Urban Wine Grower

urban wine grower.

Workshops on grape growing and wine making

Are you interested in growing grapes? Or making your own wine at home? I will be running one day workshops  in 2012 in North London. One of my workshops introduces  people to the basic skills needed to  grow and take care of grape vines, and the other shows how you can make clean, palatable wine on a small scale. My workshops are a mixture of practical sessions and classroom presentations and discussions.  They have been very well received by participants, most recently at the Forty Hall Vineyard and  the Organiclea Hawkwood Plant Nursery.

If you would like to receive information about workshops I will be running in 2012 please email me,  Marko Bojcun, at mbojcun@yahoo.com

Harvest is in, wine making begins

We’ve had quite an unusual growing season this year in London. A cold winter was followed by a very warm and early spring that saw only one frost around 2-3 May on the outer, higher edges of the city. It stayed very dry until June when rain and colder air unfortunately co-incided with flowering. The Madeleine Angevine were anaffected and pollinated well. But on the Regent vines the fruit set was very uneven. Cool and wet summer months followed.

So my five Madeleine Angevine vines did very well this season, giving me a harvest almost twice as big as last year’s, though with a much lowered sugar content (12.5 Brix). I couldn’t leave them on the vine for long  because, even though the wasps were nowhere to be seen, rot was already setting into the bunches. So I picked them on 9 September. Then after trampling the grapes in a barrel, throwing in the starter yeast colony and fermenting on the skins for about three days (as opposed to one day last year) I pressed out 23 litres.

The 2010 Mad Ange has turned out fresher and fruitier than I’ve ever made it before, with a distinct Muscat nose. I put that down to the fact that I fermented it on the skins for a day rather than removing the skins before fermenting. This year I want to prolong the extraction even more and enhance the complexity of flavours and counterbalance of sweetness and acidity. Of course, with such a low natural fructose content in this year’s grapes, I’ve had to top up the must with refined cane sugar, but just enough to bring the alcohol level to around 10-11%.

My 14 Regent vines, on the other hand, gave me 43 lbs (20 kilos) of grapes, less than half of last year’s harvest. I can think of two reasons: the fruit set after flowering was uneven and I had allowed these young vines to carry too many fruiting buds in 2010, which exhausted them. One vine, in fact, didn’t give any fruit at all this year.

These black grapes on a hybrid vine are much hardier and more disease resistant than the vinifera white grapes, so they fare well in the cooler and wetter weather. So I was able to leave these grapes longer on the vine to pick up the last rays of summer and get sweeter. When I picked the Regent at nightfall on 21 September they were all clean and whole and cold, and their juice measured 18 Brix. I trampled them right away, leaving the skins and stems with the juice. After 24 hours I removed the stems.

So the skins steeped in a thick and soupy must that looked like cherry jam.  There was no evident fermentation. Two and a half days after the initial crushing  I threw in the starter yeast colony (a small amount of Pinot Noir and Kubishevsky started two weeks earlier). Within an hour pinpricks of carbon dioxide were piercing the black liquid in the pail. 

As with the Mad Ange I want to increase extraction of flavours  by macerating the skins and holding them and the stems longer in the must. The 2010 Regent wine seems to lack complexity of flavours or length of finish in the mouth – not much “structure” as the wine critics say. Sure, its palatable and with a faint effervescence, and its from very young vines.  But its taste and aroma seem “short”, something like a Beaujolais nouveau, and that may have as much to do with my method of fermentation as it does with the vines’ youth.  I want a fuller bodied wine from these grapes, so I’m going to experiment.

Early spring, heat wave, drought, ground frost – what next?

These Regent vines in their second year were tall enough to escape the ground frost on the night of 2-3 May.

Spring has come very early to London, and with it a succession of dramatic weather events. First, there is a heat wave that has lasted till today, bringing forward the growing season by about five weeks. Without rain, however, the heat wave has led to drought. At Hawkwood on the edge of London where the Organiclea food growers co-op I belong to has just planted  over 100 fruit trees and 200 grape vines, the soil is parched and cracked to a depth of 10 centimetres in some places. And then to underscore our troubles we had a ground frost on Tuesday 3 May that damaged a lot of potted vegetable plants set outside to harden off as well as around a fifth of our newly planted grape vines.

Our 200 vines are not all the same, so the frost hit them with quite variable effect:

Fifty Regent vines planted in the spring of 2009 are well established, so they had grown high enough by last Tuesday to escape the ground frost. Only a couple of them suffered some damage to a few of their leaves.

