What We Have Learnt - So Far....

Or maybe a better title would be what we haven’t learnt so far… but that would take too long to write – and anyway, we don’t know what we haven’t learnt yet! The one thing we do know is that although everything isn’t finished yet for the 2011 vintage, we are already making plans for next year – which seems a frustratingly long time away. You can’t just go back and do it all again immediately – you have to wait for Nature to play its part and work alongside it to coax everything towards the finish line some 12 months away. You can’t rush this winemaking stuff!

With just over 750 Litres of wine from 2011, next year, we think we will:

• Change our Sipon vineyard almost entirely to single-Guyot. The test proved that although the yield was obviously lower, the quality of fruit borne by the vine was far superior.
• We will pick the Sipon earlier, to preserve acidity and freshness – and chaptalize by a maximum of half a degree of alcohol if necessary to compensate.
• We will do minimal punch-downs on the Modra Frankinja during maceration. Instead of 2 per day, we will endeavour to do just 1 midway through the whole fermentation – and in-between just keep the cap gently damp by pouring the occasional jug of must over it.
• We will definitely do the cold-soak on the Modra Frankinja again, but in conjunction with less agitation of the cap, we will endeavour to leave the skins in contact with the juice until well after the alcoholic fermentation in order to gain maximum complexity, but keep the tannins as fine and balanced as possible. We will also keep the temperatures low during fermentation and encourage a slow, drawn-out process. No funny looking heaters!
• On the other hand, we will most likely let the Sipon ferment at a higher temperature as we’re not too keen on the pear characteristics that seem to be emerging. However, we will also probably try a little pre-fermentation cold maceration to gain extra original fruit characteristics.
• We will always check the size of the barrels before filling them! In an ideal world, we will source some 500L large old oak casks and try fermenting some of the Modra Frankinja in these.

Of course, all of the above depends on getting through pruning, flowering, budding, hail storms, drought, rot, flooding – and the odd domestic disagreement about differing winemaking techniques – otherwise known as a good old-fashioned row!

The White Stuff - Part Two...

Next morning at Miro’s cellar, we pressed the Sipon early in the morning – a true “cold press” at just 13 Celsius. We also pressed the whole bunches – no de-stemming – so that we could try and increase any available acidity – which was a little low at 6.3 g/l.

It was all then pumped into our steel fermentation tank and again chilled for a further 36 hours to let everything settle. We decided we would ferment on the heavy lees (we didn’t rack the juice off prior to fermentation) and stopped the cooling on the Sunday evening and added some inoculated yeasts. Miro’s own Sipon is naturally fermented, so we wanted to try an artificial yeast instead.

But the big question was acidity. Again, many viewpoints were exchanged. A lot of local winemakers would have 7.0 g/l as a target and the obvious suggestion was to acidify by adding tartaric acid – totally legal and practised in many countries. The other consideration was that, unlike red wine fermentations, the acidity level tends to drop a little during a white wine fermentation – there being no skins and pips for the yeasts to extract some extra acidity from.

Both Sinead and I were against this though – although not philosophically opposed to acidification, we just wanted to see how it would turn out without any intervention. We needed to understand how what you start with evolves into a finished product. Miro came up with an interesting suggestion to add some gently opened grape skins from his own Sipon so that there would be some minor maceration and acidity extraction – but we also decided against that.

What we did know by now is that we should have harvested earlier. Instead of sugar levels being a target, we should have used our instincts and gone with acidity and flavour for our guide. As sugar levels rise during grape ripening on the vine, acidity drops. If we had harvested earlier, we would have preserved acidity and could have chaptalized (added sugar) easily. Sugar is pretty simple stuff, and the yeasts convert it to alcohol in a pretty straightforward way, but there are many, many acids in a wine that produce a kaleidoscope of flavours and the addition of one single acid (e.g. tartaric acid) is a bit like using a mallet to tap a tack.

