Who could have predicted, as we enter 2009, the banishment of the word ‘green’ and ‘carbon footprint’? Both terms have become quite meaningless in this accelerated world of adaptive public relations and feral free marketers. But a word and its rigorous concept that must be more vigorously promoted and understood for this new year is biochar. So important is the notion that it was included in the 2007 Farm Bill, authored by then Senator Ken Salazar, now President-elect Obama’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior.
Biochar is simply the production of charcoal from a biomass. It is resolutely not the equivalent of a fireplace, though it shares a kinship. Biochar is produced by pyrolysis, the thermochemical decomposition of organic material in the absence of oxygen. But this definition requires significant qualification. Biochar made of wood, what we commonly call ‘charcoal’, has been produced for centuries in the limited presence of oxygen. Traditional methods might include burying wood over which one would then build a fire to char the wood below. Not only was the resulting charcoal used in cooking, still is today, it was also used as an amendment for poor soils. But this is not the same as the ’slash and burn’ method employed by ancient cultures up to the modern farmers along I-5. We are not talking about additions of a transitory ash. Biochar is different.
And just as ancient. Indeed, the recent discovery in the Amazon Basin of what are called Terra Preta do Indio soils confirms biochar’s Pre-Columbian use, soils dating from 500 BC to 1400 AD.
Now, what is especially fascinating about these soils is not only the logarithmic increase in agricultural productivity they continue to allow, but also the extraordinary stability and durability of the carbon added centuries ago. And it is this feature of biochar products that has caught the attention of some of the finest minds in soil and environmental science, David A. Laird and Cornell’s Johannes Lehmann to name just two. I encourage readers to study their representative works linked above.
The intriguing question immediately presented itself to researchers: could this ancient technology be refined to not only dramatically improve soil quality but to also sequester huge amounts of CO2 among other greenhouse gasses that would otherwise be released by agricultural/organic waste? And today it is absolutely a question of the efficiency of modern pyrolysis technology. In fact, oxygen has been eliminated entirely from pyrolysis. All gas by-products are not only captured but can themselves then become a source of energy in the form of syngas or may be further refined.
One leading manufacturer of a biochar machine/kiln, Best Energies, lists the wide variety of organic inputs that may be used to produce biochar: Poultry litter, dairy manure, greenwaste, nut shells, paper sludge, straw, wood waste, woody weeds, distillers grain, cotton trash, rice hulls, and switch grass. You get the idea.
This rather stuttering (and necessarily incomplete) preamble to biochar properly situates the following telephone conversations I had with Hans-Peter Schmidt over the last week (with minor bracketed semantic corrections despite his superb English!). He lives in Switzerland and runs Mythopia, an experimental vineyard where the only European research program on biochar’s effects on vineyard terroir is on-going. I called the gentleman after receiving his fascinating e-mail below:
We started 2007 with a first test field of 3000m2 where we introduce Bio-Char, Bio-Char + Compost, and each with different seeds in between the wine stocks. This year we are going to extend the test fields and trying the method in France, Spain and Italy.
Further on we created a Carbon-Network with several Institutes researching the soil-effects, char stability, water holding capacity and so on. We are going to purchase a first Pyrolyse reactor producing about 1000t/year Bio-Char and Electricity, through that our 40 vineyards all over Europe [will] become climate-neutral by 2013.
Admin Perhaps you could give us a glimpse of your background?
Hans-Peter Schmidt O.K. I started as an anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, and I became a winegrower in my research on the agricultural attitudes of ancient peoples. Quite a curious biography to become a researcher in ecology!
About your vineyards. You have some in Switzerland, some in France, Spain and Italy. Is that correct?
H-PS I have my own domaine in Switzerland, Domaine Mythopia. And this is a kind of research domaine, very small, it’s only about 5 hectares, 2, maybe 2 1/2 hectares of grapes, 3 hectares or so of aromatic herbs, fruit trees and wild, native plants.
How long ago was the vineyard planted?
H-PS They are kind of old vines, about 50 years. I took it over a couple of years ago. And we do the research there. But I also organize the research, the ecological research for a company that is called Delinat. It is an organic wine seller working with about 40 different winegrowers all over Europe. I am occupied to organize the ecological renewal [of the vineyards] for these winegrowers. They do all organic wine growing, but organic is not enough for us. We are looking for more biodiversity, for more respect of the terroir and a climate neutral agriculture. So, it is my job to organize it for these other winegrowers so that they become climate neutral, that they make better terroir wines, and so on.
In what appellations do you work, in France, for example?
H-PS Not an appellation but the Côtes du Var, near Provence, Côtes de Provence, Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône. [All of Delinat’s domaines may be found here.]
Are any of the vineyards biodynamic? Are biodynamic principles in conflict with the production and use of biochar?
