Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Wine Makes Good

Ok, so here's the deal. I love making wine and being in the wine business. But ultimately, I don't want to be just another schmo schlepping wine. Where's the fun in that? I want to make a difference in the world - I think all of us do, in one way or another. But it's a challenge - you grow up, you have kids, and pretty soon you've got financial and time commitments that make it all but impossible to give of yourself. Amazingly, many people still do, which is a real tribute to the human spirit. But for the majority of us, whose paths have led us outside the direct philanthropic arena, and whose careers don't have a lot of cushion in them, it can be very difficult to help realize the changes that are so desperately wanted in the world.

My calling is winemaking. I wouldn't be happy doing anything else. So how could I turn that passion into a force for the greater good? My inspiration came from my friend Scott James, founder of Fair Trade Sports. Like that company, I decided (with Sarah's support) that Eleven Winery will always donate all of its profits to charity, specifically charities that focus on ending the cycle of poverty, in the U.S. and abroad. We anticipate reaching profitability in 2009; until then, we will donate $1,000 annually to World Bicycle Relief, an organization that provides bicycles to communities in Africa (they had a cool segment on the Today Show recently, btw). We will also continue to donate to charity auctions in our hometown and the Seattle area, as we have done since our first year - our contributions in this area totaled $9,000 in 2008, and helped those charities raise even more.

So that's it. I hope that what we have done is to create wines that you not only love and have fun with, but feel really good about drinking. You've earned it - by buying our wines you really are helping to make a difference. We will continue to keep you updated on these efforts as they progress.

If you'd like to know more about how it works to be a company that gives away all of its profits, read this great FAQ put together by Fair Trade Sports.

Cheers!

Matt

Monday, December 1, 2008

Sustainable Christmas Wine

If you're looking for a sustainable Christmas gift, Eleven wines are ideal. We source from vineyards that are sustainably farmed, we use packaging that is wholly recyclable or renewable, and the winery itself is carbon-neutral.

For more sustainable gift ideas check out the Sustainable Bainbridge Holiday Guide.

Making the winery carbon-neutral was easy, since we use so little energy. Being located in the Puget Sound area, having really good insulation is just about all that is needed to maintain the winery at a cool temperature year-round. All of our on-site energy usage is electric, no gas, which in Washington means most of it is from hydro power. We purchased carbon credits to offset our on-site usage as well as all of our driving, including wine deliveries and trucking of grapes. In fact, our entire household is now carbon-neutral, not just the winery. It was very reasonably priced. Find out how you can go carbon-neutral at Native Energy (just one of a plethora of sources of carbon credits).

Many wineries are now using screw-caps or plastic corks to seal their bottles, but we continue to use natural cork. Why? In addition to the fact that a top-quality cork provides just as good a seal as a screw cap (and way better than a plastic cork after the first few years), natural corks are biodegradable, renewable, and (as though that weren't enough) cork farms are old-growth forests, providing habitat for many species of birds and other animals, some of them endangered. Audubon magazine published a brilliant article on this topic, and even went so far as to encourage its members to only drink wines sealed with a cork. It turns out that while there is no shortage of cork (that's a lie promulgated by promoters of synthetic closures to justify their actions), wine corks are the only use of cork that pays enough to keep cork farmers in business. No wine corks, no cork forests. And when they're done being wine corks, the cork can go on to be other things. We save all of our used corks and send them to Korks 4 Kids, which sells them to recyclers and donates the proceeds to children's charities.

The other parts of our package may not save the world, but at least they don't screw it up. Our tin capsules are printed with water-based ink, and the manufacturer will buy them back from you for scrap if you send them in (or send them to us and we'll take care of it - we save all the capsules from bottles we open). The bottles themselves are glass, which is completely natural and recyclable, though even glass is under attack - some wineries are switching to plastic and claiming it's eco-friendly. This is so utterly ludicrous I'm not sure how they can spout this nonsense with a straight face. Like with synthetic closures, the real reason for their shift is to save money (in this case shipping costs, since plastic bottles are lighter than glass). But they're creating mountains of marginally-recyclable garbage and using up non-renewable resources to do it - and ignoring the potential health risks of putting wine into plastic bottles. And finally, our labels are paper, made from trees, which have a well-documented habit of growing back...

We try hard to recycle everything that comes into the winery, in addition to making our package as eco-friendly as possible. More on that in future posts.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Yippeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So tonight, after weeks of punch-downs and pressing, and a particularly long week of late nights pumping wine into barrels, I drank the Coors Light. I was hoping to share the brew with whoever happened to be helping at the time, but as I finished at midnight I had to drink the whole thing myself. Whew! It's been a while since I had cheap beer.

It bears repeating: YIPPEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Driving to Alder Creek Vineyard

I've been getting Syrah and Malbec from the Alder Creek and Windy Ridge vineyards for several years. These vineyards are located just outside of Alderdale, close to the Columbia River in the Horse Heaven Hills Appellation. The road up to the vineyards is narrow and twisty, and typically I arrive there late at night, in the dark, prior to picking the next morning. Under these conditions, the desert vegetation crowding the edges of this last few miles of road takes on an otherworldly, almost aquatic appearance. The headlights of the truck cause the pastel colors of the plants to leap out of the darkness, their reds, greens, blues and yellows bright against the blackness of the night. Their succulent-shaped fans, globes and branches look like nothing so much as a coral reef, absent only the swimming fauna (the animal denizens of this area being more likely to be four-legged). It is easy to pretend I'm Jacques Cousteau, piloting a high-speed submarine through an underwater race course. What was that noise, are we under attack by hammerhead sharks? No, it was just a cattle-fish guard.

