Garage Sailing in 1899

Posted on January 30, 2012

The 1899 project is in full swing. We have three barrels of pinot that have
never been moved with internal combustion or electricity. We picked them by
hand, brought them to the winery by horse, and dropped them using gravity into
a wood fermenter using whole-cluster and a hand-crank destemmer. They
experienced a 10-day cold-soak before their native yeast took over and
fermentation took off. We stomped them by foot, pumped out the free-run
with a hand pump and barreled them down for the winter.
As they were proceeding slowly through malolactic fermentation in their
double-bunged barrels (a technique we learned from Erin and Russ at
Evesham Wood), we got a package from Burgundy.
Thanks to my great friend in Burgundy, Peter Julian, Illahe is now in
possession o f some winemaking tools from the good old days. Some of
them are going to be easy to incorporate in everyday winemaking—one is a
long barrel filler that Gabe has been using to top, and another a
double-screw cork puller that you will see at the bar next time you’re up.
We have a bunch of wooden racking valves that look cool, but we also got a
spectacular bronze one that has a maker’s mark, A.D. We’ll be racking with
this in a few months. We have new metal pipettes (wine thieves). We also
scored a pruning hook and a strange screw on a gantry. Hmm…anyone know what
this is?

Harvest 2011

Posted on January 13, 2012

How is wine made?  It’s a pretty simple question, with a rather complicated answer.  In my first blog entry for Illahe Vineyards, I will try to explain our process for making pinot noir.  But making wine is more than just a process—it’s an experience.  In this blog, I really wanted to share that experience by talking about the music, the stories, and the silly little details that made harvest 2011 at Illahe an unforgettable experience.

Setup:  Arcarde Fire – The Suburbs

Most winemakers say that cleaning is 90% of winemaking, and that is especially true during harvest.  Harvest means working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks; it is exhausting for everybody, so we try to help each other when we can.  Some mornings I would come in an hour early, put on Arcade Fire, and start setting up the sorting line, so we could get off to a good start.  That means cleaning the sorting table, where imperfect grapes are removed; then cleaning the destemmer, where grapes are crushed and destemmed.  The grapes go into a plastic fermenters; each fermenter holds about 2500 lbs of grapes, resulting in about 200 gallons of wine.

Punchdowns: Soul Patrol: Can you Feel the Funk?

After we have filled the fermenters with grapes, we let them soak for 2 -5 days before adding yeast.  Sometimes, wine will mysteriously begin fermentation on its own—we call this natural yeast or wild yeast fermentation.  Once fermentation begins, we perform two or three “punchdowns” per day.  Because dried grape skins float on top of the grape juice, we climb on top each fermenter and punch the grapes down into the juice, to keep the skins wet and stir up the juice.  It’s a strenuous process, and often requires some energetic music to keep you going.  Brad has an eclectic record collection at the winery, and this funky album was always a popular punchdown anthem.  Extra credit has to go to our harvest intern Jacob, who would often come to the winery alone at midnight to do an extra round of punchdowns.

Pressing: Steely Dan!

After five days of cold soaking, and about two weeks of fermentation, we suck the juice out of the fermenter, and press the remaining grapes in a traditional basket press. While it sounds pretty simple, dumping 2000 lbs. of grapes can be quite a process…one that involves forklifts, snow shovels, and buckets.  During one very long day of pressing, Brad played every Steely Dan album in his collection; seven albums that gave us five hours of music – enough to pull juice and press three full fermenters.

Racking: The Radha Krsna Temple: Hare Krsna

2011 was an exceptionally late harvest, and had to scramble to get all our reds in barrel before Thanksgiving.  The weekend after Thanksgiving is the busiest tasting weekend of the year in the Willamette Valley, and Thanksgiving day was set to be our first day off in six weeks.  To do that, we had to get all of our wine in barrel by Tuesday, clean up on Wednesday, and relax on Thursday.  While this seemed like a reasonable goal, our barrel washer broke the Friday before Thanksgiving, and by Sunday night, panic  was setting in.  Monday we got our barrel washer back, and Tuesday we spent 14 hours racking 52 barrels of wine – almost 90% of our pinot!  As the night wore on, silliness set in, and soon we were blaring the Hare Krsna anthem while dancing in the cellar.

Cleanup: James Brown:Hot Pants!

Cleanup usually happens around ten o’clock at night.  If you’re crazy enough to enjoy working  ten hours a day, seven days a week, then you’re probably crazy enough to enjoy scrubbing equipment at the end of each night.  Everyone grabs a beer, we crank up the James Brown, and we scrub the winery until it shines.  Hopefully we get 5 or 6 hours of sleep before coming in the next morning, putting on the Arcade Fire, and setting up the sorting line for another day of winemaking!

