2008 is in the Books!

Once again the close of the year brings reflection despite there still being much to do in the cellars in the way of barrel work and harvest cleanup.

The annual cycle got off to a later start with a cool spring that delayed bud-break until nearly mid-May, sparing our vines the effect of the same frost that hurt much of California. Likewise bloom was a bit later in June than usual but was extraordinarily compressed and yielded a full fruit set with a moderately heavy crop. August heat spikes followed by cooling rains alternately pushed and slowed ripeness. The first ‘pink’ grapes were sighted the second week of August and veraison extended through mid-month.

Green thinning was the key to promoting maturity and focused development. As under ripe or sunburned clusters were cut to the ground, crop yields were reduced by approximately 10%. Yet the 2008 vintage was truly a case of block by block evaluative, not simple farming. September brought dehydrating east winds and a demand for patience. Then October’s first flush of rain sounded an alarm of a potentially condensed picking schedule, the need for which fortunately never materialized as we enjoyed sunny days and cold nights.

Fermentations were steady, clean, and complete and ultimately we have been rewarded with wines of superb color and rich, complex qualities. - Written by Eleni Papadakis, Associate Winemaker

Finally pressed off, we now busy ourselves with racking our settlers off the heavy lees and barreling down. The idea is to be as gentle as possible with the wine at this juncture; we do not use any pumps to transfer the wine into barrel but instead allow the head pressure in the tank to push the liquid down a series of fixed lines into the blending level, a floor below. The flow rate is then controlled by a valve at the barreling wand. This is a function is commonly referred to as "gravity-flow" and results in fresher, less-oxidized wines than when compared to barreling with a pump.

Although there is still much work to be done--the majority of the wines from this vintage won't be released for two years--many of the interns will close out their tenure at Domaine Serene by the end of the month. Due to our imminent departure, I think the mood in the cellar has become a little introspective of late, as we attempt to put the past few months in perspective. As I look back on the harvest, I cant help but wonder what it is that drives seemingly normal, sane people to repeatedly commit to such an overwhelming undertaking. Whats more, a harvest is not just the baggage that comes along with making wine, it is unequivocally the highlight of our year. Many of us even go to great pains to participate in two every year.

Obviously all of us in the cellar are enthralled by wine; we must be interested to an almost absurd degree to devote our lives to it. However, at some point during the harvest, after a month of Mondays, roughly three hundred gallons of coffee, and woefully little sleep, there has to be something else in it besides wine.

As best as I can figure, the hidden beauty of a vintage is the suspension of reality that comes with the crush. Only in this mode does it seem perfectly reasonable to run around wearing a camouflage bandanna covered in grape juice, an unruly beard, and terribly unkempt hair in one's workplace. In this "harvest zone" we relinquish the stale names for the days of the week and replace them with different markers: Sunday becomes the day Frank Sinatra serenades the cellar in the morning, Tuesday is dry ice delivery day, and Thursday, the day we feast on tacos for lunch. Furthermore, we will proudly display our harvest hands (blackened semi-permanently from grape juice) to anyone who will cast a passing glance, blissfully unaware that gnarled and beaten-up hands aren't as revered by all.

When, at long last, we finally emerge from this parallel reality back to our normal lives, we are pleasantly surprised to realize that we have participated in something monumental and indelible, at least until many years down the road when the very last bottle of the vintage is uncorked and savored. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.

Can You Dig It?

One of the most important rites of passage of a harvest is to dig-out a tank for pressing. After spending weeks caring for the grapes as they go through their cold-soak and fermentation, nothing is more satisfying than crossing the fermentation vessel number off the punch-down list and knowing that the next day you will put that batch to rest - or at least to settling tank - where it can slip comfortably from the forefront of our minds.

The process is deceptively simple.

Upon arrival at the winery in the morning we are greeted by a stack of work orders which list the fermenters that need to be pressed. Today, for example, one of our five-ton fermenters (F210) was first in the queue. We start by opening the valves and draining off the free-run juice, or juice that we can gather without pressing. When the tank stops draining of its own accord, we slowly crank open the door and scrape the surrounding grape skins into a stainless steel bin. This is to clear an area for a person to descend into the tank and dig it out.

