Blueprint of a Bottling - Part 2
Canela sadness, Glass hiccups, bulldogging reds, printing labels
When things are perfect, that's when you need to worry most. ~ Drew Barrymore
Do the math. Expect catastrophes. Whatever happens, stay the course. ~ William J. Bernstein
First, a tragic tale
Winery dogs are a special breed, and it seems as though every winemaker has one. They are a wonderful addition to the winemaking circus—often scruffy and more freewheeling than their highly-trained purebred cousins, they are adept at dodging forklifts in the cellar, catching the occasional varmint that has strayed in from the outside, and stealing sweet clusters of grapes from the half-tons as they are unloaded on the crush pad. Winery dogs are usually endowed with a keen intelligence and a friendly, independent personality—not unlike their owners.
Ours is named Canela. She actually belongs to Jack Sporer who runs Magnolia. But I say “ours” because all of us making wine at Magnolia share a special bond with the pooch. Coral Wang, a fellow winemaker there, describes Canela best—and late last week shocked all of us with this message:
“Many of us know, as soon as you walk into Magnolia, the first of anyone to greet you is Canela, running up, galloping with conviction, to lick and shower you with love. Our favorite Sonoma winery canine mascot, there to inspect the fruit, and loyally follow in Jack’s shadow.
“Our hearts break to share the news that on March 16th, our sweet Canela girl was hit by a car on Highway 12, just outside the Oak Hill farm property in Sonoma; by a car that drove off nonetheless. A living nightmare all of us dog owners perpetually fear, which became a reality for Jack.
“Miraculously, she survived the shocking ordeal, however, after many hours in the hospital, she ultimately lost the fight to save her right front leg. They amputated her leg from the shoulder down, and also her entire tail due to blood loss. She returned home, on March 20th, as a tripod [as dog survivors of that type of amputation are called].”
I haven’t had a dog since I moved to Sonoma five years ago. Before that I can’t remember not having a dog, ever. Canela was a special pal I looked forward to seeing whenever I was at the winery. So, this accident stung. Certainly nowhere near as bad as it hurt Jack and his family. But it did more than pale the moment for me.
I haven’t seen Jack since the accident. We just haven’t crossed paths at the winery, and I expect he’s spending as much time as possible at home with Canela right now. I can’t imagine what he’s feeling. Well, yes, actually I can. But I’m hearing through the grapevine that Canela is rallying, already insisting on hobbling on her own, however tenuously. I have no doubt she’ll come back, all scarred up but tenacious, and hopefully as curious and fun-loving as ever.
Coral has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help cover what are, and will be, some pretty hefting vet and rehab bills. Fortunately, dog lovers, winemakers, and the community at large are responding in force. Here’s the link https://gofund.me/737f767e if you feel compelled.
Four days to bottling
Alright, I’ll admit it. I’m getting nervous. With just a few days to go and still some pieces to fall into place, the biggest single-day event in my newly minted professional winemaking career is truly looming on the horizon. And I keep replaying that proverbial question over and over again in my mind…
What could possibly go wrong?
So far, nothing too worrisome. Except for maybe a few glass acquisition hiccups. My first allotment of 2,688 Bordeaux bottles from TricorBraun was delivered on time and in great shape on Wednesday. But I wasn’t quite as lucky with my 600 Burgundy bottles that I’d bought from a fellow winemaker at Magnolia. The bottle supplier he was using wouldn’t let him split a pallet so I agreed to buy what he didn’t need. The price was competitive, I’d save on the shipping costs, and we would both end up with exactly the number of Burgundy bottles we each needed.
But when the delivery showed up it was inexplicably short a pallet, and both of us were suddenly looking for glass again just a week away from bottling. I never did find out exactly what happened, but it had something to do with a heretofore undisclosed inventory problem with the supplier. Uh huh. One frustrating thing I have discovered in the winemaking industry, be it access to grapes, or bottles, or optimum timing for services, is that as a little guy you are definitely at the bottom of the heap. if a big winery needs a few more bottles to cover their production you can guess whose inventory those are coming from.