The only thing better than making wine while listening to records is drinking wine while listening to records. So Friday, February 11th, we will be having a Wine, Fondue, and Vinyl Valentines Day Party. We will pair some Brazilian Bossa Nova with Gruner, Riesling, and Cheese Fondue, and some smooth 70’s jazz with Pinot Noir, Tempranillo Port, and Chocolate Fondue. If the weather is nice, we might even have horse drawn vineyard tours! We hope to see you there.

American Art Icon James Siena Designs for Illahe

Posted on October 3, 2011

James Siena is not a household name in Oregon, though he is a household name if your house is in Manhattan and you have an interest in art. His work appears in the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, the Whitney, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Hammer in LA, and many other of America’s great museums. And now it also appears on the Illahe label.

How so? All thanks to our friend Dan Schmidt, also a New York artist, a few bottles of the earliest Illahe products showed up at James’s studio lunch table on Canal Street. Now, James is a huge fan of Burgundy and Bordeaux, but it was the viognier that he enjoyed so much that he offered to design a label for us.

He worked with Ruth Lingen at Pace Prints (Pace Gallery represents James), and they came up with a label, now our reserve label, that incorporates letterpress fonts from the 19^th century and a ‘necker’ with the vintage. Ruth, the “Letterpress Queen of Brooklyn” found a beautiful font designed by Emil Rudolf Weiss to type ILLAHE. Don’t try to find this font on the internet—it comes directly from the antique type, perhaps from the famous Bauer type foundry.

We love how the label matches what we’re trying to do at the winery. It is an old American design to match our Oregon terroir; simple, not showy; and, on James’s insistence, it emphasizes vintage variation in the necker’s circle.

Best of all, James redesigned our logo based on the word Illahe from the Duployan script that Merry Young found for the winery. James is still drinking Illahe and hopefully he enjoys our output as we transition our label.

Thank you, our sophisticated friends!

Illahe Reserve Pinot noir – Hits Like a Bombshell

Posted on June 30, 2011

By Guest Contributor Jean Yates, Avalon Wine

We taste a lot of wine at Avalon and it takes a lot to impress us. Last week, Illahe’s Reserve Pinot noir 08 hit us like a bombshell. It’s a contender for our list of the best of the famous 2008 vintage, and a wine that you want to know about.

I wanted to get some confirmation of my impressions from outside the insulated little wine world we inhabit.  So I tried it yesterday with some customers and friends. These are not professional wine people – some of them drink Pinot noir regularly, some don’t.  I’d decanted the wine a few hours before we got together, and a lot of the tightness that the best of the young 2008’s always show had dissipated. It had opened up beautifully.

General consensus among friends and neighbors? “Delicious” dominated the discussion, with “can I take the rest of the bottle home” a popular question. Blackberries and ” dark berry” were the consensus main flavors, with “spice” “walking in the forest after it rains,” “cherries,”  and “cedar” also mentioned.

“This wine just got better and better and better, the longer I tried it” Dorothy said.  “The more I tasted it, the more flavors, the more richness.”

Here’s our tasting note – A nose of blackberry, cedar, forest floor, and sweet spice only hints at the intense, round, tremendously impressive dark fruit and spice box flavors. Even though it’s clearly young, there’s so much to enjoy – the juicy blackberry and dark cherry fruit floats above a deep, dark sweet spice base with five spice, cedar, and forest floor in the mix. Unusually appealing in a young wine from the 2008 vintage, the silky tannins balance well with the fruit and acid. The core is a bit tight and there’s a strong sense that this wine has a lot more to offer with time in the cellar.

The Illahe Reserve Pinot noir 08 is a definite hit of the vintage and a wine to start collecting.

- Jean

Jean Yates sells Oregon Pinot noir at Avalon Wine in Corvallis, Oregon.

Harvest Approacheth

Posted on October 12, 2010

I’ve never jumped out of an airplane, but it’s a good movie shot when the guys are getting ready to jump and they’re collecting their thoughts quietly with the drone of the motors on the soundtrack. That’s what it feels like to me now at bloom + 105. One-hundred and five days after bloom is the traditional Burgundian harvest, and here we are after a big rain just below good sugar and pH levels, looking at a week of dry weather, waiting and waiting.

When the grapes come in, we’re going to be ready. We have a new galvanized pegboard for hanging clamps and gaskets. We have an intern, Pamela, and Justin, Zach, and Lee waiting to help. We have a new wooden tank soaked up and ready for gris, and a diaphragm pump cleaned and ready for pump-overs. Most importantly, Michael has fixed up U-96, a 1979 Willmes membrane press that Lowell harvested from the scrap yard. It can press 3 tons—of whites! We will continue to use the basket press for delicate red squishing, but now we can get the most of our home-grown program with an appropriate, retro press.

