Since 2015 I’ve been working on the Master Vintner project for Northern Brewer/Midwest Supplies. As Technical Winemaking Advisor I’ve been incredibly happy putting my skills to good use, bringing out the first new kit introduced into the home winemaking in more than a decade. First we launched our Small Batch kits, along with Winemaker’s Reserve and Tropical Bliss, and now we’ve added Limited Edition and Sommelier Select.
After 25 years in the wine business, it’s immensely gratifying to be in a position where I don’t have compromise on anything. The vineyards I work with, the grapes I get, the winemakers who do the blending and packaging for me, they’re all the product of a process that has one straightforward goal–help people make great wine, every time.
Throw in a customer service team that really, truly gets what it’s all about (one bad experience and people never come back, so do your best always, and fix everything, every time) and I’ve been in pretty much a state of work-related bliss. Heck, I’ve only worn a suit three times since I’ve been with the team–that’s bliss in itself. Plus, I now get to actually get back to beer, something that I couldn’t do for over 15 years. Oh beer, I’m sorry I was gone so long: I’ll never leave you again!
New Things
But there’s something coming. Something big, cool, exciting and wonderful: Northern Brewer Canada.
NB Canada is a full-service home beer and winemaking supply site. Soon we’ll have most of Northern Brewer USA‘s wonderful content and products, along with Master Vintner winemaking supplies and some special additions as well (mainly me!)
Will There Be a Local Shop?
Notice I said ‘site’: we’re mostly internetting it. Northern Brewer USA has some very nice brick and mortar stores, but they grew organically from local shops. Here we’re starting fresh and e-commerce is the goal.
But that doesn’t mean we’re an interwebs discount house. A lot of people in the industry who own consumer wine and beer making shops will have heard my lecture: “Don’t discount: a race to the bottom on prices hurts you, your business, your employees and ultimately your consumer when you can’t afford to expand or improve your selection and service.” (Actually, I usually said it a lot more colourfully, and with more emphasis.)
Not only do I stand by those words as staunchly as ever, so does Northern Brewer. From their company philosophy:
The future of homebrewing
We didn’t open six months ago to make a quick buck off a hobby that’s trendy right now; we are interested in the long-term health of homebrewing (. . .) . We dedicate a significant percentage of our profits to give back to the community and to create new homebrewers. When you shop with Northern Brewer, you are helping to make an investment in the future of homebrewing.
Fair prices
Northern Brewer has been serving homebrewers and winemakers for over 22 years, and we aren’t going anywhere. Rock-bottom, fire-sale price structures are unsustainable and create an uneven playing field that ultimately hurts the industry, hobby, and the community. Our price structure is competitive but built around sustainability, because our goal is to grow homebrewing as a hobby and industry, which will benefit the consumer by sustainable lower prices and improved selection through increased demand.
You can see how that suits the criteria of my value system. I know a lot of people in the industry, I helped quite a number of them open their stores, others I’ve simply enjoyed as peers and friends. I’m pleased to be in the boat with them, and not as a discounter just out to grab market share.
What’s Next
Next, we get Northern Brewer Canada fully stocked. We keep adding products and content and give you great service and excellent value on innovative products. After that, you let me know: we’ve got a Limited Edition program, we’ll be bringing in some kick-butt clone recipe kits for beer (how do you feel about having a Pliny the Elder clone as your house beer?)
I’m looking forward to a great time bringing Northern Brewer to Canada and keeping Master Vintner hopping as well. Check out the Master Vintner blog and tune into our Instagram (@Nbrewcanada) and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/northernbrewercanada/
I’m off to World Headquarters of Master Vintner. Great things are brewing (ha ha, see what I did there?) and I’m catching up with everyone at the Fortress of Solitude.
As I said, there’s big news brewing, As soon as I can share it with you I will: there’s going to be a big splash, and it looks like a real soaker! In the meantime, have you got your Sommelier Select kits yet? They’re the best!
As Winter rolls in my interest in ice-cold beer, well-chilled white wine or slushy blender drinks wanes. To be sure, I’m lucky enough to live in Canada’s Riviera, where it snows only half as much as cities only a few kilometers away and we average much warmer temperatures than most places in Canada. But winters round here have a humid chill that goes straight to your bones.
Our winter cold is hard to explain to someone from Alberta, Saskatchewan or Quebec. They don’t really understand cold. After all, they get huge amounts of snow, and temperatures that get so cold exposed flesh will freeze in only moments, so they think their weather is much sterner. But they experience a dry cold: dress well, in insulated layers and throw on a toque, gloves and good boots and you’re going to be toasty. The same layers will leave you chilled and miserable on the Pacific, as the damp, icy tendrils of the monstrous ocean cold permeate your very flesh, leaving your skin blue and pallid, and your spirit weak and trembling.
