Summer Camp for Adults....Part Two

As you can imagine, being loaded into a school bus with 40 strangers that all had way to much to drink the night before is never a pleasant thing.  Add to that, the fact that our once pristine bus had been trashed by the green bus and you have some riled up campers.  Thank god we were now into the thick of our first day as campers and were headed towards the R. Stuart and Co. Winery which also happened to house one of my favorite pinot producers...Panther Creek.  This being our first day of seminars I think most of us expected some lame cookie cutter presentation from a freckle faced tasting room attendant that most of us would have probably chewed up and spit out in the area of wine production....once again Pinot Camp had a few more surprises in store. 

We began by all being gathered into a large room where the fermentation tanks were and then herded into an area where we watched a brief video about wine making and the different types of fermentation....pretty standard stuff.  Then something new was thrown our way....we were put into 3 different groups and each group was given a little experiment that they had prepared for us.  My first was the experimentation of the process of acidification...now stick with me here and I will try not to geek out too much.   Acid is a component in a grape that is present before, during, and after the grapes life cycle.  When a grape is young and under ripe it is full of acid, but as it ripens the sugar is created and replaces the acid.  In a perfectly ripe grape the two, acid and sugar, are in balance.  Then when this grape is pressed into juice, and if fermented correctly, you end up with a balanced wine...and by that I mean the sugar content of the wine is not overwhelmed by the acid content and vice versa.  This is one of the things that winemakers try to do on a daily basis....balance these two very important parts of the wine.  So if you followed that than you can probably figure out that this is not always the case!  Alot of times Mother Nature can be a real bitch and she can throw curve balls at you and terribly screw up this process.  This is a time when the process of acidification is used.  This is the process in which acid is added to a must (pressed grape juice) to balance out the fact that the grapes were over ripened and there for produced too much sugar.  Now most wine makers would tell you they would never do such a thing...it would be unnatural....yeah right...that like saying movie stars don't get boob jobs!  However the point of this little experiment was not to call out wine makers that bend the rules a little...no it was to help us as wine buyers be able to taste the difference in a wine that had been manipulated and one that had been made with out any added acid structure.  Reason being is that most wines that have been manipulated are more likely to be unstable at a later date as they age. 

So the experiment went like this...they gave us each two wine glasses...then poured us each a different wine in each glass and did not tell us which was acidified and which was not....they then gave us all a few minutes and did a show of hands...was it wine number one or wine number two that had been acidified.  Before I tell you the results I would like to point out a few things...first off these two wines were the exact same wine at one point...same grapes, same harvest date, same wine maker, same soak time...but then for the cause of this experiment the wine maker added acid to half of the batch and basically ruined perfectly good, sell-able, wine.  I thought to myself that is a pretty big commitment to a project for complete strangers!  This is a point that I noticed numerous times about Pinot Camp...these people all gave their blood, sweat, tears, and of course wine so we could learn and become more knowledgeable in our field...and for that I am very grateful!  So now that we had all tasted the two wines we raised our hands and about two-thirds of us got that wine number one had added acid...but how you may ask...well it is actually very simple.  When acid is present in a wine it will make you saliva glands go into overdrive.  When you drink the wine the acid binds to your saliva and when you swallow the wine it cleanses your mouth of most of that saliva...then your taste buds say "hay where did all the saliva go?"  The saliva glands then kick into overdrive to replace the missing saliva...so when you taste a wine with a fair amount of acid pay attention to those little glands and what they are doing and you can gauge if a wine is full of acid or not.  Oh yeah...and wine with good acid is great for heavy foods with alot of sauce...but that is a blog for a different day.  Once again as I stood here and listened to the wine makers answer questions about this process it stuck me that this truly is a unique test of your palate and nowhere else can you get a test like this.  I mean you can take a low acid wine, like maybe big Aussie shiraz, and copmare it to a high acid wine, like a German riesling, but that apples to oranges...this was the exact same wine except the added acid.  A truly unique experience. I was now really excited as we moved to our next little expirament...to cork or not to cork?

We took our little party across the street to the bottling room for Panther Creek and began to listen to the wine maker from Brooks winery...another favorite...who talked to us about the corking process and the difference between using corks or screw caps.  To make this not too much of a geek out moment again I will try to keep this short....basically a cork is in the to of the bottle of wine to seal it while at the same time let a very minute amount of oxygen into the wine over a long period of time.  This helps the wine age and makes it taste better in the long run...but there is a unsolvable problem with corks.  Cork is a natural product that comes from a tree...it is inconsistent and can let a wine get spoiled.  Now I am not taking a stance for screw caps here, but that facts are very clear...in a single vintage up to ten percent of a wine sealed with corks may be "corked."  That means that if you use corks you may loose up to one out of every ten bottles you make...that is not good when your trying to run a business.  I can guarantee that if the Chef at my restaurant had one in ten plates returned to the kitchen that he would be the newest member of the McDonalds team on South College St. by the end of the week!  So why screw caps then...well because a screw cap is not made by Mother Nature...it is made by man and there for is a very exact tool for a wine maker.  Screw caps let in the exact amount of oxygen that the wine maker desires, and as long as there is no damage to the closure, there is no corkage at all!  So then why doesn't everybody just use screw cap right?  Well that is what our next experiment was all about. 

