SEVEN.SLEEPERS

Seven in the morning. I stumble out of bed. Tubs and tubes litter the living room and dining table. I glance at the airlock. No popping or gurgling. No heady scents of bread and fruit. Dead yeasts have sat at the bottom of a fermenter caked in oxyclean for two days.

I pop the lid, hesitant to see what bacterial outbreak has occurred. Yet, behold!

Life! HA! HA! Take that trying to do something! Something did it all on its own!

A worry persists however. Not starting the yeasts immediately allows other bacteria to join in. They can add off flavors. I have no idea what nasties might be breeding in there. To avoid wasting time with a bad batch, I will taste the must later.

For now, let the yeast cells work their slightly gross-looking magic. In addition to making alcohol out of sugar, the yeasts draw out color, tannins and further flavors from the skins. Although it looks like a liver-after-auspices, I leave in the sack of skins. This leaches out more, well, blueberryness.

To encourage my late-bloomers, I hop over to my local zymurgist (of course I have one). Back home, my yeast fine dine on Fermax Yeast Nutrient. Although grapes and blueberries have similar nutrients, I doubt my recent oxyclean debacle has left much food for the yeast feast.
Unlike Trimalcio's never-ending dinner, my yeasts eat quickly. Not enough distracting entertainments, orgies or sugars probably. I stir the must to re-oxygenate them. Without oxygen, yeasts will go to sleep.

More curious than brave, I taste the must. It is surprisingly fine. The yeasts and nutrient are there, but blueberry notes dominate. The body is medium, tannins low, acidity medium, CO2 fizz persists and sweetness still hangs around.
So I check the hydrometer in the (far more science-tastic than a wine bottle) test tube. We have crept to 1.020 S.G. Once it gets to 1.000 the yeasts will starve and sink to their grave.I check the forcast. A cold front is moving in for the night. This worries me. If the temperature drops near 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the yeast will slow down or die.

We have no thermostat with central heating. So I treat my patient with a humidifier and blanket.Welcome back yeasties!

NILLUS.

Only a few options lay before me. Wait another night and risk spoilage. Add more yeast. Add sulfur to prevent spoilage. Siphon out the old yeasts, filter out the oxyclean, add new yeasts and hope. Or dump everything.

My spouse glared at my lack of trust. Patience had payed off last time. So I will give the yeasts another night. Like Selene, I will keep visiting my over-restful Endymions. But instead of an eternal beauty-preserving sleep, I shall demand Zeus wake the lazy bastards. The oxyclean residue may merely consist of those "safe" minerals post-cleaning. The discoloration may be superficial. Wake up!

RUSHING.REVENGE

Our old apartment returns to wine friendly temperatures (middle seventies Fahrenheit). So I pack the kids into the back seat, and we carefully crawl over speed bumps home. I only yell at them once for splashing each other. Once they reclaim their place as living room decoration, we seem ready for fermentation. I quickly clean the equipment. However, the must is only a few inches deep, while the hydrometer is 10 inches long: too long to check the specific gravity (relative density, brix) of the sugar to liquid.

I rack some must into a sterile wine bottle that will fit the hydrometer.
The specific gravity sits at 1.030 brix. This means that the potential alcohol will end up at around measly 4% of volume. You might recall my Barbarescowelches started at 1.080 brix giving it almost 11% potential alcohol by volume. Blueberries have only 65% of the sugars that grapes contain. So I cheat. Not interested in blueberry beer, I stir in some dissolved organic cane sugar (maybe a cup, or two or three). If smart, I would recheck the specific gravity to determine the potential alcohol. But I am far too impatient to waste time being smart. It is time to ferment.

