Interestingly at the same time Steve Gower CCR decided to post his experiment with native yeast, the wine world has been discussing the trend in “Natural Wines” I was prepared to share this article in the New York Times Column “The Pour” written by Eric Asimov entitled, Wines Worth a taste, But not the Vitriol. You can read it here.

With the attention this article received along  comes this explosive interview by Adam Lechmere for Decanter Magazine with Michel Chapoutier a famous Rhone Winemaker.  Now here is a guy that speaks his mind.  If you know me my type of guy for sure!  You can read the interview Here.

As I said I thought that this post could house all the discussion of “Natural Wines”  so please add to it as you please.

Here are the latest comments by Mike Steinberger of Wine Diarist in a piece called , “Natural Wines: The Problem Isn’t the Skeptics.  You can read it here.

My only comment after reading all of this is I truly believe my wine is Natural and I use So2 and Yeast.  How about you?

When I started making wine, I was fascinated with the yeast tables provided by the yeast suppliers of the world.  I immediately went work trying all sorts of them and combinations of wines fermented separately and evaluated, then blended.  Over time, I settled on those that I liked and overall I probably fall into the camp that feels yeast strain makes a difference but not a huge one.  Varietals seem to react differently, for instance my Cabernet Sauvignon wines seemed to vary much less by yeast selection than Zinfandel does.

Jump forward a couple of years of personal experience and also learning more of how commercial producers make their wine.  Several commercial winemakers I know routinely use native yeasts rather than inoculated strains.  A couple of these wines completely knocked my socks off with their quality.  With the opportunity to ask some questions, I gradually started gathering information on native fermentation practices and what people actually do vs. the marketing brochure.  A couple major points:

1)      Most use some SO2 at crush to control non-Saccharomyces yeasts that these are typically the yeasts that start a native fermentation.

2)      Some feel that temperature control is important since vigor and temperature provided by the fermentation might not provide you with enough heat.

3)      All have inoculated a problem fermentations with cultured yeast when needed.  However, none felt that native fermentation is necessarily more risky if monitored.

4)      Conflicting opinions on yeast efficiency, some feel more alcohol is created by cultured yeasts but most feel that it’s not significantly different.

5)      Only one wine maker thought using cultured yeasts is “un-natural” and he is a passionate traditionalist.  Most feel that it can provide additional complexity but inoculating is a legit practice.

6)      Many debate the “native” vs. “feral” idea.  That is, the yeasts origin, your winery, your vineyard, or the next fermenter across the aisle.

So with many of these points in mind, I started thinking about “going native” for an experiment using Zinfandel, with the thought that it would express the differences well.  But first a disclaimer – Please don’t turn this into a “you’re an idiot to do this” thread.  My intent here is to provide some data and information on my experiment.  You can draw your own conclusions or not.  I’m posting this here on this forum because I’m hoping the thoughts and comments don’t degenerate into an argument on the scale of filtration and natural wine.  I’m not trying to convince anyone that my way is best.

Anyway, on to 2011 harvest and the experiment.  This year my personal Zinfandel vines produced their first full crop.  These are my first red grapes harvested of the year typically and these were harvested prior to the rain storms at normal Brix levels.  For me, the major challenge for Zinfandel over other grapes is the decision to pick.  It has a nasty tendency to solidify some sugar within the berry, effectively hiding it from you until 3-5 days in the juice.  I learned this lesson in the past wines from other vineyards picked around 25 Brix that fermented to 17.1% alcohol due to the hidden sugars.  So I have developed a fairly effective process to determine actual Zin Brix.  Once I get to 22, I begin whole cluster testing of 8-10 clusters, crushed and soaked over a period of days to get the true data.  This years was no different.  I picked a 10 cluster sample on 9/29 at 22.8 Brix, after 24 hours of soaking it was already to 24.0.  We decided to pick on 10/2.  On the day before picking, I noticed the ziplock bag of the sample was inflated.  On inspection, the 10 cluster sample was clearly fermenting.  Thinking it through, I realized these clusters were picked and sealed in the bag in the vineyard.  The yeast inside should be from the vineyard and not the winery.  The gears started to turn and I released the pressure with a sniffy sniff.  Sure enough, telltale signs of Kloeckera, a non-Sccharomyces yeast whose signature is production of ethyl acetate (smells like fingernail polish).  But I have heard that Kloeckera is also not around very long, not very alcohol tolerant.  So with this in mind, I decided that if the fermentation progressed  beyond this initial non-Sacc fermentation, I would use it for a starter on an experimental batch.  By the time we finished harvesting, destemming, and cold soaking a couple days, I went back to my Ziplock yeast bomb.  Sure enough, it smelled of beautiful fruit, blackberry pie in the oven, no sign of stinkies.  So, we split off 500 lbs. of fruit (by now Brix settled in at 25.2 Brix).  We inoculated the main fermentation with Rockpile yeast (RP15) and the experiment with the sample bag/native yeast starter.  By now it was 6 days along, still fermenting nicely.  We used Go-Ferm on both, just adding it to some juice for the native batch rather than a regular dry yeast build up.  Both also got Opti-Red additions at this time.  Fermentation was pretty perfect for both.  The native was 1/3 the size and in a single walled plastic tub.  I typically wrap these fermenters with an electric blanket and heat them until I get a good and high max. temp.  This one was no exception, I heated for 4 days until I hit a nice 90 degree peak on the native then removed heat.  The larger batch on Rockpile was in a T-bin making its own heat and peaking 1 day later at 91 degrees.  These are typical peak temps by my preference and not really comparable to each other.  Overall, I would say the native yeast performed similar to the Rockpile.  On 10/13, the native was at +2.6 Brix and Rockpile at -1.5.  Both were pressed on 10/15 with the native at -.8 Brix.  Both were settled 2 days and transferred to barrel (30 gal. for native).  MLF was done on both in the barrel using Enoferm Alpha bacteria.  No unusual smells or tastes from either fermentation.

