Good Grapes & Bad Grapes

Here is what a bunch of grapes (Sangiovese) look like long after the powdery mildew has attacked. Cracked, runted, rotten ... you can barely tell they are purple. If I tried to make wine with these it would have aromas and tastes of wet fur and sweat in the mix. No kidding!

Here are the grapes I did harvest (Malvasia).

The trick I mentioned is two-fold. The first part is called appassimento. This is letting the grapes "raisin" a little before making the wine to concentrate the essences and sugar. This is done by laying them on straw or wire racks for good air circulation in other parts of Italy, or, around here, by hanging on wire hooks in long chain. If you've ever had an old style Amarone, you know the the taste of wine made by passato grapes. It is also how, using Malvasia and Trebbiano, Tuscans make the famous local desert wine known as Vin Santo (The good stuff you want to sip like port and NOT dunk biscotti in). Here's what I ended up with in my underground garage cantina.

Makes a pretty wall paper pattern, doesn't it?

OK, this buys me some time before I have to do anything with these grapes. And since I don't plan on making vin santo (takes at least 7 years and many barrels), and I do like the Malvasia grape, I will use these passato grapes in the second technique which was invented right here in Tuscany. It's called governo and it involves the addition of the pressed juice of passato grapes to the the red wine to give it a boost when the primary fermentation is almost done. This not only kicks the fermentation up to another level of alcohol and complexity, but helps initiate acid-softening secondary malolactic fermentation. I've only heard of one winery that does governo anymore. That's because it's easier to make mondo vino wines like everyone else. So, with crows and oidio forcing my hand, if I want to use these grapes, I have to bring back the governo technique and make a traditional wine nobody here is making anymore.

What about mixing white and red grapes, you ask? Won't that dilute the wine? Is it even kosher? The answers are, no, no, and yes. In fact the famous Chateauneuf du Pape of the Rhone, including one of my all-time favorites Chateau Beaucastel, rely on the inclussion of white grapes in their blend for their delicious taste, bouquet and mouth feel. And then there's Chianti. Not the stuff now being made (which according to recent Mondo-vinization of the law, includes French grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot), but the original recipe by the guy who invented Chianti, Baron Ricasoli. The formula he codified in 1872 included 15% Malvasia along with Sangiovese, Canaiolo, and others, and was only in the 19th century bastardized to include up to 30% insipid Trebbiano to make the watered down stuff in the cute straw covered fiascos that gave Chianti a bad name and, as of 2006, is illegal to make. In fact, white grapes are no longer allowed. Good-bye Baron Ricasoli.

So here I am, forced by factors beyond my control to make a traditional Tuscan wine that according to law and global marketing nobody is making anymore. How about that!

Emergency Harvest!

Yesterday, I was remembering Aesop's fable about the fox and the grapes and wondering if Boots, our visiting fox, had been the cause of the denuded clusters I found in the middle of two rows of our white grapes. But that seemed preposterous, foxes eat voles and lizards and other small wriggly things.

I was scratching my head about it, looking up the row of what I have deduced are Malvasia, one of the four grapes Giovanni told me were planted in my vineyard, and the ones that should ripen first, when this guy flew by.

It was a European hooded crow and he had a lucent green orb about the size of an olive in his beak. It wasn't an olive.

Grabbing some used DVDs to hang in the vineyard (their flash is said to keep crows away), I went out to walk the rows. I found even more missing grapes than yesterday. One out of every 10 clusters was down to bare stem, or almost. Then I remembered a home winemakers maxim: When do you harvest your grapes? Answer: When the birds are eating them. They know exactly when they are ripe.

Yikes! Grabbing my spectrometer, I plucked random grapes and measured their sugar content. Double yikes! At 22 to 25 Brix, they were already overripe for white grapes (19 to 21 is ideal). I checked acid and found that they were not 3.1 to 3.3 pH range one wants, but had dropped much of the acid essential to making a lively wine. Then I heard the crows cat-calling from the tree nearby.

Luckily, yesterday, I had bought some grape harvesting shears. They are designed to carefully snip the stem and to pluck out bad or green grapes without puncturing good ones. I grabbed one of the cassettes I also bought and went to work picking only the best bunches. Unfortunately, crows like only grapes that don't have oidio. Still more clusters went onto the ground, but by the time I was done with the row and a half of confirmed Malvasia around lunch time, I had harvested almost 2 cassettes worth, maybe 70 pounds. The crows would get no more.

Now what? It's not enough grape to make much wine (about 4 or 5 bottles). Not to worry. I already had a plan. Because I'd already guessed that these vines were early ripening Malvasia, and that they wouldn't make much wine, I had decided to do an old trick invented, so the oenological lore goes, right here in Tuscany. I had to work fast so the grapes wouldn't be damaged. But more on that in the next blog.

Outside-In

As I was putting up the electric fence to keep the caprioli (tiny barking deer) from eating what's left of the grapes, this guy runs across my path, literally, right through the vineyard. He paused to stare at me like "What the heck are you looking at?" then trotted on.

I call him Boots because his paws look dipped in ink. He's a European red fox. At night, he's been leaving little gifts shaped like a popular log-shaped chocolate confection of my youth. On the front porch. On the back porch. In the kitchen when I leave the door ajar at night. Last night, the sound of a wine bottle falling over downstairs woke me and I knew who'd done it.

In the morning, as I had coffee (after removing the poop from the kitchen) I heard a rustling in among the paper bags in one corner. Worried it was the fox (Do they have rabies in Europe? Answer: yes.) I carefully approached, only to find it was a big fat toad with golden eyes. The outside has it's way of coming in here. If even in the "stolen views" through our windows.

Or the bats that wing in and out of our bedroom on balmy nights.

