Ah yes, the vineyards of my youth. I find that now that I've gone through the process once, the whole movie scene where someone walks thoughtfully and culturedly through a sun-dappled vineyard muttering nonsense, is not so tolerable
I've lived in Sonoma County for long enough that if I hadn't made wine soon, the police would have been sent to have a stern talk with me. Someone in the neighborhood has quite an impressive vine growing operation around his suburban house, and I thought; what the heck, if that guy can make wine from vine to bottle, so can I, time to give it a try. Later I found out that both wife and husband at that property are professional winemakers, so that's who I've set myself up to compete against. Just super. I made very clear to myself that I just wanted to make a palatable wine, where "palatable" means no injuries, and no one would call the police.
While this is a terrible time to be vineyard or winemaker,[1] it's a great time to be an amateur winemaker. That is how for the low low price of free, I harvested 50 lbs of pinot noir fruit (Rochioli clone) from a vineyard that is awesome ("H.") but will remain unnamed so their generosity is not rewarded by a horde of freebie-seekers next season (D. at H., thank you! Vineyard picture above is from that day.) I will however share that I got connected with them on the discussion group at The Beverage People's website, a website and store you should frequent if you have any interest in any kind of adult beverage creation. If I had time and capacity D. would've let me take all the remaining tons. But it was just me, with a five galloon bucket and a trash bag, and scissors that he loaned me, after work on a Tuesday, late in the harvest season - which came early this year. This fruit was the mainstay of my wine, and supplemented the meager grapes I've collected from my own gentleman's vineyard, Rutenjord, from 2023-2026. (As I learned, a gentleman's vineyard is a small hobby vineyard and I have one pinot vine, so this is as gentlemanly as you can get.) My consultant J., of R. (the real actual professional winemaker who gave me my one vine and does not want his reputation sullied by association with philistine personages) said to his knowledge a multi-year vintage hasn't been done, so ALREADY I'm blazing trails.
At first I had a list of the people I would share the precious wine with. Now I cannot imagine how I will get rid of it all and constantly foist it on people, who despite my approach often claim to enjoy the experience
As is often the case for hobbyist winemakers, the learning has been my favorite thing about it. This post is not remotely an attempt to summarize what I know (which isn't much – go back up to the Beverage People, they have PDFs that really help, much more than Youtube or AI discussions.) Instead, some reflections and the occasional humorous anecdote, that may support my fellow wine noobs.
- Don't press by hand. Took me ~3 hours to squeeze 50 lbs by hand. I swear 6 weeks later I still have tendonitis from it. I will not do that again. Borrow or rent a press. If I do this again, it will be with more grapes, and I will use an actual press.
- I almost made a rosé because I started discarding the grapeskins; I thought they would absorb all the juice (noob paranoia, fortunately as I was pressing I read more and realized I should be keeping the skins.) So the wine is a bit lighter than a normal pinot. I like rosé anyway and had no idea that's how it was made.
- It's much more fun, and I predict you will be much more successful, if you have a friend who knows what they're doing and has been through this more than once. In my case (finally someone whose reputation is already low enough so as not to worry about being damaged by association with me) I was fortunate to have the advice of Jim Margeson, an engineer late of NVDA, who has made and shared multiple beverages. Of many excellent pieces of advice he gave - originally I was freaking out that I would ruin my first attempt, and thus waste 4 years of accumulated grapes from my own vine. "Why don't you just use someone else's fruit this time?"
- Brix stopped dropping around 0 and I left it for 2 days before racking off the gross lees. This made the wine fruit forward. The final product kind of reminds me of a Rioja.
- I kind of wish I hadn't bothered with secondary malolactic fermentation (MLF.) There are three main reasons for it. First, it smooths the flavor, and the further north your red is from, the more malate you have to start with, the more important MLF is (apparently.) I'm in the Fountaingrove AVA in Sonoma, which is north for a red. And, I actually liked the crisp bite over the butteriness, maybe because my wine is pretty fruit-forward. Second, it prevents spoilage; I plan to have all this wine consumed by Christmas (ie 10-11 weeks from harvest to consumptions) and I don't think the lack of aging will be what keeps me from winning the gold in Paris, so not a big deal for me. Although The Magazine of Wine Critics Who Live at My House gave it 5 stars in their inaugural and final issue.) And finally, you don't want MLF occurring in the bottle because it can explode; see second point above. So after about 2 weeks I slowed MLF way down by leaving the wine outside once it got cooler in October.