H-PS There is no conflict with biochar. Maybe one third of the winegrowers we work with are biodynamic, but in our charge it’s bio-organic. So whoever wants to do it biodynamic is free to do it. It is not an obligation.
What is your take on biodynamics, by the way?
H-PS There are a thousand reasonable things to be done to improve the Terroir characteristics, the harmony of the ecosystem and plant protection before irrational means would become inevitable. I like the positive energy of many biodynamic winegrowers but their theories are too spooky for me. I prefer playing Mozart to my grapes than rotating planetary copper-sulphur-mixtures 20 minutes to the right!
In your email you wrote of “different seeds in between the wine stocks”. Did you mean ‘inter row’ cropping?
H-PS Yes. Usually we start with legume seeds.
Are they all nitrogen-fixing legumes?
H-PS It depends on the soil, on the region, on the climate, but that is only to prepare the soil and enrich it with green manure for the nutrition of the vine; but then we [also] try to get wild seeds from the surroundings to enrich the biodiversity. Usually we have about 100 different species growing in the soil.
Our plantings include:
kg per hectar:
2 kg Rotklee (red clover) (Trifolium pratense)
2 kg Weissklee (white clover) (Trifolium repens)
4 kg Mattenklee (Trifolium . pratense)
7 kg Luzerne (luzerne)
2 kg Phaecelia
1,6 kg Esparsette (Onobrychis viciifolia) (sainfoin)
100g Kümmel (carum carvi) (caraway)
70g Ysop (hyssop)
100g Salbei (kbA) (sage)
10g Thymian (kbA) (thyme)
10g Origano (oregano)
The mix depends largely on the soil and climate. Indigenous plants are preferable. It’s not only for nitrogen but also oxygenation, to bring organic material deep into the soil so that you get micro-organic life not only in the first twenty to thirty centimeters but down to the root zone of the vine. The idea is to prepare the soil in the vineyard for the wild seeds. It is not of interest to have five or ten plants but to save and propagate the native plants.
With respect to the biochar, is it disced in? How is it applied?
H-PS It is disced in.
To what depth? Just a few inches?
H-PS Yeah. It’s just superficial. We don’t know yet the best [depth]. As you know the char is light and it tends to get to the surface; it’s like if you put wood into water, it floats up. So what we have to do is to [figure out how to best achieve] assimilation of the biochar with the soil to [enhance its] biological life. So then we do experiments: how to get it and to keep it deep inside [the soil].
Can biochar be crushed to a fine powder? Or is it applied as it arrives from a producer?
H-PS It is powdery but you still have pieces up to two centimeters.
Who is the current supplier of the biochar product?
H-PS Well, now we have begun to produce biochar ourselves with our own machine and our own bio-material.
Would you tell me the name of the company responsible for the biochar machine?
H-PS Pyreg [site in German].
What material do you burn [pyrolyse]? What is its source?
H-PS Mostly we will burn [pyrolyse] the remainder of vinification, the pomace. But we can’t keep it for the whole of the year because it would compost. So we use other sources, the rest of the pressings like leaves, stems, and we use green stuff from the forest and [countryside].
And the cuttings from the vines at the end of the year?
H-PS No because we try to keep that in the vineyard, it’s a source of [green manure] and potassium that we need.
There must be other sources of material to maintain biochar production all year long, after the Crush, as we call it here…
H-PS Where we live we have communities who have to maintain the roads, they are cutting trees, there are lawns, shrubs, all this material we can use. If you are further south and you don’t have that much vegetation all the year round then we use the remains of olive pressings. Or rape seed pomace. So you can use very intelligently all this stuff. Pyrolysis would work combining different materials. Or sunflower. You can run your car on sunflower oil and use the remains for pyrolyse!
Even with ethanol production you have a remainder that could be used in pyrolysis. This might be a very intelligent combination if you do it on a high scale. You would combine these two technologies.
With small pyrolysis machines, you could use it on a small farm to produce your electric energy and your heating, to improve your soil and to restrain CO2 from the atmosphere. You don’t need that much material. You can scale the machine to a desired output.
My idea is to achieve a general diversification in agricultural production. In fact, not only to bring biodiversity into the vineyard, with flowers, planting trees, but also to have other cultures around and in between vine rows. For example, we do bees, we produce honey, a second product. And we produce aromatic herbs for herbal teas, and different fruits. So we have four, five supplementary products within the vineyard. So thinking in the longer view you could always have enough material to produce all the green stuff needed to produce not only biochar but also energy.
Combining the idea about Permaculture with the idea of climate farming means it’s a diversification of agriculture that [allows] you to calculate the needs of every part of your viticulture.
Since you placed your message (see bold text below) on the International Biochar Initiative’s bulletin board have you received any inquiries from other winegrowers in Europe?