On a whim I called Tony Rios Conrriquez, my sales rep at TricorBraun, fully expecting that it was too late to order anything more. But I was surprised and very pleased to find out that he could indeed supply what I needed. He even lowered the price below what I was going to pay my fellow winemaker. There would be a separate shipping fee, of course—but I was just happy to have dodged that bullet.
On top of all of that, Tony promised to try and help me locate some 3L and 6L large format bottles which I hadn’t been able to find. You’ve seen them, those giant bottles of wine on display in an upscale restaurant, or in the window of a wine shop.
Then on Friday my iPhone pinged with a voice message from Tony. I figured he was calling to let me know he had found my big bottles.
“Hey Joe, give me a call will ya. I need to talk with you about your latest order. We’ve just gotten some information from our quality control guys that you need to know about.”
“Oh boy.”
When I finally connected with Tony late in the day he hit me with this question.
“Have you ever heard of bloom?”
“Say what?”
“Here, listen to this. I’m going to read you something our quality control guys just sent it over. [Clearing his throat like an actor reciting his lines.] Bloom is the visible product of reaction between the sodium on the inside surface of glass containers and atmospheric carbon dioxide and/or oxides of sulfur. It is a thin layer of amorphous or crystalline forms of those salts and gives the glass a cloudy appearance. The formation of bloom is time dependent; the older the glass, the more likely bloom has formed and the more advanced its formation. The rate of formation is also dependent on humidity and temperature, but their influences are imperfectly understood in the industry.”
“Okay, I’m starting to get nervous… why?”
“Well, it seems our guys just discovered that those Burgundy bottles you just ordered have a high rate of surface bloom. We’ve got a crew running 24/7 basically Windex-ing everything from that lot in our inventory, but it’s slow going.
“Well, that’s a new one! What does this bloom do if you don’t get rid of it? Is it poisonous or anything?”
“No, the presence of bloom is purely aesthetic. It has no alteration on the taste or other properties of whatever is in the bottle. But it can form a haze on the glass. All glass has some degree of bloom but it’s very soluble in its early stages and washes away easily just by rinsing the bottle. But in the case of your bottles, it’s further along, and the quality control guys said that it could effect your labels, making them wrinkle and shrivel a few months after you apply them.”
“Yikes, so what are we going to do. It doesn’t sound like you’re going to get the bottles I ordered cleaned in time.”
“Yeah, I understand we are in a tight timeframe and I apologize for the inconvenience. We do have a similar mold, produced in Asia, which we just inspected and does not have any surface bloom. I just sent you an email with a bottle drawing and I can supply you with a sample of it on Monday morning so we can make sure your corks and capsules will fit. We can still have stock to you in time for your bottling, and I can also honor the price we agreed to for the earlier bottles. Oh yeah, and I found those large format bottles you were looking for. I’ll bring those along on Monday as well.”
What?! Who is this guy? Who is TricorBraun? They’ve completely restored my faith in good customer service. Bravo Tony!
Oh, and if you think I was having bottle issues, they’re nothing compared to the poor winery near Healdsburg that was waiting on delivery of 10,000 empty bottles that spilled out over Highway 101 this week when the semi-truck that was carrying them turned over! Fortunately the driver was unscathed. The bottles? Not so much.
Corks and capsules are in!
I went to pick up my corks and capsules (see last week) from Ganau on Friday and there was no drama. Never has been with this company. They have all their checks and balances in a row and are pleasantly and effectively inflexible with all of them. They wouldn’t let me complete or even pay for my order until they had seen and measured my sample bottles, even though they knew in advance exactly what size corks I would be needing. Nevertheless, being the perfectionist I am (some people might say anal) I found myself looking for problems that weren’t there, so in the end I invented one.
My corks had turned out great, with the TINY VINEYARDS WINE COMPANY logo type and website URL printed on either side, and an exclamation of anticipation—what I hope you will utter just before imbibing my wine—printed on both ends (that’s how it will always show up when you peel back the capsule while uncorking the bottle). But they seemed too big. I guess these technical corks are made a little fatter, 24mm rather than the 22mm the natural corks are that I’ve previously used, and I suddenly panicked. Will these actually go into the bottle?!
