Fall 2008 Wines - They Actually Taste Like Wine

So much has happened at Huevos Caballos and Bullock's since we last corresponded, dear readers.

I took my 08 wines, the Ruby Cabernet and the Riesling, to the Home Beer Wine & Cheese Shop up in picturesque Woodland Hills, California for their free post-harvest wine clinic. Vinters from all over the area were buzzing around a room that reminded me of the Henrietta, Texas Church of Christ rec center. The main differences were that all the men had beards, and there was not a drop of punch to be had. Related? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Both wines are within nominal pH ranges, meaning something good, apparently. The Ruby Cab is a beautiful ruby color, proving that whoever named it wasn't an idiot. It's also developing a rich flavor that I would describe as "wine-like," something to which I'm unaccustomed. I would use other foods to describe what it tastes like, but I've found that making wine doesn't make one better at doing that. If pressed into a corner, I would say it tastes like carnitas and buffalo wings. Happy?

Wines change tastes throughout their aging, and I don't think I'll know exactly what they taste like for a few years. The woman we bought the grapes from gave us some of their 2005 vintage from the same vines, but the country elected an intelligent person and pirates have taken over the coast of Somalia since then, so who knows what dazzling flavor characteristics have weaseled their way into the grapes?

You've read all about the Riesling saga, but I'm happy to report that primary fermentation is completed in both the main 5 gallon batch and in the one gallon Gran Reserva batch. They're so new it's hardly describing what they taste like, as sediment is still dropping out and the pH hasn't settled down, but it tastes good. Like spicy white wine. Um, I'm gonna go with cayenne pepper and apple fritters for this one.

I haven't tried the GR, but I'm dying to see the difference. For starters, I used native yeast in the GR, and the White Labs Steinberg-Geisenheim strain for the regular batch. The GR was fermented a little hotter than the regular, and I added yeast nutrient to it as well. Bored yet?

I also bottled the 2008 Wait til They Get a Load of Mead, a sweet honey mead I started on the day The Dark Knight came out. It's a handsome looking mead, a nice golden color that might be mistaken for Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay by someone who is unwilling or unable to read the label. The case is currently sitting on the floor in the kitchen, waiting for its moment in the sun...December 13, 2008.

In our semi-regular trips up to the central coast, we've joined a little winery called Sort This Out Cellars, a fairly new but very cool little joint in Buellton. It's run by two guys who used to work together at Club 33 in Disneyland, and has a Rat Pack/Swingers theme to it. We've thoroughly enjoyed every wine we've bought from there and Lauren joined the Wine Club a couple months back.

I've been talking to the owners about my own winemaking for a couple months now, and last time they suggested I bring up some of the mead next time and I can give a little mini-tasting to whoever wants to try it. So if you're not busy on December 13th, come to Buellton, California and drink some mead.

Riesling the Body Electric, Part the Second

It's been almost four weeks since I ordered my pail of Johannisberg Riesling juice from Delta Packing of Lodi, California. My previous shipping attempts failed in grand fashion. FedEx spilled 5 of the first six gallons, but I decided to make wine out of sour grape juice. From this orphaned juice, Huevos Caballos plans to produce five bottles of wild yeast fermented Riesling Gran Reserva, perhaps the most reserva wine ever.

UPS "damaged" the next attempt. There were no survivors.

UPS was again dispatched on Monday of this week, with my shipment to arrive on Wednesday. Wednesday came and went, and Condescending A-Hole #3 at UPS said I would have to wait another day before I could put a tracer on the package.

Thursday morning, I did just that, and, surprise surprise, UPS NEVER EVEN PICKED UP THE PACKAGE. I spoke with the supervisor at the station in Lodi, who also passed UPS condescension school with flying colors, and she told me that Delta didn't put it out. I called Delta back. The guy I spoke with told me that it had been sitting on the dock, but the driver didn't pick it up. She informed me that they would not overnight it to me for no charge. I delicately told her that I found this to be disagreeable, and hung up.

The next call to UPS landed me an elderly sounding C student from UPS Condescension School who told me very nicely that it wasn't their fault and that they would indeed not overnight it to me. I asked her to cancel the order, then sighed heavily.

And then I went crawling back to FedEx. Sure, they're a hair more expensive, but I don't hate them with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

Then something amazing happened. I went to their website, scheduled the pickup, sent Delta the packing slip, and FedEx picked up the package. Then Saturday morning, they brought it to my house. In one piece.

Sure, the box was a little wet, and maybe a little less than half a gallon of juice had leaked out, but with all the drama that accompanied this juice, I would have settled for two gallons and a kick in the jumblies from Pauly Shore.

Thankfully, that didn't happen.

