Most wineries start fermentation by adding commercial yeasts to their wines.  While we do use some commercial yeasts, we also like to use the native yeasts that can be found on the grape skins or in the grape juice.  Usually, a commercial yeast will overwhelm these native yeasts.  If no commercial yeast is added, then the native yeasts will ferment the wine to its completion.

The pros and cons of each type of fermentation are complex.  The advantage of using commercial yeast is that it allows a winemaker more control over which flavors are extracted from the grapes, as well as more control over the rate of fermentation.  During a native ferment, the winemaker is at the mercy of nature.  Fermentation will start whenever the native yeasts are ready, and the winemaker cannot control which flavors the yeast will extract.  While the flavors extracted from native fermentation are often less fruity, they also offer more depth and complexity.

As you can see, it is not an obvious choice to say one form of fermentation is better than the other. They both have their advantages, which is why we use both methods here at Illahe.  The 2010 vintage provided the perfect combination of moderate brix levels and low pH levels for native fermentation, so we used native yeast to ferment about a quarter of our wines.

With such a large percentage of our wine being made with native yeast, we decided to blend four barrels into a unique wine, made with 100% natural yeast.  While this bottling may not be as fruity as our regular pinot noir, it offers layers of complexity beyond anything I’ve ever tasted from Illahe, with hints of baking spice, cedar, and maple syrup to complement the subtle blackberry and raspberry flavors.

This might be my favorite Illahe wine I’ve ever tasted. But don’t take my word for it, come and taste it yourself!  We will be releasing “Bon Sauvage” at our annual Earth Day Event on Saturday, April 21st.  We will be pouring it side-by-side with our regular pinot noir, so you can taste the difference.  We only produced 80 cases of this wine, so be sure to come and taste it soon!

Our bottles were scheduled to arrive the day of bottling.  We spent the past two weeks filtering and testing the wine, prepping it to be bottled March 8^th.  The most amazing thing was that the bottles showed up on time.  The second most amazing thing is when Brad told me that our truck driver had re-defined the term “jackknifed”.  I stepped outside to see a truck with its cab pointing uphill and north, but his trailer pointing downhill and east.

We called across the street to Dave McKibben, the cattle farmer at McK Ranch, because he owns a giant tractor.  The vineyard crew rounded up some thick chains, and Mr. McKibben set to towing a stuck 50-foot truck with his tractor.  He spun his wheels for a good twenty seconds before he got that thing moving, but in less than a minute he had towed rig right up a hill.  Check out the video:

“http://www.facebook.com/v/2859275927616”

I bet you think I’m gonna start talking about the Viognier now, don’t you.  Nope!  Because when we stepped outside later in the day, to enjoy a rare sunny Oregon afternoon, guess what we saw?  A second truck, bringing more botttles, stuck in a ditch on the side of the road.

While we were watching from the patio, Brad turned to Lowell and said, “Your turn to call Dave.  I called him last time”.

Needless to say, Dave McKibben was the first person to receive a bottle of our 2011 Viognier.   We will officially release it at our Annual Earth Day Event on April 21st.  Last year’s vintage sold-out unfortunately fast; this year our plants have matured enough for us to increase our production to 475 cases.  The grapes come from Goschie Farms in Silverton, OR.  It is the only fruit that we don’t grow ourselves, and Gail Goschie does an amazing job of sending us delicious grapes every year.  The fleshy fruit flavors make it a great wine to drink on your porch in the late afternoon.  While it’s not a traditional food pairing, I suggest you drink it while grilling McK Ranch beef.

The saying is that it takes a lot of beer to make wine. It also takes a lot of coffee. I find that lab work and the morning go together well. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a magical happy scene surrounding the morning caffeine.

This mug is the mug that started it all–unicorn, rainbow, cloud stage left, squirrel, rabbit, turtle, frog, butterflies, bird, and even a little snail. Violets, too! The grass is even pointing toward the unicorn if you didn’t notice.

A stunning example of the genre, here. I think if I were doing a rainbow mug I would make sure that there was some optical flaw just so no one would take it seriously. I mean, it’s about fun! The rainbow is making two separate arcs and there are clouds in front and behind it–can that happen? Whatever. Balloons aren’t usually surrounded with gold borders!

This mug heralded the coming of the 1980s with cursive and rainbows. The order of colors is right, at least, unlike this next mug.

Graphically spectacular, and it’s inside out. Any rainbow with the red line on the inside is pretty good.

And here are a bunch of others in the collection:

Help us make great wine by bringing us great rainbow mugs! We’ll give you $2 off your next purchase for any rainbow mug you bring.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.