to go back to Maryland for the weekend. The winery back home had a Reggae Wine Festival and

My dad and I outside of the tasting room of the winery.

my help was requested by my dad. I went back and gave about 40 tours over the course of the festival (it was a two day event that drew around 15,000 people). It is the winery’s largest festival and I had to be there. Wine Festivals seem like they would be a lot of fun to go to. People bring chairs, blankets and food to put on the lawn while they listen to music and sip on a glass of wine. Everyone always seems to enjoy it. If you haven’t been to a wine festival before, I would highly recommend it. I have never been to a wine festival for fun, only to work, but even working is a lot of fun!

I finally made it back to Galena on Monday night after countless plane malfunctions on the way. Tuesday was loaded with bottling. We bottled 750 gallons of a wine called Sangarita. It is a cross between a margarita and sangria. One of the more interesting aspects of this wine is that it uses a closure called a Zork which are zip-corks. A person places the Zork on the bottle giving it a little push to ensure that it doesn’t pop out, then the ROPP machine pushes the Zork down the rest of the way. The outside of the Zork unwraps to reveal a bar top type cork that can be easily reinserted into the bottle after opening. This closure is only used for the Sangria and the Sangarita because these wines are meant to be consumed fairly quickly. Placing Zorks on the bottles is more difficult than placing capsules on the bottles because a rubber mallet has to be used to ensure that the Zork does not pop off. It was challenging to keep up with the line at first, but once I got the hang of it, I had no trouble at all.

That night, instead of going out for pizza like I usually do on Tuesday nights, I was invited to a barbecue at Chris’ house with her family and close friends. It was a really great dinner and I met a lot of people that I hear about all the time. People out here are so much more relaxed than people in Maryland, or even at Cornell. No one is rushing to and

The view from the Vineyard Suite.

from here or there. They are enjoying life at whatever speed it goes at. This is what I would like to call a very low stress environment which is definitely a change of pace from the Cornell lifestyle. The next three days were going to be extremely hot and since my apartment does not have air conditioning, Chris let me stay in the Vineyard Suite above the tasting room at the winery for a few nights. It was so nice! They rent it out to visitors every weekend but it is usually vacant during the week. It was wonderful to live in a fully furnished space again and it was great to have air conditioning!

On Wednesday, we bottled a semi-sweet red wine called Country Red. This is the first wine I’ve bottled that used the ROPP (screw cap) technology. It was really exciting

ROPP in action.

to see how it worked. There is a big bin at the top that holds the screw caps and it vibrates to move the screw caps around to the shoot. The path that the caps take to get there has many holes that allow the incorrectly positioned screw caps to fall off the path and back to the center. Once they are in the correct orientation, they are transferred down a shoot to where they are placed on the bottled and then tighten. The technology is very cool and it seems to work with minimal problems. The only annoying part is the rattling sound that happens when the bin starts to vibrate. It is loud and obnoxious. Next time, I’ll be sure to grab some ear plugs.

On Friday, we started a fermentation on a new wine that Chris is trying out made from Pomegranates. We mixed up the juice and then I added the yeast. Chris uses EC1118 on most of her fruit wines, so we decided to try it out on this one. I mixed up the bucket of yeast and just as it was beginning to ferment, a small tour walked past. I ran out with my bucket of yeast to show

Yeast EC1118 working!

them the most active part of winemaking. They seemed interested, but they also gave me looks like I was crazy. I guess I know that I’m in the right career path when I get that excited about yeast and people give me weird looks for it. I even told them about killer yeast and how to make a yeast culture. I think they learned more than they wanted to, but hopefully they liked it. I know I did.

My internship is almost done, only 3 weeks left! Before I know it, I will be back at Cornell and into another internship! I can’t wait for that, but at the same time I don’t want to leave Galena.

This past week, I have been doing a little bit of everything which is absolutely wonderful as an intern. Last Friday, Chris

A) Blottled Paper; B) Paper cylinder in the developing solution; C) Paper completed and drying; D) Completed Chromatography

and I set up a paper chomatography test for malolactic fermentation. This was my first time ever performing this fairly common test. The set up and the procedure are both very simple, but the test itself takes lots of time. First, we had a sample of malic acid and a sample of lactic acid that we blotted onto the paper using capillary tubes. Then, we blotted the samples of the wine that we wanted to test on the paper, too. We did a double blot of everything to ensure that we had a good sample. Once the blots had dried, we rolled the paper up into a cylinder and stapled it so it would stay in shape. The paper was then inserted into a large container which had about 1/2 inch of developing solvent in it. The developing solvent slowly made it’s way from the bottom of the paper to the top carrying the blotted samples with it. This process took about 3 hours. Once the solution made it’s way to the top of the paper, we removed it and allowed it to dry over the weekend. On Tuesday, we looked at the paper to see that the wines had undergone or are undergoing MLF just as Chris wanted.

