Fidelitas...A Perfect Wine to Celebrate an Engagement

Greetings fellow winos!  I thought I would take a moment to share a celebration this evening and the wine that is accompanying the festivities.  Previous posts have mentioned a special someone in my life who has been an inspiration and great source of support every since she came into my life.  Well, we were enjoying a lazy President's Day afternoon together and were in the middle of a period of discussion & banter when I felt completely at peace with a decision that I've been mulling around in my head for a while.  I took this wonderful woman in my arms, told her that I wanted to make her a permanent part of my life, and asked her to marry me...

She said yes!

Needless to say, after the obligatory phone calls to family, we had to celebrate.  To go with a dinner of chipotle pork loin and pasta with red chilies, lemon, & arugula, I selected Fidelitas Boushey Vineyard 2006 from Fidelitas Wines in the Yakima Valley, WA.  I had picked up this wine at the winery during a trip to WA back in 2010 and had been waiting for a special occasion to pop it open (I think this qualifies).

Appearance:  Rust-garnet color, clear, gleaming sheen
Aroma:  Restrained nose with light aromas of cherry, coffee, some earthy floral notes, and a tiny amount of cocoa.
Taste: Invigorating with light jammy red fruit.  Well structure & balanced with nicely integrated tannins and a smooth finish.  Rich, round mouthfeel.  A 14.8% abv wine that you can keep drinking until the bottle is gone.

Overall, an incredible wine to go with an incredible event.  Not overly tannic & astringent, not puckering, not overly fruity--just an excellently crafted blend of 64% cabernet sauvignon, 29% merlot, 7% cabernet franc.  And I thought the winery motto was especially appropriate for the occasion:

 Faithful, loyal, true

This is the kind of wine that I seek to make, and those three words sum up everything that Shawna & I feel about our life together.  Thank you Charlie Hoppes for creating a wine to perfectly match this special occasion.

 Salute,
Noel

Going commercial--am I crazy?

Well, readers, Aaronap Cellars is taking a big step.  A few posts have eluded to the process, but just thought I formally announce that I've been taking the first steps in obtaining the required licenses and permits to turn Aaronap Cellars into a commercial winery.  As you can imagine, this has required a lot of soul searching, planning, and dreaming over the past 2-3 years.  At a number of points, I've come close to concluding that I'm absolutely nuts to consider this and should just be content to remain small and make wine for myself.  But every time I've paused to rethink, I fall back on the realization that wine-making is my passion and the career I want to pursue in the future.  That being said, I'm not a rich person, so will have to start small and keep my day job for financial support for a good long while.

I also have to give credit to a special someone who's recently come into my life.  Facing the long road through the approval process is daunting (to say the least) when you're alone.  Having someone standing beside you who firmly supports your dream and wants you to succeed is a big help & a source of comfort when you get a little discouraged.  This special someone has been an inspiration and one of the reasons that I've made more progress in the past 6 months than in the past 2-3 years.  All I can say to her is 'Thank you hon."

So, what have I accomplished so far?

1)  Completed a business plan
2)  Completed an initial financial planning spreadsheet
3) Filed for incorporation as Aaronap Cellars LLC with the Commonwealth of MA
4) Established business bank accounts
5) Became a member of the MA Farm Winery & Growers Association
6) Completed the Federal New Winery application.  OK, I still have 2 little items left to do before I can submit it, but one is to make a photocopy of the winery premise diagram and the other is purchase a surety bond (and I know who to call for that).  Those will both be done in the next 1-2 days so I consider the application complete.
7) Contacted the town of Westford to initiate the local approval process and got good initial feedback that the winery would be an allowable activity in my zoning.  Long road to go through the local approval, but a good first step.  Hey--at least they didn't say "NO"!

What's next?
1) Complete the MA Farm Winery license application
2) Obtain building permit to finish the basement
3) Clean out the basement and start construction!

There's a lot more after that, but that's the immediate next steps.  For those wanting to keep abreast of the up-to-the-minute news, please find Aaronap Cellars on Facebook.  I often find it much easier to write short snippets of info instead of an entire blog entry, but will continue to document the big steps here as well.  Winemaking activities will wind down during construction & licensing, but stay tuned!

Cheers,
Noel

Help a future winemaker, get some wine

I recently had an opportunity to donate to the American Wine Society Education Foundation to help fund a scholarship for a student in the oenology field.  What sparked this occasion was that the AWS had a little wine left over that had been donated for the AWS 2011 Annual Conference that was held in Rochester, NY in early November.  Enough wine for 35 cases--just a wee bit of left-over wine.  We really must do a better job of drinking the place dry at the 2012 conference in Portland, OR!  So they decided to offer a case of wine to whomever would donate $100 to build a $3500 scholarship.