At night, the death watch beetles in our roof beam tick tick tick, reminding me that the minutes, even here, are numbered. And that outside my grapes are ripening quickly.

Palio! At Last!

In the 15 years since we started coming here, and the 3 since buying the property, Sally and I had never made to Siena’s famous Palio -- partly because of schedule, partly because it is a claustrophobic’s nightmare. Determined that if I didn’t go this year, I’d probably never go, I got in the car and drove to Siena on August 16, arriving at 2:00 p.m. At that time it wasn’t too crowded in the Campo, but people were already camping in the best spots. You can see the clay packed street that is the racetrack.

The contrada chest thumping and flag waving (a contrada is a community group or brotherhood), began around 3 o’clock.

Another contrada...

One of the race horses

Another contrada....

The parade around The Campo starts ...

... and takes 2 hours to complete

Sea of People. Not for the claustrophic.

VIP Balcony.

Mounts and Jockies before the costumed paraders.

The race is starting.

Here is the race on You Tube Tartuca (The Tortoise) Wins!

They thundered past so fast in such tight quarters that I forgot to breath, literally. Afterwards, all I could think of was getting out of the crowd and to my parked car as quickly as possible to avoid the crush. Since couldn’t do that without crossing the track, I stepped out onto it as soon one of the guards holding back the people turned away. That was both a discovery and a mistake. For the jockey had decided to dismount the winning horse and remove his jersey right in front of me. Meanwhile, one contrada of sore losers had pulled off their shirts and were ready to rumble.

The winning horse.

I'm close!

Way too close!

The Victors...

Photographer...

More Victors...

Sore Losers.

The Rumble begins...

Parting Shot. I got out just in time!

The End in Sight!

Dropped another 10% of the grapes 3 days ago to the dammed oidio! 10% is now what I hope to be left with. That's still enough to make some wine, maybe 80 bottles. Meanwhile, we are eating our first garden melons and pears and lots of tomatoes and lots of mustard, arugula, broccoli, and other sprouts from the Fall/Summer garden.

And the clean up of the construction work site continues. This was the view out our back door, at the southwest corner of the vineyard, yesterday.

Here is the same view today!

At last, I am done with the basic heavy lifting around the house! The chaos of big stones, earth, broken brick and other construction debris, wood scraps and firewood! Finally, I can walk around the house outside and not trip over things or step on nails or get stung by wasps or spook vipers! Finally, I see order when I look out a window! Finally, I can sit down and write. Well, almost. There's still a lot to do.

Today, I bought a 230 liter food grade plastic vat as a back up vessel to start the red wine in if things happen faster than I expect. Certain reds grapes (Ciliegiolo) are already at 15 Brix (That's a measure of the sugar in the grape) and certain whites (Malvasia) are at 18 Brix. Ideally, I want to harvest the reds around 22 to 24 Brix and the whites a little lower. The time is fast approaching! Now I need to organize and build the wine cellar and production area in our underground garage. I need to build a work bench and storage racks and make sure everything is sanitary. But that is pleasant construction in cave cool conditions. I'm out of the hot Tuscan sun at last!

My Garden's Earthly Delights

Spent 2 days after returning from the Alps planting the fall garden and getting the maturing summer garden in shape. We have melons on the vine, tomatoes, eggplants and more, but my favorite season is autumn, in the garden and at the table.

These are the some of the fruits of our labor. Despite being poised on the verge of failure in the vineyard and still overwhelmed by the persistence of homebuilding tasks, I do have moments of pleasure when I go into the garden and the garden goes into me.

Bunches of Woe

Walking the vineyard again, I am dropping half of the half of the clusters left on the vines because of the oidio damage. Damaged grapes will not make good wine. And I’d rather do the culling now so I won’t have to do it when I harvest or explain how to tell what’s good from bad to anyone who helps. And I don’t want the sick bunches infecting what’s left of the good.

In the end, who knows how many good grapes we’ll be able to harvest. Right now we are down to a quarter of what I estimated in the spring. But now I have a new problem.

Because I decided to resurrect a dying vineyard of old vines (40 years is old by Italian standards), mine are not the orderly conduits of a modern vineyard efficiently delivering sugars and nutrients to each consistently sized leaf and cluster at precisely meted intervals along each branch. No, my vines are – even though I’ve moderated their sprawl a bit – all over the place. You can still see vineyards like this around, more and more of them let go to weeds. Also, because I’ve removed almost all the clusters on some vines, the fruit loads are different for each. And not all the clusters are the same size or growing at the same rate. And they are not all at the same place in each vine’s nutrient pipeline. The point is some of the clusters on some of the vines are starting to turn pink! This is veraison, the transition to ripening signaled by a change in color of the grapes. This usually happens in August, but it usually happens to most of the clusters on most of the vines in a vineyard at the same time. But not in mine. Oy! Or should I say Oidio!

With the grapes all ripening at different rates I will not be able to harvest them all at the same time or begin a single vat fermentation as I had planned, and, from the looks of it, they could reach the stage of ripeness weeks apart. This means I either have to ferment several small batches or keep adding grapes to the primary fermentor over a graduated harvest. The first option is tedious, requires much more equipment, and is guaranteed to render inconsistent results. The latter risks contaminating the single batch each time I add grapes. What to do?!?

For now, my plan is to ferment in two batches and to pick within a ripeness bracket where the grapes that ripen first are not too ripe and the ones that ripen later not unripe. This involves measuring both the sugar and the acid in the grapes, but I will come to this later.

Meanwhile, since I can no longer spray copper sulfate to control the oidio once veraison softens the grapeskins, I can only hope the oidio doesn't return with the fogs of autumn and enough good grapes make it to harvest to make at least a little wine.

I am not a praying man. But I am beginning to see how one becomes one.