Safety is our number one concern at Domaine Serene. We all get to dig out at least one tank this harvest, and only after we have properly secured our safety harness, leash, and O2 meter. We also position a fan at the top of the fermenter to blow off any lurking CO2. Once all precautions are taken, only then are we permitted to descend into the depths of the skins. Armed with a food-grade plastic shovel and tank-only gum boots that are cleaned before and after each use, we are unleashed on the skins to usher them out of the tank in any way possible.

Personally, I favor a shovel-hand combo, while some others are strictly shovel advocates. The idea is to clear the tank of skins as quickly as possible, while leaving the lees and seeds behind. The skins are then dumped from the stainless bins into the press and then lightly squeezed to remove more juice without breaking any seeds and contributing unwanted green tannins to the wine. The pressed wine is stored separately from the free-run, and left to settle until it is racked and barreled.

The end is in sight! Today we began the first of our rackings off of heavy lees, and by weeks end we will have pressed off our last ferments and began barreling down. Our work days are getting shorter and morale is high; we've nearly completed what has turned out to be a fantastic vintage. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Samantha Poehlman.

Famous Corn Casserole

Well, we can’t have harvest without the famous Corn Casserole. For years this was served at our annual July 4th party at the winery. I found the recipe in a Bon Appetite Magazine in 1979, and everyone loves it. It is high calorie, but you can try light sour cream and low fat cheese. ( I haven’t tried it). For harvest the crew needs the calories.

FAMOUS CORN CASSEROLE

Preheat oven to 350 Serves 14-18

5 cups corn kernels. Best to use fresh, use canned drained if fresh not available
2 -1/2 sticks melted butter
5 eggs

Buzz in cuisinart in batches until almost pureed, then put in large bowl.

2-1/2 Cups sour cream
2-1/2 Cups diced Monterey Jack cheese
1-1/2 Cups cornmeal- I like a fine grind
2 – 4 oz cans diced mild chilis
1-4oz can jalapeno chilis. Drain well
1 T. + ½ tsp salt

Mix into large bowl with the corn mixture.

Butter a 10x16x 2 glass baking dish. Spread mixture into it.
Bake uncovered 60-70 minutes or until golden brown and set

We double this recipe for harvest and typically make 4 pans for the 4th of July. If you cut the recipe in half, check for doneness after 50 minutes of cooking. – Written by Grace Evenstad. Photos by Megan Jones.

Here comes the rain again ...

The wet weather has arrived! I'd been warned about its impending arrival countless times over the past three months, but by the end of October I must admit that I was becoming a bit dubious. However, from our perch atop Hilltop Lane we've had a front row seat for the endless parade of clouds that cant quite seem to take flight. Since all of the Domaine Serene interns live on property, our daily commute to the winery is by footpath through the vineyards. On our morning trek I don't think we've had more than ten feet of visibility through the thick pea soup of fog in nearly a week. I wouldn't think it possible to get lost on a five minute walk, but somehow I take enough meandering blind turns that my commute time has doubled.
The wet weather couldn't have been better timed in terms of winery operations. The day before the rains hit, we brought in our last fruit of the vintage: Chardonnay from the Clos du Soleil vineyard on the Evenstad Estate. By the time the first drops fell we were all comfortably indoors, our sorting table done for the season and spotlessly cleaned.

Although we took a short breath to congratulate each other on a successful harvest, we quickly resumed work as the realization dawned that the real work was yet to come. Although the fruit receival phase of the vintage is concluded, we have a winery brimming with grapes waiting (some patiently, others less so) to be become world-class wine. Our fermentations are in full swing, and our presses are fired up and running around the clock. We are absolutely in the thick of it. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.

Unico Italiano Disperso Quassu in Oregon!

Salve a tutti gli italo-americani collegati.

