California-Durham Wine Grape Connection October 20, 2012 Delivery/Pickup

This is the third year I've made the long drive to Durham to purchase California wine grapes...and it was a bumper crop year!  Glad JD took the chance on the California harvest with me.

With all the problems with this years North Carolina grapes (primarily from weather events), a back-up plan to acquire grapes from other locations  is always good insurance for a successful years run of home made wine.

My primary grape I like to work with is Merlot....but sometimes change is a good thing.
I purchased Merlot, Grenache and a "Mystery Blend" this year....12 lugs total.
Don't ask what the "Mystery Blend" is!

JD purchased Malbec..Petite Syrah and "Mystery Blend"...9 lugs total.

Brix were all in the 24-27 range.

 "Eagles' Nest" is a 100% Solar-Wind-Powered Home and private Micro Winery-Vineyard located just south of Black Mountain in North Carolina.

This year is busy with a number of wines and vines.....all at 3,200' elevation.

Thomas Daniel Mincarelli

Contact info.:
tomm@ren-works-energy.com
lifemountain@yahoo.com

                                               

With almost freezing cold weather approaching, we had to bundle up and get the pressing done!

Preparing for the Pressing of the crushed grapes at the Eagles' Nest:

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

JD and his "Horizontal Tilt Beam" Basket Press.
This one will press about 5 gallons.

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

Tom pours the crushed/fermented  grapes into the Horizontal Tilt Beam Basket Press.
"Free Run" or "Premium Juice"  flows before the Press is cranked down for fuller extraction.

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

Cranking the pressure to the crushed grapes!

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

The Pressed-Fermented grape juice flows!

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

Pomace!

  This is the "Pressed" wine grapes that have been used twice....the second time we added water-sugar and the used grapes along with fresh wine yeast to produce a "Second Run" extraction which is useful for topping off the Carboy's and for tasting until the "First Run" of wines mature.

Notice the difference in colors of the pomace below.

The twice pressed grapes shown are Malbec...Petite Syrah...Granache...Merlot and Mystery Blend. They are labeled.

I have started to remove the seeds for further use to make grape-seed oil.

If you would like some of the mixed Pomace please contact Tom.

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

(Photo © Tom Mincarelli 2012)

Tom and JD get grapes

 

JD and Tom and a crusher destimmer.  I am wondering whose tool this is

 

 

 business end of the crusher 

 

 

Tom and JD bought some California grapes.  Maybe he will chime in here and tell us what he got.

 

 

 

 

October meeting

The October meeting was held at Paul and Jan Herchen's home in Marshall.  I was smitten by the view.  Here is the drive up towards their house, approaching the barn

 

Approaching the house

 

 

The kitchen

Some of us ate outside on the porch.  Beautiful setting

 

The theme was German food and wine.  Jan's cooking was incredible and generous

The maestro of the kitchen.  And what a kitchen.  I love gas stoves and this monster has six burners

I am not sure about this pic but it looks like Chuck is throwing a left jab

 

Chuck presented the educational aspect of the meeting.  His topic was reading German wine labels.

Very clever topic, excellent detail and quite interesting.

 

 

Here is one of the slides that Chuck presented.  I did not realize there would be so much information on one wine label.  Typical Germanic attention to detail.

September FBV meeting

JD hosted the meeting this month.  He provided the eats catered by Phils bar-b-que in Black Mountain.  The spread was wonderful.  I wish I had gotten pictures of the food, but I was too busy dishing out the chicken and pork, potato salid, beans and slaw.  Great stuff and thanks JD for for the dinner.

This is JD's vineyard

These are Chamborcine grapes.  JD says the brix is about 15 to date and he is hoping to delay picking the grapes until that number goes up.  The rain this past week did not help that.  I tasted one or two grapes and they tasted pretty good.

JD has a real pretty vineyard, nicely tended.  The netting is clever.

 

Alan and Tom in the community center waiting to eat.  There was not drinking in the communitty center

Anna and Tom have done et

Pete, Chuck, Phil and Tony

Bob Bowles was feeling a little out of focus

Eric and Anna in the firehouse next door.  Wine tasting is allowed in the firehouse.  Notice the elegant stemware folks are using.

Alan is demonstrating his wine research.  He had made five separate batches of wine from a Cab. Sauv. kit using different yeasts and different additives.  The results were interesting and some were actually drinkable.

After the educational component we did some recreational tasting.  Here Chuck is demonstrating  the proper way to hold a styrofoam wine cup.

