Tasting Notes: Burdell Cellars 2012 Carnot Cabernet

If you missed the production steps for our first wine, you can read up on its primary fermentation, racking and secondary fermentation, degassing and clarifying, and bottling.

We made this wine from concentrate to introduce ourselves to the winemaking equipment, process, and terminology. Our winemaking kit from Oak Barrel came with a choice of grape juice concentrates, and we picked Cabernet Sauvignon--it's a wine we all like and one we figured would be pretty tough to mess up.

To our delight--and, admittedly, surprise--the wine actually tastes pretty good! We named it "Carnot Cabernet" after the thermodynamic concept, because we're all chemical engineers and into alliterative names. While the wine is still very new, and its flavor profile will undoubtedly change in the few months it's in bottles, we tasted some of it now to get a baseline of its flavor.

Carnot Cabernet is light for a Cabernet Sauvignon, in terms of its color (actually a very pleasant and clear red), tannins (nearly imperceptible), and alcohol content (estimated 10.5-12% by volume). It has aromas of red fruit, notably cranberry and strawberry. It's somewhere between dry and off-dry, with a pleasant level of sweetness that's neither too astringent nor cloyingly sweet. The finish is smooth, and the overall taste is nowhere near as sour as we feared it might be based on "accidental" taste tests throughout the fermentation process.

For now, our Carnot Cabernet is easy to drink but not very complex, though we hope some additional flavors will emerge by the next time we try it.

If you're interested in a taste, Burdell Cellars would be happy to arrange one!

"Warm-up" Wine Step 4: Bottling

After a few weeks clarifying and further degassing, our concentrate wine was finally ready to bottle!

First, we racked to the (sanitized) fermenter one more time. Here's why:

Apparently, the fining and clarifying steps we did a couple of weeks ago worked, because all this sediment was left over in the carboy. From the fermenter, the clarified wine was ready to bottle. Forrest and Kierston (with a little help from their friends) got thirty bottles together, washed them, and got them ready to add our wine. They're not all Bordeaux bottles, which would be most appropriate for a Cabernet (we also have Burgundy and Alsace and even a Champagne bottle), but for a first effort, we took what we could get.

We used the same auto-siphoner that we've been using to rack the wine to put it into the bottles...

...and topped off the bottles after siphoning into them to leave a little space for the corking. Too much space, and the wine can oxidize; not enough space, and it's impossible to get the cork in the bottle.

Actually, it was sort of impossible to get the corks in the bottles until Kierston figured out it was much easier after soaking the corks in warm water. Here's Forrest hand-corking a bottle.

 And here's a bottle following corking. The wine actually has a really pleasant red color!

 
 All thirty bottles, filled and corked! We let the bottles sit upright for a few days to let the corks expand to the bottle...

...then after a few days, laid the bottles on their sides in the classic "pyramid" stacking scheme to prevent the corks from dehydrating.

The wine will continue to mature in these bottles for up to a few months, and we'll be tasting throughout.

Winery Review: Foppiano Vineyards

My parents were in town last week, and we always enjoy taking trips to wine country when they visit. We've covered both Napa and Sonoma over the last few years, so this time around, we hit up the Russian River Valley. It's a section of Sonoma County with a bit of a cooler climate, known mostly for its Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. (This is not my picture of it, but it would be a beautiful place to visit in the fall.) Having no real idea where to go, we drove around the Healdsburg area aimlessly for a few minutes and finally stumbled upon Foppiano Vineyards.

Foppiano is south of Healdsburg proper, just past the Russian River itself on Route 101. It's an area that's mostly dominated by small, warehouse-style wineries. Those aren't necessarily bad--in fact, in Napa or Sonoma, they're likely quite good--but I can find them in Berkeley, and my parents can almost as easily in Georgia. It was nice to see Foppiano as a "traditional," if a little small, estate-and-vineyard style winery.

The tasting menu let us sample the winery's six current vintages: two 2010 whites, a 2010 rose, and three 2009 reds. We really enjoyed the Sauvignon Blanc, which lacked the intense acidity that varietal sometimes comes with but managed to retain a lot of its citrus fruit flavor; the Chardonnay, which follows a current trend of moving away from the "wood and butter" reputation, instead finishing with a bit of spice; and the Lot 96, an intriguing Petite Sirah blend that comes in refillable half-gallon jugs in addition to standard 750 ml bottles.

Unsurprisingly--both for the region and my personal taste in wine--my pick of the day was the Pinot Noir, fruity and not too dry. Our tasting guide claimed that it would evoke a "cherry cola" flavor. I was skeptical until I tried it, but once I did, I was sold, and I bought a bottle convinced my parents to buy me a bottle to take home.

Foppiano was small and quiet, and my family was three out of four people doing a tasting when we went. The selection is limited to a handful of typical Russian River varietals, but they're the best the region has to offer, and Foppiano does respectably with all of them. If you're in the Healdsburg area and want to try some of these cooler-climate wines in a "typical wine country" setting, then Foppiano is worth a visit.

"Warm-Up" Wine Step 3: Degassing and Clarifying

Before we moved on to the next step, we enjoyed the afternoon at Oak Barrel's Pre-Harvest Festival, a chance for home winemakers to show off their creations, chat about the craft, or just drink a ton of wine. The good people at Oak Barrel put this event on for free, which is pretty impressive given the amount of wine and food being offered.

To start the degassing step, we first transferred the wine from the carboy to the fermenter, then back to the sanitized carboy. The "real" way to do this is to just use a new carboy, but Burdell Cellars doesn't quite have that production capability yet. We got a new toy since last time, the auto-siphoner, so that we don't have to use the fish tank method anymore.