Well, I'm a sucker for helping young students, so I dashed off a check.  Couple of weeks later, the wine arrived today!  And I'm tickled pink about the contents

Dessert Wines
Ochoa Moscatel 2010 (DO, Spain)

White Table Wines
Firehouse Cellars Riesling Lake Erie (Geneva-on-the-Lake, OH)
Sheldrake Point Dry Riesling 2010 (Finger Lakes, NY)
Chateau Ste Michelle Dry Reisling 2010 (Columbia Valley, WA)
Concannon Conservancy Chardonnay 2009 (Livermore Valley, CA)
Leonard Oakes Estate Winery Chardonnay 2009 (Lake Ontario, NY)
Rooster Hill Traminette 2008 (Finger Lakes, NY)
Isidoro Polencic Collio Friulano 2010 (DOC, Italy)
Hera Vinho Verde 2010 (Portugal)

Red Table Wines
Swedish Hill Optimus 2007 (Finger Lakes, NY) 
Piera Martellozzo Tab Bor Rosso Friuli (DOC, Friuli Grave, Italy)
Crasto Douro 2009 (DOC, Portugal)

I think it's pretty clear that the conference attendees really went for the red wines and left the whites alone!  These will really add to the tasting spreadsheet that I've been keeping of wines that I've recently tasting.  Sweetest donation I've ever made.

Salute,
Noel

It's Mitt Romney Beer!

This is only tangentially related to wine, but it was hilarious so I have to share!

A couple of weeks ago, I invited some old friends from my Ann Arbor, MI days over to watch the Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints play-off wildcard game.  Even though I admittedly have a goodly stock of booze in the basement, I decided that wine just doesn't cut it for football watching so I stopped into a local package store to grab some beer.  The place I went was next door to the grocery store so I wasn't expecting a big selection of craft beer but figured they'd at least have Sam Adams.  To my surprise, the craft beer selection was actually pretty good and, low and behold, there on a shelf in the fridge aisle was a 6-pack of Stone Brewing Co.'s Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale shining like a beacon.  My mouth started to water and I decided that I just had to buy it, especially (or ironically) as I was wearing my Arrogant Bastard Ale t-shirt that I had gotten while visiting Stone in 2010.  I ignored the price tag (a gasp-inducing $18) and grabbed it along with a couple of other beers (a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA & a Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale for those keeping track of my beer tastes), since there was no way I was sharing the Stone with anyone.  I may be a nice guy, but I'm not that nice, darn it!

Making my way to the cash register, I handed the beer over to the clerk who scanned the barcodes of my selections.  "Oh my god," he exclaimed.  "Didn't know we had a 6-pack so expensive.  Hell, this is Mitt Romney beer!"

Salute,
Noel

P.S.  Ironically, my friends wanted to sample my wine during the game, so we actually didn't touch the beer.  And believe me, the Romney-ish Oaked Arrogant Bastard ale tastes extraordinarily good!

Football vs Wine Bottling---the bottling won!

For those not following the news, or simply living on the planet Neptune, Tim Tebow (I believe some other members of the Denver Broncos also came) was in town yesterday for a play-off game with the New England Patriots.  I think most of the northeastern US came to a grinding halt while everyone hunkered in front of their TVs for the evening to watch the battle of Tom Brady vs God.

But not at Aaronap Cellars!  I had some wine to bottle and a lovely assistant to help, so to heck with the game.  If you scroll down the blog, you'll notice that I mentioned some experiments with sparkling cranberry wine in my last post.  The primary fermentation for the base wines were all completed, so it's time to filter, bottle, add the liqueur de tirage, and get the secondary fermentation underway.

Sounds simple, huh?  Well, friends & acquaintances know that nothing is done simply at Aaronap Cellars and this was no different.  I didn't have just one cranberry wine, but THREE! 

1) Cranberry base made from cranberries and water (2 lbs cranberries/gallon)
2) Cranberry Cider made from cranberries and Carlson Orchards Premium Cider Blend (1 lb/gallon)
3) Cranberry-Niagra made from cranberries and Welch's White Grape Juice (1 lb/gallon)

All the wines were filtered in sequence through coarse, medium, and fine filters until they were polished & crystal clear.  And then the fun began...