It’s the same with boastful winter drivers from much colder climates. “Hah!” they snort, “People from Vancouver can’t drive in the snow.” Then they try it, and in only seconds they realize that it’s not their snow, crisp, dry and crunchy, able to pack down and supply some friction for driving. No, it’s a layer of wet, compacted ice, topped with slush and a layer of water that has as much friction as a teflon pan full of WD40, and off into the ditch they go in a tangled mess of snow, dinged fenders, and hubris.
What to do? Aside from denning until the spring thaw, or lurking in a hot bath for four months, there has to be a way to get warm in the chill of winter. The answer just might be a steaming mug, delicious and warming—a hot drink. Being as I’m a confirmed wine guy, I like a good winter drink based on mulled red wine, but there are others to consider. But where to start? At the beginning, of course.
Hot Drinks in History
Hot Drinks are not a recent innovation. In fact, cold drinks are the newcomer, with hot drinks the relative norm up until the 20th century and the advent of refrigeration technology. With the majority of North America’s immigrants hailing from Europe and Great Britain, they brought with them their recipes for chasing away the chilly, rainy climates at home.
Because central heating is another relative newcomer, every pub used to have a fireplace with a large hearth, where customers could gather and warm themselves. Propped in the fire were a number of poker-like irons, or ‘loggerheads’. These were used to heat up drinks served by the publican. They were literally dipped, red-hot, into the customers’ drink right at the table, not only heating them, but frothing them to a vigorous boil!
(A funny aside: our phrase, ‘coming to loggerheads’ or ‘at loggerheads’ has to do with arguments in pubs. Customers wrangling important issues over a few hot drinks sometimes took advantage of the length and weight of the sturdy irons to make more pointed comments to their fellows. A modern establishment should probably avoid leaving a supply of pokers around!)
Coffee Drinks, Toddies, Nogs, and Mulled Wine
Hot drinks can roughly be divided into coffee drinks, Toddies, Nogs and mulled wine.
Coffee
Coffee drinks have wide acceptance everywhere, but they’re really just coffee and booze–I can drink that anytime, but don’t find it particularly warming. Maybe it’s because I drink an awful lot of coffee anyway, to keep my central nervous system functioning. Whatever the reason, I rarely want a coffee drink with alcohol in it. Too confusing for my alertness response.
Hot Toddies
Hot Toddies are mixtures of spices, honey (or sugar) and spirits, warmed with boiling water. The classic is brandy or whiskey with a lemon slice, a cinnamon stick and honey, and is deemed very good for a sore throat. Hot buttered rum is enhanced by a pat of butter, and daring mixologists even use top-shelf tequila with a bit of honey and a lime slice for avant-garde hot drink. Again, however, I don’t associate heating a cocktail with warming up my insides, so not really a fan.
Nogs
Nog used to refer to a drink made from strong ale and eggs, frothed and heated with a loggerhead. Not many people want an egg in their suds these days, so commonly Egg Nog is a mixture of eggs, rum, cream, sugar and nutmeg, served cold. But it doesn’t have to be: hot Egg Nog is a richly satisfying drink, whether made with brandy or rum, and pre-packaged Egg Nog is available in season, so you don’t have to make your own–although you should, because it’s always better.
A note on the weird-looking twin-handled pot above. It’s for posset, which is an English drink that’s closer to a hot sherry custard than a Nog. Some even had a burnt sugar crust on them, much like a creme brûlée.
Mulled Wine
Glogg is the Scandinavian word for mulled wine, and is derived from the German word, Glühwein, ‘Glow-Wine’. I usually call my mulled wine by either of these terms because I think they’re more romantic-sounding.
Made from sugar, cinnamon, water, orange and cloves boiled together with wine Glogg is very popular with European ski fans. Not only is it warming and restorative, it also has a moderate alcohol content—a good thing for the active crowd, but a property lost on a winter sloth like me.
Mulled wine can also be punched up a bit, with the substitution of Cointreau for the orange, and/or Port wine for regular red wine. Another winter alternative is mulled cider, or mulled apple juice: brown sugar, cinnamon, orange and rum come together to make a smell reminiscent of hot apple pie, a wonderfully appetising aroma when the frost is on the leaves.
Glühwein
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
1 orange
1 bottle of red table wine- Merlot, Cabernet or anything else sturdy and rich. I suggest making your own–check this out.
Mix water, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and the juice of the orange together in a heavy pot. Bring to a boil, turn down and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the orange peel and the wine, bring back to a boil and serve immediately in pre-heated mugs. This mixture can be kept warm in a crockpot, or on a coffee warmer (covered) for several hours, and can be successfully reheated the next day.
