Blending Wine and Bottling Day

This is the year I graduate to becoming a middling winemaker.

Making your own wine isn’t terribly difficult; inmates do it with grape juice and a piece of stale bread. Making wine you’d want to put into a bottle and store in your house for several years is another level — a level I reached with some honey and fruit wines when I lived back East, and with my 2007 Sangiovese, which even Sara Schneider, the Sunset wine editor, thought was a good wine.

But even if Sara had downed a full bottle of my Sangiovese, she still wouldn’t think it was a great wine. It isn’t. Making such a wine requires skills I do not yet possess. But I’m getting there.

I can control a lot of things home winemakers in other parts of the country cannot: I can drive down to the vineyards to check on my grapes — hell, this year I expect to have a real “estate vintage” from my own backyard. I can pick when the sugar content (called brix) is right for that year, which may be as low as 24 in a cool year, or as high as 26 in a hot one; you want the grapes to hang on the vines as long as they can before the sugar gets too high. In the house, I can adjust acid and add tannins, just like the pros. I can oak my wines or not, leave it on the lees or not, bottle after a year — or not.

But until now I could not blend wines. Blending is vital in professional winemaking, and it is very, very rare to see a bottle that is really 100 percent of whatever varietal is written on the bottle. Really. The rules allow a winemaker to add up to 20 percent of another wine to a varietal and still call it whatever that 80 percent is. Classic example: Most of the Cabernet Sauvignon you buy is backed up with Merlot, Malbec or Petit Verdot (or all three). Syrah will often have a touch of Viognier (yes, a white!) in it; this tames what can best be called a “green pepper” taste in straight Syrah.

Blending is not easy. I was scared of it last year, and besides, I did not have more than one unflawed wine. But I held back 5 gallons of my Sangiovese in the hopes that the 2008 wines I made — Mourvedre, Touriga Nacional and Zinfandel — would be able to make a good wine great.

Why blend? Think of that Syrah. You don’t want a green pepper taste in your Syrah, do you? In my case, the Touriga Nacional, which I got from my friend Ron Silva of Silvaspoons Vineyards in Galt, was a little overripe and low on acid. I helped it as best I could, but it is still a low-acid wine. And acidity is vital to a wine’s flavor: Without it, the wine tastes flat; dull and soft on the palate.

Touriga is an intensely aromatic Portuguese red winegrape. It’s a big red, a little like Syrah or Merlot in that it has a full body and isn’t overly tannic, but its aroma is a lot like violets. It’s good solo, but I thought it needed some brightening. Good thing I screwed up my backyard Zinfandel.

In my eagerness to harvest my first-ever winegrapes, I picked too soon. I’d been fooled by a sugar-content reading I’d taken from the bottom of a cluster (I found out later that the bottom of the clusters ripen earlier) and wound up with a wildly acidic, if pretty, ruby red wine. Undrinkable by itself.

So I thought I’d blend it with the Touriga. I set up glasses, with 100 percent Zinfandel on one side, and 100 percent Touriga on the other. I graduated the percentages either way until I got to 50-50. And then Holly and I tasted.

This is where you start to pick up nuance: This combination needs a little more acid, in that one the aroma gets lost, that sort of thing. Both of us agreed that the Zin would do its duty best by becoming a component of the Touriga. There will be no “estate vintage” from 2008. That’s a little harder to take than it might seem. Fortune smiled in that the Zinfandel was not so flawed that it couldn’t be used for something, but it tasted nothing like a real Zinfandel and would only pucker the mouths of anyone I served it to. Live and learn. This year I will pick two weeks later.

The other wine I made a lot of last year was a Mourvedre from El Dorado County. I love Mourvedre: It is smoky, leathery and almost chocolatey in aroma, with solid tannins and a deep garnet color. Perfect for wild game, especially venison and duck. These grapes had been perfect. I knew this was a wine I could make a 100 percent Mourvedre from, and I will — but I’ll bulk age it another year before bottling.

The rest I decided to blend with my 2007 Sangiovese. Why? Well, the grapes came from only a few miles apart, which I thought was pretty cool, but more importantly, The Mourvedre could use just a bit of a bright note, and the Sangio is a bright, acidic wine — not like the Zin, but it is a lighter-bodied, summer red. Think Chianti.

This was a tougher blend. I wound up blending only a little of the Sangiovese into the Mourvedre because, once again, the 2008 wines were stronger — both technically and flavor-wise — than the 2007 wines. So I added a little less than two gallons of the Sangiovese to 10 gallons of the Mourvedre. Here was my first case in which I knew restraint was vital: don’t add too much! I also knew that this was going to be a Mourvedre with Sangiovese blended into it, and not the other way around; the good wine will not reach greatness, but the better wine will improve.

That’s the cool thing about this whole process. I came into it thinking I could improve “Wine A” by blending with “Wine B.” But I found that Wine B was actually the wine that benefited from a little of Wine A. A bottle of Zinfadel became a bottle of Touriga, and a bottle of Sangiovese became a bottle of Mourvedre.

Or rather 75 bottles. And I am only half done. I will hold back some of both my 2008 wines for another year to see how they age; the 2007 Sangiovese matured well over that extra year, so I have high hopes.

And then there is the Port. I made a Port-style wine from extra Touriga grapes Ron had given me, and I have neither racked it nor tasted it in almost a year. Port needs time to become drinkable, but that time may be approaching. More on that later.

This blending experiment behind me, I feel like I’ve become a better winemaker for having done it. The effort also highlighted just how amazing those super-blends are: Chateauneuf du Pape can sometimes have five or six different varietals in it. How the hell did they know they needed 1 percent of this or that? How did they know that 3 percent of this — and not 4 percent — would provide the oomph they were looking for? Pretty heady stuff.

Will I ever get to that point? If I live long enough, maybe. But with year-long waits and years-long aging experiments, I have certainly learned at least one thing that winemaking demands: Patience.

• More on my backyard Zinfandel wine.
• On crushing the Mourvedre, a very special wine.
• My story on picking the Touriga Nacional.
• Eating Blood Sausages with Ron Silva.