Ninety Madeleine Angevine, Pinot Noir and Kubishevsky vines were planted out in March as one year old rooted cuttings from our own nursery. Six of them were fully burned by the frost.

We also planted sixty unrooted cuttings straight into the vineyard. These cuttings were taken from the winter pruning of 20 year old Madeleine Angevine vines growing on my allotment. It was an experiement to see if we could dispense with the effort of propagating cuttings in the nursery for a season before transplanting them into the vineyard. Well, these bare cuttings, pushed into the ground in late March, did take well at first. However, their buds swelled and then opened close to ground, so their still tender embryonic leaves met the full force of the frost rolling down the hill. Of these sixty, a full half of them had their new growth throroughly dessicated.

We’ll now watch to see how and when the damaged vines come back to life – normally it takes about three weeks for recovery to start. However, we face an unusual spring this year. Its a bit of a firefight with the drought. We’re out there watering around the newly planted vines, waiting for the heavens to open. Perhaps the rain will come tomorrow. That’s the forecast, but as you know forecasts are sometimes wrong or they come just too late. As in the evening of 2 May, when the forecast at 6 pm was for an overnight low of 7 degrees Celsius. Everyone went home after a hard day’s work.   Then at 7 pm the forecast changed: an east wind was registered blowing out of Scandinavia. It came over Epping Forest in the night and rolled down the hill into Hawkwood. And not just here – all over southern England vineyard workers were scrambling to protect their vines, in many places to no avail.

My friend Sarah at the Forty Hall Vineyard in Enfield said to me stoically this morning: “We have to take it as it comes”. She lost some of the new season’s growth to that frost on her two acres of Bacchus.  Today, however, she starts planting another five acres of vines -7,000 of them!  Good luck, Sarah. By the time the buds burst on these new plants we should be out of the frost danger zone. All we have to do now is pray for rain.

2010 Madeleine Angevine taste notes

In my blog on 15 September 2010 I described how I  macerated the Madeleine Angevine grapes and left the juice in contact with the skins during the first 36 hours of fermentation. I stirred the must around frequently, plunging the floating cap of skins below the surface. Usually I have pressed these grapes and removed the skins right away before fermentation begins. This year, however, I have been trying to extract more flavour from the skins for a  sharper and more complex wine. And it seems to be working. I racked some of the wine this past weekend for a party and we drank a few bottles. All round, the comments were generally favourable: not only is it fruity but with stronger acidity and a greater viscosity. Someone asked if it was a riesling. Certainly, this wine is still raw, the sugar and acid competing for attention, with not much length or high notes at the end. Yet this wine certainly has potential to evolve into a harmonious and elegant drink while hopefully retaining some of its current bolder, extrovert features. It seems I’ve managed to bring out this potential by a longer period of contact of the juice with the skins. Let’s see how it tastes in a few months time.

Cane pruning

There are many different shapes one can create when pruning a grape vine in winter in preparation for the next growing season. However, in all cases the objective is to leave behind an optimum number of buds or nodes on the last season’s wood that are evenly spaced over the whole growing frame of the vine. What is optimal for your vine can be learned only from experience with it over a number of seasons.

The two most common methods of winter pruning of vines trained on vertical trellis, as in most vineyards, are spur and cane pruning. Spur pruning is the easier method to master. I have described and illustrated it in my posting on 1 January 2010 on this blog (called “Winter pruning of vines from infancy to their fourth year”) . Here I describe cane pruning and discuss its advantages. But first the method itself.

Once the vine has reached a productive age of 3 or 4 years it will have a trunk and one or two horizontal arms coming off the trunk and tied to what’s called the fruiting wire. Those arms are called cordons if they are left there from season to season. The canes growing off the cordon’s buds are spur pruned each winter to two or three of their buds as described in my 1 January 2010 posting.

The unpruned vine in winter

The vine is pruned to two well positioned canes

If, on the other hand, one wishes to replace the horizontal arms altogether every season, one needs to practice cane pruning. This requires leaving two of the best positioned canes near the crown of the trunk, pruning away everything else from last year’s growth, and then bending down and tying the two reserved canes to the fruiting wire. These buds on these canes will send up fruiting shoots in the following growing season, which will be tied into the trellis wires above the fruiting wire. And in the winter that follows the vine will be cane pruned again to give it a fresh pair of canes to serve as its arms.