So we just keep waiting. Birds are doing their jobs. The botrytis is out there on a few bunches, and the rain can’t have helped the situation. We have pretty dry canopies, so we hope they dry off and dry up and give us a great year.

Snail Powered

Posted on September 1, 2010

Thanks to the curiosity piqued by Russ Raney’s involvement in the Slow Food Movement, I found the book Slow Food by Carlo Petrini and finished reading it yesterday.

The basic idea of the book, and the name, is that fast food is bad and the opposite, natural food produced by families in traditional ways, is good. A number of American movies and articles on NPR have talked about the same thing in the last few years, so the concept can’t be unfamiliar to anyone. In fact, if you’re buying Illahe’s wine, you probably already care about appreciating the flavors and goodness inherent in natural production. You might care at least a little that your wine is made by hand and that people are involved in the love of its production. You might be quite interested in helping out the family farmer and the local farmer.

But, you say, you also like fast food, at least every once in a while, and, hey, who can afford to eat all local hand-picked stuff every day? Another neat aspect of the Slow Food concept is that he’s clear that it’s about affordability and not buying that extremely expensive coffee wrapped in monkey dung. It’s not about making food the most exclusive and expensive process possible, even if the old production methods are more expensive than the economy of scale corporate food producers provide.

He talks about food education, which will supposedly lead to extra enjoyment and better gastronomic  decisions. I’m not so sure this is the best idea, though it’s worked really well for Slow Food in Italy and Europe. I don’t know if there’s any better food education than simply growing up in France or Italy or Japan or China. Our biggest problem seems not to be education. People know about food here, we just don’t have it easily available, because we started fast food and we’re pretty good at it.

I just made my first good homemade loaf of bread last weekend, and it was wonderful, and I realized Salem doesn’t have a regular local bakery. The Slow Food concept works again and again. It works on our wine and it works on bread. Less mechanization=more love. Unfortunately it seems economically that more love=less money. Maybe that’s why Petrini hopes that education will solve the problem.

My guess is that it’s a matter of years of civilization. That will solve it. Unfortunately that’s really slow food.

Mowing to Victory

Posted on August 27, 2010

Horse Mowing

If you want to be one of the first people ever to see what it’s like standing at the end of a horse-mowed row in an Oregon vineyard with a cell-phone video camera, click on the link above. Mark Sougstad, expert teamster, horse logger, farrier, and politician is driving Bea with her one eye and white blaze. He got her to calm down as we mowed along into our third acre. The machine is actually pretty loud. The microphone in my cell phone only picks up a sliver of the sound waves blasting out of the sickle. Still, it’s easier on the ear than a tractor and rotary mower.

Mark let me mow three rows and a lot of the headland. I drove Doc. At one point, he was scared of a pile of wire, and he tried to get away from it. Otherwise, he plodded along with his head tilted a bit, laboring like Boxer the horse in 1984, and I started to get proud of him instead of only pleading with him. That guy was pulling hard, helping out, making wine!

While Doc and Mark and Bea and I were out in the vineyard, we could see that the grapes are coming along nicely. It’s definitely cooler than other years so far. Then again, it looks similar to 2008, and that year turned out wonderfully. We have low natural yields, small berries, and no mildew.

Veraison started last week, and some berries are bright purple already. Harvest is within sight.

When the team brings grapes up to the vineyard, we’ll have two new antiques to help in production: a 1979 Willmes membrane press for whites and a 1650 gallon (that’s size, not year) wooden tank. We’ll be working on our native yeast culture this year, too. Come on out at harvest to see how this stuff works if you get a chance.

Going Back in Time Takes a While

Posted on August 16, 2010

Finally, after four years of planning and work, I have mowed a row of grapes. Illahe’s friend and teamster Mark Sougstad, who is driving in the picture above, handed me the lines and walked in front of me with his hat held above Doc’s head so I could aim his ears down the middle of the row. The bar of the mower clacks loudly but Doc doesn’t make a sound and the mower bumps around, much more than the tractor. Whereas some of the parts on Marvin Brisk’s mower are made in modern factories, the mower was assembled by hand and could have been done with different parts from the 19^th century. I would guess that no other winery is approaching pure sustainability in this way.

As you’ll note from the other picture, Doc and Bea are pulling a wagon in between bales of food. We did have a tractor bale those things, so we still put some diesel into the project, but with only a few acres of hay and about four acres of pasture, a sack of oats and the occasional apple, our team should be able to mow the bottom 30 acres of vineyard next year.

