2011 Rhone Wine

The wine story concluded…

Kelly and Maureen phoned the other day to see if we wanted to join in the process of making their grapes into wine. Carmine still tends the vines and picks the grapes, but is phasing out on the wine making end of things, so he proposed delivering the grapes to King's Hill Cellars, who have established a bit of a niche market in the Calistoga hills not far from where we live.

For bureaucratic reasons that I didn't try to understand, they have all the equipment and facilities for making wine, but aren't allowed to sell it, so they arrange with small growers (which are legion around here; everybody has a few vines…) to crush, ferment and bottle their grapes. We were to help in this process for a day, along with another family who had their grapes delivered from Bennett Valley near us. In addition to the equipment and expertise, the King's Cellars family would provide lunch. As it turned out, they also provided extra man power in the form of relatives visiting from Germany

When we arrived at the beautiful mountaintop location, the grapes had yet to arrive, so we finished off the last of Kelly and Maureen's Rhone grapes, (the ones that had been picked from the little vineyard in front of the farmhouse) which needed to be crushed. Since the amount was too small for the mechanical crusher, it was done the old fashioned way…by climbing into the vat and stomping them with bare feet! The resulting juice was siphoned into a fermentation vat.

Eventually the bins of reds--pinot noir and petite syrah arrived in two separate batches--one from Sebastopol and one from Bennett Valley. They were weighed, registered, and dumped onto the conveyor belt which carried them through the destemming (done by us, standing in two rows on either side of the conveyor belt), and into the mechanical crusher. Just as we were all getting pretty tired of sifting through mounds of grapes for big stems and tiny, very sour, immature green grapes,, the whole process would come to a halt so they could empty the juice into the fermenter. Sulfites would be added to the vats, to prevent the growth of bacteria. After about ten days, it is transferred into barrels for aging, a process dependent on sugar content and a number of other factors. It is up to the winemaker to determine the peer time for bottling, usually after about two years in the barrel.

I discovered that the side of the belt that had an elevated boardwalk so that I didn't have to reach up and over the side of the side of the belt was the preferable place to be. I wound up removing my watch, my rings and my shoes by the time we finished! All together, we processed about 4,000 pounds of grapes., which will become about 400 bottles of wine, and we got to know some very interesting people, all of whom were willing to plunge into the process (literally) with abandon.

With lunch we had some King's Cellars red wine. My picture today is a bottle of Kelly's 2011 Rhone Wine made from the grapes which grew in front of the Farmhouse while we were staying there. It was probably the first vintage from the new vines, and Kelly said we might consider keeping it as a First Edition Collecteor's bottle, since it isn't really fit to drink!