So our yeasts began their long and wonderful journey to alcoholic bliss without anything extra to contend with. Temperatures remained low – never broaching the 20 Celsius mark – and fermentation was nice and slow. However the flavours began to change from a straight fruit juice style (which is what unfermented juice is anyway) with hints of apples, to a more crunchy-pear style flavour. One major criticism of cool fermentations in white wines is that they can develop a “pear-drop” style flavour and that typicity and individuality can be compromised. Certainly Miro’s Sipon tasted more of the classic grapefruit style – but ours was a long way behind in fermentation terms and the residual sugar was hiding many of the subtleties and nuances of the final flavour composition.

I also took the opportunity to sit down with Ivan to try and sort out our differing opinions about how we had harvested the grapes. We have a huge amount of respect for him and the work he puts into tending the vines while we’re not there but, as I explained, we also want to experiment and try some new ideas. It turned out to be a great meeting. What had really rankled with Ivan was the fact we had discarded some less than perfect bunches on the ground during the harvest - even leaving them on the vine would have been better than just throwing them away. It seemed to him to be a vinous two-fingers to his hard work during the year. I hadn't realised the sensitivities involved and although we will both undoubtedly still harvest differently to each other, we also understand where the other is coming from. It was a relief to discover there would be no crying over spilt grape juice.

After 15 days the Sipon is still fermenting away slowly – almost there, but not quite yet. The acidity seems remarkable good and we’re really happy we didn’t acidify after all. Having tasted a couple of other producers’ wines who did acidify, the jarring, brutal attack of the acids just doesn’t seem to work – particularly since the flavours and aromatics are delicate in the first place.

Sinead will be back next week to rack the wine off the lees once fermentation has finished – and only then will we get a proper taste of the final product.

The White Stuff - Part One.....

The original plan had been to pick the Sipon (Furmint) grapes first – and to get the fermentation of our white wine underway before tacking the red. However Sipon is a notoriously late-ripening white variety, and when Sinead arrived the advice was to leave it another week or so to let the sugar levels rise a bit more. It was a decision we were to regret later on…

Back in February, Sinead had travelled out to prune the vines. Most of the older vineyards are pruned in a double-Guyot style – two main sperons, with between 5 and 7 shoots coming off each on which the grapes grow. We had decided to change two of the rows to single-Guyot to compare the yield, and crucially the quality. Sinead was helped by Bozidar from Verus Vinograd (an amazing viticulturist) and the two of them did a great job.

Seven months later, the results were clear to us. As I walked the vineyard with Bozidar, we sampled grapes from adjoining, but differently pruned, rows. 2011 is a genereous vintage of good quality – but the vines with double-Guyot training were laden down with fruit – on average probably between 5 and 6 kilos per vine. The single-Guyot vines were yielding about 2.5 kilos and the grapes tasted fresher, purer and more complex. Ivan, who owns the adjoining vineyard and keeps watch over our own vines when we’re not there, had followed the “experiment” with interest. He is a traditionalist and was concerned about the drop in yield – his generation were paid for quantity, not quality, by the local co-operative.

Miro and I decided that we would harvest the Sipon on Friday 30th September – the juice showing a promising 90 Oechsle. At 7am we picked the two rows of single-Guyot vines into small plastic crates. In a high-yielding year aromatics and freshness can be compromised, so Sinead had suggested we leave the grapes in their small crates overnight in Miro’s cellar to see if any additional aromatics could be gained following picking.

On returning from Miro’s cellar, having deposited the crates, I was confronted by a very angry Ivan. He had visited our vineyard and was aghast at the fact we had left grapes on the vines and, even worse, that we had discarded bunches on the ground. He was very upset – feeling that all his work during the rest of the year had been worthless. I tried, through the magical international language of arm waving and bad German to explain that we had just selected the best grapes, and that there was plenty to go around – but all to no avail. He stormed off, vowing never to return, repeatedly saying what we had done was “criminal”. It was a slightly unexpected start......

The Red Stuff - Part Three....

