Day Five: Wine Pong

I know you know how Friday ended. I put it in the title. But let me enlighten you as to how Friday began: with coffee.

I was in the barrel room at 7am on Friday, collecting samples. Once I'd collected them, I took them back to the lab, where Patrick and I ran sulfur and volatile acid (VA) analyses. They're simple enough experiments, fit for a General Chemistry lab class. Allow me to briefly explain. Sulfur is a key weapon in the fight against microbial growth in wine. Only small quantities are required, so you'll never detect it. However, if the sulfur content is too low, it's ineffective as an antimicrobial agent. If it's too high, the wine will be noticeably sulfurous. That's why it's important to monitor sulfur levels in the wine until it's bottled. The experiment is simple. In wine, sulfur is present in ionic form, as sulfites and bisulfites. When you add a huge amount of acid (such as 25% phosphoric acid) to the wine, the sulfur is released from solution as sulfur dioxide gas. This gas is collected and bubbled through a peroxide solution with a colored indicator, where it reacts to form sulfates and bisulfates. Titrate that solution with sodium hydroxide until the indicator changes color, and:

Figure 1. BAM! You know the wine's sulfur content.

VAs are even easier, since there's not really any reaction until the titration. You just boil a sample of wine in an enclosed chamber, collect the vapors (acids from the wine that have boiled off) after they've run through a condenser and become liquid again, and then titrate (See Figure 1).

So the lab work is pretty easy, and doesn't take too long per sample. We were pressed for time Friday morning, though, so we only ran a few. After that, I had to go back over to the winery's original lab and set up a cork trial. What is a cork trial, you ask? It's when we test a small sample of corks from a manufacturer's lot, to see if it's contaminated with trichloroanisole (TCA). Also known as "cork taint", TCA is the product of a mold that's found in the bark of cork trees. It smells like moldy cardboard, and (needless to say) it is extremely nasty. Tiny quantities can ruin an otherwise perfectly good wine, so it's very important to minimize its presence in the corks that we plug Williams Selyem bottles with--especially considering our tiny production. All wineries that are serious about quality run cork trials. They're also pretty easy to set up. You just let the corks (usually about 50) soak in glasses of wine (cheap, shitty boxed wine, since it doesn't have a cork) for a day or so, then pour the wine and sniff it. If you smell TCA, don't buy the lot of corks that that sample was from. If not, go ahead and order them.

After I set up the cork trial, I headed back over to the estate lab. Patrick told me that I needed to take some samples to an independent laboratory up in Healdsburg. This is also normal in the industry. Some tests just can't (or won't) be run by wineries, so they'll send out samples for analysis. Anyway, I got to drop some off downtown.

When I got back to the estate, however, the time for lab work was over. The time to drink had come.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, Friday we were scheduled to taste the entire 2008 line from Williams Selyem, to get a good idea of what they do. What do they do, you ask? Their whole philosophy is to produce wines in a minimalistic style, manipulating the juice/wine as little as possible, so that the specific nature of the fruit, soil, weather, everything--the terroir--comes through in the finished product. And, I gotta say, after tasting 15 single vineyard Pinots (that is, 15 bottles, each made with grapes from only a single vineyard), they succeed in their goal.

I won't go into details or give tasting notes (email me if you want them) on the various wines, but I will say this: terroir is a real and taste-able concept. For example, a Pinot from one vineyard along Westside road might taste very different from another from just down the road, despite being the same clone of Pinot and being vinted in exactly the same manner. What's different, then? Could be a lot of things: soil type, altitude, sun exposure, nearness to the Russian River (fog territory), etc. That was what the 2008 tasting drove home to me, that you really can "put a vineyard in a bottle". Williams Selyem does an excellent job at doing just that. Now, whether or not you're a fan of this style of Pinot is another thing entirely. For those who want the more traditionally made "Burgundian" style, they'll have to cough up some cash. While the regional blends (great deals) are around the $40-$50 range (when purchased from the winery), the single vineyards start at about $40 and jump well into the triple digits. Whether or not you want to drop that kind of cash on a bottle of wine is, again, your call. I'm very glad to get 50% off a case of wine while I'm here. That will make good drinkin' a lot more affordable.

After the tasting, the interns and winery staff headed out to the patio to enjoy a night of hanging out, awesome BBQ, and some stupendous wines. All the bottles from the 2008 tasting were brought out for consumption, as well as some very special bottles that people brought along. Bob (Cabral, the winemaker) brought a Riesling that was given to him by a former intern, whose family owns a winery in Germany. Some cheeky asshole brought a 2005 Kosta Browne single vineyard Pinot. (For those not in the know, Kosta Brown is kinda viewed as Williams Selyem's "rival" ultra premium Pinot maker. I wouldn't go that far, but there's market competition for sure.) To be honest, the Kosta Browne was hideous. I couldn't even drink it, just spit it out. It burned like a fruit-flavored cough syrup that was on fire in my mouth. Come to think of it, it was exactly like this:

Figure 2. The Flaming Moe. Secret ingredient: Colonel Krusty's Cough Syrup.

The biggest treats of the evening were two bottles that Bob (I think) also brought along. First was a late 90s ('97 or '98) Olivier Leflaive Grand Cru Burgundy. For those who aren't familiar with Burgundian vineyard class designation, that's a Pinot noir from one of Burgundy's highest ranked vineyards. It was okay, but a lot of the fruit had faded, and it was heavily Bretty. The star of the night was the 1988 Chateau Lynch-Bages (traditional Bordeaux blend). It was also just okay. 1988 must have been a cool/wet year, as it tasted very "green" and underdeveloped. There was virtually no fruit left, just a lot of earth tones and tannins. It was definitely cool to try, though.

When things eventually wrapped up with the BBQ, most of the staff headed home, leaving the interns essentially unattended with some tables, some red cups, and about 50 bottles of wine. Hmm... What do you think happened next? Let me give you a hint:

Figure 3. BAM! Drink!

Yup. Wine pong. But not just any wine pong: wine pong with mixed Williams Selyem single vineyard Pinots in the red cups. It was probably the single most expensive game of drinking pong ever. And you know what the real sacrilege was? My team lost. You know what that means? It means my team had to drink a whole lotta wine. Seeing as I was driving that night, I did what any sane winery employee would do: I spit. Let this be a lesson, folks. Whenever you're playing beer/wine/margarita pong, always save that one precious rerack for when it's absolutely necessary. Don't squander it early on. It will doom you to drink large quantities of liquids from red cups.

So that about wraps up my first week at Williams Selyem. It's been a blast so far, and I can't wait for fruit to start coming in so that we're actually making wine. The people I work with are great, and all love what they do. Nobody complains about their jobs, because they want to be there. Many of them (like myself) left jobs that they didn't enjoy to work in wine. Man, let me just say: there's something to be said about being surrounded by people who love their job. It's a contagious state of mind.