Wanting to gain some real-life production experience at a winery, I approached Ed Madronich, owner of Flat Rock Cellars, to see if there was a possibility of helping out. I had a hankering to do some character-building hard labour. Lucky for me, Ed was for it. Ross Wise, Flat Rock's talented winemaker from New Zealand contacted me and voila, I had my first assignment: bottling.
Through the cellar door
On a warm spring May morning, I somehow managed to get myself out of bed at 5:30am (ugh, so early!). Upon a *slightly* late arrival to the winery, I noticed the mobile truck hard at work bottling the 2011 Nadja's Vineyard Riesling. Fully automated, I watched bottle after bottle get sterilized, filled with wine, sealed, labeled and boxed. Just like that! Many wineries use a mobile bottling service to cut down on costs. This particular truck bottled for Le Clos Jordanne the day before.
Pumping wine from tank
to the mobile bottling truck
I didn't know what to expect seeing how I've never worked in a winery. Images of bottles flying off of the line, smashing all over the place with me crying and then banned from ever coming back rolled through my mind. My job for the day was to help with the bottling of the 2011 cuvee. The wine would be laid down for a duration of time to conduct a second fermentation. The result? Sparkling wine.
An example of gyropalettes
These ones are in Champagne
www.champagne-heucq.com
The crew for the day was small in number but mighty in force. Greg, the assistant winemaker, let me pour a bucket of yeast, sugar and other nutrients into one of the large steel tanks. Crawling up a tall ladder, I poured the the mixture in and hoped for the best! The trick now was to get the wine thoroughly mixed with the additions and quickly into bottle, before the start of any fermentation.
Arranging the bottles just right
Sparkling wine is all about gas (insert your jokes here). To create "traditional method" bubbly (similar to how they do it in Champagne), base wine is placed into strong bottles with some sugar, yeast and then sealed. The yeast consume the sugar and in the process, create gas. That gas can't escape so it remains trapped inside the bottle. Once the yeast die (no more sugar to eat), the wine and sediment interact with one another, creating those complex aromas and flavours of baked bread and apple. No one wants to see dead yeast sediment inside the bottle. That wouldn't be appealing since sparkling wine is all about fine bubbles and clarity. The bottles are slowly turned until they are standing upside down, with the sediment trapped inside the neck of the bottle. This process of turning the bottles, called riddling, used to be done by hand. Now it's mostly done by a machine called a gyropalette. The bottlenecks are then frozen and opened under pressure. The yeast sediment is taken out and the bottles are topped off with more wine and a bit of sugar which determines the overall sweetness.
Images of Laverne & Shirley
came to mind during the day
Skid after skid of empty bottles
to be filled with wine
Even though most of the core bottling procedures were automated, there remained a few tasks that required more manual labour. I began my shift at the end of the line by filling the large metal cages with sealed bottles. These metal cages were to be transferred to a facility to go onto the gyropalettes. I then moved to the beginning of the line, placing empty bottles onto the conveyor belt. I thought those skids would never stop coming! Skid after skid, we had to make sure that bottles were continuously being fed into the machine. The wine was coming - whether a bottle was there or not. I then moved to middle of the line, the point that I coined as "Laverne and Shirley". The now sealed bottles had to be placed into bins and push them down to the guys who were loading up the cages. Bottles just kept coming at me with no end in sight! I was afraid to look away even for a split second in fear that bottles would crash with eachother and fall to the ground. Well, not really but it does add a dramatic flair. The conveyor belt doesn't move that fast but you still have to keep up!
The fruits of our labour!
10,850 bottles
By the end of the afternoon, we had 10,850 bottles of the 2011 cuvee. Amazing! I didn't know what that even looked like so I took photos to catalog the achievement. The base wine was 100% Chardonnay that had been aged in neutral barrels. Most of the wine was from 2011 with a small percentage from 2010. Cuvee in this case means a blend of grapes from different vintages. Now we wait for a few years for the bubbles to form. I can't wait to taste one of these bottles that I had a *very* small part in creating.