If we were worried about nutrients and temperature before, now we had even more cause for lengthy analysis. By taking away the skins, and putting the juice into a colder cellar, we had set our yeast friends a pretty hard task to finish the job of fermentation. Things slowed down even more, and a week later I chickened out and agreed with Miro that we needed to try raising the temperature a bit – a stuck fermentation is not something that you really want. On the other hand, do you really want one of these things stuck into your wine?

So we raised the temperature by 2 degrees to 18.5 Celsius – but no nutrients were added. It seemed the yeasts were just happy to plod along – and if they were happy, I was happy.

In the middle of all this, I had contacted a winemaker called Roland Velich based in Burgenland, Austria. He’s the man behind the Moric wines and to say that he is passionate about Blaufrankisch (Modra Frankinja) would be an understatement. We arranged to go and taste with him. The visit warrants a separate report, but suffice to say briefly that the wines stunned us. Comparisons have been made to Grand Cru Burgundies, and although there are definite similarities in terms of texture and mouthfeel, the wines showcase the unique characteristics of low-yielding Blaufrankisch – wonderful dark, sour cherry fruits with amazing floral aromas and multi-layered palates that leave you still tasting, and savouring, the wine minutes later. Yet they are not blockbuster wines – they are elegant, poised, precise and utterly seductive. We spent 4 hours tasting and talking about just 6 wines – and the 6 hour round-trip journey was well, well worth it. We returned to Slovenia inspired!

Back in Miro’s cellar our own MF was moving at a glacial pace – but we were happy to leave it that way. The question of what we would do next loomed on the horizon and the question of barrels arose. Miro had some old oak – 5th use – barriques and we decided we would move the two batches of Free Run juice into them and then could also continue to compare their evolution in barrel.

Cleaning barrels is a slow, challenging process. I had attempted to clean them myself, but wasn’t happy with the aromas that remained from their previous use. Miro intervened and after a few hours with a steam cleaner, many cold water rinses and lots of “juggling” the barrels to slosh around the water later, we had two useable barrels.

Yet this decision was my one crisis of confidence. For whatever reason I really wasn’t happy about putting the wines into barrels. I had grown used to their respective flavours and really enjoyed the “clean” fruit-forward style of the wines combined with refreshing, clean acidity and fine tannins. I wasn’t really sure of I was ready to wave goodbye to them - it was like watching a child become a teenager – not really sure how they were going to evolve.

As if my own lack of self-confidence about what we were doing wasn’t enough, we encountered another problem. And here’s a Top Tip for any budding winemaker: always know what size your barrels are before you start filling them! Sounds simple….. but a 220 Litre barrel can look amazingly like a 250 Litre one – particularly as they can all be different shapes.

We always knew we would be a little short on Steel Free Run juice to fill one of the barrels, but we were going to top it up with some Press juice. However as the steel tank emptied and the barrel showed no signs of being anywhere near full, we realised we had made a fundamental error in calculating the size of the barrel. That sinking feeling was horrible. Not only had we moved the wine (exposing it to oxygen and giving the hard-pressed yeasts yet another challenge), we were left with a batch of wine that, left that way it was, would certainly degrade. Stupid, stupid, stupid – and I cursed the moment we had decided to move the wine – I should have left it to Sinead who was due back in a week – and then it would have been her problem!

But one person’s misfortune is often another person’s gain – and it was off to the local toyshop in Ljutomer to buy some glass marbles. Not just a bag or two – but 50kg of marbles. They can be put into the barrel and used to raise the fill, ensuring that you have a “full” barrel. My request was met with a combination of surprise (I think they definitely thought I was mad) and the desire to sell me more marbles in a single day than they probably sell in a year!

As I write this, the marbles are on order and will be cleaned and added to the barrel in the next few days. The wine in that same barrel is still fermenting – slowly as ever – but the yeasts have hung on in there and are almost finished – some 3 weeks after starting. And the wine is truly delicious – honestly!

In the back of the car are some small jars of samples of each wine for Sinead to try when I get back. She’ll then go back out next week to finish off a few things and put the wines into hibernation for the winter. And also to make some “Champagne”……!

Oh yes, and we did make some white wine too. More to follow……

The Red Stuff - Part Two..

