Winery Work

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Later, I wanted to be an astronomer, then a photographer, then a musician, then a teacher, then a chef, then... You get the idea. Fortunately, I've been able to do all of these things as hobbies (except the astronaut). These days, I want to be a wine maker when I grow up, although I'm starting to think I may never grow up. Right now I am in the middle of making my first batch of wine, but it's really a small scale operation (about 5 gallons). So I really enjoy the fact that Jon Armstrong, winemaker and partner at Purple Cow Vineyards, lets me come and play cellar rat from time to time. Over the past couple of years I've picked grapes, helped on the sorting line and other jobs during crush, and worked several stations on the bottling line.

Last night Jon and I, along with our friends Doug and Cheryl, racked his 2006 Tempranillo out of barrels and into a tank in preparation for bottling. The concept is fairly simple: pump the wine out of each barrel, through a filter, and into a tank, then clean the barrels. We started out by loading up a small filter with several filter pads, connecting hoses, and pumping ozonated water through the system to sanitize it. We also cleaned a large stainless steel tank with the ozonated water. We then drained the water from the hoses, and inserted a hollow wand on the input end of the hose into a partial barrel of Petite Sirah. This particular barrel was on the top of a 3 layer stack of barrels and in a part of the winery where we couldn't bring a forklift to move it, so it meant climbing up on the stack and draining the barrel in place. Normally there's not much that needs to be done while the pump is doing its work, but because the hose was a little short, I had to climb the racks and stand next to the barrel and keep the wand at the bottom of the barrel to make sure we didn't miss any wine. Naturally we had to sample the wine as we worked! Petite Sirah is usually a blending grape (and Jon was blending about 12% into the Tempranillo) and adds some nice structure and color to the blend. By itself it was very chewy and tannic, with a nice simple dark fruit flavor.

After the Petite Sirah, we started on the 5 barrels of Tempranillo. Fortunately, they were stacked up at the edge of all the barrels, and Jon used a forklift to bring them all down to ground level. Things were proceeding smoothly until we got to the 3rd or 4th barrel. All of a sudden, the wine stopped flowing, although the pump was still going. We thought we had a blockage in the wand and rinsed it out - still nothing. We looked for obstructions in the pump lines and fittings - nothing. We finally took the pump completely apart and found wood chips in the inner workings. Doug and I rinsed everything out and re-assembled the pump ("did that go on the top or bottom?") while Jon and Cheryl rigged up a screen to put over the end of the wand so we wouldn't suck up any more wood chips. Fortunately the pump started working again, and we kept going. Jon said that wine making is about 90% cleaning things and 9% fixing things, so I guess we were doing it all. We drained the remaining barrels without incident.

While we pumped, we had the Blazers game on the radio (not so good) and did a little more tasting (very good). I got to sample the 2008 estate grown Tempranillo - Jon's first quantity harvest from his own Tempranillo grapes. It was lighter in color than the CA Tempranillo and had a nose very similar to the Kelsey Pinot Noir. However, it was immediately obvious after one sip that it wasn't Pinot. It was much fuller and richer, and had some of that nice fruity Tempranillo flavor. It's already fairly smooth, so Jon was thinking that it probably wouldn't need the full 2 or 3 years in barrel.

As each barrel was drained, it needed to be cleaned out. Apparently in the old days, you'd take a pressure washer and squirt around thought the bung hole until the barrel seemed clean enough. However, the winery has a very cool high-tech gadget to really get the barrels clean. It's a long nozzle connected to a pressure washer that you insert into the bung hole of an upside-down barrel. The device has a geared head that slowly rotates through a series of movements so that in 5 minutes it squirts a very high pressure jet of hot water onto every part of the inside of the barrel. It's very loud and every few seconds spews a cloud of steam from the hot water out the bottom of the barrel, making it look and sound very much like a dragon.

After all the barrels were drained and cleaned, we tidied up the winery and called it a night. Other than the poor Blazers losing their playoff game, it was a really great evening. This weekend the crew will do more filtering and bottle the '06 Tempranillo. I'm off to an early music workshop on the coast, so I won't be able to join the fun. I'm looking forward to tasting the new wine after it's had a chance to rest in the bottle for a month or two. Purple Cow Tempranillo is one of my favorites.