Internet wisdom claims Montrachet yeast from Red Star is the weapon of choice. Developed by UC Davis in 1963, yeast strain 522 can turn sugar into alcohol until it reaches 13% or dips outside of 59 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. It can even survive small amounts of sulfur dioxide (in case I get cleaning crazy). Other strains of yeast are tougher, but my fruit is not concentrated enough in flavor or body to cover up more than 13% alcohol on the palate. Balance is the goal. Well, at least drink-ability would be nice. So, as before, I add my single-celled militia of millions to a cup of warm water and wait. Nothing. One hour then two pass by. I get angry and dump the yeast into the must, cap it, air lock it and go to bed.

With morning light I check the tank. Eerie silence. No gurgling air lock like last time. I crack the lid. Nothing.

Maybe it is too cold. The yeast packet may be a dud. Maybe it was the change in location. What if red is the new black? Maybe blueberries lack the sugar or nutrients to restart yeast.

I look for life. A white film runs to a blue patch on the otherwise burgundy juice and skin bag. Not good. In my mad dash to clean and re-rack, I did not rinse out the "rinsing is not necessary with one step" oxyclean. The yeasts may never wake up. Billy Mays's revenge is at hand.

PROMETHEAN.DEFEAT

The old apartment climbs in heat, dangerously higher than the fruit could handle. Another day and work-worn, I go to our borrowed and air-conditioned abode. There, even a few defrosted blueberries have started fuzzing white with mold. Still hopeful for the batch, I toss the kin of Verminus out.
Hands purified (and not trusting my feet), I start the crush. Gravity has already broken a few berries. I could pour boiling water to start extraction, but that would water down the final result. I want a rich dry wine and adding water means adding sugar to keep the potential alcohol high (for each gram of sugar, I will get half a gram of alcohol). If I went down that path too soon, everything would taste like cane sugar not blueberries.Now any reasonable/rich winemaker would have a machine crusher/destemmer do all the work for them. Even body weight on feet or ancient plank presses would be more efficient than this. But how would I be sure that every berry met its fate? Hand crushing. I get more juice with natural sugars and flavors closer to the source. Yet after an hour of smashing, I'm spent. This really, really sucks.However, succumbing to the sweet siren call of using a potato masher would draw this ship to rocky ruin. Seeds contain nasty, astringent green-tasting tannins. Only flesh (or expensive tech) can break fruit without breaking seeds. So I press on...

Finally unbound from my mast, I need to separate juice from skins. Easy! I take my siphoning tube and pump. And pump. And...damnit! Nothing. The end is jammed. Plan B: Filter press them apart. Trying not stain the new (borrowed) apartment red, I slow pour into a filter bag. Once full, I squeeze the bag, dump the dry skins back in the crush bucket and pour it back into the bag.I keep at it for an hour but like a Promethean liver, juice keeps emerging with each cycle. The bag then breaks. But I string it up and kept going. This pressing process should get me 15-30% more juice than otherwise.Black fingered and exhausted by one in the morning, I quit. Almost ten pounds of blueberries had given me only three fourths of a gallon of juice and a hideous purple blob. Fermentation, racking and aging would evaporate the juice even further. Once the angles had taken their share, only a few bottles would remain.
Whatever. I re-bag the blob to ferment later with the juice. A CO2 blend is sprayed to protect the juice and then covered. Worry-worn, I wander back to my superheated apartment. The next day should see air-conditioning -and thus my wine to be- return home.

PHEONIX.DEFROSTING

Days of distraction divide me from my blueberry defrosting.
Wine equipment languishes like a cross-dressed Achilles, forced into hiding by his mother. Wigged in lint, powdered in dust, for too long it endures aimless domesticity. Thus, as a feigned Odysseus, I shall trick my comrade-in-drag back into virile action. This persuasive purge shall come, however, not by hidden arms but by fresh air.
Instead of sterilizing with sodium sulfate as before, which led to spousal itching, sneezing and complaining, I try oxygen. "One Step" claims to clean and sanitize with oxygen (O2), a chemical that deceased Billy Mayses and winemakers (in the electrified gas form of ozone O3) have latched onto. Simply put, sodium precarbonates (salts) mix with water, release oxygen and sanitize by morphing into hydrogen peroxide that kills microbes. Only earth friendly, fluffy minerals remain. "Rinsing is not necessary with one step". What could possibly go wrong?
Fearing Billy Mays hauntings, beards and other oxyclean-related taints, I rinse my wares, let dry and go to the freezer.
My sanitized hands dump the chilly blocks of blueberries into the crush tank. With thaw the skins should break and slowly let slip their liquor. But a cloud hangs about the horizon.
The apartment will be superheated to test for winter. In August. Too rapid a defrost could trigger a microbial outbreak of epic proportions. Thus, I pack my troops into chariot and storm a much nicer apartment.

