I totally jinxed myself with that last entry. The moment I mention that I’m bored at work, things pick up overnight. The big reason why I didn’t have much to do last week was because the juice was still fermenting. My lab only gets ferment samples once they hit zero brix, and until they do they are the yeast team’s responsibility. After the tank hits zero, we get the sample, and run it through the FTIR. Well, this last week, the quite a few of the tanks decided to hit zero brix and give the yeast team a break. As a result, my sample load close to tripled in the expanse of about three days. I stopped helping out on ferment round in the mornings, and instead collected my own samples to test for Residual Sugar (RS).
The RS round wasn’t the only thing to occupy my time, we were also getting tank samples again. Once the tests for RS get to an acceptable low level of sugar, the tank is cooled to close to freezing temperatures, in order to stop the fermentation completely. The yeast settle to the bottom of the tank, and the unfinished wine is racked off into another tank and sulfur is added again; an additional measure taken to stop fermentation (I think). The lab gets a sample every racking, so after the racking is done I get to run a sulfur and run it through the FTIR.
In this last week, the winemakers also started giving us random samples that they wanted us to pull and so they could taste them, as well as run through the FTIR. I never got an adequate explanation as to why these samples were interesting; I’m sure they had their reasons, I just wish I knew what they were. The only thing all of the samples had in common was that the tanks they came from had been on cooling for a couple days, but they hadn’t been racked off of the yeast lees yet. My guess is they were just getting some more information on the tanks, so they can make more educated decisions about secondary fermentations and blending. If any of my readers (It occurred to me that a few of my more knowledgeable collogues may be reading this) can end my speculation, please do so and leave a comment.
In spite of everything, I was able to do one thing on my Blenheim bucket list this week: I got to go out to the Oyster Bay winery and have a tour. Jenna, a girl in the Mud House red cellar, has a boyfriend, Doug, who works for Oyster Bay, and he offered to give us a tour. All of the Oyster Bay workers get picked up and dropped off at Duncannon by bus, so after Jenna and I got of work, we quickly changed clothes, scarfed down some dinner, and then hopped the bus to Oyster Bay with the night crew.
The Oyster Bay winery is about forty minutes west of Blenheim on Nelson Road, which takes you into the valley which contains most of the vineyards in the Marlborough wine region. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera, so I will do my best to describe it. Oyster Bay is a unique winery, in that it is very new (only 5 years old), all of the tanks are indoors, and that it is enormous; easily triple the capacity of Mud House. If this building were surrounded by anything other than vineyards and a picturesque valley, it could be anything: a high tech airplane hanger, some sort of crazy research and development lab out of a science fiction movie, a small professional sport arena, etc.; the last thing you would think is “this is a winery.” Once inside though, the scenery looked familiar: glycol-jacketed tanks, two and three inch hoses, pumps, spanners, fixed lines, cross-flow and RDV filters, presses, de-stemmers, and recieval bins. The biggest difference was that there was more of everything, everything was much bigger, and everything was newer. Doug’s story sounded a lot like the stories of the guys I work with at Mud House: this was the biggest winery he had worked in by far, and while it’s intimidating and confusing at first, you get used to it, and after a few weeks you can walk through it blindfolded.
Of course, the highlight of the tour for me was getting to visit the Oyster Bay lab. I confess I was very surprised when I saw it: the Oyster Bay lab had a lot of cool toys at their disposal, but they did not have an FTIR! A winery that size could easily use one, maybe even two with the volume of grapes they bring in. An FTIR, when properly calibrated, can give you decently accurate numbers for several common analyses, pH, titratable acidity, volatile acidity, malic acid, percent alcohol, yeast available nitrogen, residual sugar, and others, including free and total sulfur if you buy an extra attachment, in less than a minute. All of the analyses if done by hand can take hours if you don’t have the staff. Oyster Bay had a fully staffed lab, so they could power through samples at a decent rate, but they could siginificantly cut their staffing costs and instrument maintenance costs if they switched to FTIR analysis.
That said, I am a little jealous of the Oyster Bay techs: if it was their first vintage they learned many more analytical tricks than I did. I stayed just as busy as they did, but when it comes down to it I didn’t come to New Zealand to make money, I came to New Zealand to learn methods in analytical wine chemistry. I already knew how to use an FTIR from Oregon State, and also from my Gallo internship; the only thing I can confidently say that I learned inside and out was how to determine free and total sulfur by aspiration.
Im not going to complain too much though; overall, I had a phenomenal time at Mud House. It wasn’t the location, it wasn’t the work itself, and it definitely wasn’t the pay; it was the people who made my experience enjoyable. We had a really solid, tight-knit group of temporary employees. We went to work, we got the job done, and then we played ping pong, ate, drank, and laughed together until we had to wake up and do it all over again. I am going to miss everyone dearly with this is over. My boss Tina was a joy to work for as well; it was always great talking with her in between samples, and while I didn’t learn analytical methods, I did learn a lot about wine and winemaking from her. She is studying to be a winemaker at a university in Oz…sorry, Australia, and during vintage she was making a fortified wine for a school project. I am very sad that I will not get to taste the finished product, the last time I tasted it it had a lot of potential, according to her.
That’s all for now. The next entry will mark the end of my time at Mud House and the beginning of my travels in New Zealand. Though between you and me, I am well aware of the fact that I am posting this entry four days late, and I am actually writing this from a table in the kitchen of a hostel in Kaikoura. I hope to get back on track and have a new entry posted Saturday, New Zealand time. Talk to you later!
-DK
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