2 Lads Winery Blog

Ramp it up! (because 'Wild Leek it up' just doesn't work)

Ramp season is here! Albeit a little early with the unseasonably warm weather we've been having, but I'm not complaining. Hopefully it just extends the season this year. 

If you're unfamiliar with ramps, they are wild leeks that grow in the forests of the eastern US. You can learn a little more about them here.

I was out and about this past weekend and stumbled across a few (ok, a lot of) patches of ramps growing in the woods.

I decided to harvest a small handful (practicing sustainable harvesting methods, of course) and use them as creative inspiration for one of the weekend dinners. 

I did a little digging online for some recipe ideas and really liked the idea of making a pesto, but I only had about 10 small ramps and wasn't sure how far the pesto would go with a pile of pasta. Still, I REALLY wanted to make a quick pesto, so I decided to go for it, and drizzle it on a white pizza instead.

I started out by cleaning the ramps.

You clean them much the way you would a scallion or a leek. I trimmed off the root and cleaned out any dirt trapped where the leaf comes out of the stalk. Sometimes you need to remove part of the papery stalk, much like on a scallion. Then I chopped up the white parts and the greens (you can use the entire plant!) and threw them in my food processor with a handful of toasted walnuts and about a 1/2 cup of grated parmesean. With the food processor on, I drizzled extra virgin olive oil into the processor until it looked like pesto. You'll probably use about 1/3 cup olive oil, depending on how many ramps you have and how thick or thin you like your pesto. 

So this is what mine looked like:

Then I decided to attack the pizza. I like making a basic white sauce for some of my pizzas, I find its a bit more versatile (there are a million recipes out there online, pick any one). I also wanted a little something more on the pizza, and in the food world, things that grow together often go well together. This is where I wish I had a large field of morels. A bad day morel hunting usually is still a good day for ramp gathering. The two are the epitome of Michigan spring. But since I haven't found any yet this spring, I sauteed up some cremini mushrooms instead.

 

 

Now for the cheese. Mozzarella seemed a little too bland for the intensity of the ramp pesto (if you've never had ramps, they have a bold, sweet onion, garlicky flavor), and I wanting something with a lot of flavor that also melted well, so I decided to use the Raclette cheese from Leelanau Cheese Company. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From here it was just a matter of assembling the pizza and baking it. Well, and then the best part, eating it. And if you're wondering what wine we had to go with it, I opened a bottle of the 2 Lads 2011 Rose of Cabernet Franc. Perfect.

There are so many variations on this. Like I mentioned above, next time I would love to use morels. You could omit the white sauce and spread the pesto on as the sauce and build up from there. The pesto would be great on pasta with asparagus and mushrooms, or in your omlette, or smeared on some fresh bread, or... What are some of your favorite ramp recipes? 

 

Ramp Pesto:

 

What you need:

-A handful of ramps (about 10-12)

-a handful of toasted walnuts (about 1/2 cup). You could also use pine nuts or any other preferred nut!

-About 1/2 cup grated parmesean cheese

-1/3 to 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

 

What you do:

-clean ramps and chop up a little

-toss ramps, walnuts and parmesean into a food processor 

-drizzle the olive oil into the processor as its running until you find the consistency you want.

Disgorging and dosaging 2 Lads Reserve Sparkling Wine

The guys were down in the cellar yesterday disgorging and dosaging another "batch" of our Reserve Sparkling Wine. I thought I'd use this as a great time to explain the process a little better...

 

Disgorging and dosaging: a wine story in photos

There are a few different methods to make sparkling wines (known better as Champagne, although legally only wines made in the Champagne region of France can be called that). We choose to use the méthode champenoise or method traditionnelle (traditional method) in which the secondary fermentation process that actually creates those bubbles is done inside the bottle. This creates a much more elegant style with finer bubbles (its also a lot more work, but hey, we like the end result better).

After the primary fermentation has finished (that’s when the yeast convert the sugars in the grape juice to alcohol), we bottle the wine with more yeast and sugar, put a bottle cap on, then lay the bottles on their side in a metal cage for secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation then creates the carbonation which gets trapped in the wine.

        Bottled bubbly hanging out in cages

After the yeasts have converted the sugar to CO2, they settle to the bottom of the bottle (now we call them “lees”).