All the juice's numbers seemed to be correct according to my half-assed measurements. The homebrew store in Woodland Hills is testing your wines this weekends for free, so I'll be taking the Riesling and Ruby Cabernet up there for their mid-terms. If they don't pass, no PS3 for a week.

---

The 2008 Wait til They Get a Load of Mead is bottled. It's a nice color, the little sip I had of it tasted pretty good, so I'm excited to see what a little bottle aging will do. Only 12 bottles were produced, so this should be in pretty high demand in fantasy town.

---

In Bullock's Brewing Co. news, I've bottled Frank Shirley's Christmas Ale and Tobias Funke's Cream Ale, and will be bottling the Belgian Dubbel this weekend. I also started an Ethiopian T'ej, which is a cross between mead and beer. I made a trip to the Ethiopian district on Fairfax to buy a $10 bag of sticks that I need to make it, so good times there.

I also started a Kitchen Sink IPA, the first beer I've ever made using my own recipe. Of course I lost the grain bill and only vaguely remember what I put in there, but I can tell you that it will be a heady, citrusy IPA. I used a liquid and a dry malt extract, and agave syrup as an adjunct. Three different kinds of hops are in there, and I'm dry-hopping some Cascade for good measure. Thus the name. That and, well, it's made in the kitchen sink.

Keep an eye out for your Bullock's Brewing Company Christmas Party invitation...

Operation Grape Expectations: A Prologue

The detour to Sonic had been a disaster. Lauren said "DisneyLand" and all I could think was "Sonic is near DisneyLand. I love Sonic. We have time!" Instead of the quick jaunt off the freeway I was expecting, it turned into a 45 minute cluster-eff which saw both my blood pressure and Baja Fresh levels rise. When we finally hopped back onto the freeway, I knew we weren't gonna make it. I had to call the woman I was buying the grapes from to ask if showing up 45 minutes or so late would be all right.

"I'm sticking around the vineyard all afternoon for you guys to buy 60 pounds of grapes," I expected her to say, with a curtness that I wasn't looking forward to. "Fine, just hurry up." I was wasting this woman's time and felt awful, but there wasn't a lot I could do.

I dialed her number and put on my customer service voice.

"Hi, is that Mary?"

"Yes."

"Hi Mary, it's Charlie Fonville, coming out for the grapes this afternoon."

"Of course. Hello."

"I was hoping that it'd be okay to show up around 4:45 or so. We're running a little late."

"Okay, no problem. See you then."

"Great. Thank you." Click.

"Phew," thought I. I'm sure they're busy, with it being harvest time. Probably a lot of work to do around the old vineyard. No problem.

The address was on Grape Street, which lead me think that they themselves had named the dirt road leading to their sprawling, picturesque acreage.

Nope. Two bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac with Norteno music blaring from all different directions.

An old pickup parked next to an even older van held the driveway down, and a varitable maze of succulents, pomegranates, and other landscaping made it clear that some serious greenery had gone down here.

"This can't be right," I said to Lauren.

"No, it can't," she replied. "Are you sure this is the right address?"

"Not at all."

I checked my e-mail, and sure enough, it was the right address. The numbers were the same, there was an "N" before the word "Grape," and the zip code matched.

"Ooooooookay," I said, with a specific gravity of skepticism well over 1.100. (If you knew what specific gravity was, as well as normal SG levels, you would find this hilarious). Actually, probably not.

So we rang the doorbell, half expecting to find a kindly woman to take us to the real vineyard, and the other half expecting to get shot in the face.

May answered the door, a kindly woman indeed, but she did not offer to drive us to the real vineyard. Nor did she shoot us in the face.

"Nice to meet you. Come around to the side gate and I'll let you in."

We grabbed our buckets, with a look of confusion still etched on our faces. An old wooden gate swung open, and May beckoned us to come through.

And there it was. A fully-functioning, mini-vineyard.

This delightful couple produced 1,000 pounds of grapes anually. Just for themselves. May's husband, who was in Hungary setting up their retirement vineyard, decided not to make wine this year, leading them to sell the grapes for only fifty cents a pound. Ruby Cabernet grapes aren't the most sought after, mainly due to consistency problems, but I figured that it would be no huge loss if there was a catastrophic incident in the winemaking process, which there almost undoubtedly will be.

Lauren and I dutifully picked grapes, filling up three large buckets amongst the vines and bees. After we were finished and weighed up (70 pounds of fresh grapes, $35), May invited us in to clean up (grape picking puts a gunk on your hands that is damn near indescribable, but I will try - it's gross) in the house and have some of the 2005 Ruby Cabernet that they'd made.

When we stepped back outside, May had laid out a jug of wine along with a plate of brie and crackers. After shrugging off my normal "this woman poisoned this wine and is going to eat us while we're still alive...oh my god why isn't she having any? 'Lauren, head for the car. I'll take care of this.' Wham wham whap. Gunshot. 'You must* have messed with the wrong people, lady.' Walk off into the sunset to the sight of cops pulling up and digging out countless bodies" delusion, which I think we've all had while picking grapes in a stranger's backyard, I had some wine and cheese. And both were excellent.

