Happy New Year!

Hermann J. Wiemer

Blanc de Noir 2003

Finger Lakes, New York

40 under 40

Congrats to Fred and Oskar for being named by Wine Enthusiast Magazine as 2 of 40 "rising young stars who are changing the way the world drinks!"

Here's what Wine Enthusiast had to say about these two:

Fred Merwarth, 35

Oskar Bynke, 37

 

Finger Lakes pioneer Hermann J. Wiemer revolutionized fine winemaking in the region. Since 2007, the infusion of Wiemer’s long-time winemaking assistant, Fred Merwarth, and friend, Oskar Bynke, as co-owners, has elevated not just the winery, but Finger Lakes wines as a category. Merwarth and Bynke met over a decade ago while students at Cornell University. Ironically, while Merwarth studied business and Bynke studied agronomy, it’s Merwarth who is known for his thoughtful winemaking and Bynke for his business savvy and strident ambassadorship.

I couldn't be more proud! Check out the link for behind the scenes footage and the rest of the young rising stars:

http://www.winemag.com/Wine-Enthusiast-Magazine/May-2013/40-Under-40-Americas-Tastemakers/

A Fond Finger Lakes Farewell

After working 2 harvests with Hermann J. Wiemer and getting involved in all aspects of winemaking, I am taking this great experience to California in search of new skills to add on. My Finger Lakes family bid me a memorable goodbye with a fantastic wine tasting of 16 wines from around the world. The theme, as usual, was to try to stump everyone. Points were given for accurate guessing of varietal(s), origin, vintage and price. I won first place, but I think it was rigged.

The lineup was extremely varied, and without really planning it we ended up with an interesting comparison of wines from around the world.

 Riesling from Germany and Ohio:

 Gewurztraminer from Hungary and Chile:

Pinot Noir from Germany, France, and Oregon:

 Red blends from Bordeaux, South Africa, and Languedoc:

My favorite was the Chassagne Montrachet from Burgundy, France. I was excited by the 2005 Prieure-Lichine from Bordeaux because my FLX family got me a bottle for my birthday last year, and after trying theirs that night and the day after (1 day of aeration helped a lot - it is still very tight) I am looking forward to aging mine another 10 years.

Thanks to everyone for the wines, the lessons, the fun, the experience.

Be sure to follow my adventures in California, as soon as I figure out what they will be!

Riddle me this

Winter at Wiemer winery is a time for catching up on records, monitoring fermentations, and riddling sparkling wine. We pulled out the riddling racks 2 weeks ago and set up to riddle the 3rd disgorging of our 2006 Cuvee Brut, a dry sparkling wine comprised of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. We are experimenting a little with this sparkling wine to see how varying amounts of time on the lees affect the flavors. Aging on the lees tends to impart classic Champagne flavors to a sparkling wine, like brioche and biscuit. The current release of 2006 Cuvee Brut was disgorged in 2009, and it has some really lively, toasty flavors. The process of riddling includes a partial turn of every bottle each day for 3 weeks, with the intent being to force the yeast sediment (the lees) from the second fermentation into the neck of the bottle so it can be removed during disgorgement.

With each turn the line of sediment gradually cleans the inside of the bottle, resulting in a clear wine. After the riddling cycle has been completed, the bottles will be stored completely upside down until it is time for disgorgement. During disgorgement, we'll take the bottles outside in the dead of winter when it is good and cold so that the sediment in the necks freezes. Then we'll open the bottles, the yeast plug will shoot out, and we'll top off, cork, seal, and label the bottles. This should happen sometime in January or February. In the meantime, I'll keep turning.

Harvest mascots

Since I've been working at a winery I am now very much at home with nature. Snake in the vineyard - big deal. Bugs and worms on the sorting table - no problem. Recently there have been some cute animals wandering into the winery.

First day of harvest - this guy jumped in:

The frog eventually hopped out when he saw how busy we were bringing in the first juice of the harvest.