- Speaking of bottling: regardless whether you're actually going to get real wine bottles, use actual glass, or food-grade plastic for your storage vessels. For fun and also because that's actually what I had sitting around, I stored some in Diet Mountain Dew bottles (for which an alternate name, Mountain Dieu was suggested.) I think the PET bottles actually did affect the taste a bit. Real winemakers worry about headspace and spoilage. While for my timelines it may not have mattered as much, as a newby I have no judgment as to what really matters and probably doesn't. (And, I REFUSE to top off my wine with "similar wine." What!?!? Why did I bother making my own then? Just fill up an empty Carboy with someone else's product and say there, I declare it to be my wine now.) For my one-gallon carboy I have a real valve; for the 2L bottles I just cut a finger off a rubber glove and left the cap loose but at this point there's so little MLF going on that even leaving a tight cap on ~5 days at a time, there's no noticeable gas release when I open it. Thanks to Rene and Greg for letting me borrow two Grolsch-style bottles. I also wasn't about to buy a corking machine for my little project, so I had actually already looked at Grolsch bottles.
- Serious wine nerdery: I learned a lot of microbiology during this process as well. Yeast evolved during the spread of flowering (and fruiting=sugary plants) during the Cretaceous; it makes sense that as eukaryotes yeast have an advantage in producing alcohol – they have introns and more room for innovation to produce a suite of glucose-to-ethanol metabolism enzymes (which necessarily includes detoxification) as well as more complex and stable cell membranes – letting them use their waste product, ethanol, as a weapon against bacteria. (There are many examples of organisms producing poisons and humans saying, hey, that's fun, give me more – besides ethanol, capsaicin and cocaine are good examples. Also, there are agriculturally important ethanol-producing bacteria, namely Zymomonas mobilis that produces the indigenous agave wine pulque, which I have yet to try, but if you know where I can try it, comment!) I had read about yeast prions before, but it turns out that there are bacteria that induce prion formation in yeast and this is what often results in stuck fermentations, although over the years we've selected for prion-resistant strains so this is less of a problem than it used to be.
Above: Leprous Distillment in situ. As you know, presentation is important. Below: my fellow gentleman farmer, Aspartamé Amarillocinco, proudly showing his fair trade, shade grown, organic Dew beans. He honors his ancestors by doing the Dew (or Dieu) in the same way that they did for millennia.
CONCLUSION: my goal was to make a wine that was remotely palatable. If I say so myself, I exceeded this and made real wine that people used real wine terms to describe it, like "fruit forward". One friend even accused me of trying to prank him with store-bought wine, a compliment if ever there was one. I'm pretty happy with how it came out. And, I still have a gallon of the shit left. So if you know me and you want some, please come over, but you have to tolerate my company while you drink it. Future projects and experiments:
- Use the rest of my grapes in another pinot (I'm almost afraid to try again)
- Apple and pear wine (and maybe some dates?) from the fruit in my backyard
- A nice rosé (I really seem to want to make a rose)
- I already tried to make hick wine by throwing baker's yeast into grape, apple, and prune juice. The prune hick "wine" was terrible as you would predict. Apple hick wine was not terrible – light and refreshing. Surprisingly the grape hick wine was terrible. At first I called it Fayette County's Finest, but later retracted this, and I apologize to hicks everywhere for associating them with Fayette County.
[1] Without rehashing the wine industry's tales of woe, there are just too many acres of wine grapes planted, especially now that Gen Z doesn't drink as much, and add in this economy. This actually reminds me of what happened in Australia in the early 2000s, only bigger nd with more inertia. People realized Australian wine was good, lots of industrious/drunk Australians planted vineyards and made more good wine, then the domestic market crashed. Australia is a smaller economy with 8% of the population of the US and that population is concentrated in coastal areas - so the whole process moved more quickly than what is likely to happen here. That is to say: now that I am an accredited[1] amateur winemaker, I am also an accredited wine economist. And my prediction (and that of others) is that the U.S. wine correction (which has already been underway for several years) will only continue.