 

          Lees in the bottom of the bottle.

The longer the lees sit inside the bottle at this stage, the yeastier, creamier, and nuttier the aromatics and flavors of the wine becomes.

For the next step, the bottles need to be turned upside down to allow the lees to settle in the neck of the bottle so we can remove it cleanly. This is the process called “riddling”, which is a slow process of turning and tilting the bottles until they end up upside down.

 

             Bottles sitting upside down in riddling rack

When we are ready to disgorge and dosage the wine (disgorging is extracting the lees from the bottle and dosage is a mixture of the base wine and some level of sugar which sets the final class of sparkling wine, i.e. brut), we need to chill the wine down to help with a cleaner disgoregement. We move the bottles from the riddling rack (above) to our plastic bins fitted with an insert to hold the bottles in place:

For our Reserve Sparkling Wine, all of the above has happened since the fall of 2009 (most of that time was spent with the bottles on their sides in the wire cages, 2 years to be exact). The last step (moving the bottles into the bins above) was done about 3 weeks ago. Now the fun begins...

Yesterday the guys finished off a little more than 450 bottles. This is the process of disgorging and dosaging and here's how it happens.

 

 

 

 

Cornel carefully moves the bottles, one at a time, from the plastic bins to the machine that will remove the bottle cap and the pressure inside the bottle will force the lees out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cornel places the bottle so the lever is under the bottle cap:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here the bottle cap is about to come off and release the pressure and the remove the lees from the bottle (the machine is basically a big bottle opener).



















 

You can see the foam spraying out from under the hood on this shot:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the disgorging, the bottle of bubbly gets the dosage added to it. Cornel attaches the bottle onto this contraption which holds and measures the dosage: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the dosage. Here's how we made it. We opened a handful of those sparkling wine bottles, dumped the contents into beakers, added a small amount of sugar (it is a brut style, so legally it can have 0-12 grams/litre), and stirred until the sugar was completely dissolved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A set amount of this dosage gets added to every bottle. The machine measures out the amount (i.e 20 mL) and adds it to the bottle. This insures consistancy of the sparkling wine from bottle to bottle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bottle then goes over the Dawie or Tim who pour the base wine into each bottle to fill it up to 750 mL.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then seal the bottle up. Traditionally corks are used at this point, but we like the cleanliness and ease of the crown cap (aka beer cap).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bottles then get cleaned off and stacked again in cages so we can move them around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last step is that every single bottle gets hand labeled, both front and back labels. From here we put them in 6-pack cases and they are (finally!) available for sale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yup, making sparkling wines is very labor intensive, but we have a great clilmate for making these wines here in Northern Michigan, and we here at 2 Lads absolutely love the final product. This intensive production method also helps explain why we make such small amounts of our sparkling wines. If you're a fan of Sparkling wines, please stop by, we'd love to talk to you, over a glass of bubbly, of course. 

The grapes are all in, now what?

On one of the final nice days of the year in early November, after a few days of cold rain, we brought in the last of the grapes (the 1.4 acre block of Merlot). “Harvest” is officially done. So now what happens at a winery? Well, there is still a lot of processing and production left, but the rest of it happens inside.

Because the red wine grapes ferment on the skins, they still require some attention once they’ve been processed through the crusher-destemmer. We usually put all of our red wine grapes into our Variable Capacity tanks for fermentation:

However, this year we put some of our Cabernet Franc and Merlot into barrels (separately) for fermentation. We performed a little more intensive sorting process with those grapes:

And we performed our "punch downs" (churning the skins back into contact with the juice to extract color, tannins, and flavors. Much like steeping tea) a few times a day in the barrels:

 

Fermentation of our reds is now almost complete and today we are running the last of our red wine through the press to separate the skins and extract all the juice. Here's some Merlot in the press yesterday:

From the press pan, the wine goes down into the cellar and into barrels to start the aging process. They'll hang out down there for anywhere from 10 to 20 months.

Once Cornel gets the red wines into barrel he'll get a chance to relax for a few months (well, he'll still be checking in on things and doing a few minor tweaks and processes, as well as tasting the wines to see how they are coming along.). Our white wines are done fermenting and will stay in our large stainless steel tanks for the winter. We'll bottle most of those up in March for a spring release. Overall, its been a very successful 2011 harvest. The flavors and aromatics we are seeing are spectacular. The whites are very fruity with a bit of lushness. The reds have amazing bold fruit aromatics, nice tannin structure and will benefit from time in barrel. Production is up for us, we'll most likely hit the 5000 case production with this harvest. Stay tuned, I'll let you know how things continue to progress, and look for the first of the 2011 vintage from us next spring.