Here it is going back into the (sanitized) carboy. The foam is residue from the cleaning process. This particular cleaner is especially nice because you don't have to rinse out the cleaner--and risk re-contaminating the vessel--after you clean it.

This is what the wine looks like once the transfer finished. Notice all the bubbles! That's what we're trying to get rid of in this step. (Sparkling wine is a little above our capability at this point.) The spoon is inserted wrong-way-in because that's what we're using to stir; stirring vigorously promotes degassing. The degassing process, according to the kit, was to take anywhere between 10 minutes and 3 days, stirring every 10 minutes. That's an awfully big range, and an awfully demanding stirring requirement, but we pronounced it degassed after 2 days of intermittent stirring.

Next up was a few additives. Once the wine was sufficiently degassed, we added the remaining ingredients in the concentrate kit. First up was a clarifier...

...which Forrest is dissolving in water and adding to our carboy.

The final two additions were kieselsol and chitosan, two stabilizers sometimes referred to as "fining agents". These help to remove remaining particulates and sediment in the wine.

Last up was one more vigorous stir, to make sure we'd gotten all of our additives thoroughly mixed.

And here it is now. The amount of bubbling decreased dramatically after the degas/clarification process, which you can see. It's harder to see the consistency of the wine, but it's a lot clearer, resembling the appearance of a wine you'd actually drink on purpose.

The wine will stay in the carboy for another few weeks, when it will be ready for bottling.

"Warm-Up" Wine Step 2: Racking

After six days of primary fermentation, the wine's specific gravity--a measure of its density relative to water--had decreased from about 1.1 to less than 1, indicating that a significant fraction of the concentrate's sugar had been fermented to ethanol. That meant it was time to rack the wine. "Rack" simply means to transfer the wine to a new vessel--in this case, a glass carboy--to aid in clarification and settling. Between all the yeast we'd dumped in last week, the oak float, and the natural sediment present in the concentrate, there's a lot of junk in the wine you don't want to drink.

The easiest way to rack a wine is by simple siphoning. We put the fermenter on a chair to add some more hydraulic head, started the siphon, and let it go for several minutes.

Kierston's wealth of experience with fish tank siphoning proved valuable here.

This is why you rack: you don't want to drink any of this.

Here's what it looks like once it's fully racked to the carboy. Notice how turbid it is, in contrast to attractive, translucent mature wine. A combination of settling, degassing, and clarification will improve its appearance.

Forrest hasn't been hitting the carboy--he's (understandably) proud of our efforts!

The next step from here is to wait for the specific gravity to decrease again, to about 0.97. At that point, we'll rack again and begin to degas.

"Warm-Up" Wine Step 1: Primary Fermentation

Our first step in setting up a garage winery from scratch was to buy equipment. Fortunately, the friendly guys at The Oak Barrel sell everything a novice winemaker might need. It's pretty cool that Berkeley has a winemaking shop, and it's an especially convenient walk from Burdell Cellars.

Here's some of our equipment. The big plastic bucket is the primary fermenter. That's where the concentrate (or, in the future, actual grapes) and the yeast go during the first step of winemaking.  The brushes are for cleaning the vessels. In this picture, we're sanitizing the primary fermenter and brushes with a percarbonate solution--apparently this is a disinfectant of choice in the food and drink industry because it disinfects then decomposes to water.

Kierston and Forrest are dumping the bag of concentrate into the fermenter. The concentrate is Cabernet Sauvignon juice with sugar plus sulfites already added. Again, for future batches, we'd be putting crushed grapes in here.

Once all the concentrate was in the bucket, we diluted to 23 liters (or roughly 6 gallons) total volume, which will eventually yield thirty bottles of wine. We added some wine yeast, which is nothing more than a selected strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  In total, we added 5 grams of yeast, quite a lot, but probably necessary to ferment the 23 liters.

Here's a closeup!

Our wine kit also came with oak chips--this is a great way to give the wine an oak barrel-aged flavor without getting an actual oak barrel. It's not as authentic, of course, so we've contemplated acquiring an actual oak barrel in the future, which might not be so insane as it sounds. Here's Forrest preparing our "oak float," the name we gave to our boiled oak chip solution.

 This is what the proto-wine looks like with the oak chips stirred in.

Finally, we sealed the fermenter and attached the airlock. Within a day or two, the airlock started "burping," releasing carbon dioxide as a fermentation byproduct--that's how we knew we were making wine!

Next time: transferring to a carboy for the secondary fermentation.

Opening Burdell Cellars

Kierston, Forrest, and I are all chemical engineers. We toured France together about five years ago and all ended up moving to northern Calfornia for grad school, two of the winiest places in the world. So it was only a matter of time before we started up a winery of our own. Thus was born Burdell Cellars, a tip of the hat to the Georgia Tech legend of the same name. We're all new to the amateur winemaking scene, though we're all enthusiastic to get more into it and would appreciate any advice or experiences that the rest of the community could share.

Our plans for production year 2012 include

• a "warm-up" batch from Cabernet Sauvignon concentrate, in fermentation now, and expected to be ready by September (30 bottles)
• our first "real grape" effort--right now, leaning toward a Central Valley Syrah (30 bottles)
• various meads and fruit wines, in smaller batches (1 gallon or so)

We'll be posting all about the production of our wines, from purchasing the equipment through fermentation and finally to tasting, as well as other wine-related experiences (and even the occasional review!). We hope we can combine knowledge of science and engineering with a burgeoning passion for wine into something exciting and delicious!