A Note on Bottling

H o w   W e   R a c k
a n d   G r o w - U p   t h e   W i n e s.

We are Traditionalists and Purists.
And I'm not sure if that is because it is the easiest or hardest way.
I can argue it is the easiest because the only way to grow up fine wines is to get really
good vineyards, where the grapes never stop growing, even after they are harvested
from the vine. Their expression just keeps growing in the fermenter,
in the barrel, in the bottle, and at the table.

Now if Pinot Noir vines are planted in the wrong place, and the grapes are processed
without sensitivity, it seems to me they just gives up because they have done
everything they can do under the circumstances. But... to stop harvesting from such
a vineyard, and to admit that your processing may be happening without
enough sensitivity, is that hard or easy to do? It's hard.
Most winemakers don't seem to specialize in admitting they are wrong or inept.
Plus it's easy to get attached to a vineyard, easy to give it another chance,
and it's easy to view it as a challenge, and with those three things going on,
it's hard to just say no.
So getting in the right vineyard and getting out of the wrong ones is hard.

As a Traditionalist, here's an easy thing for me to do: stay home and enjoy myself.
If you have ever visited us, you know that we have pretty nice digs and
that the place and process is thoughtfully worked out.
Traditionalists take the long-view, and as such, things don't have to be done
two or three times because they were flimsy or fraught with fashion.

For instance, Traditionalists can stay home and don't have to go to trade shows.
These shows are a place where you need to remember names and feel badly if you can't,
pretend like you are interested in buying a lot of stuff so you get invited to the
cool hospitality suites, and have to seem like you already know it all.
Trade shows want to solve one basic problem:
how to cope with the wrong grapes planted in the wrong place.
These misfits need engineering and efficient processing such that you can make them
taste better (read: move them toward the middle-of-the-road) and with this efficient
processing and flavor engineering you can sell them for more than they are really
worth. OK, so I have copped-an-attitude about trade shows, and yes,
I used to go to trade shows, but now that I can say I've tried it both ways...
am I ever glad that we can say we are Purists.
Given our two vineyard selections, it seems easy to be a Traditionalist.
But it you are interested in your career, it's hard to not go to trade shows,
but, but, we don't have careers anymore, just a calling.

Well, then what's so hard about being a Traditionalist? I can't say that it's hard,
it's just that it's harder than the conventional way to make wine.
By choice, we don't have a lot of arrows in our quiver. A Traditionalist has only the
most basic tools when it comes to maturation in the barrel: stirring lees and racking.
I won't even list what tools and manipulations we don't have or don't do because it's
not very romantic. So with only two tools available the intensity of the art
comes with the how and when... particularly the when.

Maybe we are really practicing being comics because timing is everything.
Timing things is hard because you have to be in very close touch with the wine,
and that takes creating space for the wine and it takes some talent
or at least predisposition and discipline.
You don't get to do things when you 'want' to do them.
You do them when the wine says, "all's right, now."
And Pinot Noir is the master at this whispering of proper timing.

As an aside about the nature of Pinot Noir: this grape has been called the most
difficult grape to grow and make, it's been called finicky. This is entirely wrong.
Pinot's reputation was perpetrated by winemakers that aren't
comfortable with listening and sensing a wine.
Pinot Noir simply resists the will of the winemaker.
So if an out-of-touch winemaker is doing things on his or her schedule,
rather than the wines, and it doesn't come out so hot, you blame the finickiness
of the grape, certainly not your self. End of aside.

Then how do you get to be a good listener to the wine? Give it space.
Our barrels repose one high. They are not on steel racks. There are very good
reasons for this that are at the heart of tradition and purism.
Number One: it stops the urge for expansion and the potentially sloppy thinking
that comes along with it. If you are expanding you are not concentrating.
Your discipline is to keep up, not to refine and get closer to perfection.
A person that is in the expanding mind-set rarely, if ever, contemplates.

