The Snob Has Landed: Gary Vaynerchuk in Sonoma

Over the last two years the wit and wisdom of Gary Vaynerchuk has paved my way through the world of wine. Having been introduced to him in my senior year at college before I was really into wine, Vaynerchuk has been my defacto instructor through each phase of my enological journey.

The appeal that Gary has is easy to percieve. He is the antithesis of every wine snob you could imagine -- spitting into a New York Jets beer bucket, describing wines as tasting like Pickles and Soy Sauce and "doo doo", all the while shouting at his camera man and tossing corks in his general direction. I've grown to enjoy watching Gary's videos mainly for the little nuggets of wine knowledge he sprinkles in along with his reviews of various wines. These little nuggets make me sound cool when I repeat them among novices, firmly setting me on the path to eventual snobbery.

While I have never bought a wine from Vaynerchuk's store, or purchased and read any of his books, I feel obligated to now, as I recently had the good fortune to run into him on the square in downtown Sonoma.

Gary was in town doing a signing of his new book: "Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion!" As celebrity sightings go this one was big for me, and it was my first picture as well. Gary was in a hurry to get on to the next book signing down in Corte Madera, yet was eager to take a picture and find out who I was and what I did in the area.

Gary's passion has led him into his role as a leader in our industry and in the world of social media, which turned his parent's wine shop in New Jersey into a multi-million dollar business in the span of just a few years. Gary's passion is an inspiration to me in both my interests in wine and in the social media/blogging world. As such, Gary now has a permanent spot in my pantheon of personal heroes. Along with....

Abraham Lincoln,

Lance Armstrong,

Indiana Jones,

And Launchpad McQuack, may he rest in peace.

Day of Days: The Microwinery

Recently I got the opportunity to work for a day alongside our winemakers, chemists, cellarworkers, and enologists in the winery at Louis M. Martini.  It was a day for some of my co-workers and I to get our feet whet with wine knowledge as well as gain a deeper understanding of just what goes down behind closed doors.

Now I remember the first time I got a chance to peek inside some of the Gallo facilities.   It was a little awe-inspiring.  

So imagine my excitement when I learned I was going to put on my own oompa-loopa shoes and become a part of the magic of winemaking.  In reality, the coolest thing about the winery is how simple everything is.  Despite all the machinery and gleeming stainless steel, the biological process going on in the tanks is the exact same as it was a thousand years ago.  We're still just adding yeast to a mixture of crushed grapes to create alcohol.  As I was going to see today there were still many elements of the old world production methods, as well as many that were decidedly "new world".

The day began at 7 AM.  And what better way to start the morning then drinking!

Every morning the chemists enter the winery before everyone else to test the sugar (brix) levels of each tank and the temperature.  This crucial first step gives the entire winemaking team their starting point for the day's activities.  Because at this point the juice is changing and developing hour by hour, up to date precise measurements are needed.  To perform this test, we used a sophisticated sugar measuring device that cost more than my car.  We just wanted to taste the juice instead.  Samples of each of the fermenting tanks are brought to the lab, where they are loaded into this inauspicious testing centrifuge/time machine.  

I still don't really have a clue as to how it works, although I think its pretty much the same principle as the "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" from Back to the Future.  

After oogling all the chemistry lab contraptions, we were on to more drinking.  

Precise sugar measurements and data spreadsheets notwithstanding, the most important tool for the winemakers is their highly honed sense of taste.  With the lab data in hand we toured through some of the still fermenting tanks with winemaking team member Mike Eddy, who showed us just how hard it is to be a winemaker.  Imagine drinking warm, slightly carbonated, past its expiration Welch's Grape juice and trying to decipher how the flavors you're tasting will translate into a finished wine.  While the human brain can hold and identify thousands of different tastes and smells, we can only really pick out and recognize a small percentage of them.  The skill of the winemaker is in deciphering the clues hidden in the murky glass of unfinished wine and then deciding what to do.  

After testing and tasting, we got started on actually making the wine.  While originally wine was made using the wild yeast that exists naturally in the vineyard, most commercial wineries today employ cultured strains of yeast that are specifically designed to eat the sugars in grape must at a measured rate.  This was probably my least favorite part of the day because, like the leftover cups of stale Natty Light from last nights toga party, yeast smells.  

Whenever something is added to the tank of wine, its known as an addition.  The yeast is measured out, mixed in a bucket with some warm water and a little bit of wine to get the process started before the mixture is dumped into the tank.  Once everything's in there, you have to stir it up a bit.  

