Urbana Garagista 2009

We've been making wine in our Urbana garage since the early 1990s. This year's effort is typical of how we make dry, red wine. In a nutshell:

1. Grapes come from Jack Nettleton at Elmhurst Grapes, who trucks them in from Lodi, California. This year, we made Zinfandel and Syrah. They arrive for several weeks, starting early September. They come in wooden crates, called lugs, which hold about 36 lb. Lugs are $30-50, depending on the varietal, and it takes 3 to make about 5 gallons of wine. We bought enough for at least 10 cases.

2. We crush with friends the moment we get home from Elmhurst, using a crusher made by Clif Bergeron.

3. We destem by hand, like a quilting bee, while drinking last year's efforts.

4. The crushed grapes are called must. We measure the sugar with a hydrometer (specific gravity measured on a scale called Brix), the pH with a pH meter, and the TA with a sodium hydroxide titration. We adjust, if necessary, with acidulated water if the sugar is too high, and tartaric acid if the acid is too low. We add a minimal amount potassium metibisulfite is added to kill the wild yeasts, and the long day is over.

5. The next night, we add winemaking yeast, and the fermentation begins (in plastic garbage cans, covered with towels to keep the fruit flies out). Primary fermentation takes 5-10 days, depending mostly on temperature.

6. Every day, we listen to the bubbling and punch down the cap. This cap is the grape skins pushed to the surface by carbon dioxide gas produced by the yeast converting the sugar to alcohol. We measure the temperature of the must both to see what style of wine we're going to end up with (we are at the mercy of the ambient temperature in the garage) and to make sure it doesn't get too hot (in which case, we cool with bags of ice). We also measure specific gravity to see how far along the fermentation is. We punch down the cap to get extraction of the color and flavor from the skins using a tool made from a board screwed to the top of a cut-off Louisville Slugger.

7. After primary fermentation slows down, and the specific gravity is in the low single-digits of the Brix scale, we press the juice off the skins. If you ferment to dryness (no sugar left), you can estimate that the percent alcohol you wind up with is about half the Brix you started with. This year, our Zin should be about 12.5% alcohol, which I like.

8. We gently press with an old lard press and a Kevlar press bag. The baby wine goes into 5-gal carboys corked with water locks. The water locks allow gases to pass out during the secondary fermentation, yet does now allow air to get in, which would oxidize the wine (and make it taste like bad sherry). Sometimes we save the pressings, dump a bunch of sugar in them to get the yeast going again, and go for a bonus batch of sweet port.

9. Fermentation will stop when there is no more food or sugar for the yeast, or until the alcohol is too high for the yeast to survive (not desirable when making a dry wine). You will know fermentation has stopped when you don't see any bubbles going through the airlocks. You can also stick a turkey baster in the wine, extract a sip, and see how it tastes.

10. The carboys sit peacefully in the garage for several months while sediment, called lees, accumulates on the bottom. The lees is mostly dead yeast cells and skin particles. Then you rack the wine, which is simply siphoning the wine off the lees and into a new carboy, using a Tygon tube. Racking is repeated several times over the course of a year until you have clear wine on top and minimal sediment on the bottom. We rack around the solstices and equinoxes, so we don't forget. When you rack off one carboy and into another, you'll be short some wine, so you need to top off with more wine so the carboy is full.

We are at this point now.

11. The wine will sit in the cold garage over the winter to stabilize (tartrate crystals will precipitate out and form a crust on the bottom). When the weather warms up in the summer, we bring the wine inside.

12. We bottle in early fall, but before bottling, we add oak in the form of wood chips from Evoak. We use the teabag method: put some chips in the toe of a sterilized nylon stocking foot tied off with dental floss, with a few marbles thrown in for weight, and suspend the bag in the carboy for several days, until the wine tastes right.

13. We bottle with a floor corker after having softened the corks by blanching in boiling water.

14. Enjoy with friends!