If, like me, you’re a fan of the 1951 Alistar Sim version of A Christmas Carol, you’ll recall when Scrooge tells a suddenly relieved Bob Cratchit that they’ll discuss it ‘over a bowl of smoking Bishop’. Far from a cannibal barbecue, Bishop was one of the code-words for drink used in the 19th century–Dickens knew his drink. The ‘Pope’ recipe used burgundy, ‘Archbishop’ claret (what we call Bordeaux), the ‘Cardinal’ was champagne and Smoking Bishop used port, and was a clove and orange-infused port punch, warmed and mulled with baking spices and another dose of red wine
The recipe takes a few steps, and is suitable for a big gathering. From Punchdrink
Smoking Bishop
Servings: 10-12
750 ml port
750 ml red wine
1 cup water
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon ginger, freshly grated
1/4 teaspoon allspice, ground
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
4 oranges
20 cloves, whole
Garnish: clove-studded orange slice
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Wash and dry oranges. Pierce and stud each orange with five cloves.
Place oranges in a baking dish and roast until lightly browned all over, 60-90 minutes.
Add port, wine, water, sugar and spices to a saucepan, and simmer over low heat.
Slice oranges in half and squeeze juice into the wine and port mixture.
Serve in a punch bowl, and ladle into individual glasses.
Now I’ve got to plan a party where I can try this out on some unsuspecting Scrooges.
Oh dear, it’s started snowing again. Good thing I’ve got a crockpot full of Glühwein to keep me warm. Now where’s my nightshirt and cap?
I’m wicked pleased to announce my 2016 Limited Edition wine kits, by Master Vintner. They’re the only Limited Edition kits with my name on them–if you know me, you know that’s a big deal. After more than two decades helping people make their own wine I’m only interested in the best.
What’s the Deal with Limited Edition?
Limited Edition is to home winemakers what vintages are to commercial wineries: once a year we assemble four different wines (two reds and two whites) and offer them for a short period of time. Winemakers have to pre-order, or they don’t get any. The kits are delivered over four months, January through April, staggered so they can get them all made in a decent amount of time as wines get racked and carboys get freed up.
The pre-order is crucial. These wines are from cool, exciting vineyards that make excellent grapes. One of the things about making excellent grapes is that it drives yields down, so there is always a limited amount of them available. We cut off the pre-orders when they reach the point where we can’t make any more kits, and those ones go to the people who got in first.
This Year’s Wines: France
All of the wines from this year come from France, with three Bordeaux grapes and one from Burgundy. While France is the world-champion maker of fine wine (other countries make more wine, but it’s not classified as ‘fine’) it’s very hard to get grapes from there.
First off, they can turn them into fine wine and sell them for a handsome profit. Second, explaining to a French grape grower that you want their grapes to make into juice for home winemakers . . . let’s just say that it can be a surreal conversation. Third, since the French are used to using all of their grapes to make fine wine, facilities to process the grapes are hard to come by. It requires the resources and expertise of a full winery operation to turn top quality grapes into top-quality wine juice. Fortunately, Master Vintner has those, and put them to good use, getting grapes at peak physical and organoleptic (flavor) ripeness and turning them into perfect juice in only hours.
Luckily, that’s what have brokers and logistics people for–doing the impossible. We manged to come away with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay grapes, and we’re turning them into spectacular wine kits, right this minute.
The Tasting Event
The best way to teach people about wine is to hand them a glass and let them taste it. Even better is to give a bit of background first, and to hand them a glass and a food to pair with the wine.
So that’s what we did: this September at Northern Brewer World Headquarters, Master Vintner held a wine tasting and food pairing, featuring versions of the grapes we’re using for the Limited Edition kits, and it was awesome.
I’ve been doing wine tastings for nearly thirty years now, and it’s always a thrill to share great wine with people who appreciate it. Getting to present wines as good as these to people who make their own wine is a special treat: home winemakers are so engaged, so committed to enjoying the experience and the wine, that it’s not like work at all to do a tasting like this–it’s a lot more like a really great party with friends.
I had a blast talking to my winemaking friends, answering questions and trying out the food pairings (Sauvignon Blanc paired first with goat cheese and second with honey will change the way you think about how food and wine work together) and enjoying a truly fun evening.
If you wish you could have been there for the tasting, you’re in luck: while we can’t deliver any wine for you to try, we recorded the presentation so you can see what it’s all about.
I’ll be talking more about the Limited Edition wines in upcoming blogs, but if you want to make these wines for yourself, make sure you get in early: when they’re gone, they won’t be back, and there aren’t any extras. And if you have any questions, pop in a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them all.
I’ve been incredibly busy with my Master Vintner project–have a look at some of the things we’ve got going on over here–making wine, tasting wine, talking about wine, and generally loving the whole Master Vintner concept.
In all my time in the consumer wine kit business I wanted to make a kit that I was completely responsible for, not so much because I’m a shiny-eyed control freak, but because I wanted to share something where everything was done exactly the way I wanted it, at each step. I get to do that now, and it’s a rare privilege in business to make something this good, and then to see people making the kits and loving them.