Using air pressure, this punch down machine squishes through the "cap" of grape skins that forms at the top of the tank after the berries have been loaded in.  The skins have all the color and lots of flavor.  And due to Carbon Dioxide gas being the other by-product of fermentation, the cap is quite tough to punch through.  This process is repeated after the addition of yeast multiple times to allow the skins and fermenting wine to marinate together.  

While the girls got to enjoy the fun of adding the yeast and punching everything down, I got sent to help with the pressing of the grape skins in another tank.  After the wine is done fermenting the tanks are drained and the juice is moved to the next step of the process.  What we're left with is a giant mound of grape skins that still contain a fair amount of juice.  Like different grades of olive oil, the juice left in the skins will still be of fairly good quality, and must be pressed in order to not waste anything.  I was given a plastic shovel, and told told to fill up a press basket, which is a 4 foot tall and 6 foot wide steel container with little holes in the side like a colander.  

From there it was on to more tasting.  We accompanied Mark Williams, the assistant winemaker into the temperature controlled barrel room where, surprise, nothing still tasted all that great.  Although heavily romanticized, many of the jobs we performed were either stinky, sweaty, sticky, nasty or some combination of the bunch.  Tasting from the tanks in the barrel room was probably more tolerable, as the wines were at somewhat stable sugar and alcohol levels, but there was still plenty of citrusy green acid that gave me the cravings for something to munch on.  

Mark's easily the tallest winemaker of the bunch, and usually sports the more stylish of what seem to be required baseball caps.  

Now began the actual hard work of the day, spending time on the sorting table.

While the rest of the winemaking process is highly technical, sorting is still a very hands on process.  As the table vibrated and sent the clusters down the line, we kept a close eye on unripe fruit, rotten fruit, or any little critters that might be getting into the wine.  The vibrations of the sorting table make everything tingle, from your nostrils down to your toes.  But while we meticulously picked through the fruit outside in the sun, little did we know there was a computer inside doing our work 10 times as fast.

This sorting machine comes from Italy, and is already in use in other fruit industries like Tomatoes and Olives.  The "holy shit" part of the machine is the big blue box, which contains a high speed camera and a computer.  As the destemmed grapes pass under the machine on a conveyor belt, the camera takes pictures of everything.  Based on scanned-in images of unripe fruit, leaves, stems and other stuff we don't want the computer identifies materials we want to separate.  Then the machine blows them out of mid air as the whole mixture is shot across the gap onto a receiving conveyor.  You can see from the photo that this machine inspires a lot of people to stand around and stare.

And that pretty much brings us to the end of the day.  My thoughts on the experience....

- Winemaking, harder than it looks and not as sexy, but still a ton of fun.

- The process is very technical, but still essentially the same as its been for thousands of years.

- Why does everyone wear caps when they're indoors?

- Grapes are very sticky.

A Very Tawny Port

Wine is such a great business to be in.  Evidence?  The Louis M. Martini "Very Tawny" Port.  

Port has been made in a variety of styles for many years in California although it was made popular in Portugal during the Napoleonic wars.  With the British populace cut off from their usual supply of Bordeaux and Burgandy, they turned to the wines of Portugal where much of the early land battles of the war were fought.  The fortified wines held up quite well during transit back to England, and so a love affair with these often sweet, yet sometimes dry fortified wines was born.  

And so today we have gone from this....

  

To this....

While Port has definitely not captured the hearts and minds of the majority of wine drinkers, for a select few it is a real obsession, and a great example of one of the many quirks of nut just the wine business, but of industry in general.

In the world of wine perceived value is something you can add or take away almost instantly simply by raising or lowering the price.  The theory of supply and demand is perfectly played out here with Port.  Let a wine age in a barrel for 20 years and the value is increased 10 fold!  While there are legitimate reasons why certain wines cost more than others, its amazing to see how some wines just sell better when producers raise their prices, convincing people that what they're buying is that much more "special".

Take the Louis M. Martini Tawny Port.  Here's a wine that the Martinis had made throughout the 1940s up until the 70s, and then phased out Production in favor of Ruby "vintage" ports and Cabernet Ports.  Fast forward a few decades to the 1990s when a lost and forgotten barrel of the original Tawny Port is discovered in the cellar after aging for 65 years, making it the oldest surviving Port in California.  Obviously, this is a pretty special wine.  It deserves a price tag to match it.  In the case of the "Very Tawny" Port at Louis Martini, its 150 dollars.  We're only allowed to sell it one bottle at a time because there's simply not enough bottles yet.  All these factors come together to make for a product that people just can't wait to buy.  