Completely exhausted, I finally understood why people say that that bottling isn't fun. It can be grueling hard work but an important part of the entire winemaking process. Unless we're all prepared to show up at a winery with straws for direct slurping (which I totally am), bottling is just one of those unavoidable necessities. My co-workers thought that I had gone completely mad to have taken a vacation day to do more work! Even with the incredible muscle soreness I endured afterwards, I would do it again in a heart beat.
One by one...
For my efforts, I was given a few bottles of the 2011 Nadja's Riesling bottled that morning. I was instructed to let it sit for a few months so the wine could recover from bottle shock. A nice wine to enjoy over the summer.
2011 Nadja's Vineyard
Riesling
It was a pleasure to have been welcomed into the Flat Rock family even for the one day. Thanks Ross! Thanks Ed! Hopefully there will be more opportunities in the future. I'd love to continue with these posts, highlighting the various stages of getting that wine from the vineyard into your glass.
Go visit Flat Rock Cellars and discover how well cool-climate varieties such as Riesling and Pinot Noir thrive here in Ontario: www.flatrockcellars.com
A few weeks ago I attended the Discover Chardonnay tasting at the Roy Thompson Hall here in Toronto. It was to finish off the International Cool Climate Chardonnay celebration taking place over the weekend in the Niagara wine region. I was so excited about this event. I couldn't make it out to wine country so I just let the wines of the world come to me. I just love chardonnay. I know that there are many people who are very "ABC": anything-but-chardonnay.
Well, I say to those ABCers: "try a cool climate chardonnay!"
I was eager and early
Ontario Represent!
So what's the big deal with cool climate chardonnay? Well, usually when you say "chardonnay", people often imagine a style of wine that's super buttery, oaky with high alcohol. Sometimes, this style of wine can also be quite flabby. This style of wine penetrated the marketplace and gave the grape a bad rap. Bigger ain't always better! This type of wine will often come from a warmer climate where the grapes ripen sometimes too well. The riper the grape, the more sugar it will have. When sugar increases, acid decreases. Acidity is what gives wine it's "zing!"...it's liveliness. Warmer climates sometimes have a harder time maintaining the acidity in their wines because, well, you guessed it - it gets too warm. Don't get me wrong, I've had some wonderful chardonnays from warmer climates. There are some stellar examples in my wine rack. I'm just saying that we need to start looking at the cooler climates of the world to save chardonnay from being alphabetized...no more ABC!
My favourite sound - pop!
What is considered a cool climate? Many factors contribute to creating a climate that is considered cool:
latitude (how far north or south the location is from the equator) altitude (how high up the vineyards are) proximity to large body of water (water acts like thermal regulator)
Cool climate chardonnays really show their sense of "place". They express where they were born and raised. Chardonnays coming from cooler climates are delicate, elegant and have wonderful minerality. They can be extremely refreshing (from that great acidity) and complex.
Candians make great wine!
It was great to see so many Ontario wineries represented. I'm a huge advocate of Canadian wine. Specifically, Ontario wine. We have such wonderful "cool climate" factors for producing examples of yummy mineral-driven chardonnay:
"Thirty Ontario wineries started the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Association – a not-for-profit group devoted to reinstating the dignity of chardonnay." - www.coolchardonnay.org
I'm a lover of Ontario Chardonnay. I'll shout it out loud! I did, however, taste some lovely Chardonnays from other parts of the world. Don't hate me Ontario. My love affair with you will never be overshadowed.
Vie di Romans
This Italian Chardonnay was one my personal highlights of the tasting. It was spectacular. Too bad you can't buy it anywhere yet!
"located within the DOC zone of Friuli Isonzo, in the most easternmost area of northern Italy, close to the Slovenian border. The Adriatic is barely 20 km (1243 miles) to the south, and the first slopes of the Alps about 30 km (1864 miles) to the north."
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