Tempranillo done

Yesterday, Sunday, I noticed that the cap was not forming as much on the Tempranillo as on the two bins of Syrah.  This morning that became very apparent.  Most likely this was due to one of two things, either the fermentation was done or the fermentation was stuck.

Since our last fermentation took longer and because the Syrah is still going I was thinking we had a problem.  So, time to test the wine with a hydrometer:

Residual Sugar: 0

Surprise, it's actually done.  Nothing wrong.

So now it is time to think about Malolactic fermentation.

I tested the Syrah, just to see how we are coming along.  And the Syrah still has a long ways to go.  It is sitting at 10% sugar still.

Time to punch the cap

As of Wednesday morning our cap was officially forming.  The cap is basically the berries floating to the top of the must.  They then start to get hard and prevent air from reaching the fermenting wine.  That would be bad.  So what you do is you punch down the cap every eight hours.

So at 8 am, 4 pm and Midnight I punch down the cap and in the process stir the must so the small particles (called the lees) that settle out in the last eight hours are mixed back into the fermenting wine.  Every little bit of nutrients for the yeast to work on is good.  Thus I give it a very vigorous stir using an industrial sized stainless steel potato masher.

On Tuesday I added some more powder to the wine.  This time it was a powder called Fermaid K.  It is a yeast nutrient that helps the yeast foster a fast and efficient growth.  This powder almost looks like clay.  To add it to the must, I took a wine glass and filled it up with juice from each of the fermenting containers.  Then I mixed the proper amount of Fermain into the wine glass, swirled it all around so it disolved and then poured it back into the must during the cap punch-down process.  Pretty easy process.

The house and especially the basement smell very much like a winery right now.  Paty is thrilled with this process as you can imagine.  So I am assuming that all these fragrances mean the fermentation is taking off.

All this talk about wine and yeasts and inoculations you would think that yeast would be front of my mind.  In a non wine anecdote, I made homemade pizzas tonight for dinner.  Lately I have been using the bread maker to make the dough from scratch.  I like the consistency I can get with the dough when I am in charge of the ingredients.  Plus I can add anything I want to the dough; Oregano, Garlic Powder, Fresh Basil, anything.  Well let me tell you that if you use the bread maker to make pizza dough and you forget to add the yeast, it doesn't work out that well.  I realized that I forgot the yeast as I was adding pizza #2 to the oven.  By that time I was committed.  And while it looked like pizza, the dough was not good.  Very flat.  Morale of the story, you can make pizza dough without yeast but it will be bad.  And no, the dough did not pick up any random wild stains of natural yeast like would have happened if we did the same thing for the wine.

Day 2, Inonculation

Mark down 6:10 pm Monday October 24th as the time that grape juice became wine.

Okay, that might be a little dramatic, but we just added the yeast. I had to move the wine from the garage to my man room. I don't think the back can take much more of that, thus I had to recruit Paty to help move the second big fermentation bin in. She was thrilled to be a part of the process and is looking forward to helping more and more. Here's the fermentation station:

Garbage bags under cardboard protect the carpet from stray drops.

The fermentation station now features a newly acquired space heater to heat the room to the proper fermentation level. Last year I basically heated the entire house via our forced air electric furnace in order to raise the temp in this remote room by 5 degrees. Bad idea.

Earlier today we added more powders to the juice in the form of Peptic Enzyme. This is added to help the skins break down in the must and give the yeast more of the good stuff to chew on as it ferments. We probably should have done this yesterday at the Cellar Homebrew, but we forgot.

One of the most annoying processes of our last two wine experiments was inoculating the dried yeast.  Basically this consisted of adding yeast to some warm water mixed with more powders to make a live culture that we would then add to the wine.  While we did not mess this up, we sure thought we did.  Especially for the Chardonnay.  Not again this year as we discovered liquid yeast:

Ignore the illy can, winemaking involves a lot of Espresso.

These packets have the yeast in a solution inside small bag inside of the main bag, in order to activate the 'Over 70 Million Yeast Cells' and start the yeast going what a person does is smack the bag to burst the inner bag and shake everything up so the solutions mix.

Action Photo.

For the Tempranillo we used one packet of Chateau Red yeast blend. For the Syrah, we used two different yeasts. One bin got two packets of Chateau Red and the other bin received two packets of Bordeaux yeast. Ostensibly the two batches are handled exactly the same, so it will be interesting to taste the difference in the finished product from the yeasts.