The canes are tied down to the fruiting wire

Take care not to snap a cane when bending it down to tie to the wire. The longer the cane the easier it will be to bend. However, the flexibility of the cane will depend on the air temperature, whether the sap is flowing through it, its thickness and the angle at which it grows away from the previous year’s arm. If the cane does not bend at will, it is imperative to leave it alone, unbent and untied. When spring comes, the vine warms and starts to grow again the sheer weight of the new shoots growing away from the cane will slowly bend it down. Then you can tie it down safely to the fruiting wire.

The advantages of cane pruning over spur pruning? Some varieties of grape  vine consistently produce more bunches of grapes if cane pruned than if they are spur pruned. Arching of the cane when tying it down will in itself greatly stimulate the productivity of the buds located along the region of maximum arch. And the annual renewal of the horizontal arms by cane pruning means the vine carries less weight and is less prone to diseases of the wood. Even the periodic renewal of cordons that are annually spur pruned with new canes – say every three or four years - helps to rebalance and reshape the growing frame.

Cane pruning requires more skill than spur pruning. But it  can be learned with less hazard to the vine if you do a practice run, as follows. Take a handful of brightly coloured clothes pegs. After careful observation of your unpruned vine attach your pegs to the points along the vine where you intend to prune it. Then stand back again and double check to see that you will attain the basic objectives  of retaining the ripest, healthiest and best positioned canes with an adequate number of growing buds on them spread evenly along the available length of the fruiting wire once you tie them down.  Then cut away all the unwanted wood from the previous season, watching out for your fingers and the wires. Finally, tie down your chosen canes and only then cut them back to the desired length.

Regent taste notes after second racking

I have just racked my Regent wine a second time. The first time was just before Christmas when there was snow on the ground and the cellar was around 4 degrees Celsius. Relatively little in the way of lees at the bottom of the carboy when I poured it into demijohns. And the wine looked pretty clear. I’ve been curious ever since how its coming along, so tonight I’ve racked one of the demijohns into an even smaller receptacle and kept half a litre aside for tasting all around.  

The wine at four months is bright as a bell, a lovely crimson hue. Its still cool from the cellar when I bring it up for the family to taste. The bouquet is elusive – after all its virgin wine from three year old vines. And the taste -well, this is what the children say: crisp, refreshing, fruity, with cherry lingering in the mouth. I can taste morellos. Its a light, delicate wine, almost a red white wine, but with definite promise of a fuller body next year. I can’t help but think of Beaujolais Nouveau when I drink it - youthful, yet already complete.

Making red wine with the Regent

 

Pressing my first crop of Regent grapes yielded more wine than expected

This is the first year I’ve harvested a crop from my 14 Regent vines. I’ve no experience with this black grape, so I’m keeping detailed notes of every step of the way from harvest through fermentation to the finished wine. I remember many years ago I made a very good white wine in my second attempt with the same grapes. I wanted to repeat the process the following year in the hope of arriving at or close to the same result. Unfortunately I had kept no record of the condition of the grapes or the path I’d taken with them so I’ve never managed to get anywhere near to that memorable wine again.

So, these were the vital statistics and first steps in the process so far this year with the Regent grapes (and a little Pinot Noir on a stray vine) from the allotment:

