Potatura, pruning of the olives. random thoughts and photos

Right now is olive tree pruning time.  I have another 42 trees to go and want to finish before I come back to the US.  I am studying my enology lessons from UCD and just finished assignment 3.  I am a bit sorry the class didn't start 3 weeks earlier as I am learning stuff that would have been useful for the fermentation.  The wines are all resting quietly and without problems.  We should get our barrels of various sizes in about 3 weeks and the wine will be transferred once again when they arrive.  Above are a couple of pictures of our surrounding countryside, the B&B from the east with the vineyard in the foreground and a couple of photos I have forgotten to show of a little gem called the Tempietto in Rome inside the church of St. Pietro di Montorio.  Well worth a visit and designed by the first architects of St. Peters cathedral.  Supposedly this was built on the site where Peter was crucified.  It is a perfect little building!  Also there is a doctored pic of Rome from the Gianicolo hill at near sunset. 

I have been having a ball this autumn with all the american guests from East coast to West and a bunch of friends from around KC.  Thanks everyone for visiting!  

Pressing the Montepulciano, racking the other wines, new olive oil

29 Ottobre
Where does the time go?  We picked the Montepulciano grapes 2 weeks ago and today pressed them.  An error was made during the harvest and some grape must was exposed to more skins than another batch.  This resulted in one tank being a "lighter" wine in both color and tannin extraction than the other.  The one with more skins is seriously good, though, so it seems we will profit from the mistake.

We also racked all the wines off their muddy lees again to clarify them, so the day was long in the winery.  However, now we have a week off, so I can concentrate on studying my pinciples and practices of winemaking book, pruning the olive trees and entertaining my KC guests.
We harvested in the neighborhood of 1800 kg of olives this year and had a record yield of 213 liters of really good olive oil.  Last year, the oil was a bit mild for me, just the way it was, but this year we are back to a full bodied, bitter, spicy, fruity olive oil which will mellow in the next few months, but now is a monster.  Actually 3 monsters as we made 2 single variety oils and one blend.  Below are Leccino olives.

We got our 1st snow in the mountains 2 days ago and the vineyard leaves are turning red, orange and yellow signifying the arrival of Autumnal weather.  The year has been full of work and I don't imagine we will have another this difficult, but in retrospect, like all years at my age, it flew by.

I hope everyone has a safe, fun Halloween, a holiday which is taking off like wildfire here in Italy. Here is your harvest moon to trick or treat by, almost looks like a jack-o-lantern.

Touring with KC friends, Civitella del Tronto, Gola del Infernaccio, etc

14 OTTOBRE
Here are some photos from a few of my favorite local places to visit.  We saw a lot of the Ascoli Piceno province, visiting cheese makers, wineries, fortresses, national parks, chocolate factory, salami producers, churches, piazzas, a lavendar farm, the plateau of Castelluccio, a cooking school, lots of good restaurants and that is just a start.  Here are pictures also of San Leonardo church up in the mountains and the work of a Franciscan brother who has put every stone in place the last 40 years.  Fr. Pietro Lavini is now 83 and says he will never finish.  It was first built by the Benedictines in the 800's and had completely collapsed with the few standing parts having been used as an animal stall before he started his work.  A similar story to St. Francis in some ways.

Mike getting ready to enter the "mouth of hell"

Elizabeth's lavendar farm at Lavanda Blu near Carrasai.  She also taught the ladies how to make incredible olive ascolane!

That's Fr. Pietro on the left building the bell tower.

He refused to let anyone set one stone on top of another although he did get help with iron work and some friends help him in other ways.  He lived up here alone until last year when his heart trouble forced him into the lower altitudes in winter.  He still does midnight mass on Christmas eve up here.

Greg trying out some rose hips

Bacco in his favorite place-midstream

I love the altopiano of Castelluccio, this pic was prettier in winter

Civitella del Tronto, last fort to fall in the unification war of Italy, a great view and great place to visit.

Autumn leaves at altitude

Happy Birthday Bro,, time for the Montepulciano harvest finally and winery update

14 Ottobre
Happy Birthday to my little brother today!

I am thinking this picture tells of his good spirit, while at the same time punishing him for not emailing me more often. haha

I have been blessed with visits from lots of KC and US friends these last 3 weeks; the Thomases, Wilcoxons, Tanners, Cordells, Lemoines and Masseys have all been to visit and I have been acting as tour guide in my spare moments.  The last 3 got to watch the pressing of the Cabernet Sauvignon which had completed fermentation and had spent just over a week on the skins and seeds.  The pix below are not in a good order, but the wine and skins etc are transferred to the big red press which has a balloon inside which gently extracts any juice left behind after the free run liquid escapes.  We have about 2500 liters of C.S.  now resting and waiting for the malolactic fermentation to begin. 

 We are looking at a no win situation with our Montepulciano grapes.  While they are ready chemically, the sugar level never raised to a level we were happy with while the total acid has decreased to the correct level.  We will make a lower alcohol wine, but that is ok as I don't want any 15% wines anyway.  We have had a prolonged period of cool, damp weather which is encouraging a mold called bortrytis to infect the grape clusters, so we can't wait any longer.  Tomorrow is the day.

 All of our reds have been analyzed and have perfect numbers, so we are pleased.  Raffaele's Pecorino completed fermentation a couple of days ago, but mine is still at 4% sugar, so probably will finish next week.  We have adopted different fermentation ideas to see what differences result in the wines.  Other than that we transfer the reds every so often to remove the "muddy" precipitates which can add off flavors and we are ready to sit down with our winemaker and start ordering various types of oak barrels to finish them off, so to speak.  I am not a barrique fan, so there will be few of those with more tonneau and larger barrels as the needs dictate with perhaps different places of origin for the oak to see which works best.  I am even open to some MO oak someday...