And the other day, this pretty lady flew in:

Sarah, our intern from Germany, caught this Hummingbird and set it free.

Gewurz me

Last week we harvested the first block of Gewurztraminer from our Josef vineyard up in Dresden, NY.  For the first picking of Gewurztraminer we focus on capturing crisp, natural acidity in the grapes. Usually 2 weeks later we will harvest the rest, giving it time to develop more rich, ripe flavors and higher natural sugar content.

The Magdalena block will hang another week or so before we harvest it:

Gewurz grapes are my favorite wine grapes to eat, so I don't mind the fact that the sorting takes a long time. I eat my way through it. Sometimes you just have to sample the grapes to make sure the bunch is good enough to go into the press. If it's underripe, we reject it. Good grapes in, good wine out.

Dancing in September

 
It's the most wonderful time of the year - not Christmas - Harvest! 3 weeks earlier than last year, we started picking. First up was the Chardonnay for sparkling wine. We usually do this first to capture the natural acidity that is so necessary for wine that is meant to sparkle. Because of the warm spring and summer we had to start before Labor Day. Starting Friday and throughout the Labor Day weekend we picked from an old section of the HJW vineyard that hadn't bore fruit since 2003. We got about 7 tons in total from those vines! I spent the first day preparing for the grapes by getting the presses cleaned and ready. We weren't totally prepared since we'd just come off 3 weeks of bottling. So it was a bit of a triathlon to get everything ready for harvest. We had a very productive (if long) weekend but I didn't mind because I am so excited for harvest! Stay tuned for more as we gradually start bringing in the 2010 vintage.

Barrel Fever

This week we moved the 2009 reds out of barrels so we could get them off their fermentation lees and start blending the Field Cuvee and the different parcels of Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc.

Moving wine from barrels is much more logistically complicated than moving wine from a tank. The barrels are each 60 gallons. We pumped them into holding tanks one by one; Cab Franc in one tank, Pinot in one, the elements of Field Cuvee blended together in another. We let the wine stay in the tanks overnight to settle out. Meanwhile, we cleaned the barrels and arranged them for re-filling.

Barrels are heavy even when empty so there is some strategy involved in moving them around. Cleaning barrels is the fun part but it can get really tiring after a while. It is important to clean them well since the wood is porous and exposed to the elements. To clean them we fill them with some water and then roll them back and forth in a swift motion, creating a wave action inside that agitates any solids and splashes the whole area. We do 3 rinses: cold - hot/steam - cold. After they're rinsed we dry them out overnight and fill them the next day.

I cleaned 34 barrels in 2 days, 17 per day! The third day we set and filled the rest. And on the fourth day I rested.

Child of the 80's

Yesterday a customer called and said he had a bottle of Hermann J. Wiemer's 1987 Bunch Select Late Harvest Riesling (this is our TBA style dessert wine where we hand select every single botrytised berry) and he wanted to come to the tasting room and share it with us. We were so excited! Steve arrived with two bottles and we opened one. The cork was in great shape and the wine was a gorgeous golden color. It smelled like apricot with a touch of gasoline - very pleasant for those who love the smell of pumping gas, like me. It was a touch oxidized on the palate and tasted very Sherry-like, with a creamy nuttiness and a bit of stone fruit pitiness. Very interesting. It wasn't as sweet as I expected it to be, despite the 9.8% residual sugar. Perhaps that had something to do with the oxidation. The label was one we hadn't seen before from the Wiemer collection. I personally had never seen such an old bottle of Hermann's! This was a great way to end the week. Thank you again, Steve!