Imagine if that was the case for the makers of these products....

I'm not sure if I could sell a flaming red pimp hearse, no matter how many years it had "aged".  

Picking with the Kigers

A couple weeks ago marked my first real hands-on experience with the wine making process -- picking and crushing Syrah with our new friends John and Deb Kiger of Kiger Family Vineyards in Santa Rosa.

The whole experience came about rather quickly, and we were very lucky to have contacted the Kiger family just in time for them to be picking only a few days later. Brittany and I were watching the email pretty closely as it really is a day to day waiting game as to the right time to harvest the grapes. We had been experiencing a couple of pretty warm days that week (high 90s) and had they continued that might have sped up the ripening of the grapes to the point where they would have been picked too early for us to join in the fun. As it was the weather cooled off significantly for us to be able to pick on Friday, so we were very excited.

The morning of we got up early (7:30) and grabbed a quick bite before heading up to the Kiger's house on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. The fog had rolled in and it was really soupy in downtown Sonoma, which only added to the excitement. By the time we reached the Kiger house near Annadel State park on HWY 12 it had burnt off though, giving us perfect weather (sunny but still cool) to pick.

The Kigers are both retired from Silicon Valley and have been in Sonoma for a number of years now. The winery and vineyard operation takes up most of their time. They sell the majority of their grapes to the Biale winery and keep a small portion for themselves for home winemaking. Perched on the lower eastern slopes of the Sonoma Valley hills you can really see the draw of retiring to Sonoma country, with the fog hanging like smokey wisps above the trees and the morning sun just peeking over the hills.

We started with a brief tour of the winemaking facilities (a temperature controlled room off the garage) and the outdoor pen for the dog and the sheep - the all natural security and lawn mowing force. The sheep keep weeds and invasive plants to a minimum in the vineyard in the summertime, and in the process leave a lot of natural fertilizer behind. The dog was an extra large version of a Golden Retriever from Italy, specially bred to watch over sheep without herding them so they can do their thing in the vineyards.

After loading everything in the John Deere tractor we headed down the hill to get started.


The Kigers have two different vineyards on their property. The lower slopes have the majority of the Syrah that they sell to Bialy, while the upper vineyard has Cabernet Sauvignon and some Grenache that they just grafted recently. John told us that it was unusual for us to be picking on the lower slopes that day, as it usually is the grapes higher up that ripen first due to a longer period of sun exposure.

Using plastic tubs to deposit the grapes we got started at different ends of two rows near the bottom and got started.


We were using handy pruning shears to clip the grapes off the vine. John tells us that the pros (ie: Mexican laborers) use little half moon knives, pick about 3 times as fast as we did, and merely deflect the clusters with hands and knees into the buckets as they kick them along. After we were done picking we loaded the grapes back up to return to the house, although not before Deb chided me for not doing a very thorough job.

We brought the grapes back up to the main house where we commenced with the crushing. Like most red wines, the Syrah was to be crushed and mixed together with the skins in order for all the flavor and coloring to be extracted. While the whole operation was on a much smaller scale than commercial wineries, the process was essentially the same. Crushing was done using this contraption the Kiger's picked up at a home winemaking supply store. The grapes are fed into the hopper up top, and little rotating paddles force the grapes through two crushers that pulverise the skins and the grapes. As they are crushed they fall down into a large rotating cylinder with holes that acts as a colander, allowing the crushed grapes to fall through the holes and the leftover stems to be spat out the end.

After sorting through everything, we loaded the mixture into the most utilitarian of containers -- a garbage can. John makes sure the grapes have suitable headroom as the fermentation process will bubble things up a bit and cause it all to overflow. We use a requisitioned potato masher to punch everything down. 

These Syrah grapes will eventually become the main component of The Oddessy, a Syrah-Cabernet blend that the Kigers drink at home. They gave us two bottles to take home with us, and the wine is a fun and fruity table wine with a hefty component of french oak and a yeasty flavor. The wine will take about a week to ferment after John adds some yeast to the mixture, and will sit in a barrel for about a year before bottling.

And there you have it. About half the winemaking process done in half a morning, on no more than a few acres in Sonoma county. Seems like a pretty entertaining retirement to me.