Washington Winemaker » commercial wine

Overlake Cabernet Sauvignon

Erroll — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:00:06 +0000

I was happy enough with the Fetzer Cabernet from Trader Joe’s to give another of their budget Cabernets a try. Like the Fetzer, this comes recommended by Jason, and it set me back $6.

Running the numbers

Couldn’t find any information about this wine, so the only reported measurement I have is 14.75% alcohol. My measurements are:

SG: 0.994, pH: 3.72, TA: 3 g/L

There aren’t many winemaking books that tell you to shoot for a pH of 3.7 or a TA of 3 g/L. What do you get when you put that together with high alcohol and low sugar?

An easy drinking red

“Buttery.” So said the Lady of the House, but I didn’t pick up on that. She didn’t say, but I could tell she was thinking, that it wasn’t the only thing I didn’t pick up on! But getting back to the wine, this is a simple big red that goes down easy. We both liked it with spaghetti and sausage, and I’m going to add it to my list of superbowl wines.

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2006 Fetzer Valley Oaks Cabernet Sauvignon

Erroll — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:00:24 +0000

Jason mentioned this wine favorably on his blog, and I decided to give it a try. I bought it at Trader Joe’s for $6.50. That’s a good price to go along with the good recommendation. Now lets have a look under the cork.

Running the numbers

I’ll start with the usual analysis. Fetzer didn’t have information on the 2006 vintage, and they ignored my e-mail asking for it. They indicated 13.5% alcohol on the bottle and reported this for 2007:

13.49% Alcohol • Titratable Acidity (TA) 6.3 g/L • pH: 3.47 • RS: 0.6g/L (dry)

and here are my measurements of the 2006 vintage:

Specific Gravity (SG): 0.994 • pH: 3.5 • TA: 5 g/L

I like to include these measurements so you and I can compare them with our own homemade wine. If a commercial wine tastes particularly good and well balanced, I want to look at the measurements to see how they did it. The most important measurements, of course, are the ones you do with your nose and your palate. How did the Fetzer measure up?

Going back for more

Jason, I owe you one. This is a nice wine that’s great with pasta or steak on the grill. The Lady of the House and I enjoyed a bottle with dinner of ziti and meatballs. It would also make a terrific Superbowl wine. I don’t rate wines on a 100-point scale, but I can tell you that you get more than you pay for with this wine. I’m going back to buy more.

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Kirkland 2007 Sonoma County Chardonnay

Erroll — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:00:21 +0000

I had high hopes for this wine ($9 at Costco), because the Kirkland brand is usually pretty good and I liked the Kirkland Sauvignon Blanc. So how did it stack up?

Running the numbers

When I make wine at home, I measure the specific gravity, titratable acidity, and pH. I thought I’d start doing that for some of the commercial wine I buy to see how how the pros are balancing acid, alcohol, and sugar. Since some wineries publish an analysis of their wines, it’ll also give me a chance to see how my measurments compare to those of a commercial lab.

The alcohol content is 13.9%, according to the label, and here are my measurements:

SG: 0.990, pH: 3.34, TA: 4.4 g/L

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an analysis for this wine, and my e-mail to Kirkland Signature Wine Connection went unanswered. So I’ll just have to go on what I have, and what I have is a low TA – I would have expected 6 g/L or so. Ok, but how does it taste?

Disappointing

“Not unpleasant,” said the Lady of the House. We both hoped for more. There is promise, as you begin to sip, a hint of something lively. It’s gone the moment you swallow, however, and that short finish makes it a plain, disappointing wine. Next time I’ll pass on this one and pick up the Sauv Blanc or head over to Trader Joe’s for some Panilonco 2008 Reserve Chardonnay/Voignier.

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A White Wine Bargain

Erroll — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:00:34 +0000

A lot of cheap wine is overpriced, so it’s a real treat to find a $4 bottle that I want to buy more of. A friend recommended Panilonco 2008 Reserve Chardonnay/Voignier and I bought a bottle at Trader Joe’s – a great place to hunt for bargains.

I like my white wines to have a little bite, while the Lady of the House prefers them sweet and smooth. So I often get excited about a wine only to see her make a face. Other times her eyes light up after tasting one that I think was made boring by too much sugar.

This well balanced wine made us both happy. It’s simple, in a good way, with a nice flavor that’s crisp but smooth. Our only complaint was that Trader Joe’s was out of stock when we went back for more.

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My Dad’s Big Red Wine

Erroll — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:00:17 +0000

My dad has been keeping this big old bottle of wine that none of us knows much about. According to the label it’s a 1978 red table wine from Piedmont, Italy. It also says, “Ribezzo Barbera D’Asti.” It’s a 12-liter bottle, and I was afraid the wine was past its prime. If so, it wasn’t getting any better and the thing to do was re-bottle it. Then we’d know what shape the wine was in and we’d have it in normal bottles to drink as we liked. The first thing I had to do was uncork it.

So how do you uncork a 12-liter wine bottle? A lever action corkscrew is no good because it’s too small for the cork to pass through. I tried a waiters corkscrew. It looked a little small in comparison, but I got it in as far as I could and started pulling. I thought it was working at first, as the cork seemed like it was coming out easily. I soon discovered that the 30-year old cork had split horizontally, so I pulled out the top half of the cork but the bottom half remained stubbornly in place.

I was hoping to get the cork out whole and clean, but prepared to deal with cork or pieces of cork in the wine. I put plan B into action by gently pushing the cork down until it fell into the wine. So far, so good, but now we’re at the embarrassing part of the story. I began to siphon the wine into a bottling bucket, and all was going well. I made sure to keep the end of my racking cane off the bottom so as not to pick up sediment. As the wine level in the bottle went down, I lowered the racking cane until … it wouldn’t go down any more. That’s when I realized that this bottle was taller than my carboys and the racking cane wasn’t big enough to reach all the way to the bottom.

Lesson learned. Next time I have to deal with an unusual size, I’ll double check my equipment and make sure it fits the container. There I was with most of the wine in the bottling bucket, but no way to siphon the rest. I gritted my teeth and poured the remaining wine. From here on, it was pretty familiar. I moved the bottling bucket onto a counter, and filled 14 bottles while the Lady of the House corked them. Now we’ve got some tasting to do!

Update I took a photo of Big Red before re-bottling.

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Kirkland Signature Sauvignon Blanc

Erroll — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:00:40 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, Costco is a chain of warehouse stores, mainly in the US and Canada, that allows you to buy in bulk from a limited selection at terrific prices. It can be a good place to buy wine, but I hadn’t seen them sell it under there own label – Kirkland Signature – until now. I was curious, and picked up a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

I thought it was fruity, with the strong flavor and acidity that I know and love about Sauvignon Blanc. It was dry and acidic, but in a way that wont put off sweet wine lovers. The Lady of the House, her sweet tooth is known far and wide, liked it too calling it “grapefruit-y” and “summer-y.”

There are cheaper wines that are overpriced. This one is a bargain at $10.

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Commercial Cherry Wine

Erroll — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:00:11 +0000

I’m still trying to get the hang of cherry wine, but while I tinker and tweak I might be able to buy some from the Ten Spoon Vineyard. This Montana winery uses Lambert cherries from Flathead Lake to make a dry red wine. I always get excited when I find the pros making “fruit wine.” I got some great advice on making rhubarb wine from the Lynfred Winery, and I’m hoping the people at Ten Spoon will share some tidbits.

I haven’t looked in on last year’s cherry wine since July, when I noticed a problem with the acidity. The total acidity (TA) was too high, which I would ordinarily address by neutralizing some of it. The pH was high as well, and that made my job tougher. If I went ahead and neutralized some of the acid to get the TA down, I would also be raising the already-too-high pH. So my thought was to leave the acid alone and balance it with sugar. Maybe I can get some advice on this – and find out if any of the shops around here carry Ten Spoon’s cherry wine!

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Dungeness Red: A Pleasant Surprise

Erroll — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:00:01 +0000

I’ve written about Olympic Cellars before. They’re the winery being threatened by the United State Olympic Committee for using the word “Olympic” in their name. They also make a cranberry wine. Well the Lady of the House and I have recently tried some of their wine, and the Dungeness Red (a 2004 Lemberger) really stands out. It has enough of a tannic bite, an astringency that tastes a little bitter makes your mouth feel a little dry, to make the wine interesting without being harsh. There’s a complexity to it that makes the first sip a pleasant surprise.

What do I mean by “complexity?” I mean the opposite of some of those simple bland wines that we’ve all had. You know the ones – you taste them, and there’s nothing at all wrong. They’re not to sweet. Not to harsh. They don’t taste bad. But there’s nothing right with them either. They’re one dimensional and boring. Well, when I say the Dungeness Red is complex, I mean the opposite of that.

I’m not trying to be vague and imprecise, I’m just trying to describe the wine without resorting to phrases like, “bright cherry notes and a bit of spice.” Maybe I should just say that it’s a red table wine that’s a cut above the others in it’s price range. If you’re grilling a steak or digging in to pasta, this wine will liven up your meal and is worth much more than the $12 we paid for it.

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Rhubarb Wine In A New Light

Erroll — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:00:19 +0000

The Lady of the House has a sweet tooth, so we don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to wine. This sweet rhubarb wine from Lynfred Winery was a big hit with her, but it was also one of the rare sweet wines that was well balanced enough for me – we both loved it!

This wine is different from the dry, aged rhubarb wine that I normally make. Not better or worse, but a very different style. We both liked it, so I’m thinking about making some of my own rhubarb wine in this style. It’s also made me want to make rhubarb wine with no added water.

So the folks at Lynfred made a wine we both like and showed me a new way to make rhubarb wine – great job guys (and gals)! Lynfred is an Illinois winery, so their wines are not widely available here in Washington State. But if it’s available where you live, I highly recommend it.

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Rhubarb Wine With No Added Water?

Erroll — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:00:51 +0000

I make rhubarb wine every year. I get about 6 fl oz/lb (400 ml/kg) of juice when I thaw frozen rhubarb, and since I use about 3 lb/gal (360 g/L) of rhubarb I need to add a lot of water. But 6 fl oz/lb scales up to over 4.5 gallons from 100 lb of “fruit.” That’s not far from the yield I expect from grapes, and it made me wonder about making rhubarb wine without added water. When the Lynfred Winery announced a commercial rhubarb wine, I wondered even more. Can commercial wineries add water? I don’t think they can, so I asked them how they made their wine. They were kind enough to explain their method: thaw frozen rhubarb, add sugar to about 20 Brix, then pitch the yeast. No added water and no neutralizing the oxalic acid. They did mention that the wine needed residual sugar to balance the acid.

I think I’m going to need a lot of rhubarb this year … and maybe a bottle of Lynfred’s Rhubarb.

Knowledge is power: What winemakers need to know about rhubarb

For more information about rhubarb, like how acidic is it? how much sugar? and other things winemakers need to know when they make rhubarb wine, see here ~ Know Your Ingredients: Rhubarb.

Update 3/28/2011: Commercial Raspberry Wine is made the same way

Homemade raspberry wine is also made with a small amount of fruit and a lot of water. Why? Rhubarb and raspberries are both highly acidic, so commercial wineries approach raspberry wine the same way Lynfred makes rhubarb wine: All fruit with little or no added water, sugar to bring the must up to wine strength, and sweetening to balance the acidity.

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