Gewurztrameeter

Over the weekend we hosted a great event at Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard featuring tank/barrel samples and a live jazz band. We focused on Riesling, Gewurztraminer, and Cabernet Franc - the 3 top varietals of the Finger Lakes. We offered 3 vintages of each, including the current 2009 release still in tanks/barrels. I hosted the Gewurz table, where I poured the 2006 and 2008 vintages plus a tank sample of the 2009 vintage, just filtered on Friday. I first had the 2006 Gewurztraminer in February when I brought a bottle down to Argentina and loved it. The 2008 Gewurz is one of my current favorites. And the 2009 Gewurz is going to be great - it's got a lot of concentration. These wines paired great with Chef Michael Murphy's spicy shrimp and his tarragon and mustard seed chicken salad.

Here's what one fan and fellow blogger had to say about the event:
http://www.livelifeeatright.com/2010/06/27/let-there-be-riesling/

Pictures to come!

Who's your Pinot?

The other night after a long day of work we did a Hermann J. Wiemer Pinot Noir flight that was really interesting - 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, and barrel sample 2009. The 2009 barrels are tasting very complex and interesting; they won't be blended and bottled for some time still. The 2008 has been bottled but it isn't released yet; the flavor is really intense and it's going to be a good one. (2008 was just a great vintage all around for us). 2007 is the current release that is out now, and it overflows with bright cherry and spice - actually very similar to the 2008. 2006 was a cold, wet year so this Pinot is very light with some muted cherry and a bit of earthiness. 2004 was fantastic - very smooth with velvety tannin and a lot of beet and blackberry - very different from the others.

We had an event at the winery over the weekend and Fred brought out some of the 2004 Pinot Noir - it was a huge hit. There are still a few more bottles left at $30 each...

So hot right now

Can the FLX get any better? The west side of Seneca Lake, with its many wineries dotting Route 14, now has its very own WIENERY, and it is just 5 minutes from HJW! I could not be more excited.

I have been driving by this property for a week waiting for the "Coming Soon" sign to read "Now Open" and today was the day. They serve 6 different types of hot dogs, including 2 varieties of Hofmann's from Syracuse. I got a Hofmann's White with a side of honey baked beans (which I then put on the dog) and it was delicious - salty, sweet, and a little spicy. They also have root beer on tap and Hershey's ice cream. This is going to be bad, having this wienery so close to the winery, and on my way home from work too...

Filter this

Last week at HJW we started filtering! This was very exciting. Filtering is one of the last steps before bottling. Essentially, in the simplest terms, the winemaking process goes like this: pick the grapes, press the juice, rack (transfer) the juice off the solids, ferment the grape juice (thereby converting the sugar to alcohol by action of yeast), rack off the fermentation lees and tartrates, cold stabilize (lower the temperature of the tank to about 35 degrees F) to further precipitate out any tartrates, filter, blend and bottle. So filtering is a big step. We use a very fine (0.2 micron) cross-flow filter:

We started on Wednesday and in 3 days we filtered the components of Frost Cuvee (our white blend), a couple of tanks of Riesling, and Gewurztraminer. We still have a lot of tanks to go, but it's very exciting because once the wine is filtered we will make final blending decisions and then bottle it.

Hey Mr. Postman, look and see...

Finally we finished putting the posts in the second new vineyard plot at HJW! This plot, like the first one, is all Riesling. Just north of the winery you can see this new vineyard along Route 14.

But there was more... a small section in the Magdalena vineyard. This was a quickie - only took a day and a half. Here we have Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Franc.  All our reds are planted on the Magdalena site since it is the warmest. We have Chardonnay at HJW and Magdalena.

The plants look great and are all tied and contained. In 3 years we'll be able to make wine from these sections. Wine from young vines can be very interesting and great - in fact, I recently learned that our Reserve Cabernet Franc 2007 came from a section of the Magdalena vineyard site that was planted in 2004, and you can taste the difference from our regular Cab Franc that was planted in the late 90's. The Reserve Cab Franc is very complex and rewarding, with smooth tannin and flavors that will definitely age well in the bottle.

