French Oak

I will start with the most 'important' lesson I learned today: you should presume that a wine maker uses French Oak barrels. You cretin.

I haven't been sleeping well as I have many things on my mind that will be revealed later this month. Also, it doesn't help that my significant other has been watching Fringe, that Sci Fi show that never fails to gross out viewers with people morphing into dripping creatures, self combusting villains and other nightmare inducing scenarios involving throbbing veins and oozing blood.

I've been waking up exhausted, about 45 seconds before the cheery ring tone of my alarm goes off. Those 45 seconds are painful and precious, especially at 5:59 am. It was still dark out by the time I drove north; it was that time of day you experience only with anticipation of a flight or a major hangover.

I picked up Johanna whose car was in the shop and she looked lovely as ever even at that hour. I decided she looked like Ingrid Bergman.

Today's mission included packing orders at a local wine merchant where Abe shipped out his wine. Before hours, the shop was turned into a mini assembly line where about a dozen people including myself fulfilled orders. The tape dispenser was not my friend and my boxes were clearly distinguished by their Sharpei quality with all the folds of my taping job. I redeemed myself when I discovered that there were some mislabeled bottles in some cases we were pulling. I realized how human a process wine making was. This made me feel, well, human.

There was Brix testing back at the winery, a lab method of checking the sugar level in wine. Then there was racking; in the simplest terms, moving wine from tank to barrel. There are some multipurpose machines that are used in the wine making process; a pump is one of them. The pump has two immensely long hoses, I'd guess about 18 feet long for input and output with metal joints that attach in a way that makes me have a new a new appreciation for the simplicity of velcro.

Finally, Abe did some early blending of finished wine for aging and then dosed some other barrels with sulfur to stall malolactic fermentation. Malic acid (that gives zip to a green apple) is converted to lactic acid during the wine making process. Californian wines are notorious for going through what's referred to ML to yield those BIG buttery wines. The sulfur acts like Xanax so to speak. Of course there was cleaning to do at the end of the day.

Tomorrow it's supposed to rain. I'm hoping that means we can linger in the lab and talk about Mad Men.