We were once again given two glasses....two wines were again poured blind.... and we had about ten minutes to figure out which had been sealed with a screw cap and which had been sealed with a cork.  Once again I am going to elaborate on this little experiment.  Just like our first experiment this wine at one time was the exact same wine, but the wine maker stopped the bottling line half way through the process...changed all the bottles and types of closures on the bottling line and then donated them to the cause of Pinot Camp...pretty cool huh?  Oh and by the way this was a ten year old bottle of Oregon Pinot that the winemaker had held onto for this little test...so your talking a serious commitment!  So once again after a show of hands about two thirds of the people got that wine two had been a screw cap and wine one had been a cork.  Your probably asking how did we do it this time?  Well you can probably guess that a cork would have a little more earth on it due to the cork being in contact with the wine...so no real secret here...the second wine tasted cleaner while the first one was more earthy.  Depending on what style of wine you prefer that would answer the screw cap or cork question for you...I personally preferred the screw cap style a little better because I feel that the fruit showed a little better...but to each his own!

After two of these little experiments I now was really interested in what came next.  We moved back over to the fermentation room side of the winery where we all gathered around a sorting table (a large conveyor belt that moves grapes along to the fermentation area so that the bad ones can be picked out).  Here we were told about another interesting experiment from the lead wine maker at Domaine Serene...whole cluster vs. non whole cluster fermentation. I know, I know what the heck does that mean....and please know that I am trying not to be the biggest cork-dork in the world....it's just happening! 

Well when the grapes are picked from the vineyard they are picked from the vine on a stem and the group of grapes are called a cluster.  When the grapes are then transported to the winery they go to the sorting table and the wine maker will make a decision, after sorting all the bad grapes out, if they will then stay on the cluster or be destemmed.  If they are left on the cluster then the grape juice will have more tannins and if they are destemmed then the grape juice will be less tannic.   So why do you ask does this matter....well that is lengthy discussion but for now lets just say that certain people like tannic wines and certain people don't!  By now you have probably figured out what the experiment is and also that about two thirds of the group guessed right about the two wines.  Hopefully by this point you are beginning to see what makes Pinot Camp such an amazing experience.  For most people it would just be a cool event to attend just for fun but for people in the wine business, that taste a huge array of all types of wine and then have to sort through what is crap and what is quality, it is something that I believe is incomparable to any other event in the country. 


By now, as you have probably figured out, most of us were borderline drunk or at least definitely had a buzz...so after a quick lunch, and more wine, with the wine makers that had given the seminar we were loaded back onto our buses for my favorite part of the day...nap time.  Now I am not just saying that I wanted to take a nap...even though I did...they actually put in our itinerary, every day, an hour for "nap-time"...which I did indeed indulge in before getting ready to head to dinner at Domaine Serene....and oh what a dinner!!!

After awaking from our slumber we were all carted to the property at Domaine Serene for a tasting from all of the wineries and then a sit down dinner.  Once again I arrived and employed a little recon, tasted my way through the event, hit up one of the Domaine Serene guys for a free t-shirt, and then made my way down to the pavilion for dinner.  As I began to wonder around the pavilion I noticed all sorts of large format bottles appearing...magnums of St. Innocent, double magnums of Elk Cove, and Jeroboams of  Eyrie....needless to say that means there was alot of wine to be drank....and as campers I felt like we were up to the task.  By now I had run into a good friend, John Kimball, who actually got me into the sommelier program and we decided to grab a table together.  We ended up sitting with Grace Evenstad...who just happens to be one of the owners of Domaine Serene....so as you can guess we got to drink some amazing wines that night!!!  Dinner was absolutely numbing....seared loin of rabbit with blackberry jus...Humboldt fog and butter lettuce salad...venison with a foie gras stuffing...and chocolate terrine for dessert.  If your mouth is watering by now than imagine how stuffed we were and how tired we were after a long day.  We were all ready to be loaded back onto our buses and head home for a much needed nights rest to get ready for the next day....but as we did head that way I asked myself "what would tomorrow have in store?"  Little did I know it would be another day of amazing experiments, an insane dinner, karaoke, beer pong with my new friends from Japan...and most of all the sweet taste of revenge!