Winter – A “Not So Sleepy Time” @ Yellow Farmhouse

Racking is the process of pumping the cleared wine from the top of the barrel or tank to leave the sediment, or “lees” in the bottom. Then we pump out the sediment leaving only the cleared wine. Each wine takes several rackings to get fully cleared. As most of you know we do not like to filter our wine to clear it as it removes some of the taste and character so we are pretty picky about our racking.

Then, of course comes the bottling that takes place up in the bottling room in the little frame house up by the Wine Garden. Bottling, corking, capping and labeling all take place at the same time, and at the end of a bottling day we have cases of finished wine. Some of our cases are put down to age a little more in the bottle. Others are ready to go almost immediately.

Our “winter work” involves most of our staff, and you’ll find Lauren, Ken, Whitney, Tom & Scott around the Yellow Farmhouse on many winter days. We couldn’t do it without them.

But Winter brings a different view of the winery and the vineyard. It’s cold. The leaves are gone. The Wine Garden furniture is put away, and the Yellow Farmhouse takes on a quiet attitude. A snow often blankets the vineyard, and you can’t help but notice the frail barren look of the vines. It’s as though they really do go to sleep. We’ll have to feed and fertilize them before they awake, but that comes in March just before bud burst.

The vineyard in winter is truly a beautiful place. It’s too bad that there aren’t many people around to see it.

Many people ask us if we “just lock the door” when we close for the Winter? Hardly. The winery is a beehive of activity with pressing, racking, pumping and bottling. Some people don’t stop to think that the wine we serve during the season takes a lot of effort – and much of it occurs in the winter.

Our whites go through the press early in the Fall harvest season, and by November have generally been racked (cleared) at least once and pumped to the big oak barrels in the Tasting Room. When the weather begins to cool we turn our attention to the reds. Because we leave our Chambourcins and Nortons on the lees for over a month before pressing they are ready about the middle of November, and pressing begins. Leaving them on the lees longer produces a deeper, fuller and richer red, but it also presents a problem. The skins are softer and have broken down so that pressing is a longer and messier job than if we press earlier. But we think it’s worth it.

We are also ordering more Barbera from our grower in California. Barbera takes a couple of years in the barrel, so we might as well be looking ahead to produce some of our famous “Drop Dead Red” for 2012 & 2013.