Wine vs. Beer

One thing I enjoy about wine production is the long timeline. It allows you to take your leisure with the process and make micro-adjustments as you go. Add a touch of oak. Let the flavors mature. Take the wine off the lees and basically wait for it to reach the point you want it to.

Besides making wine, I also brew beer, which in comparison is a harried sprint. The two weeks of hustle that is the crush in wine making is roughly the same time frame for every batch of beer. The equivalent of racking in beer-brewing is secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation is a one to two week process, though it can stretch out to over a month with high gravity beers. Compare this to the 6 month or more spent racking and aging wine and the difference is expansive.

The extra time gives you opportunities to ruminate on and appreciate the process. You can make small tweaks to the final production along the way. In beer brewing, the batch is going to do what it's going to do and there are few opportunities other than futzing with some early steps to alter the final product (short of fucking it up or changing the temperature). You basically have to make your changes in the next batch, which in beer could be next week, not next harvest.

The seasonal aspects of wine making is one of it's quirks. The craziness of harvest and crush; where there are several tasks that require daily attention. Punching down the fermenting must. Attending to the Brix readings and acid tests as the sugar turns into alcohol. The rush to get everything together for harvesting the fruit and crushing the wine at the right day and time. All this activity is double or triple the amount of effort that goes into a batch of beer. Crush's intense activity gives way to patience and letting nature take its course once the grapes have been squeezed. Then the slower pace sets in. Over the winter I've started to appreciate the longer perspective that this pace generates.

Here's to a few more months of watching an waiting broken up by the occasional tasting and racking. Heck I might even need to do a batch of imperial stout or belgiam trippel, so I get to take a similarly long term approach to my beer making.

Legal Aspects of Home Winemaking

The legality of making your own wine at home came up in conversation this week. Seeing as it's part of my profession to know (or research) answers to questions about the law I thought I'd do a quick survey of the legality and limitations on making wine at home. Turns out the production of wine is regulated by state and federal law. Prior to 1979 the federal government required a permit for producing wine for personal consumption. Kind of onerous for helping some grape juice and yeast through their biological cycles. Thankfully these requirements were dropped for quantities less that 100 gallons for a single person and 200 gallons for a household of two or more adults per year. 27 C.F.R. § 24.75 (2006). So here's to legally not paying taxes on what we produce!

So if the same three households go in on the project next year we could always up the amount to 600 gallons. Or enough wine for each household to have over two bottles of wine a day, for a year. They may be little of overkill, but it also leaves you with plenty of wine to lay away.

Day 122 - 2009 Syrah - Second Racking

Crap. I thought I downloaded the pictures off my phone before I deleted them. Looks like that didn't really happen. Technology failed me again, or more likely, I failed technology.

What the pictures would show you is that there has been some yeast and other lees falling out of solution in the wine. It's been slowly piling up at the bottom of the carboys in a thin layer. These sediments are not nearly as thick this time around as they were for the first racking, but it's time to get them out of the wine and do some tasting to determine where to go next.

Based on the conversations with my fellow vinters, Saturday is going to be the day for the racking. If it's raining, it'll be inside otherwise be prepared for a driveway work-party and wine tasting.

We'll also need to figure out our oak expectations. The not quite fully-fleshed out plan seems to be we will oak some of the Syrah and leave some off of the wood. This will give us the ability to blend and adjust the flavor with the wine we have. It will also give us a few different styles of wine so we're not stuck with 38 gallons of all the exact style. This still needs to be further negotiated and agreed upon, but I'm looking forward to the next leg of the journey, starting this weekend.

Syrah - Day 100

This is the long slow period in our wine's production where not there is not much for the winemaker to do. In theory I'm supposed to monitor the wine every once in awhile with a tasting, but it's been since the last racking since I've tried any. The reality is we're not going to make any changes until after the next racking, since that's when we plan on oaking the wine and making any other adjustments to the flavor.

The reasoning here is the longer we wait to make the adjustments in flavor, the closer what we'll be working with will be to the taste of the finished wine. This reduces the guess work by making what we are tasting as close to the finished taste as possible. The drawback to this approach is that we'll have less time to make adjustments if our flavor needs a lot of work. Based on the tastings I've had so far, I don't believe this extra time will be necessary, but I'm just an inexperienced amateur, so that's far from certain to be the case.

That said, it's getting close to the time to do the next big step with the wine, we're coming up on the second racking. This will be pretty close to what we experienced with the first racking, but hopefully there will be less lees. This will also lead to less wine lost, since less leesl will be left on the bottom of each carboy during the racking process and with less lees, there will be less wine abandoned in the carboy.

So who's got some time to do the second racking in the next few weeks?