Red Wine with Fish

From time-to-time I have been writing about my path as I leave the software business and move into the wine business. Rather than be so haphazard about it, I have decided to introduce the “Call of the Wine” category. I will attempt to post more regularly about my experiences as I (hopefully) progress.

This first installment, posted on my last day at BEA Systems, will serve as a summary of what has happened so far. A re-cap, if you will, of the posts that never were.

About 18 months ago, knowing full well that I was sick of the software business, I thought I might want to try to open a wine shop. Then, last summer, at an auction at Wally’s Wine Shop in West Los Angeles, I met James Wolpert, Chair of the UC Davis Viticulture and Enology program. After talking to him, I was convinced that making wine would be even better than selling the stuff and that I could probably get into an academic program.

After serious research, I came to the conclusion that I would rather go to Oregon State University given its location and the fact that they would help me get through the Biology and Chemistry requirements, rather than expect me to get through them before applying. So, Sydney and I started preparing to move to Corvallis.

On a trip there, I met Damian North, then the winemaker at Benton-Lane Winery and Jim Kennedy, a professor at OSU. Conversations with them convinced me that 1.) I should probably spend some time in the industry before committing to years in school and 2.) if I want to get a job, we were going to have to move to northern Willamette Valley, closer to Portland, where the majority of the wineries are.

So we did. I managed to get two jobs, working in the tasting rooms at Penner-Ash and Argyle where I have been happily working part-time for the last two months. And as of now, I am considering working my way through Chemeketa Community College’s wine program, rather than OSU, although that may change.

The latest news is that Lynn and Ron Penner-Ash asked me to work the harvest and I accepted. That means for six weeks in September and October, I am going to be taking leave from my tasting room jobs to work a 70+ hour week for the harvest. Although I am going to be very, very tired after work every day, I will endeavor to take some pictures and blog about my experiences. I have a feeling I will end up writing things down and blogging later.

Stay tuned.

I have now survived my first International Pinot Noir Celebration. Although the event hadn’t technically begun, I think of it as starting on Tuesday when I had an extra shift at Argyle to accommodate the anticipated traffic. Moderate to heavy traffic late in the day Tuesday and Wednesday at Argyle made for pretty long days… and then Thursday came. After a 7 hour shift at Argyle, I zipped over to Penner-Ash to work the IPNC wine-maker’s dinner. Chef Adam Sappington from Wildwood was in the kitchen and the wine was from Penner Ash and Domaine de l’Arlot. My job was to serve wine to increasingly wine-addled diners and clear dishes. This was my first restaurant/catering job since 1995 so it took me a while to get into the swing of things. The dinner was lovely and the diners were suitably impressed with the food and wine. After clean-up, I headed home and went to bed at about midnight, ending a really, really long day.

I woke up at 6:30 to run back to P-A for the luncheon. This time Allen Routt and Jessica Bagley-Routt from The Painted Lady were in the kitchen and the wine was from P-A and Michel Clos. The luncheon was again extremely popular, despite a few rough moments behind the scenes. Again, the food and wine were impressive to all.

Yesterday, I had a normal closing shift at Penner-Ash. Lucky for me a ticket came free for the salmon bake. This meant I got a chance to go to the shining event of the IPNC conference. I attached myself to the Penner-Ash crowd and was treated to wonderful wine and food all evening. Some of the bottles on the table were truly breath-taking. Sadly, Sydney had another event to attend to she couldn’t come. Next time I think Sydney and I should get a dorm-room so I don’t have to be so careful. As it was, I drank quite a number of wines, but dumped and spit for about the last 2 hours, enabling me to do the long drive home from McMinnville. It was heartbreaking dumping some of those wines, but dumping was better than not tasting… or crashing on the way home.

I was much, much too busy to ever take good tasting notes on anything–that’s the disadvantage of being behind the scenes. And since I didn’t expect to be at the salmon bake, I wasn’t prepared to take notes there either. There were so many wines, I didn’t even always know what I was tasting. But, here are a few highlights:

• 1995 Chehalem Reserve: Wow. Fruit fading but replaced by a wonderfully earthy funk.
• 2000 Penner Ash Syrah: Gorgeously integrated and still tannic after all these years
• 2000 Penner Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir: Fruit mostly gone, but still some acidity and that wonderful aged Pinot nose.
• 2001 Penner Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir: Really nice. Four years in the bottle and the fruit still strong. What a difference a single year and a different vintage makes. I hope I get to taste this one again in a few years.
• 1997 Domaine Drouhin Laurene: Very, very nice. Apparently this is an Oregon classic. Like the other older Oregon wines, the fruit was diminished and replaced by a wonderful earthiness.
• 2000 Domaine Michel Gros Clos des Réas: my favorite of the Burgundies we served at P-A. The layers of earth flavors were amazing: mushroom, beet juice, evergreen. Very, very nice.