2 Lads 2011 Harvest update

Harvest is in full swing and things have been busy here at the winery the last few weeks. We’ve brought all of our white wine grapes in. Our Pinot Grigio is in stainless steel tanks and about done with fermentation. The Chardonnay (it's understood that its our Chard-oh-YAY!) is in the large French oak tank and still undergoing fermentation.

We pressed both the Fouch Vineyard Riesling and our estate Riesling this week. They are also down in stainless steel tanks and will be innoculated to start fermentation probably this weekend.

The Pinot Noir is all in as well. It's been run through the crusher-destemmer and is in our smaller variable capacity tanks fermenting. I posted a similar photo on facebook already, but it's always amazing to me how much CO2 is given off during fermentation.

We'll run this through the press, most likely next week, and we'll fill up the Burgundy barrels in our cellar with the fermented juice.

The Cabernet Franc grapes and most of our Merlot grapes are still on the vine. We'll be bringing in some of the Cabernet Franc for our rosé next, and finishing up harvest with the last of the Cab Franc and Merlot.

As the reds come in, and we continue to process the fruit, I'll get more photos and videos posted and keep you up to date on where things are in the winery.

Harvest from the vineyard's perspective.

As we start to get closer to harvest I often get asked, how does Cornel decide when to pick the grapes? Well, there’s a lot more involved in the decision than a magic date on the calendar or popping a couple grapes in your mouth and thinking they taste pretty good, so why not start now?

First off, it depends on the style of wine we are making. We bring in grapes for our sparkling wines before the rest of our wines. Earlier harvest of those grapes means that the sugars haven’t developed as much, and the acids are a bit more prevalent. We usually harvest grapes for our sparkling wines with the sugars at around 19-20˚Brix. The earlier harvest, with not-as-ripe fruit also means that we aren’t getting the phenolic compounds, and while we want some fruit aromatics, we also want some of the sparkling wine aromatics that come from the yeast (so we use a champagne yeast for these wines). Other styles of wine we choose to make might depend on the growing season. A warm year or a longer growing season will see riper fruit with higher ˚Brix which would allow us to make a bolder, heavier, richer wine if we chose to (especially a red wine). These wines are a little more reminiscent of a California style wine. A cooler year or a shorter growing season might have us leaning more towards a European style wine, with brighter acidity and fruit, and crisper mouth feel.

Variety of the grape will also determine when we harvest. The grapes in the vineyard all ripen at different states. Some varieties need longer time on the vine to develop and ripen. We also have different clones of the same variety, and some clones ripen sooner than others. After the grapes for the sparkling wines are brought in (some of the Pinot Grigio and sometimes some of the Chardonnay), then we start harvesting grapes for our still wines (those without bubbles). The first varieties that tend to ripen are our Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio. The Pinot Noir follows in batches along with the Riesling, while we might be bringing in the last of the Chardonnay. We bring in Cabernet Franc for our rosé as we’re wrapping up the Pinot Noir, and lastly, we bring in the Cabernet Franc and Merlot. Harvest isn’t a linear event. Varieties overlap, we bring in parts of the vineyard, while we leave others to ripen a little longer on the vine.

Then there are the grapes themselves, with quite a few factors involved there; pH, acid levels, physiological ripeness (tannins and phenolic compounds that add to color, flavor and aroma), seed development, and sugar levels. We’re not opposed to sampling the grapes either, to see how they taste. It’s a combination of all these factors that help determine when we get the crews out into the vineyard and start bringing the grapes in.

Harvest of Pinot Grigio for 2 Lads Sparkling Pinot Grigio

The 2011 harvest has begun! We started this morning with harvesting part of the Southern block of Pinot Grigio for our Sparkling PG.

   

We harvest all of our grapes by hand.

 

All the buckets get dumped into large bins that, once full, get driven into the winery to start processing.

