Monday, August 27, 2007

Last One in the Crusher's a Rotten Grape!

Today, August 27, 2007, marks the official start to our wine-making venture as our Galleron Road sauvignon blanc grapes were picked very early this morning and are currently being processed at Crushpad's San Francisco facility.

Check out the progress via Web cam at Crushpad Cam.

On Friday, we were sent some statistics and a description of the taste of the grapes:

Galleron Road Sauvignon Blanc
Brix (sugar content): 24.2
pH: 3.24
Total acidity (TA): 7.8

On the home stretch, the leafy green component in the juice is just about gone, the fruit is showing lots of sweet melon flavors, and the pH and acidity are at the levels that suggest optimal maturity for SB.

More details of the sauvignon blanc to come soon!

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Thursday, August 9, 2007

Harvest Update


An e-mail update from Crushpad tells us that our grapes are 30-60 days away from harvest.

As harvest is an insanely busy time of year for anyone in the wine-making biz, Crushpad wanted us to make our wine plans well in advance, which we did for both the sauvignon blanc and zinfandel in July.

The wine plan involves approximately 30 steps that will take our wine from grapes to finished juice. Via a conference call with our wine maker at Crushpad, we worked our way through each of these 30 decisions, discussing the effects each choice has on the end result. These decisions are everything from the target alcohol content to the desired pH to the strain of yeast to use for fermentation to the type of wood (both country of origin and new versus used) in the oak barrels used for aging.

We (well, perhaps not Ryan!) had all done some research prior to our phone calls and were surprised both by how much it seems we have learned and how much more there is to know.

After harvest once the grapes arrive at Crushpad's facility in San Francisco, they will be tested for sugar content (Brix in wine lingo), pH, and other things that will put our wine plan into action, a plan which may need to change depending on what nature offers up. Regardless, as things move fast in the days after harvest, the wine plans provide a good guideline to reference as we make our way to our desired finished wine, something we can better assess after tasting samples this past weekend of the 2006 bottlings (made by Crushpad itself) from the same vineyards as our two 2007 wines. While definitely encouraged and excited by the 2006 barrel samples of both the Galleron Road sauvignon blanc and the Teldeschi zinfandel, our tasting also brought up additional questions that we'll ask of our wine maker to help ensure we are getting the type of wine we all want.

Next up is changing those wine plans as necessary and awaiting more concrete news on harvest time. We hope to be out in San Francisco for harvest of at least the zinfandel, but as it'll have to be a last-minute trip (they often don't know until a few days before that they are picking the grapes), we are crossing our fingers that it works out with work schedules, flights, and, for Katie and Ryan, the status of their little babe, due early December!

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