Which brings us up to this week.  I took sample of both wines to Vinquiry who verified both had completed MLF.  They also measured alcohol.  The native Zin was at 15.34% and the Rockpile yeast Zin at 15.13%.  Interesting that the native converted .2% more alcohol from the same fruit.  Next came sensory evaluation last night.  Both wines have a somewhat muted nose at this point with some residual CO2.  After resting for an hour and sniffing again, I would say the wines are very similar with a slight nod to the Rockpile on aroma.  Taste – again the similarity was surprising.  Both have typical Russian River Zin flavors of plum, blackberry, and maybe a little pomegranate.  I would see all the same flavors exist in both wines although I feel the complexity and finish are slightly better on the native.  The real surprise to me was the similarity of the two.  I would feel more disappointed if I didn’t like them both.  But it was nothing like the difference between a comparison I did in the past using Syrah yeast and D80 yeast which are quite different on Zinfandel.  My wife tasted these blind with similar thoughts and comments to mine.

So what do I take away?  1) native yeast will provide similar or higher alcohol levels.  2) native fermentations can perform very similar to inoculated yeast in practice. 3) IMO, the starter buildup ad hoc process worked very well.  Or maybe just provided me with training wheels.

Thoughts to ponder – I used Rockpile yeast in the main ferment.  It never crossed my mind at the time that RP15 was isolated about 20 miles from my vineyard to the north from a spontaneous Syrah fermentation in the Rockpile appellation.  Could it be that this strain does a good job on representing the dominate yeast floating around western Sonoma County and explains the lack of major differences in the wine character?  Or, did the RP15 yeasties hop over and finish off my Zin in the winery?  This seems unlikely to me since if anything, the native had a head start and really only took one more day to finish.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Steve Gower aka: Crazy Run Ranch

As Westchester Amateur Winemakers we should be very concerned about the outlook for grapes in the coming season.  It is no secret that due to a light harvest due to a cold growing season the bulk wine supply is just about exhausted.  This and growing consumer demand is putting further pressure on prices.  We can hope for a great growing season and an abundant harvest to ease the strain on supply but make no mistake grapes are in demand and will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future.   Here is an article that sheds light on the industry and what moves Growers are making at this time.  Click  Here It’s comforting to know we have Frank Musto and M&M paying attention to this situation.

2011, A Year In Review

It was a good year for westchesterwinemakers.com, the official blog of the Westchester Amateur Winemakers Club….

In it’s second full year we are gaining popularity, expanding our demographics and geographical reach, improving our content and becoming an authority in the amateur winemakers blogosphere.

Here are some stats to look at for 2011:

Audience:

Visits: 19,435
Pageviews: 74,151
Bounce Rate: 1.93%
(That means that less than 2% of the people that come across our blog leave without performing an action or clicking on a link…. that’s pretty impressive.)

Demographics

We have been visited by people all over the world, The United States (of course), Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Russia, France, India and Italy to name a few (In total 108 Countries and/or Territories).

Traffic Sources

59% of our blog traffic came from Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing
10.64% were referrals from sites like Facebook, Twitter, juicegrape.com and winepress.us

Thank You to all of our loyal readers and contributors, we look forward to having another good year in 2012.

Salute

The M&M Family of Wine will hold its Eighteenth Annual Amateur Wine Maker Awards Dinner on Saturday March 3 , 2012 at the Farmington Gardens  999 Farmington Ave, Farmington Ct.  The reception begins at 6 pm and dinner will be served at 7pm   All of the Members of the Westchester Amateur Winemakers Club look forward to seeing all of you that evening.