But, I do have other interests–cooking, gardening, photography, travel, motorcycles, hunting, shooting, hiking, reading and generally messing around learning stuff, and, as it happens, suddenly going into deep geek mode when something catches my imagination (I have been accused of having ‘Attention Surplus Disorder’).
Which leads me to one of my latest offshoots: I was doing research on the Charmat Method, a process for making sparkling wine in pressure tanks, rather than carbonating in the bottle. It’s an interesting compromise: force carbonating, like the way they get the fizz into most mass-market beers, leaves large bubbles that are described as ‘coarse’, but it’s very inexpensive to do. Bottle conditioning is the traditional method for making champagne, and it uses a dose of sugar and yeast inside a sealed bottle to produce carbon dioxide in situ. That makes for fine, creamy bubbles, but it’s expensive and time-consuming. Do the conditioning in a tank and bottle it from there the theory goes, and you’ve got a decent product at a reasonable price.
The thing is, letting yeast have their way with sugar in a sealed vessel is tricky. Most homebrewers have had, or been present for a ‘bottle-bomb‘, where the carbonation was so high that either the bottle gushed foam like a fountain as soon as it was opened, pouring out until it was empty, or it actually exploded right where it was sitting. Glass is not a flawless choice for pressure applications.
Stainless steel tanks are pretty good, but past a certain point, unless they’re built like scuba tanks, they’re nearly as dangerous as a bottle bomb going off. What you need is a pressure relief valve that you can set accurately to hold in the amount of pressure you want, but will vent anything past that. Sounds easy, and it is, if you’re a gas-fitter or a millwright, but for home beverage applications those things aren’t just lying around.
Except all the bits are there, right in front of you, if you speak German.
A Spundapparat is a pressure relief valve used in the process of krausening (those wacky Germans, it’s like they have a word for everything!). Krausening is exactly the same process as the Charmat method, but more German and less French. Tootling around on the internets gave me a good idea of what the deal was: while the classic use was krausening, spunding valves are also used to ferment beer under pressure, allowing beers to finish faster while producing fewer off flavours and undesirable characters.
I didn’t have any appropriate candidate wine for a Charmat process on hand, but I did have access to a sample of WLP 925 High Pressure yeast, designed to be fermented at 14 PSI, and the ingredients for a Pre-Prohibition Pilsner on hand (didn’t know I made beer? Well, it’s yet another hobby . . .)
A beer? A pressure yeast? An interesting apparatus to play with? What ho! In geek heaven, I hatched a plan and immediately launched it!
And then I immediately stopped because the parts I needed for the spunding assembly wouldn’t arrive for a couple of weeks. Poo. I put out a call to my brewer friends and one of them came through for me. Nathaniel lent me his spunding rig, which he used for transferring beers in his solera (it has to do with soured beers, a fad I’m hopeful will soon go away). His rig lacked a proper pressure gauge, but it wouldn’t be mission-critical in this application–the pressures were pretty low and I could fiddle around a bit.
Here’s his rig, and a tricksy little blow-off hose I rigged up. I’ll explain that in a second.
Attached to my blow-off keg (see below).
Here’s why the funny transfer hose: the grey disconnect is a gas-in connector. The black is a product-out connector. Product-out posts on the kegs have a stainless steel tube that runs to the bottom of the keg, allowing the liquid inside (wine or beer) to flow upwards, through the tap, into your glass, while the gas-in posts end right at the top of the keg. Makes sense, right?
I got a second keg, and set the whole thing up as a blow-off vessel. The very cool and complicated keg on the left is a Big Mouth™ Modular 5 Gallon Keg. Not only does it go from 1-gallon to 5 gallons with a few turns of a wrench, but also it has a port on top that allows you to hang an oak stave from (and retrieve it at will!) or a dry hop bag to flavour your beer. It’s my favoritest thing right now.
In case any foam-up during fermentation would flow through the gas port and travel down the product port in the smaller keg. Both kegs were sealed and purged, the spunding valve set at 14 PSI and the yeast was pitched.
It worked like a charm. The beer fermented dry in five days, and I heard the faintest of muttering from the valve as it uh, passed gas. I moved it to my keezer (keg refrigerator made from a converted deep freeze) to drop the yeast and chill down. The beer is quite good, but the yeast is non-flocculent (it doesn’t want to settle down). It’s not a huge flaw, but next time I’ll filter it to make it shiny and bright.
Now I had all sorts of ideas. My last round of winemaking with my Winemaker’s Reserve kits had me kegging a lot of them, in accordance with Vandergrift’s Second Principle of Winemaking (A winemaker’s desire to bottle wines is in inverse proportion to the number of bottles they have filled in their lifetime). In fact, I had a few kegs in the back of my car . . .