While we were waiting for the developing solvent to move to the top, Chris and I delivered some freshly bottled Cranberry Wine to the downtown tasting room. We met up with Britt and had lunch in the restaurant above the tasting room and they showed me around the 4 story building which is where the winery originally started. After lunch, I finally made SO2 adjustments to the tanks that needed it and mixed them up by pumping nitrogen through them. It was difficult to figure out how much nitrogen was needed exactly to mix it up and I over shot it a few times making the fully topped tanks over flow. It’s just not a day working at a winery without wet feet or wine everywhere.

Fireworks above the Mississippi River (Dubuque, Iowa)

I had the chance to stay in Galena this weekend and explore the downtown area for the first time. There are a lot of small stores and restaurants, all of which are amazing. There are probably around a dozen or so food stores alone, each selling a speciality food product ranging from freshly popped gourmet popcorn (I bought Vermont Maple Sugar popcorn) to the delicate Liquid Kentucky Bourbon chocolates. The town is wonderful and I highly recommend stopping at Galena if you ever venture near northwest Illinois. I headed over to Dubuque, Iowa (about a 20 minutes drive) on July 3rd to see an air show and fireworks over the Mississippi River. They were absolutely beautiful!

Tuesday morning was spent in the vineyard again. We are still working on hedging the low shoots and removing the suckers. Ed came out to spray the La Crosse  vineyard so we finished that up quick and headed over to the St. Croix vineyard which needed our attention badly. The majority of the vineyard was overgrown with foliage. It took about an hour to go through and remove suckers and try to comb through and open the tops a bit to get some light under the canopy. However, light didn’t seem to be much of an issue because the Japanese Beetles had made their way into the vines sometime in the last 3 weeks leaving small holes all over the leaves. Even though this does increase the light on the grapes, having non-functioning leaves is not exactly the best thing ever. In fact, it’s pretty bad. Hopefully Ed will be able to get out and spray soon.

In the afternoon, I helped Chris blend together some Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. My job was to determine the

Ebulliometer used for determining the alcohol percentage.

alcohol levels of the wines to make sure that 1) the alcohol was within the limits indicated on the label and 2) that the alcohol was below the next tax bracket. Luckily, the alcohol levels just made the cut and we bottled the Cabernet today and the Merlot will be bottled tomorrow.

The people here are so sweet, the views are breathtaking, and I love working at the winery. I’m so glad that I decided to come out here and work with Galena Cellars. My internship isn’t even half way over yet and I feel that I have already gained experience that will last me a lifetime.

Many people do not realize how much of making wine is actually spent cleaning the equipment, floors, and about everything else. As the intern, I have had the wonderful experience of cleaning quite a bit of Galena Cellars in the past few days. But, I’m jumping ahead of myself.

Empty bottles going into the first block of the bottling line.

Let’s start with last Thursday. We bottled Rhubarb in the afternoon. The nice thing about bottling fruit wines is that they don’t require a capsule because they use a colored cork. Since my previous job (capsule placer) was not needed, I dumped on bottles. The bottling line at Galena Cellars goes a lot slower than the line that I am used to working on. It was nice to go at a slow pace. However, as much of a pain as it is to keep up with a line that is running fast, I do miss being able to bottle 500 gallons in 45 minutes instead of 2 hours.  When a delivery of wine came and Pedro (the worker that was taking the bottles off the line) had to go unload the truck, I was able to run the line all by myself .Thank you years of fast bottling. The only trouble I had started about 10 minutes in when the corker became jammed and decided to not cork about 2 cases of bottles. The bottling isn’t bad at all.

Rhubarb Wine

They have plastic conveyor belts which help to soften the noise of the bottles being dumped on the line. I will be bottling the remainder of the Rhubarb tomorrow along with some Cranberry. After bottling, we started cleaning the back of the bottling room.