The bins of Pinot Grigio go into the hopper:

  

 Which carries the grapes into the press:

 

Here's Cornel making room for the last few bins of grapes for this press load:

 

Once the press is full, we close the doors and turn it on. We have a bladder press, which is a large cylinder with a canvas-rubber-like balloon that fills with air and presses the juice from the grapes while leaving the seeds and skins inside the press. It will take about 3 hours to press one load. Here is a shot of the juice coming from the press and collecting in the press pan: 

 

We measure the sugars at this point to know what our starting sugar level is (which we follow as fermentation occurs). We want the juice for our sparkling wines to be a little lower in sugar, and have a little more acidity. Here's a shot looking through our refractometer (an instrument that measures sugars). We came in on this press load at about 19.5 degrees Brix (defined as sugar content of an aqueous solution. Its how we measure sugars in grape juice):

 

They guys are just finishing up this first press cycle of Pinot Grigio (We loaded the press at around 10:30 this morning and started it around 11 AM). The stainless steel tank down in the tank room is filling up, and they are about to fill the press again for the next cycle (Its just after 4 PM now). They will be here late into the evening as this cycle runs its course and then they will have some clean up to do. That will be it for a few weeks. We'll take a short respite while the rest of the grapes continue to hang on the vine and ripen further. I'll keep you posted!

Harvest Update from Old Mission Peninsula

 
I spent a little bit of time earlier today out in the vineyard with Cornel, our winemaker. Despite the late, damp spring we had, things are looking pretty good. The gang has been out in the vineyard removing some foliage to open up the area around the clusters to allow a little more sunshine in and to help with picking once harvest starts. We'll be putting the netting up in the next day or two, to protect the grapes from birds, deer, and racoons as the grapes continue to get sweeter.

The first grapes to come in will be some of the Pinot Grigio from our southern block. They are currently at around 18 degrees Brix (how winemakers measure sugars in the grapes). We plan on harvesting these the week of September 26th, at around 19 or 20 degrees Brix and we will use these in our Sparkling Pinot Grigio.

 
Pinot Grigio clusters hanging in our Southern Block.

 

Our Pinot Noir is probably the farthest along in the vineyard. It's at around 19-20 degrees Brix and has incredible color.

 
Mmmmmmmmmmm, Pinot noir.

 

We hope to harvest at around 23-24 degrees Brix, so probably around mid-October. This will be the first of the red varieties we bring into the winery.

We have 3 different clones of Chardonnay, and they are all progressing at different rates. The 96 clone is the farthest along at around 18 degrees Brix, and is tasting incredible! The Dijon 809 clone is a little further behind, with some good sweetness and those great floral notes the clone is known for (also called the "Musqué" clone, and can have similar aromatics to Muscat). Our 76 clone is about on par with the 809 clone.

 
The Chardonnay turning from green to a more yellow tone.

 

As for the other varieties: the Merlot is around 15-16 degrees Brix and is still gaining a nice dark color, with the vineyard block located behind the winery a little further along. The Riesling and Cabernet Franc are farthest back at 12-14 degrees Brix. The Cabernet Franc is usually the last variety we bring into the winery for processing, so we have some time to reach full ripeness (if nature cooperates with us).

The 2011 growing season has given us vines that are heavy with fruit. We're bringing in some more barrels for our reds and we will be utilizing most of our tank space in the cellar to deal with the larger harvest. We're hoping to produce around 5000 cases for the 2011 vintage. That means more wine for you in 2012 (whites and rosé) and 2013 (our reds)!

2 Lads 2011 Vineyard Update

The heat wave that scorched the country last week was brutal. Even “Up North” we saw more heat and humidity than we’re used to. But while those of us in the animal kingdom might have been complaining, the grapevines didn’t seem to mind too much.

