At the winery @ 7 a.m., not expecting anything to be ready to go. However Harry and Frank are standing around waiting on us toget started. Frank’s a little grumbly about us being “late”, but he’ll get over it.

Our hired crew shows up as scheduled at 7:30. Frank H. and the labels show up at 7:33 or so. We haul corks and capsules to the truck wrestle hoses and hook up pumps and the first case rolls off the truck at 8:08 a.m. We’re finished at 12:15. At one point we bottled 140 cases in 20 minutes. Amazing. Harry and Frank are fast and efficient and everything works. Why do I sound surprised? Go read the January through April portions of the 2006 blog. Last year’s bottling was hell on earth and I actually had been dreading this day, but damn, it went well.

We bottled all the ‘05 wines except for Zinlady, which we’ll do next weekend - labels aren’t ready yet.

We scheduled next year’s bottling for March 1, 2008.

Our thanks to Harry and Frank and Mobile Wine Line!

Tomorrow is bottling day. I was at the winery until about 6:30 p.m. worrying over the wines, measuring pH, SO2, stuff like that, wondering if everything is ready to go.

We use a mobile bottling line to bottle our stuff. We’re using Mobile Wine Line out of Galt this year and the truck pulled into the parking lot at 4:30. After a couple minutes discussion we figured out where to park it and how to set up the flow for tomorrow.

1000 cases of empty bottles were delivered this afternoon from Demptos Glass Company and the corks from MA Silva were delivered this morning. Last year we ordered enough capsules for our 2004 wines and 2005, so we’re covered there.

I’ve got a crew of severn guys hired for the day tomorrow. They’re supposed to be here at 7:30 a.m.

Overall everything is ready, I think.

We usually don’t filter our wines unless we have to for some reason or another. The Petite and the Zin needs filtration, they’re not as clear as we’d like and the residual sugar is higher in the Zin than I’m comfortable with leaving unfiltered. I was able to borrow a plate and frame filter from Ryan, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery, and took care of things with the generous help of Mea and Stan from KLR Machines.

Okay, no day-to-day entries from late March until early April because I’m behind (or was, I’m writing this entry on May 7!)

In the run-up to bottling we’ve got some issues to solve, #1 being tanks to hold our wines while bottling. We can’t bottle from the barrels and we don’t have tanks to put stuff into.

Ryan Leeman, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery here in Lodi showed me a solution that we can afford - 360 gallon “Totes”. (see pic at right) They’re basically a plastic 360 gallon “milk jug” inside a steel cage, the plastic is food grade, the fittings are adaptable to winery equipment and they’re cheap. $195 each. They’re cheap because they’re plastic and it’s relatively thin plastic at that. Not suited for long-term storage but perfect to use when racking, settling after pressing, or bottling small lots of wine. We got ‘em from KP McNamara out of Ohio.

We also have to filter - and again Ryan helped out, see the entry for April 13.

Chris and I spent time in the winery working on our final blends for ‘Trio’ and ‘Duality.’ And the Zin; which we finalized about a month ago. We ended up with about 10% Petite Sirah in the Zin this year, losing the Soucie Vineyard designation, but that’s okay. (To vineyard-designate a wine 95 percent has to come from that vineyard.)

Our labels were printed by Bonham Label Company in Livermore, and Frank Haversak, our rep from there. Great job too. Last year’s labels, the 2004s, scratched easily and weren’t printed on the right paper, and overall weren’t very satisfactory. This year’s look great; we were able to save enough money over what we budgeted that we were able to emboss the ‘m2′ on the label. A minor detail perhaps, that no one might notice, but it’s a classy touch that was needed.

I’ve also been racking the ‘06 wines, transfering clear wine from barrel to tank, washing out the barrel, then refilling. We’ll do this process two or three more times as necessary to clarify the wines.

Minor thing but we’ll be calling our Syrah/Petite Sirah blend Duality now, in lieu of Duo. Seems like Duo is already being used as a name for a wine.

Springtime is definitely here. Weather today is mid-70s and the winery is finally warming up. We’ll keep it cool this summer, of course, but for now the warmer temperature is welcome as higher temps will cause the malolactic fermentation process to finish up in the 2006 wines.

The vineyards are showing new growth too.

Chromatography indicates only one of the ‘06 wines has completed the conversion of malic acid into lactic acid. This process, called malolactic fermentation (MLF), is an anerobic bacterial thing - they perform in the absence of oxygen. Simply stated, because that’s the only way I understand it, the little buggers eat the malic and produce lactic acid. Malic acid is the type of crispy acid found in apple, lactic acid is softer, like the acids in milk.

Wines that have not undergone MLF are not biologically stable and will spontaneously commit MLF at some point in their lives, most likely at the worst possible time. If a wine hasn’t completed MLF it must be filtered to be stable in the bottle. White wines usually do not go through MLF, Chardonnay the biggest exception. Red wines almost always do MLF.

I don’t like to rack wine while it is doing the MLF thing. Some people say it doesn’t matter. I’m of the opinion that the lees contribute a great deal of nutrients to the MLF buggers, and since the point of racking is to eliminate the lees, I don’t rack until MLF is complete. 

How do we get our wines to finish MLF? It’s temperature dependent, so once the winery warms up this spring MLF will happen.

Racking is the process of transferring wine from barrel to barrel, leaving behind the fine lees that have settled to the bottom of the barrel. The ‘06 wines haven’t been racked since we pressed, settled and barreled. It has been so cold in the winery that malolactic fermentation has been very slow and I don’t like to disturb the wine during the MLF process. So, time to test to see if MLF is complete.

Chris and I spent most of the afternoon in the winery sampling the ’05s that we’re going to be bottling and deciding upon our final blends. We’ll be introducing two new wines - ‘Duo’, a blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah, and our varietal offering of Petite Sirah from Herzog Vineyard in Clarksburg. The Petite is a mouthful of wine, so the Duo ends up as a 80/20 blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah. If you’re a Petite Sirah fan, watch out - ours is going to be a blue-tooth wine for sure. HUGE fruit with enough tannin structure and acidity to carry the wine for years.