All-Texas Vintage – Part 2

Well, Dr. Russ Kane, of Texas wine blogging fame, has shamed me into continuing the saga of our first all-Texas vintage.   Thanks, Russ

To pick up where I left off (last year!), when we got our two 5-gallon buckets back to the house we were faced with the prospect of getting fermentation going.   Fortunately, my friendly wine hobbyist store, Fine Vine Wines (alias The Winemakers Toy Store) in Carrollton sells a variety of yeasts.   I picked one for red wines and headed back to the house.

Since then, I attended the Viticulture 1 course at Grayson College in Denison and picked up a lot more knowledge about yeast and fermentation.  I can highly recommend Scott Labs, and especially their downloadable Fermentation Handbook, a combination catalog and miniature wine-making guide.

Anyway, I picked a generic Montrachet yeast for the shiraz-sangiovese blend.   I added the yeast directly to the must the day after we brought it home from the vineyard.  Nowadays, I would prepare a starter solution rather than add the yeast directly to ensure a strong fermentation, but, hey, live and learn.

In any case, fermentation started up pretty quickly.   The CO2 very quickly floated the cap and started pushing it up toward the top of each bucket.   What was most surprising was how thick the cap was and how strong the upward pressure it exerted.  I knew that I would need to “punch” the cap down during fermentation, but it was surprising how quickly it floated again after punching down.   I used a clean spatula to do the punching down, once in the morning before work and once in the evening.  In hindsight, twice a day turned out to be a little too infrequent.

I continued the daily punchdown routine for a week, checking the balling (sugar content) periodically using my hydrometer and wine thief.   About midway through the week, I (re)discovered one of the banes of commercial winemaking: fruit flies.  Wow, those guys multiply fast; faster than my wife could yell at me to get the fruit flies out of the house.   If you ever have an infestation of fruit flies, here’s the only method we found that worked well:

We put a little sherry into an open top wine bottle with one drop of dish soap.   The flies find the sweet smell of sherry irresistible and the soap breaks the surface tension of the sherry causing the flies to slide right under when they land to drink.   After a day, the bottle had a collection of some hundred fruit flys swirling around the bottom, and I was out of the dog house.

The wine finished out alcohol fermentation in 7 days, just in time to press.  By the end of the week, the cap was not longer rising after punchdown and a bit of rosy colored wine was showing above the skins.  The color had been bothering me all week.   I really wanted a dark red color, but the wine was clearly more of a rose color.   I hoped that pressing would change the outlook.

Once again, our friend George Cornelius at the Wimemakers Toy Store had offered the use of his press at the store.  So, we schlepped our two buckets of fermented must to Carrolton on a Saturday morning and got in line with a number of the folks that we had met the week before at the vineyard.  Everyone’s result looked about the same: rose colored, so I felt a little less bad about my fermentation technique.

Pressing turned out to be interesting for everyone, including George’s folks.  None of us had ever pressed any wine, so the basket press was a bit of a challenge.  Our batches were really too small for the 35-gal press, so most of the pressing was what people call “free-run”.  In other words, we loaded the wine, skins, and seeds into the basket and collected the wine that ran free.   That was fine with me as I wanted to avoid the more stringent taste associated with pressed skins.

I ended up with a full 6-gallon carboy plus most of a 1.5 liter bottle from my batch.  I was glad for the extra bit to use to top up the carboy as I pulled wine for testing during the aging process.

At this point, I probably should have started malo-lactic fermentation, but hey, I was a neophyte, so it just didn’t occur to me what that might good for.  I wish I had done MLF, because the result later on was much more acidic than it should have been and would have been with MLF.

To bring Part 2 to close, I ended up aging the wine in the carbot for about 5 months, bottling it over the Christmas holidays when my nephews and their enophile dad were in town.

Our first all-Texas vintage

We’ve been making wine at home from juice and kits for over a year now, but this weekend we had the exciting experience of starting our first batch from grapes grown in Texas.

Last week I got an email from George Cornelius at the Winemakers Toy Store about a small vineyard in Ponder that was offering shiraz and sangiovese grapes to anyone who would come pick them on Saturday, August 9.  At $1.25 a pound this seemed comparable to the amount we’ve been paying for kit or even frsh juice.  So, Aimee and I got ourselves up early on the 9th and headed out to Ponder.