All for now, the fermentation should start in 1-3 days.  Part of the privilege of making wine involves punching down the cap every eight hours for a while.  So I will be doing that.  Maybe I can get out the good camera for some good shots that do not involve chronicling this entire process by an old iPhone.

2011 Crush

So Nate and I took the plunge and bought grapes that eventually we hope will be wine. As noted on the previous post, this blog will chronicle our foray into making grapes into wine. The first post will deal mostly with the crush and how almost 300 pounds of wine grapes came into our possession. Enjoy:

We procured a wee bit more grapes than we expected, this being due in part to the fact that the grapes were 50% of our anticipated price. Harvest 2011 cost us $1/lb or $30 per box:

We received 7 30# boxes of Syrah and in addition picked up 2 boxes of Tempranillo. The Tempranillo was a spur of the moment acquisition. The 30# boxes were coming in around 32-33#s of fruit each. The fruit came from Doc Stewart Vineyard, appellation Wahluke Slope, near Mattawa via Gilbert Vineyards. Initially we were going to pick it up at the vineyard, but they had a truck coming over the pass to a distribution point in Woodinville on Sunday October 23rd. For the princely sum of $8 we could pick up our grapes in Woodinville instead of Mattawa. Done deal. The fruit was picked in the early morning of October 23rd.

Crush 2011, happened at 1 pm on October 23rd. We rented the crusher/destemmer from Cellar Homebrew in shoreline and used the equipment on site. This is a very messy process so being able to do it on site with everything set up and easily cleaned was great. The rental fee was $20.

Basically you put the grapes in the hopper on top, being very careful to pick out any MOG (MOG = Material Other then Grape), and then spin that handle on the right. The machine crushes the grapes and removes at least 90% of the stems. Being a small batch operation we picked through the crush as it was coming down the chute to the food grade plastic fermenting bin (basically a new garbage can) so virtually every little stem was removed along with any MOG that persisted through the initial sort.

The two large fermenters in front are the Syrah, the small fermenter in the back is the Tempranillo. We estimated 12.25 gallons of Syrah in each bin and 7 gallons of Tempranillo must. Thus each 30-32# box of fruit yields 3.5 gallons of must.

The Tempranillo came in at 23 Brix, while the Syrah came in at 21.5 Brix. This is not very ripe, a product of a cold summer and fall apparently. So we treated the grapes on site. Basically added sugar to the must. We added a 1 cup to the Tempranillo and 2 cups to each of the Syrah batches. We also treated the must with some more powder (SO2) that kills any natural yeast or bacteria. I've quickly learned that making wine involves adding a lot of different powders in various volumes.

We then transported the wine back to the interim storage point, my garage, to let the SO2 do it's work for 24 hours. Cover the fermenting vats with a towel so they can still breath and keep cold in the garage. More tomorrow as we add yeast and most likely, more powders.

Winemakeing

As many of you may or may not know, and by many I am probably talking to the two people who still have this site in some sort of reader as I have not added any content lately, I have started making wine. Thus for the near future I'll start documenting some of the adventures of Chris and Nate making wine in this space.

Some of you do not know Nate, he is my buddy that I go to the Husky Basketball with and now make wine with.

This fall will be our first foray into buying grapes and making wine with those. Previously we have bought frozen juice and must from Brehm Vineyard's.

Last fall we made a Chardonnay that was bottled around November of 2010. And this spring, also from Brehm, we made a Merlot and Cab Franc 50/50 blend that is currently aging in 5 gallon and 1 gallon glass carboys. The Chardonnay was attempted mainly to learn. And the red was purchased because that was readily available and we did not know how much actual wine we would get from two 5 gallon pails of frozen must. The answer was approximately 6.5 gallons, 6 of which made it to aging.

This post will be short, because I already have photos and content to write up concerning:
Chris and Nate's first crush!

The Eye Post

I had a few people ask what happened to my eye. So I figured I'd just post the pics instead of texting them to everyone individually.
This happened on Monday, view from the game. AKA, my very own Zombie Pic:

Well, as it was only 10 minutes into the game I left early and headed to UW Medical Center. Here is what it looked like after being cleaned but before the stitches:

And here is Tuesday morning:

I write this on Friday. Basically it is still swollen, but not nearly as bad. I've had a horrid headache all week which I think was from the swollen head. It was the worst Wednesday and much better Thursday and is tapering off today.
There you go, my first morbid post.

Soccer and Sport in Australia

During our three week sojourn to Australia, we were able to take in two A-League games. The A-League is Australia’s professional soccer league. It is 10 years newer than the MLS and it shows. The quality of play was lower than the MLS and the crowds are still an in development concern.

