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

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.

The first Pinot Noir of the season

Bam! Suddenly it's upon us. While the Syrah is always welcome, we look forward to and even yearn for the first lots of Pinot Noir. Ask and you shall receive! This past Friday we saw our first full day of the Domaine Serene 2008 Vintage, it looked phenomenal. Everything seemed to fall into place; the perfect weekend of weather, pristine fruit, and the eagerness of the entire staff.

Now, under a thick blanket of dry ice fog (to maintain adequate cold soaks), we are scurrying about helping out wherever we can. This past weekend had us primarily focusing on our Two Barns Vineyard and Guadalupe Vineyard fruit. These Dundee Hills Vineyards are not owned by Domaine Serene, but were planted by our Vineyard Manager, Joel Myers, and are tended to our strict specifications. They produce rich, lush fruit and tend to ripen faster than other sites. Both the numbers (Brix, pH, TA) and the exceptional flavors produced at these two vineyards helped us to make the decision to harvest. Believe me, with the strict attention to detail regarding fruit quality at Domaine Serene, these two vineyards alone have kept us plenty busy, working two harvest crews and double shifts around the clock. Speaking of painstaking attention to detail, today we received the fruit that will become a wonderful 2008 Coeur Blanc. As the sorting line slowed to a crawl, everyone inspected individual clusters of grapes to ensure that only the best fruit imaginable would make it through the careful selection process.

With weather that is "predicted" to stay more than nice (especially for mid-October in Oregon) we now have the luxury of collectively catching our breath as we wait for the estate vineyards to reach their prime. But don't worry! We will still tirelessly work to inspect each fermentation vessel and every vineyard sample as we anxiously await the remainder of the 2008 harvest.

For the record, even with the generous portion sizes provided by our harvest chef, Brad Powers, and Ken & Grace Evenstad (who cook meals often this time of year), and including the multiple helpings of ice cream, I have still managed to do a fair bit of running around the winery this past weekend to not see the calories take a toll. Well, at least not yet anyway. – Written by Sam Poehlman, Lab & QC Technician.

I love the smell of cauliflower in the morning!

At 8 o'clock in the morning most people would consider the smell of horse, cauliflower, sherry, wet cardboard, rotting fruit, ethanol, vinegar, and sulfur some interesting breakfast components, but yesterday morning we had it all! We were lucky enough to have a guest, Patrick, from Chemeketa Community College in Salem, visit Domaine Serene to teach a very educational class about wine faults and important wine components.

The tasting started with simple water samples containing concentrations of tannin, malic, citric, tartaric acids, bitterness, and mineral components. These were then followed by comparative tastings with a control wine and doctored samples including sugar, sulfur, vinegar, tannin, and alcohol. The various concentrations of each element had the team fine-tuning their senses to detecting various elements important in creating a perfectly balanced wine (as well as recognizing one that is not in balance).

In addition to our flights, we had a nasty selection of flawed samples to remind us just how awry wine can go without due diligence by those of us in the cellar. Examples presented included: brettanomyces, ethyl acetate, volatile acidity, oxidation, mercaptans, dimethyl sulfide, and ...TCA (cork taint!!)

While some of the senses stimulated were not the most desirable, I think each one of us developed a new appreciation for the attention to detail, commitment to quality and the fabulous wine we are in the process of creating here at Domaine Serene. - Written by Ameila Hildebrand, Harvest Intern.

The fruit kept rolling in ...

The fruit kept rolling in Friday with a new twist: Viognier from Folin Vineyard in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon. Justin Cox, one of the full-time cellar assistants, slid into his green rubber wet-weather gear and braved the steady rain to retrieve the fruit from the staging area while we set up the sorting line.

In contrast to the Syrah, the Viognier would not be de-stemmed but would instead be ushered directly from the sorting line to the press. There were about 8 of us on the sorting line sifting through the whole clusters, removing any leaves or other vegetation and culling out any bunches that didn't meet the strict standards laid out by our Associate Winemaker, Eleni Papadakis. Domaine Serene is a gravity flow winery, so in lieu of using pumps to transport grapes we either allow them to flow of their own volition down a slide to a lower level in the winery, or, as was the case Friday's, we forklift the sorted fruit down to the fermentation level and gently tip it into the press.

After we finished sorting the Viognier we moved on to processing more Walla Walla Valley Syrah, Eleni would occasionally pop over with a sample of the Viognier free run juice or of the pressings for us to taste; I think my teeth still ache from the abundance of sugar and acids from those couple sips I took. Sweet, high-toned juice makes for great Viognier and we can’t wait to taste the finished product.

The latest round of Syrah did not present any issues. The fruit came in very clean, so we were able to sort through it and process it at a good clip. As those of us who are relatively new to this cellar grow accustomed to the layout of the harvest deck and fermentation area, we will be able to push forward with less and less lag time and start establishing a consistent rhythm. This week, from one day to the next, I could feel our momentum building and our confidence surging. I'm sure that in a week or two the processes will be so entirely ingrained into our muscle fibers that our hands will be chasing clusters on a sorting table even as we sleep. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.

First fruit today!

As September wanes into October, I think all of us at Domaine Serene were thrilled to bring in and process our first fruit of the vintage today, getting underway a harvest we have all been eagerly anticipating. I don’t feel like I'm going too far out on a limb to claim that all of us down in the cellar did not get into the business because of a passionate and insatiable love of cleaning.These past few weeks we have gotten ready for the main event by scrubbing and re-scrubbing every floor, drain, tank, and barrel in the winery, and let me tell you, this place is CLEAN! We might not have loved every minute of the preparation, but it was well worth it all to bring in our first lot of Walla Walla Syrah and see the juice and skins splatter into our fermenters. To us, the aftermath of the first day of crushing in what had been a pristine cellar is kind of like spending all afternoon perfecting a sandcastle on the beach, and then actually enjoying it more as you don a Godzilla grin and tear it apart.

The winery was absolutely filled with a perceptible energy today, smiling faces running about even as the hours piled up and the sun threatened to disappear before we made it outdoors to enjoy the uncommonly seasonable day. Still, in the midst of all the fun, we were reminded that we had an obligation to fulfill: the pre-harvest weigh in. One by one we dutifully took the place normally reserved for picking bins on the scale and heard our weights yelled out by the watchful throng. I learned that I've got to gain a modest 60 pounds to gain the title of biggest guy in the cellar. A prize will be awarded at the end of harvest to the person with the biggest weight differential--higher or lower. Although we'll all be putting in some seriously long hours over the next few months in a physical job, we'll also be enjoying meals prepared by an in-house chef...so its anybody's guess how our bodies will respond.

First day in the books, I think we're all looking forward to getting into a rhythm and bringing in a lot more fruit. Still, first things first, and I know we're all going to sleep really, really well tonight. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.