Fog Crest Vineyard | Russian River Valley | Sonoma County, CA

Winemaking Process: A profile of consulting winemaker David Ramey

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Our consulting winemaker David Ramey is widely acknowledged to be among the wine pioneers whose efforts helped raise the bar for all American winemakers and brought California to the forefront of the international wine world. David’s groundbreaking work with indigenous yeasts and malolactic and barrel fermentation yielded a new California style that was richer, more lush and silky smooth than previously known. As a result, he created a benchmark style now emulated by many.

At first, David followed a traditional path and received a graduate degree from the University of California at Davis, where his 1979 thesis on volatile ester hydrolysis (translation: how flavors evolve in wine) is still used today to unveil certain vinous mysteries. But shortly afterwards, a stint working for the Moueix family at the renowned Chateau Pétrus introduced David to the time-honored methods of winemaking in France. He brought his lessons home and applied them to the grapes he found growing in California’s premier wine regions.

Here at Fog Crest, David lends his advice on winemaking technique and style. In this well-established tradition, the winemaking process varies little from year-to-year, only in the case of rain and consequent botrytis for example. Otherwise, these techniques have been refined over the thirty years David has been making wine, and the hundreds of years the same techniques have been employed in Burgundy.

Our next major step in our winemaking process this year will be the bottling of our 2008 Chardonnay.

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In the Winery: Bottling

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Here at Fog Crest, March means bottling! This month we plan to bottle our 2008 Estate Chardonnay, 2008 Estate Level 6 Chardonnay, and our 2008 Laguna West Chardonnay.

Our bottling begins only when enough flavors have been developed and imparted into the wine. Yet it is important to commit the wine to bottle before it becomes over-exposed to the elements, such as too much air or oak.

The wine is racked out of barrel into stainless steel tanks about three weeks before bottling. The bottles, labels, corks, and capsules are ordered so that they arrive at the winery ahead of time.

On the day of bottling a mobile bottling truck pulls in very early in the morning — sometimes the night before — and begins to unpack, hooking up power, rinsing, and testing machinery. Our specific set up is then calibrated for the size of bottle, label, cork, and capsule.

Finally, the wine is hooked up to the truck by hose and pumped into the bottling line. As the bottles come off the line, they are loaded into cases and dropped down a ramp where another person tapes the box closed, puts our label on the box, and places the box on a pallet. A single pallet holds 44 cases, which are then shrink-wrapped for transport to our warehouse.

It is interesting to note the differences in how wine ages in bottle vs. barrel. The barrel is a large container and thus holds a more stable temperature than a bottle does. This diminishes the risk of temperature fluctuation damaging the wine as it ages. The oak from the barrels imparts flavor into the wine, however barrels are bung-sealed, so there usually some air exposure. (In wine-making lore the part of the wine that evaporates while in barrel is called “the angel’s share”.) Bottles provide better long term aging, because the glass imparts no additional flavors to the wine (preserving that perfect amount that was achieved in barrel), and corks provide an air-tight seal.

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In the Winery: Racking

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

It’s February, and here at Fog Crest most of our activities have been focused on the vineyard. In the meantime our wines have been resting on their lees, creeping steadily towards that perfect level of extraction.

We tend to let our chadonnay rest sur lie in barrel, with bâtonnage every two weeks. “Sur lie” is the French term for leaving the wine in contact with its lees, and “bâtonnage” is when we stir the lees back up into the wine to induce a higher extraction of flavor.

But now is the time for racking, and our winemaker Daniel Moore will be hard at work this week racking our 2008 Estate Chardonnay in preparation for bottling next month. Racking, or soutirage,  is the process of siphoning the wine off the lees into a new, clean barrel. Racking allows for clarification of the wine and aids in stabilization. The racking process is repeated several times as the wine ages in barrel.

After the last round of racking, the final blend will be expertly assembled by Daniel Moore, whose wine-making expertise has allowed us to achieve a perfectly balanced and nuanced chardonnay year after year. We can’t wait to see what the 2008 vintage has in store!

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