It’s clear to me at this stage that winemaking and blogging don’t go together – one has to suffer. In this instance, it has been the blog. As I was wound my way through the vineyards early on Thursday morning, there was frost on the ground – it seemed almost unbelievable that only 10 days before the daytime highs were 28 Celsius, dropping to 15 Celsius at night. Now, well into my journey home, and on the distinctly un-wine friendly ferry to Rosslare, it all seems so long ago……

But we left off with having pressed the first batch of naturally fermented Modra Frankinja just as it came to the end of fermentation – a relatively quick 7 days and we were concerned that the tannins and extraction would only increase if we left the juice in contact with the skins for longer.

On the other hand, our second batch of Modra Frankinja that we had cold-soaked for 3 days to allow for aqueous extraction prior to fermentation was only just beginning its long journey to alcoholic adolescence.

The flavour of both was quite different: the MF that had been naturally fermented in an open plastic “box” had bright, crunchy red-fruit flavours – similar in some ways to a young, fresh Pinot Noir. The Steel tank of cold macerated MF was obviously still sweet to the taste, but the fruit characteristic was very different: this time more black fruits, more like a blackberry fruit compote, and was inky purple in colour – much darker than the others. It had an amazing dark core of fruit – like a vinous black hole, that sucked you deeper and deeper into layers of flavour.

Over the coming days, this tank of fermenting juice just worked away slowly – causing us both delight and frustration. The temperature rarely topped 22 Celsius, which is low, and the sugar levels dropped very slowly. Many discussions were had – and many opinions offered – did the yeasts need some nutrients to help them along, did we need to raise the temperature?

I think one of the biggest challenges of being a winemaker is to have conviction in your decisions. If you have any self-doubt (note: this does not imply you need arrogance), then winemaking isn’t for you. The activities in the cellar (let alone the vineyard) are all based on making decisions to deal with an ever changing situation – that only previous experience can at least help you to try and judge the impact of your decision. You only get to do this once a year – most winemakers might be lucky to do it maybe 30 times in a lifetime – and those decisions will resonate for the next 12 months until you get to try it all again. A clear head – and clear thinking – is required.

And for me, staring into our little 250 litre steel tank of slowly bubbling MF, those decisions seemed just as relevant as if I was dealing with a few thousand litres. To me (and Sinead) we wanted to try and watch the process unfold as “naturally” as possible. To be clear: I don’t regard adding nutrients or raising the temperature as being un-natural – just that if you do them, you won’t know what would/might have happened – and we needed to learn.

In the meantime, another important decision was pending: as the fermentation was proceeding, the tannin levels were becoming more prominent on the palate. Yes, there was still sweetness, but behind the gloss of sweet, juicy fruit, the chewy tannins were appearing. We therefore took a decision to press this batch midway through fermentation – two days later than the “Box” batch, but at a much earlier point in the fermentation cycle. Sugar was still at 60 Oechsle – so it still had a way to go. We bled off all the free run juice on Saturday 1st, so it had had a total of 9 days maceration. The subsequent juice from the press was then added to the other press juice from the open “Box” fermentation.

So now we had three batches: Free Run from plastic open Box fermented, Free Run from cold macerated Steel fermented and a tank of combined Press Juice from both.

Waiter, There's an Alien in my Fermentation Tank....

It's in there somewhere.....

Amazing what a bit of yeast and wine must can do! If the tanks all have slightly different fill levels, you can get a tune..... maybe.....

Many thanks to Samo and Lela for the video - I think Samo got up in the middle of the night to film it!

The View From The Press

Most wine-related pictures tend to focus on shots of beautiful vineyards. And with good reason - partly because they are indeed beautiful - and also partly because the winery itself can often be an ugly lump of industrialised concrete, or down a backstreet somewhere..

In my humble opinion, Miro has the best Press location I have ever come across. The view as you are pressing the grapes is amazing....

Note the stool for contemplative thinking whilst the Press works away slowly. Many of the world's problems have been solved from this stool..... but I can never seem to remember what the solution was......