Dec 1st

Time definitely flies when you are having fun because these four months felt like 4 days. I've learned that making good wine is not easy. Life at a winery is very very hard work and the companies must wait years before they can sell their product in the market and start to get a return on their investment.

I would like to thank the Comenge family for allowing me to come and learn from their winery. Alvaro and Jaime were so generous and could not have treated me any better.

Also Rafa spent countless hours with me showing and explaining - sometimes over and over - all aspects of making wine. From canopy management, grape growing, harvesting, making, tasting, barrels and everything else in between. I also spent countless hours working with Emilio, Rafa's assistant. Also thank you to the girls in the office - Faviola, Elinor and Stella. They made my life so much easier.

This picture is Emilio, me and Rafa on my last day.

Thank you all !!! It has truly been a dram come true for me. Last stop - graduation and then job search....

Cork Forrest

After the wines had fermented, life at the bodega retuned a little bit to normal. I spent most of my time working on my thesis but I did have a chance to go to Portugal for a conference. One of the cool side trips was a visit to a cork forrest and manufacturing facility.

This picture is the forrest. Corks are made from the bark, not the tree. I learned that the trees must be at least 50 years old before companies are able to use the bark for corks. Then, they can only be harvested every 9 years. You can see the bark removed from the trees.

The other picture is of me at the manufacturing facility. This facility had tons and tons of bark stacked around their property. It was really impressive.

Fermentation

After the grapes go into the deposits, then Rafa starts the fermentation process. Yeast is added and converts the natural sugars in the grapes into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The must expands and heats up as the sugars are converting and it is necessary to monitor the density and the temperature throughout the process. As it converts, the density lowers. If the temperature gets too hot, it will kill the yeast strains and fermentation will not finish. A couple of the vats did get too hot but before it ruined itself, Rafa ran the juice through a cooling mechanism. It was very interesting and fun to taste from the deposits while they were converting.

This first picture is the top of one deposit that was filled a little too full, it expanded too much and pushed the top up.

The other picture is of me trying some of the must from one of the deposits.

Fermentation is started in a smaller vat and then later added to the bigger ones, I stood on top of the deposit and took a picture of the smaller vat fermenting. I think the colors are cool and you can see the juice bubbling.

Harvest Time

I became very lazy and stopped updating my blog... but I wasn't that lazy, its just that when the harvest started, so did our 14 hour minimum workdays. Harvest lasted a little less than two weeks. It starts by pulling out and putting together the sorting tables, setting up the de-stem machines and the pumps to move the grapes up into the deposits. Comenge harvests by hand and the grapes are put in plastic bins that stack on top of each other in order to prevent the grapes from breaking while they are being transported. Once the grapes start arriving, they dont stop until the end of the day.

There is a triple selection of grapes that are used for Comenge wines. the first is in the field, the second is on a sorting table where any leaves, bugs and un-ripe clusters are removed. After the clusters move through the de-stemming machine, the individual little stems are removed so that only grapes are getting into the deposits. At the end of the day when all of the workers have gone home, then all of the equipment must be cleaned thoroughly to prevent any bacteria from growing and creating off odors and flavors.

The video that is attached shows some of the action after the grapes arrive.

Back to the grapes!

When I arrived back at the Bodega on Wednesday morning, Janina and I went straight out into the field to collect grapes from each parcel and measure sugar content, acid, ph etc. We are also finishing measuring all of the plants and inserting the data into spreadsheets. There is more labeling of bottles and stacking on pallets happening now, and this morning, we tested all of the equipment needed for the harvest to make sure everything is working... and everything is working.

We analyzed the sugar content outside and stomped on the grapes this time to get the juice. Well, Janina stomped on them. I was going to take a picture of me doing it with bare feet but it was very cold that morning. The boots fit her better than me so she gets the privilege.

The grapes are maturing quite nicely, I'm happy to report.

A trip to Holland

The Bodega flew me to Holland to represent them at a wine fair. I flew to Amsterdam and then took a train to the city of Houten. That is where the fair was and that is where the importer for Comenge is located. Its a city of about 50,000 people. I was not able to do anything that a tourist would do because my hotel was located in a 'tech center' kind of place and the fair was all day long. This was more like a trade show in that all of the exhibitors are importers of wines and spirits for Holland. All of the attendees were restaurant, bar and wine shop owners. These events are fun because you can walk around and taste all different kinds of alcohols. They are just tastes, so everyone is not walking around drunk. I tasted an Organic Vodka, several different styles of Sparkling Wines, Several different styles of Sherry, some wines from Brazil and wines from Austria. The Austrian wines were interesting because there was a guy from the winery in the same booth with me. I was able to taste the wines with him and there were some new grapes for me that I had never tried; Gruner Veltner and Zweigelt. He had 8 different wines and I tried them all. The best was a trockenberenauslese. This is a very-sweet desert wine that is made from grapes called Welschriesling. They are picked after a mold called Botrytis starts to form. Sometimes people call them 'late-harvest' wines. Delicious!!!

The first picture is the name of the wine fair - Drankenpakket.

The next is the booth of the importer - Van Dort Wijnspecialist.

The third picture is me standing outside of the exhibition hall.

Laboratory Fun!

Harvest is just a few short weeks away. Janina and I have driven out to all of the parcels, pulled individual grapes off of the vines and have taken them to the laboratory for analysis. We first count 200 grapes and weigh them, then we take 20 of those grapes and squeeze out the seeds to look at their color. We count the number of seeds, separate those that are all green, green and brown and all brown. Green indicates non maturity and brown indicates maturity. Right now, most are somewhere in the middle. Then we crush the rest of the grapes with our hands and analyze the juice. We take the temperature, sugar level, acid and ph measurements. The wine maker uses all of this information to determine exactly when to start the harvest in each individual parcel. Its important information. We will be doing this several more times before I get to enjoy the back-breaking fun of harvest.

Sticky hands are the norm.