The heat set in on the 16^th of July and lasted about nine days, with temperatures mostly in the upper 80s to low 90s. As I’ve mentioned in past posts (see Spring in the Vineyard), Growing Degree Days (GDD) help us to assess how the vineyard is doing. With the cool wet spring, our GDD numbers were hovering right around the 2008 and 2009 seasons, one a pretty typical year and one a very cold year, respectively. The heat wave has helped us pull away from chilly 2009, and now we’re pretty much on track for a classic Michigan summer with a classic growing season. A little more heat and we’ll toast the 2008 season as well. Check out the GDD chart below to compare how this year’s heat kicked the season into high gear:

GDD: The Heat is On:

Year	GDD thru July 15	GDD thru July 25	Increase in GDD from 15th-25th
2007	1113.0	1273.4	160.4
2008	924.5	1124.3	199.8
2009	804.0	944.0	140
2010	1216.9	1424.2	207.3
2011	926.8	1184.5	257.7

 
 

A happy, healthy Chardonnay cluster

 

30-Day Crush Course

People often ask me how to identify all those aromatics and flavors that get thrown around by wine professionals. It’s not easy, and it’s not instant. It takes a lot of work, a lot of concentration — and tasting a lot of wines (poor you). It also takes a little background knowledge; if you have an idea what you might find, it makes putting a name to that elusive aroma a little bit easier.

Getting there just takes a little focus. To learn the most about wine in the shortest amount of time, zero in as follows: pick one variety — be it your old favorite, a new variety that you’ve just discovered, or one you’ve never heard of before — and drink nothing but that variety for a month.

I know, I know, variety is the spice, right? Well, that’s one of the true beauties of wine. Variety is never lacking, even among the same variety. Put yourself on the case with a little bulk buying:

Get a bunch of bottles — maybe even a case at a volume discount — where every bottle is from a different region of the world, at different price points, or from different vintages, just as long as they’re all the same variety.

Then drink some wine every night (poor, poor you). Ideally, share it with some consistent partners in wine. This gives you the opportunity to talk to about what you smell and taste — and whether you like it or not.

When sampling the same variety nightly, you start to understand the varietal characteristics, the commonalities that the variety shares no matter where it’s grown, how different the weather conditions may be, or what style the wine was made in. You also start to understand how the variety differs when grown in a warmer climate versus a cooler one, or how vintage affects the wine, or how the quality varies between an $8 bottle compared to a $20 bottle (each a little cheaper with the case discount!).

If you hit your palate with the same variety every night for 30 nights, it’s a concentrated enough time span that you can remember things about the wines (and it’s always good to take notes) that you won’t remember if you’ve had a dozen different varieties in between. I guarantee that by the end of the month, you’ll have a much better understanding of that variety, its basic characteristics, and what you may like and dislike about it. Then you’ve got another 30 days and a new variety to explore.

How can a wine be dry?

We hear it a lot in the business. People say they don’t like dry wines, then they ask for a glass of Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc. It always makes us scratch our heads a little. It also makes it harder for us to help recommend wines to people or steer them toward wines we think they’ll like.

Communication breakdown is an all-too-common occurrence in the wine world. I think “dry” is the most misunderstood and misused wine term out there, especially to those who are rather, um, wet behind the ears when it comes to wine. But never fear… here’s a quick breakdown on using “dry” like a pro:

Dry is actually the opposite of sweet. Both terms are used in reference to the amount of residual sugars left in the wine after fermentation. When the grapes are picked at harvest, they are full of sugars and acids. Through the fermentation process, yeast converts the sugars to alcohol. As the sugars are converted to alcohol, the amount of sugars left in the wine decreases (becomes less sweet) and the alcohol level increases (drink responsibly!). This process can be stopped at any time during fermentation, as controlled by the winemaker, to leave the finished wine at a level of sweetness or dryness that complements the other characteristics of the wine.

More sugar doesn’t always mean sweeter. The assumption here is that more sugar left in the wine means a sweeter tasting wine, right? Not always. Acids, tannins and alcohol affect the perception of how sweet or dry a wine tastes. Ultimately, the winemaker tries to create a balance in the wine, where these factors are all in harmony with each other. A wine with more residual sugar might also have a bit more acid, so it won’t taste as sweet as one that actually has less residual sugar. 

Use your words, but trust your taste. Are all these acid/sugar shenanigans raining on your pleasure parade? Don’t sweat it. It’s good to be able to use the right vocabulary to help guide you toward wines you might like, and to effectively communicate your preferences to someone who’s trying to help you choose a wine. But don’t be boxed in by these terms. It’s always best to actually try a wine, whether it’s considered dry or sweet, to really know if it’s something you would like to drink.

Oh, and that “drying” feeling you get between your cheeks and gums? That’s not dry, that’s actually astringency, which comes from the tannins, but that’s a whole other blog post! Stay 2ned, Nation…