6 harvests completed with 1 to go, Olives before Montepulciano?

29 Settembre
I am sitting here in front of my computer enjoying my last handful of Garrett's caramel corn from Chicago which was kindly gifted by the Wilcoxons and Tanners during their visit last week.  What a drug it is!
We finished harvesting variety no. 6, the Petit Verdot yesterday and have enough to fill another 1000 liter tank once we take the skins and seeds away.  Here is an example of how we decide when to harvest:

This is the graph I made showing the maturation of the Syrah grapes.  As you can see pH is very stable, while the sugar content (in green) increases while the total acid (in red) decreases.  As Syrah can use a bit higher acid content, we harested with a final Babo sugar content of 19.5 and total acid near 6.  Our Merlot was 20 and 5.6 approximately.

We harvest into small containers to prevent damage to the grape clusters which might lead to premature breakage, fermentation and oxidation and then the containers are dumped into a de-stemmer.

The grapes are then sent off to the stainless steel tanks with a bit of yeast to start the fermentation and then after the fermentation has begun, we start the pump overs which is a process of sucking out the grape juice or wine from below and sending it up to the top of the tank where it filters through the skins which are floating on top of the juice, thus extracting more tannins, color and other important cancer fighting ingredients.  Once a day, we allow the developing red wines to breathe a deep breath by pouring the wine into a huge container outside the tank and then pumping it back to the top.  This gives the wine a bigger exposure to oxygen and some strange and unhelpful odors and vapors escape into the ether.

For the white wines, the process changes in that very little, if any "skin time" is allowed (for my Pecorino-just 30 hours) and many times the grapes travel directly to the press from the de-stemmer and then to the tanks.  There are no pump overs as the white wines are much more susceptible to oxidation and also much slower to ferment as we take away nutrients (grape skins) from the yeast and the fermentation progresses at a low temperature.  Where the reds might take 3-6 days to completely ferment, the whites might take weeks.
We have done this now for 6 varieties and I am becoming more skilled with all the new pumps and equipment.
Now that I have that sugar/butter rush from Chicago, I am off to do it again.  With the cool end of summer and early Fall we have had, the Montepulciano grape maturity may lag such that we will harvest our olives prior.  It has been a strange year.

The harvest and beginner wine making

22 Settembre

We have begun the harvest, with 1st dibs going to the Merlot on the 15 and 16th, then the Cabernet Franc on the 17th and finishing with the pecorino on the 20 and 21st.  We have approximately 3000 liters of the Merlot, 1500 of C.F. and with the purchase of some of our constructors Pecorino we have about 5000 liters of white wine.

Raffaele and I have help from some local youth and can harvest approximately 1.3 acres per day.  We have a Merlot one week old which is not half bad, a Cabernet Franc a bit tannic and difficult to ascertain right now as to its eventual characteristics.  The Pecorino has not started fermentation yet, but the juice was pretty nice.

Harvest days are long and we worked over 12 hours 2 days ago and 17 yesterday.  Tomorrow, we will harvest the Syrah grapes and then next week probably the Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot will be ready which will take up 3 full days, I imagine.

I had a great week, with the Thomases of KC and MA visiting followed by the Tanners and Wilcoxons from my old bible study group from Kansas City which met every Friday morning at 0600.  It was great to catch up with everyone and speak English or "American" as the Italians like to say.

The latter 2 couples helped us with the harvest and were rewarded with Bacco t shirts and olive oil as their payment.  They, in turn, brought me some goodies from the US like Garrett's caramel corn, which is seriously addicting and artery clogging as well as some puzzles for whenever winter comes to interrupt this work schedule.  They enjoyed stomping about 180 kg of grapes as well, so the tradition we started in 2007 lives on!  I hope everyone gets to try it sometime.  It was on Jan's bucket list, so she has succeeded in crossing that one off.

The pictures are a series of our winery construction photos from me breaking ground March 25 until September; our contruction workers were great and worked extremely hard to get us ready for the harvest, which as luck would have it came about 10 days later than usual this year.  Right now we have 4 of the tanks taking care of various wines with no. 5 arriving on the morrow.

9/11 memories, winery update

11 Sett.
9 years ago I remember watching live as the 2nd plane flew into the other world trade tower and feeling sick to my stomach as it was then obvious the 1st fire was also an attack.  My heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones and hope as a country we are mature enough not to blame a billion and a half people for the actions and beliefs of a miniscule percentage of extremists who wish us ill.
On to more pleasant topics, here is a photo of 2 lucertole (lizards) who are enjoying the last warm day we had before the cloudy rainy weather took over.

It has slowed down our grape maturation which has helped us out as the winery is not quite ready for grapes yet although last night we had the trial run of the refrigerator unit which cools the fermenting tanks and all is covered with ice, which I guess is a good sign it functions.

Today or tomorrow we will analyze the grapes again which have been stuck at the same levels for a week.  We test for sugar content, pH and total acid content and if we had to pick today we would have a wine of about 12.5% alcohol, but not as complex as we would like.  Waiting when you are ready to go is tough, but it is not us who decides when the grapes will be ready, but Il Signore.
We now also have doors on the winery, which allow me to sleep better with the place locked up.

My friend Fernando is digging the trenches for the drainage tubes here and he has already leveled the mountain of extra dirt which was piled up on the southern side of the winery.

Here are a couple of dawn photos from this morning to finish.

The first is a skewed picture of the winery and the other looking back at Nascondiglio di Bacco.