Number Two: having barrels one high on two rails invites the visitation.
Not just any visit and sampling, it invites you to use many more of your senses.
Once you pull the bung, you can use your eyes and see the surface of the wine,
you can use your nose to alert you to maladies or confirm good health, you can use
your ear to hear any pings of fermentations. The tactility of a talented practitioner can
feel the energy of the wine. None of these things can happen when you stack barrels.
In the stacked case, a sample is drawn (typically not even by the winemaker) and the
qualities at hand are determined by inferred intellectual activity,
not via direct sensing of the wine as it is.
Traditionalists evolved their philosophy when there were no laboratories for wine.
There was not the possibility of intellectual inference because there was no data.
Your only choice was to sense the wine. And that is the choice we love.

Number Three: contemplation. This is one of the chief tools of listening.
The wine has told you something, what does it mean?
Well it could mean a number of things, depending on the context in which it is
heard and understood. The number of contexts, are like facets on a jewel.
Each one is a lens. Only through contemplation can that gem be rotated
such that the intended context comes clearly into focus.
Only at that point will the previous murmuring of the wine become knowable.

Let me tell you, when you go to school to become a winemaker, do you think
any one trains you in contemplation? Ha ha! Nope, the only reason you want
to do that training on your own is cuz you're weird.
But once contemplation is mastered, there is a grounded and grand feeling.
One of the by-products of that feeling is it makes for a confidence
where it is perfectly alright if somebody thinks you are weird.
So to know what the murmur means, is to contemplate.

Listening gets us to the when, how about the how?
The first consideration is thoughtfully working things out so we don't have to
do any pointless labor. For example, the barrels never leave the rack,
they just roll on the rails. An empty barrel weighs 100 pounds,
lifting them gets old fast.
Instead we think through the how of the process and take out most all of the hard part.
If it's not easy, it is at least relatively easy. With it being easy, you have no reason
to procrastinate. The when is done when it should be done.

What needs to be done is racking, and it is one of our principal tools.
I don't know why it's called racking, but it is different than transferring.
When you transfer wine you take it all, nothing is left behind.
Racking leaves behind the lees, those things that have fallen out of solution like yeast
cells, fruit fragments that sneaked in from the press, condensed tannins, and so on.
Now do you want to get rid of all the lees? This is a serious question a
Traditionalists must ask because it's half of the arrows in the quiver.

Retaining some fraction of the lees and stirring them once every other week will
tend to give the wine more body, give a nuance of creaminess, and tend to lessen
the brightness of the fruit. Because we ferment and manage the cap the way we do,
we end up with plenty of body, the creamy nuance is distracting, and we like the fruit
our vineyards give... so lees stirring is something that we rarely find necessary,
even though it is a traditional tool.

Racking is our thing, and we rack in quite a unique way.
This is where we can't really be called Traditionalists, but boy-oh-boy,
are we Purists. Here is the deep background. There are two threads to follow:
the microbiological zoo and the inoculation against bi-polar disease.

Take a barrel stave, slice it very thinly, and look at it under a high powered
dissecting microscope. When I did this for the first time, I gasped.
It was mostly all air. You see these really little lines of cellulose stacking up
all these open rectangles. All of a sudden you perfectly understand why the wine
in a barrel evaporates and why you can't sterilize a barrel.

There are so many hiding places for microbes, and the hiding places are insulated
against heat and disinfecting liquids or gases. It makes one quite thankful of Louis
Pasteur's observation that "there are no known human pathogens in wine."
This arrangement of all these condos and cages in a barrel makes for the
Microbiological Zoo. Each barrel has its own expression. It is really quite amazing.
If you have ever been to one of our tastings, you probably tasted two different barrels
side-by-side from the same block of grapes and found a noticeable difference,
no matter what degree of tasting proficiency you had.