On Friday, I cleaned out the entire bottling room while everyone else helped get ready for the Top of Illinois Wine Festival that was happening the next day. I spent a good 6 hours on that room. I cleaned everything from the windows to the mounds of dirt under the machines to the conveyor belts. It was a lot of work and I was covered in dirt by the end of the day but it was worth it. The bottling room looks spectacular! Almost everyone has commented on how clean it is. I got off work early on Friday and drove to northern Indiana to spend my weekend there.

Chris and I cleaned out the back room of the barrel cellar on Monday morning. This room had just a little bit of everything in it. I probably found about 40 bunches of plastic grapes that we decided to save for decoration. We found old wine, magazines, bottles (some were shaped like Christmas trees), and a pump among other things. After lunch, Chris put me in charge of relabeling all of the tanks and then taking a SO2 reading on all of them. I started the SO2s around 2pm on Monday and finished at 1pm on Tuesday. I did 23 SO2s and I now feel like I am the SO2 pro! I also took a pH of all the wines and determined the recommended SO2 level for .8ppm SO2. Tomorrow, I will be adding SO2 to most of the tanks. Luckily, Chris does an excellent job of topping all of the

Free SO2 apparatus

tanks off so we don’t have to worry too much about oxidation although it’s always good to play it on the safe side. We mixed the tanks up by bubbling nitrogen through the wine. This allows the SO2 to be fully incorporated into the wine without oxidizing the wine by pumping it.

After lunch today, Britt and I helped Chris mix up some Sangria for this weekend and then we spent 2 hours out in the vineyard suckering and cutting back the vines so the weeds can be sprayed later this week.

I’m loving my time in Galena this summer and I am learning so much! I can’t wait to learn more in the coming weeks.

The last few days have been busy. My 30 minute drive to work is very nice. There are a lot of farms in Illinois and by the end of the summer I will have probably seen more corn than I wanted to. One of the barns I pass is painted in ‘barn

Barn Quilts off of Stagecoach Road

quilts’ which give a barn a unique character and color. The midwest is usually stereotyped to be fairly flat, but it is not flat here in Galena. There are rolling hills and mounds everywhere. Galena is a large tourist attraction in Illinois, drawing about 10,000 people each weekend. I have been told not to venture into the downtown area on the weekends because of the traffic. It’s hard to imagine how a town of 3,000 people turns into a town of 10,000 over night. I guess I’ll see how that all works this weekend.

On Tuesday morning we finished up the Pinot noir blend so we could bottle it that afternoon. The bottling line they have is a Prospero line consisting of a rinsing head, CO2 sparger, 8 head filler, leveler, ROPP machine (for screw top bottles), heat shrinker, and a labeler. The only thing that the line is missing is a capsuler. My job was to do just that, place capsules on the bottles as they went down the line. This job also doubles as a quality check point to ensure that the bottles have the right amount of wine and that they contain a cork.  We bottled about 550 gallons (roughly 210 cases) and it took about 2.5 hours.

The blue capsules that I placed on the bottles

I had the opportunity to learn more about winery sanitation, which has become a recent fascination of mine. There is not much research about winery sanitation, so many wineries operate in unsanitary conditions which can lead to wine spoilage. Galena Cellars has a fairly strict sanitation system that helps to insure cleanliness at all times. They rinse all of the hoses through a soda ash solution for  about 1 minute, then water for about 1 minute, then a solution of citric acid and potassium metabisulfite (KMS) for 3 minutes. The hoses are then attached to pulleys and suspended from the ceiling to prevent the ends from sitting in wash water that ends up on the floor. Before the hoses come in contact with wine, the ends are sprayed down with 70% alcohol to make a final sterilization effort. A similar process is done for all of the fittings and any other pieces that come in contact with wine. The bottling line is cleaned by the use of ozone water for about 10 minutes. It has been a great experience for me to learn about the sanitation practices because many wineries have trouble with this and I’m glad that I found a winery that seems to have it under control.

This is where we sat and paraded around for the Reiki ritual

After work on Tuesday, I went out to dinner with Chris, Britt, and Chris’ father at Happy Joe’s (a pizza place) and then we went back to the winery to participate in Reiki, a form of Japanese healing that was being performed on the vines. One of the employees at Galena Cellars is a Reiki master and since it was the summer solsitice, she felt that the spirits would be able to help the vines grow this year. The ceremony consisted of all of us being smudged with burnt sage, calling the spirits out with drums and rattles, the calling of the directions and chanting. The night ended with a nice wine and cheese tasting and a guided meditation session. Reiki has never been done on the vines before and Galena Cellars doesn’t usually participate in rituals like this, but they decided to give it a try. I will definitely say it was intresting and that I’m glad I attended. However, I am wondering if  this ritual will produce any results. I’ll just have to wait and see.