That’s a big ‘should’ since so far we’ve only mowed an acre. I hope to get up to three acres mowed this year and at least the reserve grapes pulled up to the winery by horse.

Mark plans to take Doc and Bea down to California to do some horse logging next month and have them back before harvest. They’ll have more practice and be healthier when next year rolls around. If we can mow 30 acres a few times we may save a few gallons of diesel. I’ll work on the math when quantity matters.

Now, only quality matters. We have never been closer to bringing true Oregon terroir into your bottle. Let us know when you want to come thank winemakers Doc and Bea.

A Short History

Posted on July 29, 2010

The Romans sometimes finished their wines in a smoke-filled fumentarium and grew grapes up the side of trees, the Greeks plugged up their amphorae with pitch, and the Egyptians pressed wine in large canvas sheets that they twisted like they were wringing out a towel.

The French developed a taste for wine stored in a barrel and knew that burning sulfur in the barrels helped clean them. Despite the fact that wine was significant in most ancient religions and important in both the Old and New Testament, attempts to restrict and regulate its consumption have been consistent ever since Medieval monks tried to sober up their members.

Wine is now produced seriously in most of the world’s temperate regions and global consumption has continued to grow despite phylloxera, prohibition, and war, to its greatest amount in history.

This is an even more concise history of wine than the one I finished reading recently, Rod Phillips’s A Short History of Wine. The book itself was good. It was easy to read and covered most of the big events in wine history. A lot of the sections were anecdotal, which is what one might expect in a book not called The Entire History of Wine. He connects it together but it’s obvious that he’s leaving a few things out.

The book does better covering the olden days before good records. No one knows what wine tasted like back then, and there was no real discussion of quality beyond good, bad, sweet, dry, old, or young. In modern times wine is subjected much more harshly to recorded criticism. The Greeks and Romans didn’t sit down and write descriptors or scores and they had no scientific measures to speak of, so they probably just enjoyed it more. Viticultural recommendations were simpler—don’t crop it too high, plant it toward the sun, and pick it at the right time—these were the main words of advice of the theorists.

Now we’ve entered an enlightenment in which sophistication thrives well. To understand the transition from monasteries to sommeliers one would have to reach for a different tome. But at IPNC I was asking Thibaud Mandet and Steve Doerner about vine spacing, and Steve said that it used to be the width of a monk’s ass, then changed to the width of a horse’s ass, then changed to the width of a tractor, and each measure works fairly well to make great wine. I have to thank Steve for making sure we don’t get too sophisticated.

Did someone say tacos, mango salsa, and Pinot Gris?

Posted on July 6, 2010

Illahe fans everywhere are beginning to write in with their recipes to match
our wines. This recipe for fish tacos comes from Santa Barbara, California
from our esteemed graphic designer, Merry Young, who believes that it was a
perfect match with our pinot gris.

Remember, it takes a lot of beer to pair with great wine.

You’ll probably want to make the salsa and stick it in the fridge before you
start in on the tacos.

*Beer Battered Mahi Mahi *

Canola or olive oil

1/2 cup all-purpose flour (or whole wheat, or a combo)

1/4 cup extra flour for dredging

2/3 cup beer (PBR works well)

1/4 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp paprika

pinch of cayenne

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 pound or so of Mahi Mahi (tilapia, flounder, etc.)

In one dish, whisk together 1/2 cup of the flour, beer, egg, baking powder,
salt, pepper and spices. In a separate shallow dish, place remaining 1/4 cup
flour.

Heat enough oil to shallow-fry the fish in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high
heat. There should be enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan, plus a
little more.

Pat dry and season both sides of the fish fillets with salt and black
pepper. First, dredge fish in flour dish, turning to lightly coat both
sides, then shake off excess flour. Second, dunk fish in beer mixture and
turn to coat both sides, let excess drip off.

Add the fish to the hot oil and cook 2 to 3 minutes per side, until cooked
through and opaque. Remove the fish from the oil. Place on a paper towel
lined plate. Cover and let rest a few minutes.

*Mango Salsa*

1 ripe mango, diced or 1 1/2 cups (I use Trader Joe’s frozen mango chunks)

1/4 cup finely chopped red onion

1/2 medium red bell pepper

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon or so chopped fresh cilantro

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl. Let chill a half or so and stir
before serving.

Corn tortillas are the best, and can be fried quickly in the oil or wrapped
in paper and microwaved, or even steamed if you have such a contraption.

Brad Ford thanks to Merry Young

Illahe Vineyards and Winery 3275 Ballard Road Dallas, OR 97338 phone : 503.831.1248 fax : 503.831.1237