There were, of course, many, many others, but these are the ones that for some reason made an impression on me. I hadn’t had many Oregon Pinots of this age before. It is wonderful to see what happens when the acidity lowers a bit and the fruit fades in favor of an earthy funk. You start to see the soil come out from behind the fruit. It’s really amazing. That said, they aren’t the same as the Burgundies. I can’t say they are better or worse, but the depth of earthy flavors of the (slightly) aged Burgundies is amazing.Still, the fruit in Oregon wines is still my favorite. The California ones seem a little too hot and plumby for me oftentimes and the Burgundies generally aren’t fruit-focused. The Oregon Pinots have a delicacy in the fruit that I adore. And it is nice to see that once the fruit fades there is still something amazing. I see what Scott Wright of Scott Paul Wines means when he says that we don’t know our land quite well enough to be able to pull as much complexity out of the earth as they do in Burgundy, but our winegrowers are making good progress and while they learn they are making some amazing wines.

This is a great event. If you have several hundred dollars and a few days to spend tasting wine, you should come next year. You can bet I am not going to miss the opportunity to work the event again next year.

Verasion is well under way. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, verasion is the period in which the grapes change color. I have been regularly going into the vineyard to watch the grapes change. About 6 weeks ago, they didn’t even look like grapes. About 3 weeks ago, they were virtually all green. Now, as you can see, a good many of the grapes have turned purple. These are Pinot Noir grapes from the Dussin which is Penner-Ash’s estate vineyard.

Apparently, the harvest is set to be toward the end of September. I am very excited to start. While I enjoy my jobs at the Argyle and Penner-Ash tasting rooms, I am dying to get involved in production. I realize the large majority of my time will be spent on mindless tasks like washing fermentation tanks, but I don’t care. This is what I have come out here for and I am desperate to learn. Every day in the tasting room is a learning experience, but until you are neck deep in the production process, I don’t think you can really understand what wine is all about.

After the harvest, I should have visceral understand of wine questions like:

• how does a punch-down work?
• why do wine makers use cold-maceration?
• when does each stage of the process occur?
• how much beer does it really take to make a case of wine?

In the meantime, I will try to learn what I can in the tasting rooms. Pictured below are the two tasting rooms I work in now. As you might guess, they are both very pleasant places to work. I hope that within the next year or two, I can get a full time job. Working in more than one place is certainly interesting, but it would be nice to be able to concentrate on one winery and really get to know it.

And although my software gig is going fine, I hope I don’t have to do it for too much longer. Three jobs is really too many, even if they are all part-time.

Wish me luck.

Tomorrow, bright and early, I begin my first day of bottling at Penner-Ash. Bottling is reputed to be the least pleasant part of the wine production process: loud and boring. No matter, I look forward to it anyway. I just hope my poor back holds up. It hasn’t been too cooperative the last two weeks.

Within the next couple of weeks, the harvest begins in earnest and Sydney becomes are harvest widow until November. To my friends and family and everyone I owe a message, phone-call or money: sorry, it will have to wait until after the crush. Thank you for your understanding.

Today was good. I basically worked eight to five with a healthy hour and forty-five minutes commuting. My first few hours were spent hot-gluing six-packs of Dusky Goose which is not a terrible job, despite my tendency to drip molten glue on my flesh. At least I wasn’t in the bottling truck with the noise and the yellow jackets.

The rest of the day was spent hand-bottling large-format. We did Dusky Goose and a few Penner-Ash single-vineyard Pinots. The formats were everything from the magnum, which holds two normal sized bottles worth, to the Salmanazar which holds an entire case. Apparently, I will be working on that more tomorrow.

My back held up and I rather enjoyed it, truth be told. We are ahead of schedule and people are in good spirits.

More soon…

After completing my second day bottling, it is clear that I got off really easy yesterday, making magnums most of the day. After today, I am much more tired and sore and had considerably less fun. That said, it still wasn’t bad. Although I won’t be sad if we do finish tomorrow and Ron is right that we have worked fast enough to save ourselves from a forth day of bottling.

Today, I did a few new tasks: “palettizing”–stacking six-packs of 2005 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir on palettes. Not a bad job and certainly better than “capping”, which is putting those little foil caps on the bottles. It isn’t that cappng is hard, but rather it is mind-numbingly tedious. Just hour after hour of dropping little metal caps on bottles, so the machine can do the real work.