The drive home in daylight is much less vivid, the colors of the night washed out into the dusty sun-bleached backdrop of the desert.

Unfortunately this may be my last trip up this road for a while, as these vineyards are being put up for auction and there's no telling if the new owner will be willing to sell the fruit....

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Picking Pinot Gris

Every vineyard is run a little differently. At most places my picking boxes are spread out into the rows beneath the vines, the pickers fill them, and then other workers come behind with a tractor and load the full boxes onto pallets, and from there onto the truck. At Chuck Suggett's Willamette Valley vineyard, the pickers pick into five-gallon buckets, which they then carry to the end of the row (at a run) and dump, receiving a punch on their picking card for each bucket picked, and at the end of the day they are paid by the bucket. On most days they are dumping into half-ton bins, and a lot of the grapes are going to get smooshed anyway, so they're not always very careful. In my case, we spread out yellow picking boxes at the ends of the rows and they dump one bucket per box, in order to keep all the grapes intact until they are crushed at the winery. Last year I observed that some pickers were being less gentle than others in their dumping, so I inquired how to say "carefully" in Spanish. So this year, the same crew chief is explaining to the pickers in rapid-fire Spanish how the system works, and when he's done he turns to me and says "Right??". "Si...con cuidado," I reply, in my very best accent, with D's verging unto TH's. He looks at me like I've just stepped out of a UFO, pauses, and says softly "si, con cuidado!"

The great thing about this picking system is that it allows for many pickers to work simultaneously, and the picking gets done fast. Plus, the vineyard is on a pretty good slope, which I back the truck up, so that when we're loading in the boxes, they will pretty much slide all the way to the front if given a good push, making loading fast and easy.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Leaks are not for the Meek

This evening I was pumping juice into barrels from the first grapes of the season, the Artz Vineyard sauvignon blanc. Because we have very limited space (and no forklift), our barrels are stacked in a traditional diamond pattern, rather than in the more modern (but less space-efficient) way using metal barrel racks. This means that barrels on the bottom of the stack are essentially immovable once the barrels on top of them in the stack are filled. So just as I'm filling the topmost barrel in the stack, I notice a pool of juice forming on the floor. "Oh, crap" I thought (not exactly what I thought, but you get the idea). I grab my flashlight and shine it in between barrels, looking for the leak. Sure enough, it's one of the bottom barrels. The thought of emptying all of those barrels, unstacking and restacking all of the barrels, and starting over with filling makes me feel ill and slightly dizzy. I have to try to plug the leak. Unfortunately, the leak appears to be at the far end of the barrel (I only have access to one end, because there's another stack of barrels right up against the one I'm working with). Leaks like this are not all that uncommon in barrels that have been sitting empty for a few months between being emptied for bottling and refilled after harvest. That's why I had washed and soaked all of these barrels to make sure they were watertight before stacking them. I've never had one leak after being put in the stack, not like this.

Luckily, many leaks are caused by very small holes or cracks, and can be plugged. But I couldn't see the leak from the side I was on. There was only one thing for it: I would have to go in from the other side.

Now, crawling between two barrels at the bottom of a multi-ton barrel stack in a wine cellar rife with spiders (and the occasional mouse) is not for the claustrophobic, but it was the only thing to do. With my mini mag-lite in my mouth and a toothpick in one hand, I wiggled my way in between two barrels on the bottom of the neighboring barrel stack that would give me access to the back end of the leaker, and prayed for all the local seismic faults to remain quiescent for the next few minutes. Just to give you an idea of the size of this space, the stick that I use to space out the barrels is 8 inches long, so that's the distance between the fattest part of the bulges. I'll try to get a photo to show the space I was in. There are no photos of my legs sticking out, because I'm pretty sure Sarah would have had a heart attack if she had seen me doing this. Sure enough, I could see the spot where the juice was leaking out, right along the edge of one of the metal hoops that hold the barrel together. I jammed the toothpick in and waited, shining the flashlight on the spot. Right away the flow stopped. Calooh! Calay! Oh frabjous day!

Just another evening in the life of a winemaker.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The Silver Bullet

Sometimes weird things happen with trucks. For example, with the truck that I rented to pick up the first grapes of the season, the sauvignon blanc. It was a pretty smooth trip, no real problems, but there was this noise. Every time I started from a stop, there was a little thunk, like something being moved by the acceleration and hitting something else. It sounded like metal on metal somewhere over my head. I looked everywhere - on the roof of the cab, in the cab, under the seats - nothing. Then, when I took the truck back to the rental place and was making sure I had gotten everything out of the cab, there it was: a can of Coors Light under the seat, in a spot where it could roll back and forth on the floor, hitting the metal bars that kept it from rolling out under my feet. Thunk.....thunk.

"Ah HA!" I thought. The gods have just handed me, at the beginning of Harvest, the beverage that I will use to celebrate the end of Harvest!