Argentina Trip

Here is a preview of the Argentina trip, complete with a fancy map I just made.


View Argentina Trip in a larger map

Seattle to San Fransisco
San Fransisco to Washington DC
Washington DC to Buenos Aires
Leads us to 4 nights in the Hilton Buenos Aires in the Puerto Madera District.  Highlighted by a trip to a Boca Juniors game at La Boca (nickname La Bombonera) Stadium.  I'm not sure of the spelling of the stadium's nickname, but it's one of the most famous in the world.  Argentina won the 1978 World Cup there.

Then an overnight bus ride to Mendoza for four nights in Wine Country and the Andes Mountains.  We were looking at driving to Santiago, Chile for a night.  One of the highlights of the drive is the pass you can go over is 15,400 feet above sea level.  For reference, Mt. Rainier is 14,411 feet.  Crazy.

We have 4 nights booked in Mendoza and from there the plan is murky as it will be Sunday and we leave the following Sunday from Buenos Aires.  The tentative plan is back to Buenos Aires and then up to Iguazu Falls along with an overnight or day trip by ferry/hydrofoil to Colonia, Uruguay.

I'll be posting here once I generate some good pictures and experiences.  Today I am attempting to pack and do laundry with a broken washing machine (high spin does not work).  Packing is a little tough, this trip we are going to be much more mobile but still gone for 17 nights.  So I am trying to limit Paty to one carry on size piece of luggage, but expandable.  Thus I need to do the same, plus a laptop sized carry on for both of us.  We don't want to be lugging around a bunch of luggage for two weeks.  Ideally I'd go all Amazing Race and backpack it up, but I don't have an appropriate backpack sadly.  The problem is that Argentinians are more formal when dining, especially dinner which incidentally starts around 11 PM.  So I need to reluctantly pack a pair of pants or even two and something more than a tee shirt.  It's 91 degrees today in Buenos Aires today.

Stirring the wine.

So right now the main activity is stirring the wine.  Every Monday and Thursday I mix it up.  This really isn't that exciting, so the post will be short.  We tasted the wine last week, it tastes like really young wine but is starting to develop some flavors.  Currently both the Syrah and Tempranillo are undergoing Malo-Lactic fermentation.  This lasts at most three months.

Shortly we will also add in some oak chips to impart the oak flavor we are looking for.  We need just a pound for all four carboys as each five gallon take 4-5 ounces.  Thus Nate and I have been looking on the internet for different oak chip or oak cube options.  We debated on racking the wine again as the lees are still fairly prominent, but decided against it.

In other news, Paty and I are heading to Argentina on Thursday for a couple of weeks.  So this space will become somewhat of a travel blog again for the next few weeks.  If you do not want to read my somewhat entertaining prose about life, football, scenic vistas, food, waterfalls, soccer and wine in Argentina then all you have to do is sort by tags.  The Chris and Nate make wine portion of this blog is all tagged Winemaking.  So you can click on that tag and ignore the rest if you must.

Cheers!

Rack It!

As you may or may not have noticed I am spacing these posts out a bit.  Mostly because winemaking involves two speeds.  Either really busy, or waiting.  There doesn't seem to be much in between.  And a great portion of the really busy is front loaded when I started blogging about wine.

So after the press the next step was to rack the wine.  This I did approximately 48 hours after the press.  Racking is not too hard, it involves carrying the wine upstairs from it's home in the basement and setting up a siphon to move the wine from one carboy to another.  After you press the must, you end up with wine.  But the wine is not filtered, so you have something called Gross Lees.  (Gross meaning big)  The Lees quickly settle to the bottom of the wine and you are racking the good wine off the top and leaving the gunk (or Lees) at the bottom to be dumped out.

I did this part by myself, because my partner was very distracted by a little person that night and you really want to rack between 24-48 hours after the press.

The little man made the blog.

Here is my racking set up:

After racking our 21 gallons of pressed wine became 20 gallons.  We used 4 bottles (pictured) in addition to the two half gallons to top off the four carboys.  That is a tricky part of being a home winemaker is that we are not working with massive quantities.  So we have to think ahead  in what we are producing in order to keep full carboys.  Keeping full carboys is crucial since air is your enemy when making wine.  Our current inventory of carboys is six 5 Gallon, one three gallon, one one gallon and numerous half gallon beer growlers that can double as small carboys in a pinch.

When we pressed, the Tempranillo was basically done fermenting but the Syrah was still at about 4% residual sugar and still aggressively fermenting.  We were worried the racking might slow or stop the fermentation, but that has not been the case as I write this a week later it is still bubbling along in the carboys.

In addition to racking, we started the Malolactic fermentation as well.  Malolactic fermentation is a process in which tart tasting malic acid, naturally present in the must, is converted to softer tasting lactic acid.  We again used the premade cultures, here is a photo of one used bag.  One bag per five gallons.

Much easier using these than the dried version, no stress that we messed up the culture.

Now, because it's wine there must be more powders to add.  Yes sir, two days after starting the Malolactic fermentation I added a some powder that looked more like clay called Opti'Malo Plus.  The Opti'Malo is supposed to make sure the Malolactic fermentation keeps going.

Lastly, as this turned out to be a longer post than I intended (I guess I had more material), we also tested the current wine we have in carboys.  We did a free SO2 test, assessing the amount of free SO2 in the wine.  To do that you have to set up this chemistry set and run the test.  The test itself takes 12 minutes.  Setting up takes around 4 hours the first time and 10 minutes once you get it all figured out.  Here is our basement bathroom/chemistry station:

Two beakers, an air pump, some wine and a lot of chemicals.

That's all for now, the test showed that we needed to add a full dosage of SO2.  At last test we needed to add about a 10% dose (probably equivalent to the margin of error).  So it did need the test and the treatment.  But this batch of wine should be ready for the bottle in December, just in time for the Holidays.

Press Day

As you saw earlier, the Tempanillo is done fermenting and when I measured the Syrah it was down to about 4% sugar so it is time to press and let the fermentation finish in the carboys.

We wanted to press on Thursday, Nov 3rd.  But Nate had to work during the day and at night I had won tickets to Rise & Shine; The Jay Demerit Story from Jay DeMerit himself via twitter.  So we pressed on Saturday.

Pressing is pretty messy, basically you are pressing as much wine out of the skins of the grapes as possible.  To do this we rented a press.  But first I had to prep the workspace, my garage.

Garage Prep involves moving Mercedes out of the wine press area.

Pressing the grapes should not take that long, in fact the time spent cleaning everything getting ready to press and then cleaning up after the pressing is much more than the actual pressing.  But you have to keep everything clean as random bacteria can really kill a wine.

30 Gallon Ratchet Press

If that press looks a little big, it's because it is.  When we reserved the press we wanted the small basket style screw press.  Instead we got the thirty gallon ratchet press.  Considering we were pressing about 10 gallons of must at a time, this led to some improvisation involving blocks of wood and some extra muscle.

But we got it to work, action photo of wine coming out of the press right here.

Finished, now time to clean up.

After we finished, it's time to clean up.  Which again took about as long as it did to actually press.  And I was privileged enough to do this solo as Nate took the press back, getting it in well under the 4 hour $20 rental fee.

16 gallons Syrah, 5 gallons Tempranillo

And there is the finished product.  Next I need to rack this off the remaining gross lees, which will most likely take our 21 gallons of wine to 20 gallons.  If you look closely at this wine, the bottom is a different color.  This is the little bit of sludge (gross lees) left over from the press.  We will rack the wine off this in 24-48 hours.