The Crush, Part II: Touriga Nacional

My patch of California is suffering from an unseasonable heat wave; we hit 98 degrees here today. Not very autumnal, I can tell you that. This means the two lots of winegrapes I have secured for this season both came ripe at the same time, more or less, which has made the past four days a frenzied blur: There is a reason winemakers call this time of year, “The Crush.”

First came the call from Ron Silva of Silvaspoons Vineyards. Ron is the guy who grew the grapes that made several of the spectacular wines we tried earlier this month (see last post), and when I interviewed him for a story recently, I asked if he sold to home winemakers. He said sure, and since I have raved about the Portuguese table wines based on the grape Touriga Nacional, I was very excited to get my hands on a few hundred pounds of them.

Last year I made a Sangiovese and a Tempranillo, both of which are medium-bodied, almost light red wines. I like my Rainy Sunday Sangiovese very much, but the Tempranillo, which I dubbed Tempra Mental, needs help. I think this Touriga may be just the ticket.

Where those wines are light and fruity, this Touriga is a bruiser. That’s my arm punching down the cap on it above. Any of you who make wine may notice just how deep and dark this stuff is. It’s really pretty amazing how different Touriga is from the other grapes I’ve dealt with thus far. Part of it is this grape, which is to Portugal what Cabernet Sauvignon is to France.

The other part of the equation is that Silva likes his wine bold, so his call turned out to be when his grapes were slipping into over-ripeness. When I crushed them, the must was brown — and when I tested it, I found out why: These puppies tipped the scale at 26.5 brix, which is enough sugar to give you a table wine approaching 15.5 percent (Darrell Corti would not approve), and they were unusually low in acid. I had to add quite a bit to balance the wine, and when I did, lo and behold! The must turned red. Chemistry is a wonderful thing.

What? You mean I add things to my wine? You bet. And anyone who doesn’t is either very, very lucky, or very, very stupid. There is a huge amount of chemistry in winemaking, enough to make me happy I did well in the subject back in school. You test the wine’s ph, you test the wine’s titratable acidity, you test its sugar levels and of course you check its temperature.

And if anything is out of balance, you add things. Low in sugar? Add some. Too much sugar? Add water. Not acidic enough? (low-acid wines do not age well and can taste flat) Add tartaric acid. Even if everything is in balance, you add things. Yeast, for one. Wine yeast, not baking yeast for God’s sake. Anyone in this country outside of Napa or Sonoma who puts their faith in natural yeasts is a fool. Once you add a proper yeast, you add yeast nutrient if you are smart. This keeps the wee yeasties happy and prevents the wine from picking up a rotten egg smell.

Then there are the freaky additives. I add something called Booster Rouge to get a better mouthfeel and softer tannins in my wine. I add something called Lallezyme EX to get better extraction of flavors from the grape skins. These are optional: I did not add either to my little batch of Zinfandel. But nearly every winemaker adds sodium metabisulfite, which is a vital preservative and stabilizer in wine. Something like it has been used for more than a millennium, back when winemakers burned sulfur in their barrels. This is why almost all wines say “contain sulfites.”

You can be assured that my wines contain far less of the stuff than all but the highest quality premium wines. Ever drink some cheap Gallo wine and experience that nasty headache the next day? Those are the sulfites talking. Bulk wines are neither picked nor stored in pristine condition. Neighboring farmers have told me about the black clouds of fruit flies that swarm the Gallo plant in Livingston every crush.

Sulfite keeps wine from turning into vinegar. My Touriga grapes were in pretty good shape, and I crushed them within 90 minutes after they were picked. The bottom line is that I can fuss over my grapes, so when it’s all said and done, I will have something on the order of 40 parts per million of sulfites in my wine; that bottle of Gallo will have close to 175 parts per million.

All of this is meant to convey some sense of the reality of winemaking. It is not terribly romantic, nor is it pretty. I am developing a purple arm from punching down my grapes, and I was almost knocked on my ass tonight when I took a whiff of a batch of Touriga I was checking to see if it had begun fermentation. It had, and the alcohol smell was overpowering!

Basically I open the top of the fermenters sitting in my living room (Holly is a very kind and patient woman), look to see if the cap is rising, then inhale to see if I smell alcohol, then put my ear to the must to listen: Is it singing? Yeast on a full rage almost sounds like a sizzling steak. Then I take its temperature, check the sugar level and punch down the cap of skins that forms on the top of the must. This gives the wee yeasties air, and gives the wine more body.

This checking will control my life for the next five days or so. When the yeasts are close to eating all the sugar in the grapes, I will play my final card: I will add something called malolactic bacteria to the mix. These bugs eat acid and are responsible for that round mouthfeel of most reds, and are the cause of that “buttery” taste in a California Chardonnay. Can you get this without adding the critters? Yep. But then again, you might not. Best not to leave it to chance.

Once the sugar is all gone and the wine is dry, I will then press it off the skins, seeds and other crap, and pour that new wine into glass carboys. A heap of shit will fall out of the solution onto the bottom of the jug. It will look like the sediments at the bottom of the sea. These are, aptly enough, called “gross” lees.

But I will get into pressing later. Likewise, Ron Silva threw me a curve ball Friday, which I will relate in the next post. Let’s just say it involves Portugal’s most famous drink and Everclear.

And then there is the matter of my Mourvedre grapes, which I crushed this morning. These grapes are something very special. More on that later, too. Now I need to catch some sleep…