By Steven Hickman Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Harvard University and Fox Run Winery Intern emeritus
The story, as told by Peter Bell, goes as follows: a woman calls the Fox Run tasting room one afternoon, in a state of some distress. She had removed a bottle of Fox Run wine from her fridge, and as she was preparing to open and serve said bottle, noticed shards of glass suspended in the wine. She was rather upset at the winery, accusing it of at best gross incompetence on the bottling line, and at worst an attempt on her life. What had caused this strange circumstance?
With the fun and work of vintage behind us, now is the time that we have to have courage in our convictions at the winery. By this point in the year (i.e. three weeks after the completion of vintage) when we are asked a question regarding the 2010 vintage we almost resemble a high school debate team; ask about the Finger Lakes 2010 Harvest and we can tear off an answer from rote in record time. Ironically, it is precisely this time of year that we also happen to lose our ability to really track how our wines are doing.
This is not to say that our thoughts on Vintage 2010 are glib. Based on the available information, which we feel is only useful after all the grapes are in, we are happy to provide our estimation of how everything will look as these wines are released and opened. Nevertheless, in the winery we are now faced with an annual twist in winemaking that keeps us humble: the Thanksgiving slumber.
In her post on Gewürztraminer, Tricia briefly mentioned that one of the many times that leaves us doubtful in gewürztraminer’s development actually occurs after the harvest. The wine seems to go into a quiet funk, losing much of the lychee, rose, and fruit precociousness that made it so endearing mere weeks ago. What does it smell like it instead? Well, nothing, to be frank.
While we have seen this happen to our gewürztraminer already, it is a phenomenon that occurs with all of our aromatic white wines. Just as many of us will be doing after a large turkey dinner in a few days time, the rieslings, pinot gris, and gewürztraminer have all decided to take a snooze. These wines will not wake up from their nap for quite some time, however, and in the meantime will send us into fits in the winery wondering whether everything is all right.
This is where the courage part comes into the equation. During the fermentations of these wines we are constantly tasting everything and noting the beautiful aromas present in them at that stage. While this process is enjoyable, the primary purpose is to evaluate how the fermentation is progressing and ensuring nothing is compromising the wine. The other purpose of this tasting, however, is just as important; to get an early feel for what style of wine each block of grapes in each tank is best suited for.
Particularly as our rieslings are fermenting, when we taste we are taking note of the flavors in the wine and how they match up with its structure - especially the acid profile. With a softer and rounder riesling proto-wine, we start to think of our semi dry program and the slightly more tropical and tree fruit flavors we find complement that level of sugar. With a riesling that is lean and electric in its acidity, we lean more towards our dry program and the citrus driven flavors we appreciate with a lower level of sugar.
Based on this tasting we eventually decide when to end the fermentation of our individual blocks of grapes and thus how much sugar will be left in each. It is at this point that we then lose the guiding light of those beautiful flavors. By chilling the wine down to 28 degrees fahrenheit for a week and then adding sulfur, we arrest the fermentation and then kill the yeast. Trying to taste the wine at this point to find the flavors we hoped to lock into it is fruitless (your call whether it is the loss of fruit flavors or that terrible pun that is most unfortunate). To me, the wine smells and tastes flat even though the structure remains. Maybe there are hints of banana, but this aroma reminds me more of the suspended-solids character of a nice hefeweizen rather than the wine we wanted.
And with that we enter the winter, having to trust our decisions and our noses back when we decided to stop the fermentation. This trust gnaws away at us in the coming weeks as the continuing lack of fruit flavors begin to worry us, even though we know and expect this to happen. How was vintage 2010? It was fantastic, but right now we would appreciate it if some of those wines decided to agree.
With how much we've mentioned the huge time commitment and work schedule of vintage, it would be natural to wonder exactly what there is left to do in the winery after we harvest, crush, (punch down), and press the grapes. Obviously there is nothing quite as urgent and time consuming in the coming weeks, but there is a lot that goes into making sure our new wine is staying happy and healthy. Primarily this means we will all be checking sugar levels, temperatures, and looking/tasting for overall health in our wines every day at least until the fermentation process is complete and the yeast frozen out.
In the immediate future, however, we are preparing to feed our yeast so they keep working without complaint. After the yeast has fermented about 1/3 the available sugar into alcohol in wine ferments they begin to run out of necessary nutrients other than sugar that they are unable to make for themselves. As they enter this period they start "stressing;" a unique piece of jargon which has nothing to do with a teenager cramming for an exam the night before... unless that teenager also starts to emit hard boiled egg aromas as they get more stressed out. When we smell the beginning of these stressed aromas (variously described as hard boiled egg, scrambled egg, or sulfurous), or the fermentation has went through a third of the total sugar, we know it is time to feed our yeast the nutrients they need.
With white wines, those where the fermentation is occurring after pressing and therefor without skin contact, we feed our yeast a mixture of diammonium phosphate and a mixture known as Fermaid-K. The former is to provide the crucial missing ingredient of nitrogen back to the yeast, the latter provides much smaller amounts of various other pieces the yeast and juice lack. With red wines, where the fermentation is occurring with skin contact, we only worry about adding diammonium phosphate for nitrogen; as the skins and stems often provide the other components the yeast desire. The result of this is, to an extent, distinctly new world insofar as our aim is to produce wines that are immediately "clean" (filled with aromas and flavors of fruit) and easier to control (not smelling of eggs).
All in all it is a straightforward process that is easy to predict the start of and even easier to carry out. The only trick is making sure to be careful when adding anything to a white fermentation. Since the fermentation is occurring in a large, stainless steel tank without interference, there is a large amount of dissolved CO2 that is ready to burst out of solution if given the opportunity. Many are the stories of someone adding a granular slurry of diammonium phosphate or Fermaid-K to a white fermentation too quickly, only to end up covered in wine a few moments later. No such luck this year at Fox Run, but we'll make sure to grab a photo of it if it happens.