BLUISH.BARTERING

Five months after bottling my Barbarescanadianwelches "wine", the itch has returned. Against all odds, the remaining 20 bottles have avoided ruin, re-fermentation, or apartment explosion. They even taste a bit better with the bottle shock faded. Yet, with poor acidity and minimal tannin structure, I doubt their futures.

Therefore, this Aeneas must leave Dido and the lap of wine-kit-complacency. Destiny calls. Inching towards real wine, I set sail in hope of picking, crushing and fermenting my own. However, grapes still cling green to the vine with the harvest months away.

In my impatience, I aim to fool Bacchus.The blueberry, poor tough cousin to the grape, ripens with the arrival of August beneath the northeastern sun. This false berry rarely makes wine of merit. It bears the baggage of sweet confections and jams. Yet rich, dry red wine can be made from it. Thus, under spousal assistance (persistence), we pick go picking berries at Hand Mellon farm.My first day out, I ate more than I picked, got lost, came home happy and blue-fingered but disappointed by my lack of focus. Grape growers will plant different varietals and even various strains of the same grape in order to find the best match for their vineyard's growing conditions (climate, weather, soil and slope). Hand Mellon is no different.

They grow four kinds of blueberry: Chandler, Blue Crop, Spartan, Nelson. I could just ferment my first haul en mass. But that would tell me nothing about what each type could provide. Sure, I could doctor the mix by adding acidity or sugar later, but each manipulation would walk my drink further and further from its source, tasting more of my process and assumptions of how things should taste than of the fruit.

Luckily, while I wallowed in worry, my spouse went picking again. She returned with bags separating each type. For the sake of science, I analyzed each:
Chandler:
Medium, high pulp, small seed, black skin. Slightly sweet, low acidity, light bodied, tasty, fine.
Blue Crop:
Small, little pulp, small seed, red blue skin. Sweet, high acidity, medium bodied, high skin, cherry.
Spartan:
Large, high pulp, low seed, firm red purple skin. Medium sweet, medium acidity, medium bodied, very aromatic, typical blueberry and tangy green notes.
Nelson:
Large, high pulp, medium seed, black blue skin. Very sweet, low acidity, medium body, firm skin, mellow blueberry plum notes.
I needed bulk, so Spartans offered the best choice. However, blueberries have 45% (9.96g/100g) less sugars (half fructose, glucose and trace sucrose) than grapes have (15.48g/100g). Thus adding some Chandler and Nelson might fill that gap, while adding complexity to the batch.

With weather cleared, I returned to pick properly.
I worked fast, cutting ahead of kids, their parents and dogs from getting the better fruit. The season was on the wane by now.
At the counter, my haul included 4.5 lbs of Spartans, 2.5lbs of Chandlers, 1.25lbs of Blue Crop and 1lb of Nelsons. Nearly ten pounds seemed like a enough.

To avoid a massive, fuzzy, white outbreak of mold I washed my acquisitions. Freezing them was the internet's best advice for extraction, as the cold would break down cell walls.

