Now that the bubbling has subsided, it’s time to rack the nearly 40 gallons of wine that is becoming a nuisance sitting in my dining room. Racking involves a  little grunt work in lifting the 5 gallon carboys to a table, siphoning the wine down to a lower clean carboy and then cleaning everything up for the next batch. Eight jugs in all. What’s left at the bottom of the carboy is a truly hideous sludge of purple spent yeast. What gets put into the new carboy is the fruity, ruby-colored substance of next year’s indulgence. It seems light and lively and joyously free of the yucky yeast that triggered its conversion from juice to wine only to become a cadaverous burden once its job was done. Taking a taste of each wine as I go is a must. There’s still a long ways to go before these wines reach the depth and complexity I hope for, but they all show promise, even the one early-picked cabernet I had to rescue from near smelly egg death.

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The vigorous splashing I put my cabernet through last week seemed to rid it of the stinky egg odor, but I decided to take it a step farther and try the technique suggested by grapestompers.com and also local wine expert Alex Saliby. It seemed sort of silly to be tossing my copper pots and pans into a vat of wine, but that’s what I did. A copper skillet and two milk steamers went into the 20 gallon container first. Then I splashed the wine out of the carboy over the copper. I used the copper utensils to stir and splash the wine around in there a couple of times to expose it to plenty of air before pouring it back into the 5 gallon carboy. It did seem like the sulfide smell was gone, but I’ll take another whiff in a couple days to make sure.

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I have seven carboys of wine merrily perking along in my living room. A quiet symphony of bubbles making their way through airlocks as my wine goes into its final phase of fermentation before carrying them down for their long winter’s nap in the cellar. But one 5-gallon carboy seemed less happy than the others. No bubbles. It was the first pressed Cabernet, so it would make sense that fermentation was further along. I decided to give it a taste the other day and was horrified by the smell of rotten eggs that filled my nose as I sniffed the ounce I siphoned into my glass. Something was definitely wrong. I quickly cleaned my wine thief and sampled the other carboys. They all smelled fragrant with fruit and yeast and no evidence of off smells. Whew!I read up on the  smell and found out that it means the one carboy had developed a hydrogen sulfide problem. I had this problem once before and was able to get rid of the smell by vigorous exposure to air. I siphoned the wine from the carboy into my 20 gallon open fermentation bucket and splashed it around for several minutes. Each time I went back to stir it up again, I could tell that I was getting rid of some of the smell. Following advice I got from Leavenworth winemaker Chuck Egner and offerings I found on grapestompers.com, I added some yeast nutrient and splashed it around a little more before siphoning it back into a clean carboy and putting the airlock back on. I’ll try the wine again tonight and see if I have to go through the process again. Grapestompers also advises filtering or fining the wine and pouring it over a piece of copper. A tiny amount of copper sulfate — a poisonous compound — can be added to the wine as a last resort. I’d probably throw the wine out before I did that. But the aeration should do the trick since I’ve caught the problem early.  Grapestompers said the problem is due to too much sulfite added (I was careful not to do that), lack of proper nutrients (maybe, since I didn’t add any), yeast combining with various forms of sulfur (likely, since I used Red Star Montrachet that is know to occasionally have this problem) or bacterial contamination (always a possibility though I tried to be very sanitary). If this batch of wine succeeds, it will have a story to tell.

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I finally got around to harvesting the grapes from my own little vineyard last weekend. The vines were killed by frost a couple weeks ago so the grapes had waited for me about as long as they were going to. I really don’t know if I was doing myself any favors by letting the grapes hang, but I was too busy with getting the last of the garden vegetables and tomatoes taken care of and tending the fermentation of the two batches of grapes I had acquired from commercial vintners.Grapes don’t continue to develop sugar after the vines die as far as I can tell. But the season didn’t work out too badly. I have about 100 vines in five varieties. The lemberger, chardonnay and pinot gris had plenty of growing time and matured nicely, except for a couple wet spots close to my neighbor’s pear orchard sprinklers that had some powdery mildew. Brix value — a measure of sugar in the grapes — tested between 22 and 24, pretty much perfect for producing a wine of about 11 percent alcohol. The cabernet franc tested a little lower. The sangiovese, which needs a longer growing season than my site will ever be able to provide, lower still, about 18 brix.I picked and crushed all the varieties separately, but then seeing the small amounts of each that I had, particularly the whites, decided to throw them all together and ferment them as an estate blend, a menage. The resulting brix level was just below 22, meaning I didn’t have to add any sugar to achieve the correct alcohol level. The five gallons of wine the blend will produce should be interesting. At least I can say it’s all mine, from start to finish.