Other perfectly reasonable jobs I did today were to feed bottles into the bottling machine and put in cardboard inserts. A more challenging task was to grab the newly filled, corked and capped bottles and put them in the six-pack. That was not easy. I was the first in the line which meant I had to drop in the first three bottles. The first person really sets the pace, for the following two, who add in the insert and then add the final three bottles. When I fell behind, we all fell behind. It took a good ten minutes of Lucy-esque sketch comedy before I finally got the hang of it. After a little while, I got good enough so I could just grab the bottle and with a little spin of the wrist, set the bottle label side up.

So tomorrow is most likely the last day. Assuming that ends up being the case, I get Friday off, then I work a couple days in the tasting room and I have a whole week off; well, a whole week off from the winery anyway. I do have my software consulting gig to consider. I know they want a few more hours from me before the harvest hits. Hopefully, I will be able to squeeze in one last little day trip to the Columbia Gorge. The people from the Pines Vineyard were in town a few weeks ago and said I should visit their newly opened retail space in Hood River. I think I might take them up on that and check out the beautiful falls nearby.

It’s over. We were done by four. 2005 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir and Rubeo are in the bottle. Rubeo will be released as early as this weekend (eep, can you say “bottle shocked”).

No exciting new tasks today. I did more of what I did yesterday except rather than put on the foil caps, I put on the sleeve for the Rubeo screwtop. It isn’t really much different honestly, but the fact that the sleeve is sturdier makes it a little easier.

So, now I get the week off to heal and then the harvest starts. I will attempt to provide quick updates from time to time, although I won’t have much time. In all likelihood, I will just take lots of notes and a torrent of posts will appear in mid to late October.

In fact, for some, it has already begun. I think Argyle has probably already starting picking for their sparkling wines since those don’t need to be as ripe. Penner-Ash is about a week away. The weather has cooled off a bit and that has delayed the start of crush by a week or so. This is, I think, a good thing, if for no other reason than it gives me one more week to prepare/heal for the rush.

We are supposed to get some rain this week, which is not ideal, but it doesn’t look like it will be much. Unless there is some sort of unanticipated disaster (like huge thundershowers next week), this is looking like it is going to be a fantastic vintage. The weather has been warm but not too warm. The nights were mostly cool. There was sufficient rain early in the season and virtually none all summer. And the vineyards have been prolific. 2005 was a light vintage. 2004 was a ridiculous light vintage. 2006 looks like it is going to be a massive vintage… by Oregon standards. Many vineyards have dropped fruit two or three times, giving them plenty of opportunities to get rid of the few berries that got scorched during our one short hot spell.

The berries are sweet and look beautiful. I imagine, based on weather, sugar levels are going to be a little higher than average but not much. I don’t expect huge boozy wines like those from the scorching hot ‘03 vintage.

Again, this is all speculation. A lot can change in a week and, frankly, I haven’t been through this before. But the word I hear right now is excellent. That is not to say Oregon wine buyers should stop picking up ’04s and ’05s. They are very nice wines. There just isn’t that much of them. Hopefully, that won’t be as much of a problem with ‘06 wines when they come out over the next couple years.

Pictured above:

• Argyle’s Lone Star Vineyard in The Eola Hills (8/25/06)
• Dropped fruit at Lone Star (8/25/06)
• Pinot Noir from Penner-Ash’s Dussin Vineyard (9/9/06)

It has been such a lovely season so far, but now these last minute rains might complicate things. The grapes were ripe, or close to it and you can’t pick them wet, so now we have to wait for them to dry off. This might be tricky considering the forcast calls for rain on and off all week. Hopefully, we will get enough sun one day to dry them out and pick them quick before it rains again.

What does this mean for the vintage? Well, I am not sure. I haven’t talked to the winemaker yet. At this point, this is just speculation. I do know that wet grapes have higher odds of rot and fungus. Enough rain at the last minute and the grapes start to swell up with water and the flavor gets watered down. I am not sure whether we are at that point yet. I certainly hope not. Regardless, you need to wait for some dry weather, which after Oregon’s first rains can be risky.

I will know much more after Sunday when we have our harvest kick-off party. Hopefully at that point, I can provide some better information about the state of things.

Tonight we had our harvest kick-off party. Lots of good wine and food, of course, and I finally got some insight into what this week of rain means. Mostly, it means that I don’t get to start my job for another three days. Apparently, the grapes haven’t absorbed much water, other than in the estate vineyard, where they swelled a little bit since they were so parched. Apparently, they should still be just fine, once they dry out.  Nobody seems panicked and the vintage sounds like it is still going to be a good one. To me, it’s just frustrating because I want get started.

Well, it looks like I can work my software gig for a new few days. Joy.