I grabbed a handful of corks and two sample bottles and raced off to my tiny winery at Bobbie’s where I had a corker. The way a corker works is that it squeezes the cork on its sides within steel jaws and then plunges the compressed cork cylinder into the bottle. And that’s exactly what happened, only easier and way smoother than with a natural cork. Hmmm. Then I found a corkscrew and extracted the cork as if I was opening a bottle. Same thing, smooth. Okay, it’s official—no problems with our corks!
Printing labels
Press checks are sacrosanct. You don’t miss them. Precious time and expenses go into to bringing any printed job up to color and ready to run, and if the client isn’t there to sign off on it, or extract a little more expertise out of the pressmen, then it’s a waste of time for everyone.
That’s why I found myself headed out to Stockton at zero-dark-thirty in a rainstorm this past Wednesday, gritting my teeth against the highway spay of the semis and the blinding glare of those oncoming vehicles that fail to turn off their high beams. Due to an unfortunate tangle with a large saltwater fishing hook in a prior life, the iris in my left eye doesn’t contract or expand like a healthy eye. It’s frozen open and simply shuts down when too much light pours in.
But I had agreed to be at the printer by 8:30 a.m. come rain or shine and MPI Label Systems had built their whole Wednesday schedule around that promise. It was a two-hour drive, rapidly growing by fifty percent as the remnants of our latest cyclone bomb continued to pound the Bay Area. But it was definitely worth it in the end as collectively my sales rep Leticia White and her talented press crew had come to play, and the results were outstanding.
I like press checks. It’s incredible how today’s modern digital presses can be played like a musical instrument, bending notes of color to realize the final composition you had in mind. I’ve been printing things for 50 years and you can tell right away if a pressman is simply going to humor your requests until you leave the building, or go the extra mile to create a masterpiece. It was the latter to the end with the folks at MPI Label Systems. You can read last week’s post about what we wanted to accomplish, and did!
Bulldogging the Reds
Last week we talked about Bulldogging my Chardonnay. This week we did the same thing to my six barrels of Red Blend and three barrels of Malbec. Both of those wines have been aging for 18 months (can you believe it!) in different cooperages of French oak and it was now time to blend them together—not the two different wines, but the different barrels of each—before bottling.
Each barrel really does taste different with sensorial variations in mouthfeel and degrees of oakiness, sweetness, bitterness, vanilla and coconut. I’m hoping, that when everything is mixed together, something special will emerge. Maybe not right away, but certainly within the life of the wine. Blending, even at this final very subtle level, is as much about luck, as it is craft, as it is art. There is still a lot of chemistry going on at this point and just the act of blending the same wine from different barrels brings into play issues of equilibrium, masking, buffering and maybe sometimes, dare I say, even alchemy.
In the massive textbook from my Winemaking Certificate Course, Wine Science by R.S. Jackson, the author concedes that at times blending is still somewhat a leap of faith. “There is little to guide blenders other than past experience. Blending to achieve specific attributes (relative to taste or some legal requirements) is comparatively easy. Predictions of proportions based on the composition of each component wine may approximate the desired result. However, many aspects are so complex and nonlinear that major discrepancies between physicochemical-based prediction and sensory perception are common.”
In other words, it may not all come out like you think it’s gonna! But then again, magic might happen. Like it does so often in this endeavor.
The home stretch
So, it’s been a pretty full week. Somewhere in there I got my final grades back for my last class in the Winemaking Certificate Course, Wine Stability and Sensory Analysis. Yeah, I passed. I even maintained my A, just barely! But it almost didn’t register. After two years and three months I was so done. I had already turned my attention to getting through this bottling, and when the sun finally came out on Thursday and Friday, Deb and I, and our friend Tom, went up valley and pruned Hassan’s vineyard, just to get out hands in the dirt again. It was rejuvenating.
Friday night Deb made a smoked ham and kale soup, with local Rancho Gordo cranberry beans. Insanely good! She had given me a celebratory bottle of Duckhorn Cabernet Sauvignon as a gift to mark the completion of my Winemaking Certificate course, and we opened it to drink with the soup and a baguette of sweet French bread.
It was a simple, perfect meal, and both of us devoured it ravenously, still dressed in our vineyard clothes, our hands cramping from the day’s pruning. We talked about the satisfaction that special wine evoked, and how that was really all we were after… after all.