In barrels, the curator of the zoo seems to have a fancy to certain animals and
populates the zoo accordingly. That is what makes the barrel variation occur. But we
reserve the right to curate the curators. As we evolve our cellar we retire barrels where
we didn't like the collection. And the other worthy zoos are matched up vineyard by
vineyard and block by block to have a harmonious and symbiotic effect.

In order to do this match up, we don't do what the Modernist would do, which is:
rack all the barrels in a lot of wine to a big tank where the barrels will blend,
clean out the barrels, and transfer the blended wine back to the barrels.
What a Traditionalist would do is to avoid the tank and rack one barrel to
another barrel. But see the problem with that from a Purists point of view?
You are mixing zoos, even though you are not blending the barrels of wine,
you are blending the zoos so there is less specificity.

Another way of saying there is less specificity is to say that you are
taking away the highs and the lows. This is the second thread to follow:
an inoculation against bi-polar disease.
This inoculation is what the Modernist gets. The Modernist gets a more uniform
product (read: middle-of-the-road) because they have taken all the really good barrels,
the highs, and blended them with the not-so-good barrels, the lows,
and given you a more 'reliable' product. This becomes a phobia of the un-reliable.
This Modernist technique becomes even more simpy because of the following:
The regular blending of a lot of wine overlays zoo after zoo from each individual
barrel, such that the zoos all have a predictable (boring) nature to them.
This is the easy way to make wine. You never have to make the hard decision:
is this good enough?
We make that decision every time we bottle a single barrel, and then we make it again
and again during its bottle aging. In this case, yes, we grow-up wine the hard way.

We know our lows and highs. The highs are so worth it we can use other
management tools to take care of the lows without norming them into the whole lot.
What we can do is sell them in bulk, meaning we sell a barrel to another winery.
They are happy to get it because it usually has some interesting, but not great,
character that completes a blend that they are working on, and we get our money back
for the grapes. So the low finds a happy home and becomes perfectly acceptable.

That is the deep background so now you can understand the how of our racking.

How we rack is to move a single barrel by using nitrogen counter pressure to
a vessel and back to the same barrel. The barrel is slightly pressurized from a
tank of nitrogen and the wine comes up the racking wand, and through the hose
to a stainless steel vessel that looks like a big ice cream cone.
This vessel is the dynamizer. While the wine is in the dynamizer,
we clean the barrel of its lees and compost them.
If the barrel has built up tartaric acid crystals (the same stuff that they make
cream of tartar out of to put in meringue pies) we dissolve those crystals
with hot water and cool the barrel down with cold water.
The barrel is rolled to its place on the rails and is ready to be filled.

Now we dynamize the wine by stirring it in one direction and getting that
ice cream cone of wine rotating, then we open the valve at the bottom
and that stirring motion smooths out and makes a beautiful spiral form.
The wine flows back to the exact same barrel it was in by gravity.

To explain everything about spiral forms and how energy is transmitted in
and out of them would literally take a book. Let's just say spirals are
very basic and plentiful in nature and are a striking design of creation.
That is why I designed the vessels that way to give the wine access to this
additional layer of energy and particularly the energy of creation.

Once the wine is racked, we use all of our senses to know when to rack again.
So we are back to the importance of having the barrels just one high.
In any event, we barrel age for two years if not longer. There is an amazing
transformation of the wine in the second year of barrel aging. We are mystified by
those winemakers that age their Pinot Noirs only one year and pass up this deepening
effect of the longer barrel aging. However we are glad to say that this one-year fashion
trend is waning and becoming less stylish with other Pinot makers.

We feel strongly that barrel aging for two years and bottle aging for two is what
it takes for our style to reveal itself. Hey, I mean the wines taste good
all the way along, but there is this time when really good goes to better.
It is the time when an ahh comes out of my mouth.
The suspense of how this single barrel will come out resolves itself.
The wine stops murmuring where you have to listen with great sensitivity.
The wine starts speaking in complete, declarative sentences.
That is ahh.
And that is the story of how we grow-up our wines for their own pleasure and yours.

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