A glass of wine later, May told Lauren and I how they landed, of all places, in Escondido, California, selling grapes to a weirdo and her boyfriend. She and her husband owned garnet mines in Alaska that they had just sold to buy a retirement estate in Hungary. After he got laid off from his job as an industrial photographer, he and May drove from the northernmost part of Canada they could get to all the way to the Panama canal. Oh yeah, and he escaped a concentration camp.

We asked her about how she found her way over here, and I have to say, her answer was not what I was expecting. It turns out that when May was 18 or 19 or so, she moved from Ireland to London, and through some girlfriends found out about the bars where the American sailors hung out. Nearly every night, she said, she and her friends would go down there to "meet" some "nice" sailors. Please note that she was not doing air quotes as she spoke.

Ladies and gentlemen, we bought grapes from the most interesting people I'd ever met.

*Must (from the Latin vinum mustum, “young wine”) is freshly pressed fruit juice (usually grape juice) that contains the skins, seeds, and stems of the fruit.

What a load of Bullock's

Friday night not only marked the first presidential debate, but a much more historic moment in the grand context of our nation's history. While the first African-American presidential nominee debated the oldest mother-effer since Methuselah, I bottled my first batch of homebrew. It'll be another 2 weeks before it's carbonated and ready to drink, but still, a huge day. 

Here's my marketing slogan: Bullock's Red Ale is a dark, hoppy brew that features notes of lemon, honey, wheat, and plastic bucket. 

You learn something every day in homebrewing, and that day I learned that beer (at least this beer) is carbonated by putting sugar into the beer just before bottling. The yeasts, now close to death, drunk, and abusive, set their sights on this new sugar and start gobbling it up, producing C02 and just a touch of sediment. The result is the familiar and comforting "pssssch" sound of a beer cap being popped off, signaling that the trapped carbon dioxide has escaped the gulag of the bottle. 

---

In other Huevos Caballos Noticias, I should be receiving my wine press today or tomorrow, after which I'll squeeze all the juice from the Ruby Cabernet must, and secondary fermentation will start. 

I just started malolactic fermentation, in which some bacteria who love malic acid eat the stuff by the bucket-full and turn it into much nicer tasting lactic acid. According to Wikipedia, this process often leads to "nicer mouthfeel," which is something I think we can all get behind. 

Operation Grape Expectations, Part the Second

Day Three of the wine from scratch experiment is almost over, and it's been a good one. The fermentation seems to be moving along quite nicely.

You can tell from the before and after picture that things have picked up considerably over in the yeast department in the last 24 hours. The carbon dioxide that's constantly being produced is pushing the skins, pulp, and seeds, (or "cap," as we call it in the business) to the top of the must, and I have to stir and push the cap back down into the wine several times a day.

The cap is now sticking over the top of the fermentor, held together by what I can only believe is a diabetes-inducing amount of sugar and sheer willpower.

The grand mess that I made in the kitchen yesterday has been cleaned up for the most part, although it looks sort of like a good-natured dullard murdered someone and tried to clean it up with a bloody towel. Were this CSI: Franklin Hills, David Caruso would undoubtedly walk in and say "Sometimes...(long pause, removes sunglasses) grapes aren't the only things that get stomped."

But it's not, and I got grape juice everywhere and it's totally sticky.

Operation Grape Expectations, Part the First

I'm happy to report that Operation Grape Expectations is now fully underway. Lauren, who is a saint for putting up with all of this nonsense, and I went to Escondido yesterday and bought 70 pounds of Ruby Cabernet grapes from a very nice woman and her husband. More on that later.

We destemmed and crushed the grapes last night, and I analyzed the brix (or sugar content), the acidity level, and the pH of the must this morning. I'm happy to report all were nominal after the tiniest bit of tweaking. I added the yeast this afternoon, and fermentation should begin in the next couple of days.

In an attempt to make this blog more legit, I'll post some boring technical stuff along with the story of the grapes themselves and their eclectic international origins.

To tide you over, here's the apocryphal warning on the primary fermenter.

Try explaining THAT at your homebrew club.

Announcing the Huevos Caballos 2008 Ruby Cabernet

Faithful blogateers, your two and a half days of religiously checking this blog have finally paid off. You are officially the first to know that late next year, Huevos Caballos Vineyards will be unveiling its very first direct from grape wine - no concentrate, no kits, no effing around.

If you're not busy on Saturday and want to get in on the ground floor of this truly historic happening, come with Lauren and me to Escondido for the grape picking.

It is a proud day, dear readers.