Wednesday morning started off cold and wet and didn’t improve much from there. It even Ithacated throughout the day. I helped Chris enter 18 of her wines into the Illinois Wine Competition, which included more tasting and hard decisions. Once the rain let up a little, we went out into the vineyard to comb the vines out some and remove extra shoots, lateral shoots and suckers. It was probably the longest amout of time that I have worked in a vineyard and I’m glad to know that I chose the correct concentration. I enjoyed my time in the vineyard today, but I don’t think that I would enjoy doing that day after day. It was a great experience though and I believe that I will be out in the vineyard again tomorrow.

Once the rain started again, we headed back inside to stay dry and we did some bench trial blends on a wines that will be finished soon. We made blends for St. Croix, Rhubarb, and Cranberry. The Cranberry was filtered today and will most likely be bottled tomorrowafternoon.

The automatic labeler on the bottling line does not work with a few of the labels because the sensor cannot read through the brown paper backing. There are only a handful of labels that this happens with and the Pinot noir that

Pinot noir Label

was bottled yesterday just happened to be one of them. Britt and I spent the time after lunch hand labeling 30 cases of Pinot noir, 30 cases of Merlot, and 30 cases of Syrah. We finished just around 5pm and headed home for the day.

Working at Galena Cellars has already been a fantastic experience and I am looking forward to see what the next 7 weeks will have in store for me!

Galena Cellars Vineyard Location

I am proud to say that Day 1 of my internship at Galena Cellars is done! It seems like it took forever to actually get here. The trip alone took 14 hours plus countless other hours finding housing and figuring out all the details, but it was all completely worth it.

Galena Cellars is a small winery in Northwestern Illinois that makes a wider selection of wines than any other winery I have ever been to. They make 42 different wines including dry reds and whites, sweet wines, fruit wines, and several port and sparkling wines.  This is quite impressive considering they only make about 50,000 gallons of wine each year. The winemaking staff is lead by Chris Lawlor, who opened the winery with help from her parents in the early 1970′s after receiving a degree in Enology from Fresno State University. The location of the winery has moved several times after it’s start in Iowa and Wisconsin. In the 1980′s, the Lawlor family decided to move the entire production to a small building in the town of Galena, Illinois. Once they outgrew that building, all of the actual winemaking production was moved onto a 25 acre farm about 15 minutes outside of town, while the building in town was converted into a tasting and sales room.

My first day consisted of a mix of different activities. Early in the morning, we started by tasting 6 barrels of St. Croix and 4 barrels of Marechal Foch to see if it was ready to be bottled yet. After deciding that the barrel of St. Croix with the added tannin was clearly better than the rest, it was my job to add tannin to the rest of the barrels then top them off with some Pinot noir. We tested the alcohol content on the Pinot noir because the it is going to bottled later in the week. Thanks to Wine Composition and Analysis, I was able to successfully complete a test for alcohol without any complications besides the fact that the thermometer was old and the markings were mostly rubbed off.

Ziggy - the winery dog

After lunch, I tagged along on a tour that Janet, a server in the tasting room, was giving to a couple. She even let me give some of the tour. I talked about Phylloxera and trellising systems out in the vineyard and aging and fining in the cellar. Once the tour was finished, I helped Britt, Chris’s daughter who is planning on marketing wine after college, take sugar readings on all of the wines. It took a long time and we wasted quite a bit of wine, but we got the job done.

Chris is entering 12 wines in the Illinois wine competition that takes place next week. We spent the remainder of the afternoon tasting around 25 wines to decide which ones should be entered into the competition. All in all it was a good day and I am looking forward to tomorrow even though we will be bottling (my least favorite activity). It will be different than home, so maybe, just maybe, it will be fun.

While the first (half) week included some familiarizing work in the Tensley tasting room and winery (mostly some riveting hours spent washing glasses and topping some barrels of Syrah) I wanted to focus in this post on the work that was done this week in the new estate vineyard being put in on Joey Tensley’s property (a <10 acre property that doubles as Joey’s BEAUTIFUL private residence in the rolling hills of the Santa Ynez Valley).  When I arrived on the 1st, I was quickly introduced to the core team of the Tensley wine operation.  Joey Tensley is the owner, winemaker, recent vineyard manager and essentially sole businessman in charge of distribution and retail sales.  Zach W. is his 23 year old right-hand man; a recent graduate of UC Berkley with a degree in micro-biology.  And, aside from a handful of contracted agricultural workers, this is the nitty-gritty of the Tensley team.

Much to my luck, I arrived at the true pinnacle of new-vineyard excitement.  Aside from a few hours spent distributing trellising poles, all energy was focused on the 2400 vines of Syrah clone 470 that were scheduled to arrive on the 2nd, the day after I arrived in town.  I awoke bright and early (I thought 7 am died with high-school) on the second and, after spending some quality time with a dish-washer, polishing tasting room glasses, Zach and I arrived at the vineyard to the sight of 2400 neatly dug planting holes with Joey standing eagerly in the middle of his field.

Syrah Homes

Holes

10 or 12 contracted agriculture workers were also present (on the clock) to help with the planting for the day.  There was excitement in the air; despite the fact that the nursery delivering the vinespromised to deliver at promptly…. anytime that day!  Thus the excitement was a blend of anticipation and frustration.  Not only were there a dozen on-the-clock farmers sitting around with nothing else to do but make sure that each hole was dug correctly, but there was a front of threatening weather (intense winds that could easily dry out a vulnerable graft union) quickly making its way towards our part of town.  Thankfully, the vines arrived around noon and we were all able to get to work.  The following few hours were truly magical.  It felt as though we were watching over tender, vulnerable creatures that would one day mature into complex and crafted wines.  Planting vines instills a sense of maternity in those involved; a responsibility to coax the fragile vines from pot to soil and ensure that they have the right conditions to take root and thrive.  Each vine was placed into a 3 foot hole with about 15 inches of rootstock protruding out of the ground, with the graft union at the top.  After planting, cardboard cartons were placed around each vine and tethered to the trellis to protect the graft union from drying out  during the fragile stages of growth.  As in all exciting stories, though, there was a hitch.  As the planting winded down, it became apparent that the nursery had delivered only 2200 cartons to protect all 2400 of the vines.  And, with weather rapidly approaching, it was clear that it was necessary to get the required protective cartons ASAP.  Thus with contract workers now idle (and still on the clock) we placed calls to vineyard supply stores all around the area, desperate to find the materials we needed before wind compromised the exposed vines.  At 2:30 PM we located a store in the next town over that was open for the next 30 min.  After a quick espresso, Joey and I booked it over to the shop, calling Zach to tell him the details as he had been on a delivery run for the tasting room and was headed back to the vineyard.  Joey and I arrived at the store at 2:50, and were greeted by the most happy-go-lucky salesmen alive.  This guy was truly high on life.  For those of you who watch the Simpsons, I would liken this man to Gil Gunderson the salesman (minus the fits of manic depression).  This guy was all “take my card,” “half off this and that” and “be sure to tell your friends that I’m in the area.”  Attempting to dispense with the pleasantries, Joey and I glad-handed this guy for 10 minutes or so, bought the necessary cartons and raced back to the vineyard where we met a confused-looking Zach.

The Salesman

Zach had arrived literately seconds after we had left to the sight of the contract workers packing up and shipping out, stating that they had another job they had to attend to.  Thus, with approaching weather and exposed vines, we now had nobody to help put the necessary cartons in place.  It was clear that the three of us could not finish the job before wind and rain arrived, so we went to the vineyard to asses the situation.  Fortunately, before shipping out, the workers had mounded dirt over the remaining graft unions, a protective measure that would temporarily protect the graft from damage (though it meant more work later to un-mound the dirt and attach the cartons).  Unfortunately, they had completely neglected a block of vines that needed to be tended to.  The three of us managed to install cartons just as the rain arrived, and all had a sigh of relief over a glass of  Tensley’s namesake Grenache.  It was truly one of the most exciting and enlightening afternoons of education.  Being present at the very beginning stages of vine/winemaking is an experience that cannot be described, and should be experienced by anyone who truly loves the art and science inherent in the making of wine.  I am looking forward to learning more about the techniques that go in to managing a developing vineyard, and cannot wait to share!!