As I am writing this, we are pressing one of our last three tanks of Cabernet Sauvignon in the cellar. It’s almost over: Harvest 2012.
In Wellington we have now started a blessing of the harvest ceremony which coincides with our annual harvest festival. I love the idea, but I thought I wanted to make a list of exactly what I was grateful for.
I thought it would be fitting to tell you about the 10 things that I feel blessed for this year:
1. Harvest started one week later this year than usually – It gave us one extra week of planning, mostly in the vineyard. It changed a lot for me in terms of concepts and logistics.
2. Our Optenhorst Chenin blanc vineyard had its 60th planting birthday. Oh how I love thee…
3. Our cooling system worked like a bomb, no failures, consistent cooling. What a joy.
4. ESKOM (our South African electricity public utility) supplied consistent power this harvest. No outages. High 5!
5. We employed a small team of young adults from our farm as harvest help- just to keep cleaning and help sorting. Some of them showed great aptitude and energy. Getting excited about the next generation of cellar hands for the future. I love that we can get excited about PEOPLE!
6. And on people – I feel immensely blessed that we all got through harvest intact and with no injuries. Some people forget that in making wine we work with high voltage electricity, heights, wet surfaces and a lot of happy tanks emitting CO2.
7. We had a super harvest form our grapes from the Upper Hemel-en-Aarde Valley in Hermanus. Healthy grapes from a winemaking area overlooking the ocean. High risk – but high reward.
8. On a personal level – my support team that made things work out at home. Being a winemaker in harvest time is a nerve wrecking exercise (especially if you are married to one too). Add 18 month old twins and a rosy cheeked 7 year old, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Thanks team Fourie.
9. Coffee – good coffee. Thanks, Petrus, for the machine. I will endure any hardship with a cup of java in hand.
10. I work in a cellar where winemakers in the last century made wines without high pressure, steam, pumps, high tech presses. Thank goodness for technology and hygiene. As an obsessive compulsive type of cleaner – all we have in technology helps me feel safe and confident about our products. I sometimes go into the old cellar and look at the primitive utensils our forefathers had to work with and I feel happy…very happy.
Another year, another set of lessons learnt, I was happy with you, I fought with you. You won your fair share of battles and I mine. Harvest 2012 you beauty, we still have a long road before I put all your wines to bottle…But you have been blessed.
If you are a parent this question might have you cringing behind the steering wheel. Especially if you live in South Africa and you are on a road trip of note.
I do ask the same question to Mariaan though – every morning. So I have sympathy with her situation with me!
Mariaan does a stellar job in going into the vineyards every day and sampling bunches from specific sites. She then comes to the cellar and makes juice from the samples to be tested.
Following this regime every vineyard has a blueprint of ripening and it also flags us to when we should start tasting the grapes for picking. I would love to say that we only taste the grapes for picking but having analysis to underline your decision helps a lot!
So here I`m filming Mariaan sampling. You can’t hear me asking it on the video, but my next question to her would be…..Are we there yet?
Noble rot is the benevolent form of a grey fungus, Botrytis cinerea, affecting wine grapes. Infestation by Botrytis requires moist conditions, and if the weather stays wet, the malevolent form, “grey rot” or “suur vrot” can destroy your grapes.
Grapes become infected with Botrytis when they are ripe or almost ripe. If they are then exposed to drier conditions and become partially raisined this form of infection brought about by the partial drying process is known as noble rot. Grapes when picked at a certain point during infestation can produce particularly fine and concentrated wines.
We visited the De Bos farm in the Upper-Hemel-en-Aarde Valley yesterday, to see what we will be taking in this week from there. We saw this awesome picture in the Zinfandel vineyard – too good not to share. The infection looks like little claws getting stuck into the grape.
We do make a wine with Noble Rot character called Dolce Primitivo. It is from Primitivo grapes, but from Wellington. So after the fungus has attached to the skin, because of our dry conditions, the berries become beautifully raisin-like and concentrated. Because of the sugar content of the berries the fermentation stops naturally at some point giving rise to a wine with a lower alcohol and higher residual sugar. Through the concentration process of the noble rot – the acidity is also concentrated. The product then a wine which isn’t just sticky sweet, but also has some lovely acidity to balance it all.
The perfect ending to a meal, or a late night glass (or two) now that February`s cooler nights have set in.
We have had a lovely breather from the hot weather of end of January. We actually had some rain on Friday evening and a really cool weekend in the cellar. We are hoping that the grapes, that have become more sugar ripe the last few weeks, will now also have the opportunity to mature in regards to crunchy pips, soft skins and grape flavour maturity.
So our weekend in pictures. The view from my cellar window: cloudy and cool – just after the night’s rain.
While we were pressing, some of Elsenburg Agricultural college’s students came by for a tasting. Happy to report an enthusiastic and eager group. I wish them well with their viticulture and oenology studies for this coming year. May you learn that in wine, one never ceases to learn!
Sunday morning saw the drawing off of some lovely clear juice to start fermenting our Chardonnay from our De Bos farm in the Upper Hemel –en –Aarde Valley. The grapes are from high density bush vines surrounded by fynbos and some of the most beautiful surroundings known to the wine world. Hoping we will do the area justice with the wine we are pampering.