I had read about an innovative secondary fermentation method that avoids the laborious process of riddling & disgorging during sparkling wine production.  To give proper credit, Zac Brown had posted this method on WinePress.US and I really wanted to give it a try.  Essentially, I placed 1g of a QA-23 yeast that has been encapsulated in alginate beads (sold as Pro-Restart) in the hollow portion of a plastic champagne cork.  A 3/4-inch disk of stainless steel screen (sold as faucet aerator or smoke pipe screens) was then wedged in the top of the cork to hold the yeast beads in place.  This was actually harder than it sounds as the screens are pretty stiff, but after some flexing and slow pressure, it was actually possible to push the screens in.

For the liqueur de tirage, I used Coopers carbonation drops (made of ~3 g invert sugar) that are normally used to carbonate beer.  I further complicated matters by splitting each batch of wine into half and adding 2 Coopers drops to one half and 4 drops to the other to give a frizzante-style lightly carbonated sparkler and a full-blown carbonated sparkling wine.  After the drops were added, each bottle was capped with a yeast-filled cork and covered with wire hood, and then inverted to dissolve the sugar drops and place the wine in contact with the yeast.  At the moment, the bottles are sitting in my guest bedroom closet hopefully beginning to undergo the secondary fermentation that produces those lovely "bubbles"

Salute,
Noel

p.s.  And in case you're completely out of media touch:  Tom Brady won.  Actually, not so much as won, but crushed, obliterated, demolished, stunned, bowled over, etc.   He even punted for pete's sakes!

2011 Crush Winding Down, Sort of

After all the excitement this week, I'm feeling a little let down as the 2011 crush season is winding down.  I'll admit that having M&M crush & destem for me robbed a little bit of the experience, but it did save me a lot of work (especially on clean-up).  I didn't admit to it in the last post, but I actually left the carignane sitting on the loading dock at M&M when I picked up the rest of the grapes.  Was in a hurry since I had gotten there a little late and they brought out a pallet of frozen buckets that was wrapped up so nice, and I completely forgot to count buckets.  Got home and realized that the carignane was a separate pallet of buckets.

What do you do in this case?  Thank your lucky stars that your girlfriend's parents lives just north of Hartford and happens to be coming to your house for Thanksgiving.  Shawna's dad graciously agreed to stop at M&M on Wednesday and pick up the carignane for me.  What a guy--I did send them home with 5 bottles of wine as a thank you! 

The syrah and grenache are pretty much done with alcohol fermentation.  I innoculated with MLB near the end to take advantage of the warm vat temperatures and big nutrient source in the grapeskins.  Trying to extend a maceration until next weekend when I can press.  The cab sauv is coming along a little slower--just about half done with alcohol fermentation.  And the carignane just got innoculated this morning.

Of course, that makes it sound like things are starting to wind down for the year.  Can't have that!  So I got a bee in my bonnet about other sparkling wines I could make from MA produce and thought--sparkling cranberry apple!  Can't get much more New England-y than that.  Found some premium cider and loaded up on cranberries on the cheap this week and just started the base wine tonight.

Salute,
Noel

2011 Fermentation---at last!

It's been a long, long, & difficult harvest season in California this year.  Spring rains that knocked the pollen off the flowers and resulted in drastically reduced yields followed by cool summer temperatures that extended into fall.  Many vineyards failed to reached maturity and the fruit was left to rot on the vine.

I've been patiently waiting for my grape order to arrive.  Almost a month later than usual, the Koch Vineyard cabernet sauvignon reached maturity and was harvested.  Of course--it arrived on the East Coast just in time for our Snowtober.  Thankfully, the emergency back-up generators at M&M kept it cool.  I was simply unable to receive the fruit after it arrived, so I had M&M crush/destem and freeze the must until I could get down to CT to pick it up.  The Koch cab sauv was actually the ONLY thing in my order that arrived on the East Coast.  Everything else either failed to mature or West Coast wineries snatched it all up.  But, my broker Nick was able to find some replacements for the rest of what I had ordered.  What a guy!

The line-up for 2011:

32 gallons of Koch Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (Suisan Valley)
23 gallons of Lambert Ridge Syrah (Suisan Valley)
12 gallons of Paso Robles Grenache Noir
14 gallons of Lambert Ridge Carignane (Suisan Valley-a special fermentation treat for Shawna)

Now, this will be the absolute latest that I've ever fermented wine and is pushing the envelope of my creativity to get the frozen must thawed and warm enough for the yeast to be fruitful and multiply.  Here's some pictures of what I've resorted to.  The fermentors are clustered around a space heater and then covered with blankets to contain the heat as much as possible.  So far, it's working.  Must temperature after innoculation is ~70 °F and cap formation was evident within 18 hrs.  I'd like to spike the temperature to at least 85 °F so will continue the heat tent treatment, especially as the temperature dips below 32 °F at night.

Salute!
Noel