1. 120 lbs Regent and 10 lbs Pinot Noir harvested on 30 September.
2. After 24 hours standing in covered pails outdoors, bunches are all destemmed by hand, mouldy grapes discarded, and all berries, Regent and Pinot Noir,  held together in one large food grade plastic barrel, covered by a secured cloth in an unheated shed (temperature ranging between  9 and 18 degrees Celsius through the day and night time)
3. Two handfuls of berries are crushed by hand and the juice measured by hydrometer at 1060 Specific Gravity (7.6% potential alcohol).
4. A starter batch of fermenting Regent grape juice that was prepared a couple of weeks earlier is poured over the berries in the barrel. The barrel is stirred thoroughly by hand to coat all the fruit with the juice collecting at the bottom. There is no  crushing or pressing of the fruit at this stage.  
5. Fermentation spreads rapidly through the juice within 24 hours. The skins of the berries were slightly broken when they were pulled off their stems. So the fermentation spreads inside the berries and works its way through the sugars there outwards towards the skin. This kind of fermentation of whole berries entirely without their stems (or with just a portion of them still in whole bunches) is called maceration carbonique. It proceeds at a lower and more even temperature than is normally the case with red wine fermentation and it usually leads to a softer, more aromatic wine. I am taking this approach the first time round with the Regent grape so that the fermentation will be slow and even over time, rather than peaking in a feverish hot episode. I am at work all day through the week, so this way I will be able to look after the fermentation and  decide just when to the wine has taken enough colour and flavours from the skins and the must can be pressed.
6. Unrefined organic granulated cane sugar is added to bring up the potential alcohol level to 12.6%. This is done as soon as the fermentation is well underway. The sugar is simply poured in and stirred for a few minutes. I estimate that 130 lbs of grapes will give me 5 gallons of clear wine after fermentation, pressing and racking twice or thrice off the lees. So I add 5 lbs of sugar which, according to my table (see it in my blog on 20 September 2009), will raise the specific gravity from 1060 to 1090, which will give 12.6% alcohol after fermentation to dryness.
7. The carbon dioxide rising from the fermenting juice lifts the mass of berries to the surface. This ”cap” is now plunged back into the must every 4 hours if possible, every 8 hours at least.
8. Each time the cap is plunged a cupped handful of the juice-wine is tasted: as sugar gives way slowly towards dryness a more concentrated taste of fruit comes forward – in this case something like dark cherry with a mildly burnished edge.
9.  On 9 October, eight days after the fermentation took off, the liquid has a deep crimson hue and  it tastes definitely like young wine, not juice. It is time to press it out and remove the skins altogether. Over two-thirds of the contents of the barrel is now liquid, which is just poured through a sieve into a big glass fermentation vessel.  The remaining skins go through the press in three batches. Each batch is pressed twice. The first press gives an easy run of wine.  The cake inside the press is then broken up, repositioned and pressed  again for an additional run of wine. This second run is harsher than the first, so no attempt is made to squeeze every last drop out of the skins. On the second, and sometimes third press of the cake, less is always better.  The resulting wine will be finer.
10. Overall, I pressed out 7.5 gallons of young wine, I considerably more than I expected from 130 lbs of grapes. After the wine is has fermented and settled down about 20% of this volume, or 1.5 gallons, will be removed as sediment. This will leave, I estimate now,  6 gallons of clean wine rather than 5 gallons that I had originally estimated. So the 5 lbs of sugar I added  to the must on I October will bring up the potential alcohol level to around 12%, not the 12.6% I first planned for. That’s okay, 12% alcohol in a medium bodied, softer tasting, earlier drinking wine should be just right.
11. The onion shaped demijohn I’ve poured the 36 litres into has a capacity of 54 litres, which leaves enough room above the wine for any turbulence during the ongoing fermentation. I fit a fermentation lock in its neck, sealing any gaps between the plastic lock and the cork with candle wax.

Now to get my son Max to help me pick it up and carry it safely indoors to the cellar. There it will sit for the coming year in the dark. I will turn the light on only to look in on it, top up the fermentation lock regularly with water (and a bit of a Camden tablet in the lock, not the wine), and to rack the wine off the sediment.

Making white wine with Madeleine Angevine

On Sunday 12 September, I harvested the Madeleine Angevine on the allotment. The grape skins were already very soft, the berries were pulling away easily from the stems and rot was setting in. Facing another week of intermittent rain I took the decision to harvest these grapes, while leaving the tougher skinned Regent black grapes still on the vine. 

Together with the small batch of grapes picked a week ago to get a yeast colony started, I have a total of 46 lbs or 21k, slightly more than last year’s harvest. However, the specific gravity of the juice measures 1070 on the hydrometer, a lot lower than the 1080 achieved last year. So I’m debating whether to add sugar or to make a light wine at 9%  alcohol. 

I think this is called bunch rot

Picking the grapes this year involved the laborious process of removing individual berries that had started to rot from the wet weather. This involved deftly flicking each one out of the bunch with the semi closed blades of the secateurs. All told I probably lost only about 2-3% of the grapes, and I had a clean harvest to take to pressing and fermentation. 

The next step was to press the grapes, remove the stems (you can do it the other way around) and then decide for how long to leave the juice in contact with the skins. I thought to try for a bolder and hopefully more aromatic flavour than I achieved last year, when the grape skins were simply removed after pressing out the bunches in a small wine press – i.e. no prolonged contact.   

Wash those feet first!