CLIFF.HANGER

From Benmarl Winery we drive thirty minutes to Whitecliff Vineyards. Hoping. The road curls over hills, twisting East and away from the tempering humidity of the Hudson. The sandstone and shale crescent of Shawangunk Ridge (from where the wine-region gets its regrettable "get gunked" tag line) hangs in the distance. This ridge likely traps the convection of warm air from the river just enough to grow grapes. Maybe.
Whitecliff's gravel drive slopes between western-facing vines and parks us around the back of the converted shed. The lot is a stage for their stainless presses and pumps. Proud in their farming roots and hard work (and costly equipment), Whitecliff has little to hide. We wrap around the massive, ridge facing deck and squeeze into the tasting room.

Inside, the tasting bar is mobbed and all the coffee, I mean wine tables, filled by chatting bachelorettes. We bob and weave our way to the counter. Behind it a lone twenty-something pours and drops bottles. Once he wraps up a pack of small-talking couples, he rolls over to us.

With two pages of wines to pick from, we stick to the Estate and Hudson Valley wines. Why try imported Long Island Malbec or Merlot?

The whites are honest.

The 2009 Traminette carries its Gewürztraminer (lit. "spiced Traminer") roots lightly, with the typical lychee, floral and ginger spice notes wafting about. However, the Cornell University crossing with the Franco-American Joannes Seyve 23.416 adds a watery white melon blandness to the Gewürz. A lack of ripeness might also be to blame.

The 2009 Chardonnay is crisp and fine. No oak or butter here, albeit a bit on the light side.

The 2009 off dry Riesling is fine, although the sweetness might make up for the lack of body.

Whitecliff's Estate Awosting White blends Seyval Blanc (another French hybrid that handles New York's cold) and Vignoles (ditto) into a dry white with enough wake-up acidity to stay interesting.

MASSIVE TANGENT ALERT:

[Phylloxera, a nasty sap-sucking aphid, had wiped out most of Europe's vines by the end of 19th century. Europe scrambled, crossing or grafting their classic Vitis vinifera grapes with hardier American varieties (Vitis aestivalis, rupestris, riparia and to a lesser extent, labrusca). Grafting French grapes onto American vines won out. So to pretend as if nothing had happened, EU wine regions excluded the hybrid grapes. But in cool climate, underegulated US wine regions these hardy new grapes flourished.]

Then there were Whitecliff's reds.

Their Estate Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc and Gamay Noir, all from 2008, looked pale and pink in the glass. As if to compensate, the Pinot had an inch of sediment left in the bottle. The cool climate acidity cut across the palate. Finally oak veneered the faint fruit in harsh, woody tannins and toast. Whitecliff's overly petite French barrels left nothing but forest in the glass.

For kicks (and an extra $2) I tried their Hudson Valley Estate Port, distilled just down the road at Tuthilltown Spirits. The Frontenac grape (a recent French-American hybrid of U. of Minnesota descent) is red and all acidity. Combine that with 22% alcohol, toasted oak and 5.2% residual sugar and you have a maraschino cherry factory that's burning to the ground to sip, very, very slowly.

While waiting for our pourer to stop talking about guitars, Whitecliff starts to clarify. The flanking couple follows Whitecliff's mailing list religiously. Since the winery makes roughly 1,500 cases a year, getting a hold of anything takes will. Yet brand affiliation seems strong.

Whitecliff' has the will to experiment and learn but at the cost of focus. Having Merlot or Malbec might meet customer demand for fruity, warmer climate reds, but labeling them Whitecliff Vineyards is a bit of a lie.
There is even a Redtail red that claims to be their thirteen dollar "answer to Yellowtail". But why drag yourself into that battle (7.5 million cases -vs- 1,500)? New York wines will never be the soft, full bodied and cheaply mass-produced wines of the Aussies because the sun and available vineyards are not here. Competing on that level distracts not only the customers but the winemaker from learning what their vineyards do best. Also, now that Australia's wine market has hit a hard patch, such comparisons only lower expectations of your wine.

The only way to win is to trust your grapes and your location. Sell on the merits that differentiate you from the rest and find ways to take your customers there.

Next Time: garage wine with Brimstone Hill.