Here is hoping someone checked that girls ID

Alan was in charge of our educational component.  Here he explaining how to measure Total Acidity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom's pics from the wine festival

Here is Tom and the wine.  There is something poetic about this picture. Just Tom and the wine.

FBV judges the Amateur Wine Makers Contest

The French Broad Vignerons provided the judges for the Asheville Wine and Food Festival Amateur Wine Makers Contest.  We had a table at the festival to display the wines entered and the ribbons won, and there we completed our judging of the entries,  a task which we had started earlier during the week.  Thanks to all the members who turned out to help judge, pour and organize the judging session.

 

The wines with ribbons

Some of the Blethen trained Vignerons judging the sweet white wine category. 

 

There was one gold medal winner.  That was our president, Alan Stanton, who made a very nice sweet blend of viogner and petit manseng. That is Alan in the picture above with wearing the red shirt.

 

The bronze medal winners are listed below.  The number by the name is for ID purposes only and does not indicate place





 

 

1	Tom Mincarelli	dry red blend	2011
2	Tom Mincarelli	merlot	2010
3	Ken Chrismon	dry red muscadine	2011
8	Rick Petrus	shiraz	2006
10	alex chambers	cab saug	2011
12	Ken Chrismon	pear	2011
13	Ken Chrismon	blackberry	2011
14	Bill Close	peach	2010
17	Ken Chrismon	blueberry apple	2011
19	Ken Chrismon	blueberry	2010
22	Rick Petrus	Reisling Ice wine	2006
26	cornelius Ashe	scuppernong	2011
27	Bill Close	Sweet blend	2011
29	cornelius Ashe	Catabawba	2011
30	Angelo Bianco	Golden Muscat	2010
35	Ken Chrismon	scuppernong	2010
36	Ken Chrismon	scuppernong	2011

                                                 Silver Medal Winners

Tom   Mincarelli	Merlot	2011
John Kinnaird	Bordeaux blend	2011
Ken Chrismon	strawberry	2010
Ken Chrismon	Peach	2011
Cornelius Ashe	blackberry	2011
Cornelius Ashe	strawberry	2012
Alan Stanton	chocolate raspberry port	2011
Alan Stanton	petit manseng	2011
Alan Stanton	niagra honey	2008
Bill Close	La Crosse	2011
Tony Gaddis	Pinot griggio	2011
Ken Chrismon	muscadine	2011
Ken Chrismon	muscadine	2011

August FBV meeting

 

 

We met at Bob's place.

The meeting was preceded by a 30 minute wine judging of some of the wines entered in the amateur wine making contest. 

The minutes were read and approved,
The treasurer reported that we have $450 in the bank.
In the officer's report Chuck Blethen discussed the herbicide overspray problem.
   Chuck said that he met with the GM of the French Broad Electrical Co-op and discussed the spraydrift problem.  He reports that FBEC will only not spray if surrounding vineyards are certified organic. 
    JD is still requesting some coordinate information from members to help vather information on the overspray problem.
    David Wijewickrama from Waynesville discussed the new vintner program being created at the Tri County Community College.  Surrey College is suspending its program due to lack of funding.
    Money sources for agricultural projects were discussed, including Gold Leaf and ARC funds.  It was suggested that if we had a well defined mission statement and project we could possibly qualify for a grant to fund those projects. 
   David suggested that we hold a meeting in November at his office in Haywood county.  He suggested that we might be able to get some political leverage through his contacts to help with some of our concerns and plans.
   Pete and Alan sugested that we have short term and long term plans before the November meeting.
   Alan wants each member to email him their suggestions for long term and short term goals for the FBV.

After the meeting Alan presented an interesting technique for calculating volumes when blending wines to get a desired alcohol or sugar content.  Its called the pearson's square and it works something like this:

                                      A                                   B



                                                        C

                             
                                     D                                      E

The highest concentration wine goes in A..In this example lets say its a wine with  15% alcohol
The lowest concentraton wine to be blended goes at D.  example 11% alcohol
The question is how much of A and D should be blended to produce a wine with a desired alcohol percentage which will be written at C.  (example perhaps we want 12 percent wine)
So in this example we write 15 at A, 12 at C and 11 at D.  Then we subtract c from a and put the answer at E and subtract C from D and put that answer at B.  (drop the negative sign)
So our square now looks like this:
                                  
                                         15                                     1

                                                       
                                                            12


                                           11                                    3

The square is now telling us that if we blend 3 parts of the 11 percent wine with one part of the 15 percent wine we will hit our target of 12 percent.
Nifty tool

                                         

 

Alan teaching the Pearson's square