This year I thought to give the grapes a little more maceration, so I tramped them in a pail for a few minutes. My children used to do that when they were little, but now they’ve grown they let me have a go. So, after tramping I picked out each stem and stripped it of the berry skins still hanging on. I then added to the must the starter batch of juice that had been fermenting the whole previous week. Finally I covered the pail with a clean tea towel fixed around the rm with a big elastic band. Within a couple of hours I came back, put my ear just inside the pail, and could already hear the tiny little bubbles pricking the surface of the must. 

Over the next 36 hours I periodically uncovered the pail and plunged the cap of grape skins back under the surface and stirred around the must. If this cap is left indefinitely on the surface, to where it is lifted by the fermentation, there is a danger some kind of spoilage can commence on the exposed skins. Once fermentation is underway you are likely to be visited by the fruit fly, so keep the fermentation container covered with a securely fixed, breathable, but impenetrable cover. Plunging the cap also gives an opportunity to lick your fingers and taste the evolving flavours of the nascent wine. It helps you to decide just how long you want to leave the juice on the skins.  

After 36 hours  fermenting in a warm place I removed the skins. Then the covered pail went onto the clay floor in the cellar for a long, cool fermentation.

Starting fermentation before harvest

I went onto the allotment yesterday with my neighbour Dave to see if any of the grapes are ready for picking. None of them are. The Madeleine Angevine is the closest, so we took 10 lbs of its grapes and brought them home to make a starter batch of fermenting juice.

We picked the bunches of grapes that have the most damaged berries. Before dropping them in the pail we cleaned the bunches by hand, removing brown, collapsed, split, shrivelled and otherwise damaged berries. We also cleaned the rest of the bunches by hand, leaving them hanging on the vines. This way there’s less to attract the wasps before the full harvest.

The grapes were crushed by hand. The clear juice measured 1070 on the hydrometer, which means it holds 18% sugar by volume, for a potential alcohol level of 9% at the end of fermentation. So, if the grapes still on the vine can stay there in dry weather for another week at least, the sugar level will rise one or two percent more.  

Removing the stalks I left the crushed grapes, skins and juice together, to stand in a container covered with a clean cloth in a warm corner of the house. Twenty four hours later I could already see from the bubbles collecting along the sides of the container that fermentation has begun. (Remember the grape carries its own yeast on its skin, which i rely upon for the fermentation. Others prefer to inoculate their must with a commercial wine yeast.). I strained the must through a muslin cloth into a demijohn, throwing away the skins and pips. I stopped the demijohn with a fermentation lock and put it back in its warm spot. Within a few days there should be a healthy colony of yeast in the fermenting juice, ready for the main harvested crop.

Note that I ferment the clean juice of the Madeleine Angevine after crushing the grapes, leaving the juice in contact with the skins for around 24 hours and then taking it off its skins. Sometimes, as in this year, the fermentation starts quickly, even before the juice is separated from the skins. In other years it takes longer to start, sometimes up to five days. I follow the same procedure with the starter batch as I do with the main batch after the full harvest.

Most white wine is made by fermenting the juice on its own, without the skins. However, there is this crucial period between harvesting and full speed fermentation when you have your grapes standing in their container and then you crush them into a mixture of juice and broken skins. It is important at this point in time to decide for how long you want the juice to remain in contact with the broken skins.  It all depends on the kind of grapes you have and what kind of style of wine you want to make. An inner layer of the skin contains esters and other important contributors of flavour, which are released when the skin is broken.  Prolonged initial contact of the juice with the skins is desirable for aromatic varieties, such as the Madeleine Angevine and others that have a Muscat ancestor. However, prolonged contact of the skins with the air will cause oxidation of the skins and pulp, turning them brown and changing the flavour of the juice in yet another way. Some wine makers deliberately allow some oxidation of the must to occur, others abhor it. 

I have left the Madeleine Angevine’s juice in contact with the crushed skins for various periods of time – from one to forty eight hours before separating the juice to ferment on its own. The result is a  wine with a lighter or fuller body, a delicate or more pronounced flavour, taking anywhere from a year to three years to round off its rough edges. 

Once inside the demijohn the surface of the juice is blanketed by the carbon dioxide rising from the ferment, so oxidization of the juice or any solid matter in it is minimized.

In the case of red wine, contact between the skins and the juice goes on for much longer. We’ll deal with the red wine scenario when I pick some Regent grapes next week for a starter batch to ferment. Speaking of next week, the weather forecast for Greater London calls for five days of rain, starting sometime today…