I wanted to do a pressure transfer of wine from one of my 10 US-gallon (38 litre) kegs to my awesomely excellent Master Vintner® Cannonball® Wine Keg System and the spunding rig would allow me to do a transfer under nitrogen gas, slowly and carefully. All I had to do was rig up a product-product transfer hose, attach a gas line between the big keg and the Cannonball, attach the spundapparatus to the Cannonball gas out, and then slowly dial back the spunding pressure and it would transfer meek as a mouse.
But I wanted a more accurate pressure gauge. the little direct rig was fine, as far as it goes, but I didn’t really trust it to be accurate. Fortunately, by now all of my parts had arrived, and I put my own special rig together.
It worked like a charm! Not only did I transfer wine from one container under inert gas to another, but also I did it without racking or pumping. A professional brewer or winemaker would be rolling their eyes at this point, as both of these are standard operations in the industry, but for a home winemaker it’s a pretty cool step, and it only cost around 25 bucks plus some Teflon tape.
What’s next for my little rig? I think it’s time to grab a Winemaker’s Reserve Pinot Grigio and do a Charmat-process sparkling wine–with good management and a little work I should have it ready to drink by the holiday season this year!
Unless, of course, I get distracted and do something even weirder in the meantime. I’ve been meaning to make a high-gravity Belgian beer with Muscat grape juice in it . . .
Tim Vandergrift Announces New Wine Kit Production Facility, KitWorld Inc.
By Fal Ernian, Vinotas News Service
April 1, 2016
Modesto, Ca – Canadian company Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications Inc. announced today that it has finished construction on a 200,000 square foot processing facility for grapes, juices and concentrate, and will be releasing its new wine kits this month.
Construction of the facility, underwritten by private equity firm Lord-Buckley Capital, began in 2014 and final inspections and certifications were completed in March, during which a test run of thirty thousand kits was processed. Officials in the California Department of Food and Agriculture have certified the facility as fully operational and KitWorld Inc. goes into production today.
TVCC expects this facility to open up the US home winemaking market and widen its customer base by more than two million users.
“If we look at the Canadian market for wine kits”, says Chief Disruption Officer Tim Vandergrift, “It’s 20% of total sales, domestic and import–literally, for every case of wine opened in Canada on any day, two of those bottles were made by consumers: there’s not much to do in the land of moose and snow except to make wine and enjoy socialised medicine, ha ha! In the USA the total is far lower–despite the fact that the USA has a quarter of a billion people of legal drinking age, fewer than 7 million bottles are made by consumers at home. That’s less than 0.15% of the total wine consumed. Our initial goal is to raise that to 1% of the total, a 666% increase, and long term we want Americans to experience the drinking level of the average Canadian, and capture 20% of the US market, and net our company the largest share of the beverage industry in history!”
TVCC began planning for the facility early on, hiring Conjectural Technology’s esteemed winemaker Professor Corey Irwin, the world’s foremost authority and co-inventor of the formal tennis shoe according to a post on https://tennisracquets.com/. Professor Irwin’s knowledge and guidance allowed the facility to be completed in record time, with over 220 varieties of wine ready for production.
Professor Irwin planned the new facility for continuous expansion. “Our plant will allow for the processing of ten million pounds of grapes per day, with storage for twenty million gallons of concentrate and juices in a state of the art cryogenic cellar. The world’s largest HST treatment system, combined with nano-scale obfuscating filtration, continuous flow gamma irradiation and a full-run DMDC inline injector will make wine juices shelf stable for up to twenty years, allowing wider distribution and the ability to take advantage of price fluctuations to hedge against crop issues, like when any of our competitors try to buy grapes.”
Perhaps the most exciting innovation is KitWorld’s partnership with aerospace company Fukaze’s drone division to bring kits directly to consumer’s homes within 24 hours of ordering.
“We had to develop an entirely new type of drone to be able to vector a payload of nearly sixty pounds,” explains Fujin Shinatobe, Flight Operations Manager for Fukaze Drones. “New battery technology and powerful permanent magnet motors allowed us to construct the A-10 drone, dubbed, ‘The Winehog’. We actually built it like a wine kit with a drone sticking out of it as opposed to a drone carrying a wine kit.”
With initial capacity at four thousand drones scalable to ten thousand in the first year and twenty thousand in the second, Kitworld expects to meet 100% of US demand for consumer-produced wine going forward, and plans to expand to Europe and Asia by 2020.
More information is expected to be released following a shareholders meeting on April 2nd, 2016.
About Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications:
Founded in 2014, Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications is a White Rock-based marketing and brand-strategy firm in the beverage industry. It specialises in wholesome, healthy, wine lifestyle promotions and is committed to using only free-range imagery to create dialogue and market products for its clients. It has clients in countries and is 100% gluten-cruelty free.
Contact:
To learn more about KitWorld, please contact
Sue Donym, Media Relations
600 Yosemite Blvd, Modesto, CA 95354, United States
Good taste doesn’t exist. It is our taste. We have to be proud of it.