Speaking of vineyard plots, we're continuing to move wines from the 2009 vintage that have finished their fermentations and making blending decisions. Since we vinify vineyard plots separately, around this time of year its time to decide how to blend the final wine. We base this on the varying flavors, sweetness, and acidity of the different tanks. Fred, our winemaker, is a master blender. In France he would be called a Chef du Caves. It is fun to taste the different components of a blend and then the way they come together.

Last week we worked on the Semi-Dry Riesling. This is one of our top sellers - we'll make about 3000 cases of it. We're also getting the Chardonnay cuvee ready to become sparkling blanc de blanc - which literally means white of white but refers to sparkling wine made from white grapes.  So, we moved the Chard cuvee from barrels to tank for cold stabilization, which helps with tartrate precipitation. Then we'll filter it and bottle it for the second fermentation, which will make the still wine sparkle.

Btw, I've been getting into stainless steel tanks to clean them and it is pretty fun. When I was a kid growing up with 3 siblings I fashioned a solitary space underneath an end table in our living room and hung out there with my books and toys. I find a similar comfort inside a stainless steel tank. Except instead of books and toys there are tartrate crystals, fermentation lees, and a lot of water :)

Nursery Rhymes

Just as temperatures spiked to 80 degrees in the FLX it was time to get the grafted plants into the Hermann J. Wiemer Nursery, aka the ground. After grafting and waxing into spring, we packed the plants in boxes with peat moss and sand and kept them in a warmed room for two weeks so they could develop a callous around the graft, thus protecting it. While they were warming up in this phase we would brush the sand on top to fill in any holes to keep the plants packed in tightly. I called this the Zen Garden because brushing the sand was very soothing. During the second week they started sprouting some greenery, and then it was time to get them into the real world.

We carefully unpacked the plants, checked the callouses to make sure they were sound, re-dipped the tops in wax, and re-packed them in large bins for transport up to the nursery about 15 miles north of the winery. With a crew of 10-12 people, we got 100,000 plants in the ground by hand in 3 days: 2 people unpacked the plants into hand-held picking boxes; 1 person drove the tractor, which pulled a 6-seater trailer; 2-4 additional people followed behind filling in the spaces that were missed.

It was sunny and hot and essentially backbreaking, but what an accomplishment! The babies are doing well and they'll stay in the ground until November, when we'll harvest them and get them ready for shipping across the country to vineyards in need. (I did the harvesting part last November, so now I've gone backwards to the beginning).

Meanwhile, we still have some 1 year plants that are ready for planting if you'd like to have your own backyard vineyard. On our patio outside the tasting room you'll see potted plants of varieties including Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Chardonnay, Gruner Veltliner, Viognier, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Wine Bloggers Unite!

TasteCamp EAST 2010 was held last weekend in the Finger Lakes. TasteCamp is a regional wine event aimed at getting enthusiastic journalists and bloggers together in a region that is new to them to taste as much wine as possible and speak to as many winemakers as possible over the course of a weekend. It had its inaugural weekend last year in Long Island, and this year they hit the Finger Lakes.

We hosted a group of 36 at Hermann J. Wiemer on Saturday, and Fred Merwarth, our winemaker, focused our tasting on the evolution of our vineyard sites and how we make blending and bottling decisions. We started off with our 2008 Frost Cuvee, a blended wine of Riesling and Gewurztraminer accented by our cuvee of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir - a second pressing from grapes originally designated for sparkling wine, where we only use the first press juice (sparkling wines are very delicate so you only use the first pressings, whereas with other still wines there may be 2 or 3 pressings total). Then we poured the '08 Dry Riesling and the '08 Gewurztraminer to illustrate examples of wines that are blended from different pickings. Next was the Reserve flight - the '08 Dry Riesling Reserve, a blend of the best tanks in the winery, and the '03 Dry Riesling Reserve, which was 100% fruit from the HJW site, Hermann's original planting and a very slatey site. After that we poured the 2008 single vineyard bottlings: Dry Riesling HJW Vineyard and Dry Riesling Magdalena Vineyard. We finished with tank samples of these single vineyards from the 2009 vintage, still fermenting.

