Racking

So after malo has wrapped up we've decided to rack the wine off of all the dead yeasts and other solids that have sunk to the bottom of the barrels. With pinot, a wine that is generally not served well by lots 'o oxygen, racking is "normally" only done two of three times (this is contrasted with a grape like syrah thought to benefit from a little more oxygen exposure). For the deux punx pinot we are now at racking number two of three. The first being just prior to starting malo, the second being just after malo and the third being right before bottling.

Dan is setting up the pump to rack out of the neutral barrel

The majority of the effort around racking is cleaning. Cleaning out the barrel, cleaning hoses, clean pails, cleaning the pump, cleaning anything that will have any exposure to the wine. This is quite possibly the most important single task (or series of tasks) in winemaking.

Yours truly getting out of moving the barrel by "documenting" moving the barrel while John and Dan do the heavy lifting

Sampling the wine during the racking process.

After the barrel is cleaned out we then pump the wine back into it

And the "hard work" is done. Until we're ready to bottle pretty much all we have left for the '08 pinot is periodic topping off and sampling.

malo'd out

So it's been a long hiatus since my last post. As the wine has sat in the barrels aging away we've been busy plotting away. Plotting day dreams mixed with real possibilities. The daydreaming still continues and we are still plotting and plotting and plotting - do we up the numbers in WA and try to go through compliance there, building up a space in Olympia that can hit the legal limit of roughly 8 barrels or do we leave WA as a friends and family venture and work on a host-winery/co-locate in CA.

It's all a lot to think about over various tables filled with constantly emptying bottles of wine.

In the interim, as '09 plotting and planning goes on, we have two years of wine in the barrel to deal with.

The '08 pinot:
So we've just wrapped up malo-lactic fermentation after four months of slow steady progress. If you've never experienced wine during malo-lactic just believe me when I say that it takes a lot of imagination to see the wine you are hoping to making in the wine you are tasting. During "malo" your wine tastes like, well..., it tastes like shit. The acids are weird, chalky and bracing and the mouthfeel is weird and the fruit is buried. Imagine making a soup that took months to cook and you new half way through it was going to taste crappy and so when it tastes crappy you have to constantly remind yourself that it is supposed to taste like this - one of the wines pupal stages in which it is not what it will be.

Well that brings us to now and the following plot. Now this might not be the most exciting image we've ever shared with you but for us it says everything we wanted it to. We have completed malo-lactic fermentation. Accompanying this was a wine that is really starting to take shape, a structure that has rounded out well and something that we could only point to fruitland ridge - a character from the great pinots we'd tasted from Briceland and Woodenhead and Elk Prairie that (insert mushy moment) taste like the land they are from. I can only now offer you the promise of trying this down the road. We're racking this sunday and will have documentation from it. After that it's another 5 or 6 months of aging and then we bottle.

Malo sheet from '08 pinot noir:

'08 Syrah:

The '08 Wahluke Slope syrah is still going through its own very slow malo - we both feel slower is better and so you won't hear us complaining. We are hoping that it is on track to wrap up next month and we'll be up there to test it and rack it (if necessary). Right now this little pupa is still hanging from the tree.

'07 Syrah

The '07 Wahluke Slope syrah is ready to go. This is a wine we're very excited about - it's very a very reserved syrah from a very good year in WA. This is not a fruit bomb and won't leave you with purple teeth - it should leave us in a pour-happy mood come June on. We'll be up in Olympia next month to bottle and after a couple months of resting should be ready to start drinking.

until then...