Pre-game as the Sydney FC hosts Perth Glory:

Cute stadium, a lot of MLS teams would love to have this facility. One thing that the A-League has going for it is the plethora of soccer ready stadiums due to the popularity of the Rugby League and Rugby Union. (Yes, there are two types of Rugby both with their own leagues and rules and such.) But Soccer is a definite outlier in the terms of popularity amongst most Australians. Here is a picture during the game, attendance 6,654.


Keep in mind that the opposition, Perth Glory, has Australian legend Robbie Fowler on the team. This was supposed to be a big game attendance wise. The Sydney metro area has approximately 4.5 million people, the game was on a Sunday at 3 PM in beautiful spring weather (November is akin to May for us) and to only draw 6,654 was pretty disappointing. Especially when you realize that probably 1,000 of the fans were tourists like us checking out the A-League for the first time.
Here is kickoff at the Perth Glory at the North Queensland Fury match from Townsville. Attendance, 4,471:

Sitting on the end zone, beers were flowing:

As you can see, footy in Australia is definitely a work in progress. Talking to people here in the bars and such as far as I can tell the Australian team sports priorities are: Rugby League, Australian Rules Football, Cricket and Rugby Union. Soccer and also Basketball are definitely lower tier sports.

From my limited experience, the A-League is doing what the MLS did Pre-Seattle. (Random tangent: Every MLS reference should be BS or PS, Before Seattle or Post Seattle. Or maybe Pre-Cascadia after next year when Portland and Vancouver join the MLS. I know it’s arrogant as a Sounders supporter, but the goal was moved over the last two years by Seattle and Qwest field.) They are catering to families and the ‘soccer moms’ as their main target market. Time and again, this just does not work. The supporter culture at both matches we went to did exist and in Sydney it lent a tad bit of atmosphere to the stadium, but the F-Troop in Townsville was hard to pick out. I only knew who they were because they were the only ones standing and our resident 8 year old was bugging her “mummy” to ‘go see the F-Troop’. Supporters drive tickets sales.

But the Aussies really love their Olympic sports. In fact they have a great system to discover the next swimming prodigy. In grade four, 9 years old, every child is required to participate in a swimming meet. Each kid has to do at least one race. The top 3 in each distance and discipline per school go to the town meet. The top 3 in each town meet qualify for regional. The top 3 in regional go to State and the top 3 in each state (6 states and 2 territories in Australia) go to Nationals. Keep in mind, this is mandatory participation. It’s a very efficient way to discover those latent swimming talents.

In fact, the Aussies love almost all sports. If we went to a bar during the day (a likely occurrence, have we met?) the telly was always tuned to sports. Whether it was English Premier League, Cricket, Rugby, motorsports or anything else they were used to watching sports at odd hours and always had them on.

In summary, Soccer is down in Australia. But every day a lead on the national news segments is the World Cup 2022 and Australia’s bid chances. Currently at the bookie’s, Australia pays $2.35 for $1 bet. The USA is the favorite at $2. So they have more than a chance, they are almost co-favorites with the USA. A World Cup here would be great to attend and would do wonders for Aussie Soccer. Almost as much good as it would do for the advancement of footy in the US, ALMOST.

Townsville

We journeyed to Australia in part to visit our high school friend Melita. She lives in Townsville, Queensland. It is up the coast from Brisbane, about a 3 hour plane ride from Sydney. It is quite hot there, and we discovered it is also quite tropical. Describing the area as coastal tropics would be apt. Old friends meet up:

After the hustle and bustle of 8 nights in Sydney, Townsville was much more relaxed. It was very hot every day, even when it rained it was still hot. We spent a lot of time in Melita's backyard. I was in charge of cooking, this is literally
Shrimp on the Barbie:

The second day there we visited the Billabong Sanctuary, look below this post a couple for that post. The Billabong was definitely a highlight that deserved it's own post.