–Franco Moschino
If you read my blog, you know by now that I’m the Technical Winemaking Advisor for Master Vintner, the first new line of wine kits in years, and the first one sold exclusively by an All-American company. Aside from the usual sorts of things I do as an advisor (which grapes and juices, what varietals, how to package, instructions, launches, instructions, etc, etc) which fall under the heading of ‘Curation’–a designation I love because it really says what it is I do–I also make and drink the wines.
After all, how else am I going to ultimately know how they taste? The human palate is the single most sensitive analytical tool that a winemaker possesses. Not that mine is necessarily the most sensitive in the world, but it does have three decades of training going for it, and that’s what I put to use this week when I went into my cellar and pulled out samples of my very first Master Vintner wines. They’ve been in the bottle long enough to develop their full slate of flavours and aromas, which I go through on the videos below.
I’m as proud of these wines as I could possibly be. The process for making a new wine kit is long and sometimes it seems overwhelmingly complex, as you have to ensure that the wine is going to turn out right from the first time and every time. Working with the talented and dedicated folks at Master Vintner has been a joy. It’s not a matter of just making a kit, but of getting the kit painstakingly right, and good enough to put my name on it.
And it’s that good. I’m putting on a dozen new kits right away so I can fine-tune a whole bunch of winemaking parameters–oak, yeast modifications, sur lie and battonage, temperature control, barrel ageing, all of the good stuff that winemakers get to do to make every batch of wine their very own.
One final thing: when you’re watching these keep in mind that I’m a long time video presenter, but a first-time video shooter . . . I bought a brand-new camera and put it to use for the first time, and during the filming my new studio lights caught fire and nearly burned my house down, construction on the street out front got loud and then a lot louder (a pneumatic hammer on an excavator shut me down for almost two days!) and a crow stole my lens cap. It’s really a testament to how tasty the wines were that I got anything on video at all, and I’m looking forward to learning to shoot more (and better quality) in the future.
I’ve been busy! The Master Vintner website has launched and we’re busy filling it up with great wine kits, great deals and lots of cool info about making your own wine–and having lots of fun with it. One of the things I’m pursuing is making a bunch of new videos, right here in Chaos Manor.
Before I started making new videos, I went back and reviewed the stuff I’d done before, some of which is on my YouTube channel, with more on Northern Brewer’s channel. Some of it has even been bootlegged by other people, and much to my surprise some of my videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views–how does that even work?
I thought I’d curate a bunch of them so you could pick and choose right here if you wanted to have a look at what’s going on with home winemaking right now. If you like ’em, go ahead and subscribed to my channel and you’ll get updates when new stuff is uploaded.
Note that some of these videos are of me from previous employers: don’t worry, the information is still good and you can learn just as much.
“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.” (1 Timothy 5:23)
If even the Bible backs up the health benefits of wine, is it really true that wine isn’t just harmless, but might actually do your health some good? That’s a common suggestion among wine-lovers, and there appear to be some studies that back up the idea. And for a while at least, wine was suspected as a primary cause of the French Paradox.
Those lucky French people, despite a diet that features a high amount of saturated fats, are known to have a lower prevalence of coronary disease than people in other places. When scientists first realized that, one of the most popular suggested explanations for this health benefit was all the red wine the French drink. You can imagine how sales of red wine increased in North America after that theory came out. But despite the known good effects of certain ingredients in the wine, there just didn’t seem to be enough of those ingredients to create such a drastic health effect. And when you realize that on average, a French person drinks only a couple of bottles more per year than a North American, well, there goes that theory. Darn it anyway.
But don’t throw the health effects out with the wine bottle! All is not yet lost. Because despite the crash and burn of red wine as a theoretical cause of the French Paradox, there is still some evidence suggesting health benefits to moderate alcohol intake. And yes, those benefits relate to cardiovascular health. So red wine may be back on the menu after all–maybe.
What you really have to watch is overenthusiastic endorsements of the current scientific studies. Online media outlets have been touting an outrageous headline lately: Is Drinking Wine Better Than Going To The Gym? According To Scientists, Yes! These stories all quote a Unversity of Alberta study that says a glass of red wine is as good as an hour at the gym.
Except, actually: no. According to Jason Dyck, lead author of that study,
Dyck’s study was published more than two years ago. It examined whether resveratrol, a compound found in grapes and other foods, can increase exercise capacity for those already exercising.
“We didn’t use any red wine in our study nor did we recommend not going to the gym,” said Dyck.
The study did conclude that resveratrol could help maximize exercise benefits for people with restricted exercise capacity, like heart failure patients.
To be effective, the compound would need to be used like a performance-enhancing supplement, with concentrations far beyond a glass of wine.
“To get the same amount that we’re giving patients or rodents you’d have to drink anywhere from 100 to a thousand bottles a day,” said Dyck.