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Warning: This blog could be hazardous to your health. That label might be required if I were writing this blog in France. According to an article in today’s New York Times, warnings similar to what must be included in tobacco ads in this country must now be included in journalistic articles about wine in France. Yikes! Is France — a country where wine is held more historica and sacred than Holy Water — to become a teetotaling nation of secret imbibers?

Check out Eric Asimov’s column for yourself: http://thepour.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/put-a-cork-in-it-french-government-says/?partner=rssnyt

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October is apple cider making time. There are always a couple apple pressing parties to go to as air grows nippy, the leaves begin to fall and apple growing areas are sweet with the smell of ripe fruit. Marya and Jose Luis Vidal had their annual party at a new location this year. They recently moved to a 100-year-old house on a hill overlooking Cashmere. The orchard that once surrounded the place had been pulled out several years before, but the location was still perfect for the gathering of 30 or 40 friends, ages 1 to at least 61 (me), two cider presses and boxes and boxes of ripe apples. A roast turkey, pots of chili and trays of potluck casseroles and desserts kept everyone well fed between their turns cranking the apples through the crushers and winding the screw to press out the precious golden juice.

As the sun descended behind the hill, people began wondering what they would do with the 50 or 60 gallons of apple juice that still remained after many went home taking only a jug or two. There is only so much room in the refrigerator and freezer. Naturally, talk turned to making apple syrup, hard cider and brandy. Everyone seemed to have a recipe or at least a random experience. The half gallon jug forgotten at the back of the refrigerator on on the back porch. The explosive fountain of bubbly vinegar. The underground vaults of aging brew. Granddad’s secret still. While some preferred natural fermentation, others suggested a more scientific approach of killing the natural yeasts with sulfites and then adding a wine yeast. I recalled being told that farmers would often make hard cider and then let that freeze out in the winter cold to separate the pure alcohol from the juice to make their own version of apple brandy.

What’s your recipe or apple cider experience?

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Terry Flanagan called last week to tell me cabernet sauvignon grapes at his Bishop Vineyard near Ancient Lakes were ready to pick. I finally had time to get out there Sunday, accompanied by Lynn and Mary Madsen and their wonderful granddaughter, Maité, who made sure I knew she was 2 years old. It didn’t take us long with her help to pick about 200 pounds of grapes. It was a beautiful thing to be doing that morning on the flat close to the cliffs above the Columbia Gorge. There are so many aspects I love about making wine.

Terry Flanagan is owner of Ryan Patrick Vineyards. His wines have won many awards and I think are among the best produced in the area. I’ve purchased grapes from him for my wine the past three years, but he said the cab at Bishop’s has really come into its own this year. I’m excited to be making wine with it.

I had to run out to cover the opening of the new Town Toyota Center that afternoon, so the grapes had to sit until Monday before I could crush and de-stem them. I had the day off so I could leisurely crush the grapes by hand and think back to the time when I was a youngster not much older than Maité helping my Grampa Micucci make his wine next to the garden behind his rural Chicago home. Crushing purple grapes with my hands and feet was better than playing in the mud back then. Still is today.

This was my second time out for grapes at different vineyards. I now have about 400 pounds in fermentation, the first batch nearly ready to press. That should make me about 25 gallons of wine. I still have grapes from my own vineyard to pick, maybe another 100 pounds. They still need more time so I’ll wait as long as I can before the vines are killed by frost. In the meantime, I have plenty to do.

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Sunday was racking day at Rick’s Wine Rancho. Not my favorite way to spend a sunny weekend day, but it’s an essential part of making good wine. Especially so for me and other amateurs who age their wine in glass carboys rather than barrels that breathe somewhat. Racking is a process of transferring the fully fermented but aging wine from one container to another. It’s necessary to give the wine a little air and to get it off the yeast and other sediment that has settled to the bottom of the container. Usually this is done at least twice during the first year. At this time of year, the second racking is also a time to make room in the cellar for the new wine soon to come.

