Vineyard 94. It’s about 7 weeks since I wrote my last vineyard blog which is quite a long time in the context of this story of grape growing and wine making in the Yorkshire Dales – Nidderdale in case you’ve forgotten. And it’s not as if nothing much has happened in the meantime as might usually be the case at this time of a ‘normal’ year. This on account of us making the wine ourselves as opposed to sending the grapes away and them returning to us months into the future magically turned into as you can see above, in this case, sparkling wine. You got a glimpse of this in my July blog but this photo is the full Monty
Opening, tasting and of course sharing this pink fizz has taken up quite a bit of time just recently but nowhere near as much time (and effort) as making this year’s batch of red (Rondo) and white (Solaris) which I began to tell you about in my last blog (number 93).
Back to the fizz for a moment. Audience reaction among those people we shared our wine with has been positive but then given a combination of the fact that a) they are polite people and b) it’s free, this is perhaps hardly surprising. As we go further our wine will be subject to greater scrutiny but at this stage we are quietly confident that it will be indeed as enjoyable as we, even more biased drinkers, think it is. I’ll keep you informed as we go along.
But for the rest of this blog let me bring you up to speed as to the wine we are making as opposed to that we have had made for us. The common denominator is of course grapes that we have grown and harvested ourselves in our very own vineyard.
But the commonality disappears when it comes to making it ourselves. So many decisions to be made and so little knowledge on which to base these critical decisions. So far we have crushed, de-stemmed and pressed both white and red grapes. And both sets of juice lie in their respective barrels having been yeasted, CO2ed after fermentation etc. waiting for me to decide when and whether to rack the juice and filter it with our quite expensive filter and pump. And while on the subject of the CO2, how much in each tank and when does it need adding?
So this brings us to racking. It sounds simple enough. After fermentation we let the juice sit sur lees (on the deposit / sludge at the bottom of the barrel) but then have to rack it (move from one barrel to another, leaving the majority of the sludge or lees behind. Possibly more time on the lees means extra flavour. I say possibly because it seems to me, as a novice wine-maker, that nothing is a certainty in the world of wine making certainly not amateur wine-making in one’s garage, trying to be guided by somewhat contradictory advice from various books and Youtube videos. Oh and not everybody wants extra flavour in their wine. A matter of individual taste and I’m not sure what exactly my individual taste is.
Anyway, I’m planning on racking the white juice into glass demijohns so I am better able to see when the juice that I do have needs filtering before putting into bottles / boxes or whatever we choose as the final containers for our vinous infants. Forgive the over-elaborate language but this wine-making brings that out in me partly as a response to this poetic process and partly as stress relief because it has been and continues to be stressful.
Vineyard 94 Summary.
My gamekeeper chum who hopes to pick his own grapes and make his own wine next year says it doesn’t matter if things go wrong with my efforts this year as I can learn from my mistakes and help him with his efforts next year. I’m not so sure about his logic. First, next year is a long time to carry any knowledge I might have ground out of this year and second, I’m too fragile to cope with failure when we’ve put a great deal of effort into this year so far. Anyway please do follow this engrossing challenge. Hopefully by the time I write the next blog things will be considerably clearer and I include in this the wine itself.