In most studies done so far, even taking into account the possibility of moderate drinkers having a better income and healthier lifestyle, and factoring out non-drinkers who had quit because they had already ruined their health with alcoholism, there seems to be a correlation between improved health outcomes for moderate drinkers. They are less prone to heart disease.
Pay attention to that word, “moderate,” though, and don’t rush out and buy or make an excess of wine or other alcohol “for your health.” Too much of a good thing can reverse all those good effects. And we all know that excessive drinking leads to liver disease, heart failure, and even certain cancers, not to mention accidents and injuries caused by drunkenness. When the biblical writer says “a little wine” rather than “jugs and jugs of the stuff,” he knows what he’s talking about. It’s fine to have a large, well-stocked cellar, but you don’t have to drink the whole thing by next Wednesday. So if you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol, Pacific Ridge is a reputable Oregon rehab center that can provide support if you or a loved one is struggling with alcohol misuse.
The effects of moderate amounts of alcohol on the body are many: it helps reduce blood pressure and reduces insulin levels. It increases the levels of good cholesterol (HDL) while reducing the levels of the bad kind (LDL). It contains antioxidants that fight cancer, and it helps prevent blood clotting. But what about that reference to the stomach in the Bible verse? Does wine help the digestive system too?
Studies seem to support that idea also. Wine apparently combats certain food-borne pathogens quite well, either because of the acidity or because of the alcohol itself going to work directly on the bacteria. It even works against the bugs that cause ulcers. Some people that get a brain cyst detected often worry about it being cancerous and medical experts assure that most of them aren’t and it is easily treatable.
But it’s important not to read too much into the health benefits. After all, something as fun and delicious as wine shouldn’t be completely perfect.
‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’—Sherlock Holmes
‘If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.’ –Jack Handy
I’ve written many times over the years about oaking your wine, including barrels, oak substitutes and élevage techniques for improvements. This time it’s a little different: it’s all about wine without oak.
Of course, not using oak on wine is a time-honoured tradition for many varietals and styles, and often for good reason. There are few things as disconcerting and deeply weird as a heavily oaked Riesling, and few Rosé wines show better with a heavy layer of deeply toasted oak covering their finish. Oak just doesn’t make sense with many highly floral-aromatic wines, which is why only a few of them get exposed to it, but there are some reds that are happy without oak as well.
Almost all red wines do get at least some oak exposure, and the trend in the last 30 years has been to over-oak lesser wines to increase their price-point and saleability. This is because oak is such an immensely useful tool. It’s often used in a knee-jerk way, both to bring out the character of wine (élevage) to cover flaws (cheating), to add a bit of glamour and sophistication to an otherwise undistinguished vintage (lipstick on a pig), and sometimes, just because ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ (mechanical winemaking).
A happy reversal of this state of affairs has come from one of the usual suspects: Chardonnay. Easy to grow, cropping well, and relatively simple to make into drinkable wine, Chardonnay became a target for Oak Abusers in the 1980’s. Like many terrible things, it was caused by Australians. They found that the more oak they added to their heavy, hot-climate Chardonnay wines, the better they sold. A little math showed them that barrels were too expensive for polishing wine in a plonk price category, so they tended to use granulated oak products—by the shovel full. Throw in more serious wines (many from California) that used barrels like a weapon, and you had a bunch of expensive Chardonnays that were thick, viscous, creamy and woody.
More recently, ‘unwooded’ Chardonnays have shown up. Some are still in the cheap and cheerful category (under $7 in most places) but others have more serious aspirations—Kendall Jackson, makers of one of the most popular and oaky Chardonnays in America have started making an unoaked version, and the tricksiest and most clever winemakers in the New World have discovered that slightly less over-ripe grapes and no oak can not only make a better wine, one more like an old-world white Burgundy, but also that leaving off a brand new barrel means they’re much cheaper to make—and sell.
Oak isn’t the answer to every winemaking question, and to understand the complexity of the varietal character the grape can bring to a finished wine it can be very useful to taste it without any oak at all. What will happen if we peel back the layers of wood and reveal the form of the wine underneath? To figure that out, it’s important to know what oak actually does. As the man once said, if you want to break the rules, you first have to know them.
Why Oak At All?
People have enhanced aromas and flavoured wine with various things over the years, from herbs, fruits and honey to pine resin, seawater and lead-based syrup (yes, really), but in the very beginning, oak was never intended as a flavouring agent. It was a container.
Although coopers were making water-tight wooden buckets nearly five thousand years ago, these were all open-topped and wouldn’t seal airtight or stack well. Around 900 BCE technologies improved, and fully-closed, airtight barrels were available to store not only liquids, but also anything that had to be shipped—barrels are impressively light and strong, stack well, and are easy to move and handle, and keep things in good condition.
