Bottling - what a workout

Who needs a gym? Lifting, lunges, squats and cardio - you can get it all on the bottling line. The last few weeks we have been furiously bottling the 2009 white wines at Wiemer to free up tank space for the fast-approaching 2010 harvest. I'm at the beginning of the line, putting the bottles on and controlling the flow of the wine. Sounds easy enough, right? The challenge is keeping up with the line while monitoring fill heights and making sure everything runs smoothly - the spouts, the corker, the conveyor belt, and of course, the bottles. There's a lot of back and forth and eyes darting. My favorite part is when I breeze by the part of the line where the bottles have just been filled and are about to be corked, because at that point you can get a whiff of the wine and it smells so good! But I always hope I don't have to take a bottle off around this stage because after putting on so many empty bottles a full one feels like it weighs 10 pounds.

On a full day of bottling we can fill over 10,000 bottles. You can't get this kind of workout anywhere else. I'm ready for a nap now.

Getting Tanked

One of my favorite things to do at Wiemer is to get inside the tanks to clean them. We've been doing that a lot lately, since we're preparing to bottle the wine. The technique for getting into a tank varies from person to person (mostly because of our varying heights), but I tend to dive in head first and come out feet first. Here are some pics of me getting ready to clean a tank.

Made in Vermont

Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard is going to be featured in the Hubbardton Forge spring catalog! Hubbardton Forge is a light fixture company in Vermont. Their stuff is really classy and unique. They chose our winery as a set for featuring their new line of fixtures, so last week they installed new lights in our winery. This week they'll take photographs for the layout, which will appear in their March 2011 catalog.

It was really cool to see the guys installing the lights in our huge, scissor-trussed barn:

And the result is tons more light and a world-class design:

Wines from Alsace

Over the past few weeks I've tried some interesting wines from Alsace. They have a similar wine-growing climate to us and are known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer, so it is interesting to compare the wines.

This is a super high-end Riesling that retails for around $240:

It had a petrol nose that opened up to floral and stone fruit. Crisp acidity mingled with a smoothness on the palate as it sat in the glass.  Alsatian Riesling is generally more dry than in Germany, and this too was a very dry style.  This 2002 is their current release, so it has already been aged and now could be aged another 30 years.


We also tried a couple of Gewurztraminers next to Wiemer's 2002...

The 2007 Emile Beyer was surprisingly similar in taste to our '02 - with a mellowed creaminess balanced by the still-refreshing acidity. The 2000 Domaine Zind Humbrecht was viscous and sweet, the sweetest Gewurz I've ever tasted. That winery is the gold standard in Gewurz, so it was cool to try it, but I preferred the crispness of the Emile Beyer and ours.

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.

Sugar Rush

We've been preparing to bottle our 2009 wine designated for sparkling. We're making a Blanc de Blanc (from Chardonnay) and a Cuvee Brut Rose (from Pinot Noir). We've filtered the base wine and last week we added the sugar, moving the wine from one tank to another and mixing the sugar continuously so it dissolved. This was fun :) Next we have to add yeast to the base wine to kickstart the second fermentation, which will convert the added sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide will be trapped in the bottle, and this is what makes the wine bubble. We'll also add riddling agents to help the yeast coagulate once they have finished their task.

Sugar: check
Yeast: on deck
Riddling agents: on deck

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!

When you're quite finished!

Last week we finally called it quits on our last 2 fermenting tanks. 2 tanks of Riesling were still going, after 9 months of fermentation! We like to let the wines ferment as they will, so usually in the winter they'll slow down or stop, but instead of adding yeast to get them going again we'll just wait - and then without fail they'll kick up again in the spring. Maybe it's the spring moon or just the rising temperatures, but either way things kick up. So after putting together our various Rieslings from all the different tanks we decided these last 2 were ready to stop. Now they've joined their friends in going through cold stabilization. Which I have to say is like natural air conditioning for the winery in these hot temperatures.

Blend, baby, Blend

This week we released a new wine: Field Cuvee 2007. This is a red blend that until now used to be called Estate Red.  Field Cuvee 2007 is dominated by Cabernet Franc and Merlot, followed by Lemberger, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir. Hermann originally planted some of these varieties for the nursery business to provide bud material for grafting. We vinify Cab Franc and Pinot Noir as single varietals. Depending on the vintage we'll also do a Merlot. But we'll always have a blend with these 5 grapes, and from now on it will be known as Field Cuvee. It's a medium-bodied red with a lot of bright fruit that is easy to drink and will go well with many foods from BBQ to pizza.

The Cuvee line of wines is our blended line, with a different label to distinguish it from the rest of our wines - which are single varietals that are named on the label. It was first unveiled last summer with Frost Cuvee 2008, a white blend of Riesling, Gewurztraminer, and Chardonnay.

Blends are nice because they can bring out the best of each variety. If you can't decide on one grape, blend, baby, blend!

Unrelated: Apparently John Travolta has bought a house on Keuka Lake, which is west of Seneca. I've called dibs on his tasting if he comes to the winery!

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!