Mi e' stato chiesto di scrivere un paio di cose in italiano.....purtroppo or ora siamo alle prese con una immnesa quantita' di PINO (fratello di Mario) che ha "pressa" matta di essere pressato.....quindi rimandero' a piu' tardi un mio intervento.

loris ... unico italiano disperso quassu in Oregon! – Written by Loris Tartaglia, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.

Although Pinot Noir offers us the opportunity to walk through many different phases in the wine-making process (sorting, destemming, the cold soak, heating, fermentation, pressing, racking, and barreling down, just to name a few), this past week it has been a pleasure to receive fruit from our blocks of Chardonnay because it is a slightly more stream-lined process.

Since we do not whole-cluster ferment any of our white wines, we experience the instant gratification of tasting the juice from the press the day the grapes are picked; one of the aspects I've enjoyed the most of this vintage has been the opportunity to explore the differences in flavor reflected in the fruit coming from our different vineyard sites. Nearly a week ago, our cellar master Griffin Brown and I stood around the press sampling the free-run juice from a block of Chardonnay from the Two Barns vineyard. Each of us, upon first sip, decreed that indeed it wasn't juice we were tasting but rather a beaker of butterscotch. A short time later, after a press cycle, that we agreed that the same juice had turned into chocolate creme brulee. The next day, our palates weren't as in sync. Chardonnay from our Etoile Vineyard tasted distinctly Fuji apple-like to him, while the only thing I could think of was a Bartlett pear.

Blessed with perpetually clear days and a seemingly endless summer, through the end of October we have had the pleasure of harvesting our fruit only when we feel that it has achieved optimum ripeness. For those of us new to the area and to the winery, this has provided the perfect template to learn the different characteristics of the varying vineyard sites under optimal conditions, and for that we are certainly grateful. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.

Ken and I have been cooking for the winery harvest crew since the mid 1990’s. In our old winery in Carlton we had no kitchen and everything had to be prepared at home and eaten room temp, and the dishes brought back to the house to be washed. We were a lean crew then with dear friends and neighbors on the sorting line volunteering their time. When we built our new winery in time for harvest 2001, we knew we needed a kitchen so our hard working crew could get proper meals. Until last year Ken and I cooked every meal, often feeding 30 or more people at a time. Last year we hired a professional chef to cook 5 days a week, so Ken and I cut back to cooking on his 2 days off.

This year we have 8 interns from around the world, and 2 shifts each of 8 or so temporary employees on the sorting line helping our regular production crew of 5, and about 10 more “office people”. Over the years there have been favorite recipes that everyone likes. I have been requested to blog some of these.

My Kentucky Butter Cake recipe came to me 30 years ago from my sister-in-law, Suzie Evenstad. It is a buttery pound cake without frosting, and was the perfect cake to Fed Ex every year to our kids, Serene and Mark, for their birthdays when they were away at college. I would package it up with candles and unblown balloons and birthday banners with love and kisses. It travels well in its bundt pan and doesn’t get stale. – Written by Grace Evenstad. Photos by Megan Jones.

KENTUCKY BUTTER CAKE

3 Cups sifted flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
Combine these ingredients in small bowl and set aside

1 Cup room temp butter
2 Cups sugar
Cream together in large mixing bowl with electric beater

1 Cup buttermilk
2 tsp pure vanilla
Combine and set aside

To the butter and sugar mixture in the large bowl add 4 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then, add your set-aside dry ingredients, alternately with your buttermilk mixture, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients, and beating after each addition.

Pour into buttered bundt pan or 9x13 pan and bake in 325 degree oven for 60-65 minutes.
Run spatula along edge of pan. Prick cake several times with a fork, and pour sauce over the cake.

SAUCE

Heat in saucepan:

1 Cup sugar
½ Cup butter
¼ Cup water
When melted together and sugar is dissolved, add
1 T. vanilla
1 T. rum flavor

Pour sauce slowly over cake. It will all soak in.