It was a great event, but obviously I'm biased. Here's what some of the bloggers had to say:

New York Cork Report: http://www.lenndevours.com/2010/05/when-a-winemaker-asks-if-you--need-to-be-anywhere-the-answer-should-probably-be-no-when-that-winemaker-is--fred-m.html

The Wine Case: http://winecase.ca/2010/05/09/tastecamp-day-2-quick-notes-from-seneca-lake/

Wine Lover's Journal: http://www.examiner.com/x-17620-Manhattan-Wine-Examiner~y2010m5d11-Hermann-J-Wiemer-German-precision-gives-rise-to-fine-wine-in-the-Finger-Lakes

Going Postal

For the last couple of weeks we have been putting posts in the 2 new vineyard plots of Riesling that were planted last Spring on the HJW site at Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard. This task requires a good eye and a bit of upper body strength, since this site is very slatey and we have encountered many rocky interruptions. Sometimes there's a bit of rock just where you want to put the post, and the post either has to be jammed hard enough to break it or the rock has to be dug out. (Last week one of the guys dug out a rock about the size of a small child. Maressa took it home to put in her garden.) The posts have to be in line with the plants, the end posts, and each other. Usually 4 of us are working together to make this happen. It's been pretty windy lately, so we've had to do some correcting along the way since the posts are not completely set until they are pounded into the ground via tractor machinery. While it is difficult to get them all exactly perfect, we are still obsessively trying (I've even been dreaming about posts lined up nice and straight), and I'm pleased to say we have completed 1 of the 2 sites and it looks pretty darn good. Next step there is to finish stringing the wires and getting the plants tied so they don't grow all over the place as they would like to do.

This week we hope to finish the posts in the second site. After the past weekend's gusty winds I am afraid to see what has become of our work so far, but I am trying to be optimistic :)

Pink Pinot

We had a nice summer-like spell here in the FLX about a week ago and it reminded me that people like to drink pink when it gets warmer. I enjoyed a bottle of Wiemer's Pinot Noir Rose from 2006. This is a Pinot lover's pink wine - a rosey nose with bright strawberry fruit and nice body. I had it with pizza and again with broiled salmon and it paired well both times. At $11.50/btl it's a serious steal.

That girl is poison

Well last week we had bud break, a bit earlier than expected and a bit unnerving since the threat of frost in the FLX still looms. But still, it is exciting since it means that soon we will have new growth. We're preparing the vineyards for flowering, and lucky me, I took home a little poison ivy as a souvenir. Since at Wiemer we don't use herbicides it can get a little wild out there, but I didn't think anything was really sprouting yet since nothing is green. Silly me - the poison ivy is red; I should have noticed it. Oh well - now I know. It's not so bad, just on my forearms since the rest of me was pretty covered and I was wearing gloves. I saw a snake too, but I'm way over that already.

Back in the FLX

I'm back at Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard in the Finger Lakes, with a promotion from harvest intern to full-time assistant and the dirty, raw hands to go with it! This past week we were grafting - European Vinifera buds on American rootstock - which involved a fun machine that makes an Omega cut to hold the pieces together and an even more fun vat of hot red wax that we dip the new plants in to keep them together. Also this week we started moving the first of what will be many tanks that have finished fermentation so the wine can clear.  It was fascinating to see the tartrate crystals that had formed (although not as much fun to clean them since I didn't realize how harsh they are and my hands are now thoroughly cut up) and to see how fast the wine cleared once it was moved off the fermentation gunk (by the next day). I'm learning how to sulfur the wine to stabilize it and how to measure residual sugar and alcohol.  It was very exciting to taste what has been made from the grapes we picked and crushed last fall.

Spring in the FLX is pretty nice so far - as long as it doesn't snow tomorrow like they are saying - and I get to see this waterfall every day: