The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover or should it be the Winemaker, the business women, the mother and her dog

Posted: 22/10/2009 8:04:13 p.m.

The Title is “Winemaker Unplugged”.  Unplugged is pretty much how I feel, with GST returns due, sales demanding more of my time than my family, a 9 month old daughter that is showing far too much of her mother’s personality for anyone’s liking and a dog that has first child syndrome. I feel unplugged from outside life, unplugged from normal people and generally lacking in electricity all round. But I am sure that is not what the title meant to anyone reading.

So, what am I doing in my spare time? Oh, yes, making wine. Well, like all good New Zealanders, my wines are just waking up from a sleep during winter. Having bottled my 2009 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc last month, I am back in the winery getting my ’09 Richardson Pinot Gris and the Waitaki Braids Pinot Gris and Rose ready for bottling.

It is quite a stressful time, well I make it stressful as I worry about  last minute details or unforeseen  mistakes and I don’t breathe calmly until the wine is safely bottled, labelled and in its carton. I know there are plenty of wines out there that are sent straight to the bottlers without the hand-wringing anxious winemaker slash parent standing at the gate or following the child, sorry, wine through their first stages of their next life. I know, parallel worlds but until Valentina came along (or should I say Erik the dog) my wines were my children.  They were an extension of me, in fact they still are but I guess I have (rightly so) put them in a different and possibly more sane perspective.

So, what is needed to get a wine ‘ready’ for bottling you may be interested to know, so I shall move on to the informative part of the blog. Well, the better the fruit is, the less you have to do, so I don’t do much... Good fruit means wine is in balance. It does not need added sugar as the sun did that for us; it does not need to have any tannin added as nature did that too. But what does need to happen is the wine is ‘put on cold’ and by that I mean that it is refrigerated at below zero temperatures. This causes the crystallisation of the potassium and tartaric acid (these are natural grape components)   and by doing this we pre-empt it happening later on, in the bottle, in the fridge.  It is much easier to have this happen in the tank at the winery than appearing in the glass of the poor person who is the last pour.

As I write, my Pinot Gris is struggling to get a ‘pass’ on this, in that, it still shows that if I bottle it now it could possibly  throw crystals in the wine. So, the tank is still refrigerated, bottling is next week and fingers are crossed. It is down to the wire, bottling slots are not easy to get. When it does pass (and it will!) the wine will then be filtered (to get rid of any yeast debris) and bottled.  Simple.  And I can then breathe calmly again until the next bottling.