Most of us have seen the wine movie Sideways. At the time when I saw it, I hadn’t made Pinot Noir before. So here we are… The first grapes from our high density Pinot Noir plantings are in the cellar. Here is my #captainslog on the grapes coming in.
I thought I`d add the transcript from the movie of Miles`s explanation on why he is so into Pinot Noir:
“It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. Right? It’s, uh, it’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s, you know, it’s not a survivor like cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And, in fact, it can only grow in these really specific, little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.”
Interesting news last week was a lot of writing about natural wines and cases in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa where wines have had problems getting through export panels (here in South Africa called the Wine and Spirits Board). Read Jamie Goode’s perspective on his blog here.
These wine were usually made in new innovative ways, and or more traditional ways resulting in wines that were “different”.
At Bosman Family Vineyards we have had the same experience with one of our wines. Called Liquid Gold by our Wine Club members, it went through a round of rejection before we could start selling it. The wine was ready for bottling when our Swiss importers came for their yearly visit. They demanded a shipment on the spot, and we were happy to comply. The following week the wine was rejected.
Said wine (a mere 2600 x 750ml) is made from one of the most awesome wine regions in South Africa – the Upper-Hemel-en-Aarde ward, near Hermanus. It is a 2010 blend of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. With a lovely golden hue and secondary flavours from being fermented and matured in oak – it definitely looked different than a Rose. It was obviously also not a Blanc de Noir.
After a kind letter of explaining what the thinking was behind the wine and with good, clean analysis the wine was passed in the end.
Another wine which also has a ranging track record in regards to approval is the “Coffee Pinotage” style. As a student getting involved with this wine style in 2003 at Diemersfontein and then subsequently in other cellars it has happened time and again that this style is not always looked upon favourably by the individual tasters in these panels. This while, as a wine style, it has clearly been accepted by a greater group of consumers.
Interesting how these “different” wines usually are the ones with a following. As a winemaker I have however always felt that the Wine and Spirits Board has given the wine the benefit of the doubt, in the end. Long live progressive thinking in regards to wine and wine styles.
Cheers!
*Disclamer: Writer is married to winemaker Bertus “Starbucks” Fourie to whom the “Coffee Style Pinotage” is attributed.
Writing takes up way too much time, so here is this morning in some pictures, and a clip.
Early morning pressing is just the most vibrant process of the day. I get to taste the juice, get my head around what I want to do with it. You really do get a feel for it! Here pictured our press and sorting conveyor.
Press ready to roll
Conveyor cleaned and ready
Buckle up – here is the action
The little YouTube clip shows how the grapes (from the cold storage room) in offloaded onto the conveyor. All things other than lovely bunches are removed here. Then it goes through the de-stemmer. This is collected in the bin. So the product you are seeing is just the clean stalks which will be taken away. The grapes are then off to the press.
Will keep you updated, but in the meanwhile raise a glass on Harvest 2012!
Looking back in my notes for 2011, by today – last year, we had taken in our Chardonnay vineyards and the first bit of Chenin blanc for our Adama White blend. This year I have only taken in one barrel worth of old bushvine Chenin without irrigation, which in the heat wave two weeks ago, wouldn’t have made it. And then also the Chenin blanc for our base wine.
This is the view from my office this morning: Cloudy and overcast, but a bit humid.
So we’ve been to the vineyards and what an exciting morning! The Chenin Blanc looks lovely (sun kissed, freckled, sweet but with a lovely level of tartness). See the picture below. I can only imagine what it’s going to look like in the press.
And then for the highlight of the morning – Pinotage testing! The vineyard in question is the same one used by Wellington Wines for their La Cave Pinotage – a wine that has earned them a spot in the inaugural Top 20 Pinotage Classification. It is also the vineyard from where the grapes came for our Top100SAWines lauded Pinotage 2009 and the Cape blend “Erfenis” 2010.
I learnt something new about our viticulturist today. Except for his acute fine eye for detail – he does not like snakes. He spotted the skin of an enormous snake between the rows in our Pinotage vineyard. Luckily at that point we had made up our minds about the grapes. Here is a picture of a part of its tail that fell off when I picked it up. Nice to know our vineyards are bustling with the sounds and the signs of nature.
Today was a great breather from the warmer weather we have been experiencing the last few days. We were very interested to see what the heat`s influence was on our grape`s analysis so this morning we started sampling and testing!
In the photo below, we are testing our Chenin Blanc from a vineyard called Driehoek (or Triangle vineyard). Some of the plantings in this vineyard date back to 1963 and 1979, which makes it quite humbling (note the winemaker and viticulturist not even being a twinkle in our parent’s eyes in those years).
As said in the previous post we had experienced some cloudy weather during flowering, so to make sure that we get samples that paints the best possible clear picture – we are using bunch samples this year.
Results on this vineyard show that we did not have a significantly higher rise in sugar in the last few days, but we did lose a small bit of valuable acidity. Still have a few days before these grapes do come in. In the meanwhile, we will be dreaming of the lovely granny smith and honeysuckle notes released from these little berries. Bliss…
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