For harvest, make 2 or 3 cakes

Wild Nights. Crazy Days.

Some of the last of the late, end of work day picking decisions await me tonight as we take advantage of this amazing late season weather. It is 1am and the Dream Team (our night crew: Justin, Loris, David, and Josh) are busy with inoculations, punch downs and pump-overs, readying the press for the first dry reds, barreling down our first Chardonnay of the season, and, of course, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Fortunately, we are at a point when the crew is finally able to rotate through a day off. We're into our 3rd week without one, and personal hygiene has had trouble keeping up with winery hygiene!

Everyone is incredibly good humored as we keep up the pace. We ferment our Pinot Noir and Syrah primarily in 1-ton bins which requires an extraordinary amount of work and patience. The winery is filled with these 1-ton bins now and we must move them about to hand work them each day and to reach the ones that need care at any given moment. Drew Voit, our Consulting Winemaker, is a master at the bin management game and has helped us strategize press cuts and initial lot blending. Another full day as we carry the Domaine Serene tradition forward through another exciting year. - Written by Eleni Papadakis, Associate Winemaker

Crunch Time!

This is the point during harvest when it’s usually best to cut off all communication with the outside world. Nothing is more disheartening than picking up your phone to hear a friend inquire about your Friday night plans. It’s a seemingly innocuous question I realize, but it is guaranteed to provoke this chain of thoughts:

"Friday? It can’t be Friday already. I thought it was Wednesday. Well that’s awesome! Oh, wait, I have to work all weekend too."

The joke around the cellar during this time of year is that it is always Tuesday. We worked yesterday and we work tomorrow.

Luckily for us, even though we are firmly entrenched in the routine of rising, going to work, and collapsing into bed, we get to live vicariously through the grapes, which are on the thrill-ride of a lifetime. Allow me to paint a picture of their first days in the winery:

The grapes typically arrive in picking bins loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck, although with several of our Estate vineyards only a mile or so away they are sometimes hauled up the hill behind a tractor. When a particular block has been evaluated, the decisions of how to process it are made. Type of grape, size of berry, taste of juice, presence of plant matter all determine the speed at which we run the fruit down the sorting line into the de-stemmer. Lots will be sorted and de-stemmed before being delivered to a fermenter.

For the majority of our Pinot Noir, we add precise amounts of dry ice and Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) to prevent the beginning of fermentation for up to seven days. This is called a cold-soak, and it allows for the juice to absorb more phenolics from the skins. Some of our fermenters are equipped with Glycol jackets that give us the ability to cool and heat the tank at the press of a button, while some of our smaller open-topped fermenters require us to shuffle them between a chilled room and a heated one to manage the temperature of the must. After the cold-soak period, we gently restore warmth to the juice and skins and inoculate with a hand-picked yeast strain. Different yeasts promote distinct flavors in the wines they ferment; at Domaine Serene we use many small fermentation lots, up to 120 for Pinot Noir, so that we can achieve greater complexity in our wines due to the influences of multiple yeast strains and to have as many options as possible when creating the final Evenstad Reserve blend.

Yeast needs oxygen to complete the fermentation of sugar to alcohol, so our Associate Winemaker, Eleni Papadakis, walks the tightrope of introducing the necessary oxygen without over-oxidizing the fragile, young wine. During fermentation, we will punch down the cap several times daily--a process of submerging the top layer of skins in the juice which helps to maintain a homogenized temperature, introduces oxygen to the grapes, and prevents the top from developing unwanted microbial populations. Additionally, the wine can be pumped over, which entails drawing the wine out from the bottom of the tank and returning it over the top, making sure to wet the whole cap. This does not follow a set schedule, but rather is decided directly by Eleni on a tank by tank basis according to her flavor analysis.

This weekend we will finally get to see our first Chardonnay, as well as more Estate Pinot Noir. We treat our Chardonnay pretty differently (obviously) from the Pinot and the Syrah, so I'm sure it will provide great material for the coming blog posts. Stay tuned. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.