Please make your reservations early.

What?!  Stock up on French Colombard?  Imagine you an Old Timer standing in line buying grapes at Prosperos preparing as usual to be abused when you discover your cheap French Colombard grape price has gone through the roof.  How can that be?   Who should you blame?   Gallo.   Yep Ernest and Julio.   Remember the days when you bought brown Moscato for 18 dollars a box? What the heck throw a few in with the Zinfandel and Allicante for flavor.  But then the prices of Moscato started to become out of reach until finally in the past 2 years there wasn’t any to be purchased.  But there was always loads of French Colombard even Juice in some half fermented state was available.  Well this too will now come to an end.  They now have a new use for it and well this probably doesn’t leave you with many other choices.  Leave it to Gallo to bastardize everything they touch. It is sad to me they are Italian.  Scustumato tutti.

Read about the problem here

I have posted a few articles on this subject last year.  One of them cautioned that it was going to get as cold as Bordeaux in Napa the other article predicted The Second Coming of Central Valley.   Well we can all breathe a sigh of relief.  Here is the latest Science and Data gathering project that was completed by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Stanford University and UC Davis.   We are safe for the time being.   Now if we can just get back to a normal growing season that would be grand for our Beckstoffer ferments.

It is not really a surprise that the Lanza Vineyards and Winery has captured a Double Gold for their 2009 Petite Sirah. M&M Grape Company provided these grapes to us so we know first hand making these Suisun grapes.  The awards we received only prove the wine resulting from them is beyond anything we have ever made before in this varietal.

The Double Gold Medal was awarded by the San Francisco Wine Competition. To me this win has to be particularly sweet when you can top the famed Concannon Winery’s  entries by two levels.  Nice!
Congratulations to the entire Lanza Family!

Boys, order a few bottles to see what I am talking about.  Frank Musto sent me two for Christmas.

As the New Year begins it is worth saying that a little introspection by Winemakers is needed in this club and quite possibly beyond. There is always a risk of resting on one’s Laurels when one has some experience under their belts. But for those with only 3- 5 years experience even that cannot be an excuse for a disaster or mishap should it occur. It seem s to me from listening to reports from members that some have not only been resting but ignoring some important things that need to be accomplished to insure the quality of their wines.

So you have to wonder why this is happening. Often we joke about the Old Timer that ignores everything and manages to destroy decent grapes and make a wine only to discover that it has gone bad or turned out to be horrible that he cannot even drink it. Usually the next thing you hear is the Moon was not right or the grapes were bad or his wife’s period, which she hasn’t had in years, screwed up the batch. I am not sure what members of this club will use as an excuse.

As I said before I have received reports, admissions would be more accurate, that certain members have done or ignored the following. Let’s start off with the Member that was too lazy to move ALL of his wine to the cellar for MLF. So now get this, some of his wine of a varietal ended up at 72 degrees for MLF while the remaining carboys of the same varietal were in the garage at 60. Why the admission to me? The burning question this member had. Is Mlf done and can I rack? With wine at different temperatures my advice to this member is to purchase MULTIPLE Accuvin Malic Test kits. Moving along…

Then there is the Member that prides himself in medals and bragging about them. Yet when we discovered that we had a slight H2S issue in one of our Zinfandels before Thanksgiving and MLF was completed we advised a course of action. The application of Reduless and Ascorbic acid worked and the wine is fine. Yet this member has not found the time to rack 6 carboys to date. I suppose he is testing the limits of producing Mercaptains. My guess there won’t be any medals with those 6 carboys.

And then have the member who relies on others to tell him if his MLF is complete. This member calls and asks if yours are done and then decides to rack his. Of course when reminded that he should be testing his to be sure, he says yes he needs to order the Accuvin Test kit. The problem is he has been saying that for the past three years.

Finally we have the underground members who with the latest harvest season for making wine on record forcing us to try to get MLF done before Christmas , which we did accomplish, were also blessed with the warmest December in history. A blessing when can rack and wash carboys at 50 degrees instead of 30. How much do you want to bet those quiet members have not racked yet. Of course this spring when confronted about this , there is one that will expound the benefits of not racking.

So there you have it. Here it is for all to read and see. I hope some of you are embarrassed. You should be. Just remember to keep your expectations for your wine in perspective going forward. Especially when you ask; Why does your wine taste different then mine?

This will be emailed to all members. Any responses to this will be posted here by me since most are too lazy to read the Blog as well.

Happy New Year!

Best Wishes to all our fellow Club Members and Readers of this Blog. I would like to thank all of you for making this blog the premier Amateur Winemaking Blog on the Internet. Your participation makes this happen. Thank you and I hope you enjoy this Holiday Season with your love ones and enjoy wonderful wine the fruits of your labor.