When we arrived at Greg Hawkins’ 3 Vines Vineyard around 7:15 there were already 15 or 20 people busily cutting bunches from the vines.  Greg’s vineyard is about an acre planted in two blocks in his front yard.  One block is shiraz and the other sangiovese.  The vines are 7 years old and bearing production crop loads.  The shiraz block looked to be a good bit less productive than the sangiovese.  We later heard from Greg that he had had irrigation and bird troubles with the shiraz resulting in a weaker yield.

After signing in, Aimee and I got started picking.  Our goal was to pick 100 lbs., the quantity we felt would make one full 6 gallon carboy after fermentation and pressing.  We started in the shiraz block since we had never produced shiraz wine before.  Greg’s trellis system, a VSP with three sets of catch wires, puts the cordon wire at about 4 ft high, which seemed about perfect for harvesting.

We soon realized that the shiraz block was so sparse that getting a 100 lb. load was going to prove difficult.   And those big bunches of healthy-looking sangiovese grapes in the other block kept calling to us.  So, we settled for about 25 lbs. of shiraz and started on the sangiovese.  In about 30 minutes we had all the grapes we needed and headed back to Greg’s driveway where his son was manning a small manual crusher-destemmer.   We crushed and destemmed our lot and poured the resulting must into two of the 5 gallon primary fermenter buckets we’d brought along for the purpose.

We were both surprised at how quickly the process went.  True, harvesting 100 lbs. is nothing like harvesting acre blocks, but there’s a first time for everything, and this was a lot of fun.  The next post will cover what we did with the must after we got it back home.

Basic Wine Grape Growing Facts

I realized quite early that behind the “art” of winemaking there’s a whole lot of math and science. Nicole, being the science nerd in the family, is quite happy about that.

Anyway, in starting to put together the business plan for Rafter 5 Vineyards, I’ve had to get some basic vineyard/winery facts together. I’m capturing these facts here for future reference.

Vineyard Facts

• An acre is 43560 square feet making a square of 208.7 feet on a side.
• A typical row and vine spacing scheme using a Vertical Shoot Positioned or VSP training system is 6′ x 9′ i.e. 6′ between vines on rows 9 feet apart.
• Using a 6′ x 9′ spacing, one acre can support around 807 vines or 23 rows of 35 vines each.
• Using a somewhat wider 7′ x 10′ spacing, that same acre support around 600 vines or 20 rows of 30 vines.
• Under full production, and depending on the varietal, an acre of vineyard can produce between 4 and 6 tons of grapes.

Winery Facts

• It takes about from 12-15 pounds of grapes to produce 1 gallon of wine.
• At this rate, an acre’s full production yield of grapes (4 – 6 tons) can produce from 500 – 1000 gallons of wine.
• One gallon is about 3785 ml, enough to produce a smidge more than 5 standard 750 ml bottles of wine.
• So, an acre’s yield of grapes can produce between 200 and 400 cases (12 bottles each) of finished wine.

I’ll link to some of the sources for these data in future posts.

First Post

This is the first post on the Rafter 5 Vineyards blog.  Rafter 5 Vineyards doesn’t exist yet.  It is the dream and goal of Pete, Aimee, and Nicole Fuenfhausen: to start and run a vineyard and estate winery in Texas.  This blog is intended to chronicle the project from the beginning.

OK, maybe not the very beginning.  This winery idea had its start several years ago.  Aimee and I have enjoyed wine for the entire 18 years of our marriage.  Like many others, we started out drinking sweeter whites and (heaven forbid) roses.  After a while we started trying the reds and found we liked the dryer ones best.

When we moved to Texas in 1995, one of the first landmarks we noticed in the area was Delaney Vineyards in Grapevine.  Delaney’s large winery building and neat rows of vines were clearly visible from the highway and drew us in almost immediately.  We were intrigued that grapes were growing in Texas and right next to a major highway.  We bought several bottles of Delaney’s first Grapevine vintage (most of their wine comes from their vineyards in LaMesa, TX.  We felt quite fortunate to have some of the 1995 vintage when we found later that the Grapevine vineyards had succumbed to Pierce’s disease the next year.  That was an eye-opener.

In the years since, we visited numerous vineyards around Texas.  And slowly the thought began to grow that we could possibly start our own Texas vineyard.   The popularity of wine has grown dramatically, with interest growing quickly in the wine growing regions that are off the beaten path.   Aimee and I figure that Texas should have its day in the sun pretty soon, and we want to be part of that.

So, I plan to use this blog to document the journey from here.  We know we have a long way to go with many challenges.  We’re pretty certain that others will follow, so we’re hoping to lay down a bread crumb trail.

Pete Fuenfhausen

Flower Mound, Texas