I have about 30 gallons of various red wines aging in six carboys from last year’s harvest. It’s pretty simple to siphon the wine from the full container into an empty one. It brings great pleasure to see the dark red wine gush through the siphon hose and swirl in the clean carboy. My cellar fills with the pungent aromas of lush blackberries, leather and oak. I’m careful to keep the siphon hose above the layer of yeast and oak chips at the bottom of the carboy as the last of the wine fills the new container. Less exciting is the march up and down the stairs as I bring the empty carboys and cleanse them of the sticky sediment and then sterilize them with a rinse of potassium metabisulfite.

Each wine gets tasted to make sure it’s aging well and to judge whether another round of oak chips is needed to soften the flavors. I decide to forego any additional oak until I’m ready to do more individual tastings. I’ve had problems with over-oaking in the past and would rather err on the side of too little rather than too much in the future. The cabernet tastes especially deep and full. The co-fermented cab-merlot is lighter but seems nicely balanced. The syrah is nice and fruity. I top each carboy from bottles of my 2006 wine and then seal them back up with sterile caps. By late winter, they’ll be ready for bottling. About a year from now, they should be ready to drink.

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I got the call Thursday that there were grapes available and ready to pick in Quincy. A friend and I went up Saturday morning, our vehicle loaded with buckets, barrels and clippers. I only get a couple hundred pounds from this one vineyard so the grower allows me to go in and pick some of the row ends before his picking machines come through. It only took about an hour for Lynn and me to get about 70 pounds of cabernet sauvignon and 130 pounds of merlot. The merlot looked especially good this year. The huge clumps of sweet, dark purple berries were so tightly massed together that it was nearly impossible to find the stems.

Once home, I ran the grapes in separate batches through the crusher on my apple press. It does a good job of splitting the grapes and pulling them off the stem. Then I put my clean hands into the barrel of crushed grapes and removed the stems after hand crushing what few berries were still attached. It was wonderful work, sitting outside in the sun with Dan Maher’s Inland Folk show playing on the radio and feeling grape juice and gooshy grapes run through my fingers. The 70 pounds of cabernet should make me close to 5 gallons of wine once fermented. The merlot nearly double that. There will be other grapes to come as the season progresses, including those from my own little vineyard.

Once the fermenting barrels of grapes were sitting in a cozy corner of my dining room, I took hydrometer and pH readings and recorded them in my record book. Both wines were near perfect for making a 12 to 13 percent alcohol wine, 25 brix sugar on the merlot, 24 for the cab. PH for both was about 3.6, judging by my crude litmus paper test. I added a tiny bit of potassium metabisulfate to the two vats, about 50 ppm per gallon, to kill unwanted foreign yeasts that came in with the grapes. Sunday afternoon, I added the appropriate yeast and covered the two containers with loose fitting lids and a blanket to keep temperatures at 65 to 70 degrees. Things should start bubbling in a couple of days. I’m already looking forward to coming home to that wonderful yeasty smell of fermenting grapes.

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Got a call today from Price Gledhill who owns one of Leavenworth’s coolest new restaurants, South, at 913 Front Street. Price wanted me to know that he had some of Dean Priebe’s prized porter on tap at the restaurant. Priebe, he told me, is the king of Leavenworth area home beer brewers and loves to enter his brews in contests all over the country. He entered his porter recipe in a recent contest offered by Pike Place Brewing Co. in Seattle. They liked it so much they wanted to do a commercial brew of the recipe. Priebe’s porter is currently available at their brew pub at 1415 1st St. in Seattle. The porter will also be entered in the Great American Beer Festival Oct. 9-11 in Denver, Colo. The brew will be one of 10 from Washington and 60 nationwide entered in the pro-am division, in which a commercial brewer submits an entry based on an amateur’s recipe, Gledhill said. Gledhill said he’ll be serving samples of the Priebe’s porter Oct. 2 at the restaurant during an open sendoff party for the local brewer.

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