Townsville has it's very own hill in town. You can climb up it, taking approximately an hour or drive up (we drove). From here you can see 360 views of the city and just outside the city you can see the virtually neverending sugar cane fields. This is looking out toward The Strand (the beach area), Magnetic Island and the Great Barrier Reef beyond:

The Strand is 2.5 km stretch of beach in the heart of Townsville. But due to 'Stinger Season' you can only safely swin inside these nets:

Stingers are what we would call jelly fish. There are four types of stingers, a few of which can kill a person. The others just hurt like crazy. If you get stung, you need to flush the sting with vinegar for 30 seconds. And just in case you don't have a jar of balsamic ready:

These Aussies take their Stinger's very seriously, every beach without the nets looked like this:


Another thing that the Aussies take seriously is sunscreen and UV exposure. Every morning the radio would report the UV index along with the weather forecast. Each day we were in Townsville the UV index was 16. 0 is night, 11 is considered extremely dangerous and the highest ever recorded is 18. When you are outside and stand still for even a second, you can almost feel your skin burning. It is much more intense sun than we have ever felt. The hole in the Ozone layer that resides over the South Pole is definitely felt down here. Understandably, a lot of the news and papers have daily articles about climate change:

This child's play area would NEVER work in the US. Another example of the 'no worries, mate' lifestyle:

I might print this out and hand out as a postcard for all of you with kids so you don't have repeat:

Overall Townsville is pretty cool. It reminds me a bit of the Tri-Cities (180,000 residents) but with the ocean instead of the river. The town originated in support of the mines with farming a significant portion and a very active port shipping the mines and sugar cane refined output. Plus Townsville is the major city in an otherwise pretty isolated area. They do have teams in a lot of the major sports leagues including the A-League (soccer), NRL (Rugby League) and NBL (basketball). But Rugby along with state cricket is king.

Lastly, they do have these in some yards:

Billabong Sanctuary

Hold a Koala, pet a Wombat, have a Kangaroo eat out of your hand and see huge crocodiles jump for food; is that something I could interest you in?

Then Billabong Sanctuary is just your place. We spent Thanksgiving 2010 at the Billabong in Townsville with Melita and her daughter Jordy. I have a feeling this post is going to be picture intensive. We arrived at 10:30, just in time for the Koala show. Basically Koala’s are very lazy animals. They sleep around 20 hours a day and mostly just hang out in Eucalyptus trees all day. This pic is a mom and baby in the main tree where 4 koalas live.


For a little extra money you were able to hold a koala and get a professional photo printed in a frame. It was $33 for three photos. We were able to take additional photos with our camera as well.


Each Koala had a name, this was Ray Charles. He is basically blind, but the offshoot is he is super comfortable being pet. So while we were only able to hold Annie above for a few minutes, we pet Ray Charles as much as we wanted.

Paty is thinking of leaving me, for Ray:

Next up was the Wombats. This is Tonka:

And Cloe:

This wasn’t a zoo like in the States with a lot of rules. It was more of a ‘no worries mate’ situation with everything. There were geese everywhere in the sanctuary wandering around. And since it was maiting season, they were pretty aggressive. At one point both Paty and I were bit by a pissed off goose while trying to walk by. Instead of freaking out and having a lawsuit if this happened at Woodland Park Zoo, we pretty much just laughed it off.

Next up was the reptile show, not my favorite. Paty tried to volunteer me to participate in ‘What’s in the Bag’ time. I refused, but was able to channel her natural tendency for attention and convinced her to do it:


Four year old salt water crocodile:


Eight year old Ginger, as dangerous as the croc she is holding:

Strange reptile, maybe called a Shingleback:

Forty Four year old salt water crocodile:

There is a reason I am not in this picture, Paty and Melita:

Then it was off to feed the turtles:

Followed by a turtle race:

Suprisingly, the turtles could really move. The one on the right made a straight line to the water and won easily in the 'race'.

Watch out for the eel:


Next it was off to the big daddy’s of the show. The Australian Salt Water Crocs. Apparently, you need to ‘jump’ them or they won’t get any exercise.

Some jump better than others. It was about a 50% success rate on getting the crocs to do anything. This one basically just sat there until he put the chicken on his snout and wiggled it around for a bit. Then it barely leaned up to feign an attempt to devour, still intimidating:


That was the end of the formal show, but that was only about 1/3 of the animals in the sanctuary. The rest was a self guided walk around tour with some animals caged for show, quite a bit out and about and some exceptionally beautiful birds flying around (not including the evil geese):
Red Tailed Black Cockatoo:

And Kookaburras:

Dig I mention Kangaroos?




Huddle up fellas:

The aforementioned evil geese:

At the end of the day, Paty was debating between me and staying with the Joey’s:


All in all, it was a wonderful experience. Nothing against the more loyal readers of this space who missed us on the holiday, but this was a great way to spend Thanksgiving.
(Chris's Note: I'm not able to upload pictures yet to this computer. I know that img 3067 is a holder for a pic on my computer and not a mistake. I'll get it uploaded as soon as I can figure it out from Down Under. Right now I am using a zip drive to transfer things from the laptop to Melita's computer.) And done.