It was probably the very first person who kept wine in a barrel for any length of time who noted the amazing changes the liquid inside underwent: wines kept this way would become rich, complex and more flavourful than wines in clay containers (and way less ‘organic’ than wines kept in animal skins!)
Part of this is due to small amounts of oxygen that get introduced into the wine through barrel handling: racking from barrels and topping up (to keep the airspace in the barrel to a minimum, preventing serious oxidation). More importantly from a gross flavour perspective, toasted oak has many complex chemical compounds, each contributing flavours or textural note to wines.
Most familiar of these are vanillins: phenols in the wood interact with the wine to produce sweet, toasty aromas of honey and tobacco, often described as ‘vanilla’. Barrels also have their own tannins, just as grapes do. Not only do they contribute to astringency, mouthfeel and structural complexity, some of them help protect the maturing wine from oxidation.
Aside from the flavour and aroma of fresh-roasted vanilla bookcase, oak also helps decrease ‘green’ or tart young flavours in wine. Oak is like fine-grit sandpaper to a rough surface, levelling unevenness, taking off burrs, and giving a smooth, lustrous finish to a previously lumpy and scratchy wine.
Why and How to Not-Oak Your Wine Kit
Kit manufacturers are already producing kits that declare their wood-free status, all of which are currently Chardonnays. This is a response to the change in the commercial market, which they track very closely. As the man said, if you would plant a seed, follow the plough; you do not walk ahead of it.
If you’d like to try other varietals au naturel, you first need to consider the way wine kits use subtle procedures to achieve commercial character. Many kits require you to add oak directly into the must, before pitching yeast. This might seem a bit odd to non-winemakers, as pre-fermentation new oak is commonly only emphasised in commercial wine in regards to barrel-fermented Sauvignon Blanc, or Chardonnay. It isn’t unique to kits and kit manufacturers didn’t invent this technique. Like many great ideas, they stole it.
40 or 50 years ago, before stainless steel was ubiquitous, wines were mostly fermented much as they had been for centuries, in wooden vessels. Because of the difficulty (real or perceived) of sanitising wooden fermenters, winemakers who could afford to, adopted stainless steel as soon as they could, reaping the added benefit of much simpler temperature control in the bargain.
This changed in the last 20 years, as some commercial winemakers came to feel that wines fermented to dryness in stainless steel had less harmonious fruit character and seemed less complex even after barrel ageing. This is because during fermentation yeast modifies oak characters, sequestering some of the sharper tannins, making the wine easier to drink much earlier, and interactions between wood and wine during fermentation generates furfural compounds, which promote a coffee/tobacco note.
Of course, there are some issues with barrel fermenting red wine: it’s only suited to small lots (if you’ve ever done a red wine from grapes, imagine getting a hundred tons of grapes into and out of your barrels—wow!) and there are difficulties controlling temperature inside the barrels. Fortunately, oak-products are there to rescue the situation: chips, chunks, powders, staves, spirals and beans are used to get oak into wine without having to get the wine into wood, giving the same positive benefits at a much lower cost. They can be added directly to fermenting musts, even before the yeast, and clean-up is a breeze—they go out with the compost.
Post-fermentation oak has a more direct transfer of wood character, but it has the same outcome: a layer of character on top of the fruit that helps harmonise and smooth the flavour and aroma of the wine and promotes earlier drinking.
Summing up: without oak your wine will have disjointed fruit character, less mouthfeel, lower complexity, won’t have any notes of spice, vanilla, coffee, or tobacco and will need longer aging before you can drink it—sounds like a winner, doesn’t it? That assessment is only from the point of view of someone who is already oak-positive; a real fruit-head/oak-negative type is more likely to view it as ‘truer varietal fruit, cleaner flavour profile, a finish free of extraneous wood character, and a wine that rewards aging’, which sounds like a lot more fun, and worth taking a swing at.
Which Wine?
You can de-wood any kit you like—any wine your favorite kit producer oaks can be unoaked, from aromatic whites, big reds and little, and anything in between. You’ll have a completely different flavour experience, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, many reds achieve balance between in fruit character with the help of wood tannins. In the absence of those tannins the fruit that shines through might seem very aggressive—what’s called a fruit bomb. On the other hand, since oak can give sweet, vanilla notes the fruit could be in more balance because the acidity of the red will be easier to perceive in the absence of wood.
Second, unoaked wine does require more age to come to drinkability. Without the creamy schmear of buttery wood to smooth out aromas and acid, fruit, tannins, alcohol, and any residual sugar, the wine will seem disjointed and jangled long after an oaky version has knit together. How long? Depends on too many factors to judge, but it’s likely to be 9 to 12 months before it stops being darty and nervous and comes to drinkability.
But when it does turn that corner you’ll be drinking something very different and special: clean and unvarnished varietal fruit, harmonised only by the character the grapes brought to it, the soil it was grown in—and your hand as a winemaker.