From the Bulletin Board:
We are going to begin in 2008 a carbon-project in a Swiss vineyard in order to improve the auto-defence of the wine-plant, to fix toxic-elements of earlier plant-treatments (esp. copper) and last but not least to improve the climate balance of the vineyard. Has anybody worked already with carbon enriched compost in wine and fruit growing? Is somebody working already on carbon-projects in Switzerland?
H-PS I do not know exactly who contacted me through this [post] but I have received five questions a week about our project. But it is not only for winegrowing, it is for everything concerning climate farming and biochar. It seems that in Europe we are the first to use biochar on a big scale.
More specifically, you are doing side by side experiments in vineyards using just biochar and another with the biochar and compost mix. And you are doing that as a control study.
H-PS Yes.
And also determine how best to keep the biochar in the soil.
H-PS Yes. It’s a huge project we have, with different institutes and universities. There are many parameters that we [are] try[ing] to determine. One question is about the capacity of the soil to keep water, and this capacity, we believe, will grow with biochar which gives us the possibility to grow wine in Spain or in the south of Italy where there is no rain in Summer [so no moisture] without watering. It is not, however, about growing vineyards in the desert but about the possibility of inter row growing of green manure and wild plants to foster the biodiversity. We can better keep the rainwater that falls in the Winter season. We can keep much better the water in the soil which has a huge effect. And there is research on micro-nutrient activity; that is a very interesting question for terroir quality. The vines can better absorb the minerals and phosphorus. [And biochar] increases the bacteria and [therefore] the bioactivity of the soil because of the [porous and durable structure] of the biochar.
There are many different aspects that change through the utilization of biochar. We try to document the best possibilities of all these changes. So what we do, for example, we measure the change of aromatic profiles in the grape. We measure all we can! To better know how to use it [biochar] for better wines, and also the stocking of carbon, how long biochar will keep in the soil without [itself] changing. Another question [we’re answering] is if a vineyard usually has been treated with chemicals that still are in the soil then biochar can fix it. These are the kinds of questions we have and we have a network of different researchers doing different [projects] in the laboratory and also on the farm.
Where in Spain and southern Italy?
H-PS We are just starting this year (I began working for Delinat last year.) in Sicily, and in Spain, it’s the Navarra region and Extramadura.
Not in the Penedès?
H-PS We work with vineyards in the Penedès, but the pilot vineyards where we’re going to show how it works, [these are] in Navarra and Extramadura. Later on we’re going to introduce this whole concept of biodiversity and climate farming for the other vineyards.
Could you name a few of the institutes and universities associated with your research?
H-PS The University of Zurich, FiBL, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, Fraunhofer Institute in Munich, and others you may not know. But these are the biggest.
So it is fair to say you are undertaking a research project that is the first of its kind in Europe.
H-PS Yes. And there is one thing that is great using biochar in the vineyard: you have a kind of permaculture. It’s not like you harvest every year and have to change [bio] cultures. But you can look to the long term impact of biochar on one culture, so you can do it not only with vineyards but with fruit trees or olive trees. This is one thing that is good. And the second thing, quite remarkable, is that we can make publicity with our research! So another agricultural producer doing cereals or beans or whatever doesn’t have much to win on promoting their efforts on biodiversity or climate farming. But with wine, and we sell organic wine, we can make it a marketing tool doing what we do.
So you understand this is a great occasion to be engaged in research and wine.
I understand. And by the way, as far as I know there is no one doing this kind of vineyard research in the United States. Biochar is hardly known here.
H.PS They will if you write a good article! (laughs)
That’s why I’m here. I’ll try! What kinds of grapes does your Domaine Mythopia grow? And where is your vineyard located?
H-PS We do Pinot Noir. We are located in the Wallis [Fr. Valais], between the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc in the High Alps. We are between two mountain chains, 4000 meter mountains. There is a valley, the Rhone Valley. In fact, the Côtes du Rhône gets irrigated from our valley. So this area is a micro-climate, very dry, warm, and we have a special terroir because, being in a mountain region, we have a different soil every 100 meters. From one micro-climate to the next, a different soil.
It is very interesting to make little wines. Sometimes we make a Pinot Noir from only 1,500 square meters, a special wine for that, then on another patch of 2000 square meters we make another wine. All is Pinot Noir, but the different soils [the terroir makes] different wines.
Where might we read the results of your research?
H-PS We are just starting an online journal called ithaka, like the island Odysseus came back to after a twenty years’ voyage. We call it ithaka because we try to bring bees, butterflies, birds, amphibians… back home to the nature of the vineyard. The official start of the journal is in two weeks [1/20].
Will it also be in English as well as French and German?
H-PS Not for the moment. But I like your blog; maybe we could interlink some stuff, translate some articles.
I would like that. Thank you very much, Peter.
H-PS You are welcome, Ken.
Admin
As returning readers of this blog well know I am a tireless enthusiast for the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA. I feel it has enormous unrealized potential, this despite fistfuls of awards won by its wines over the years. What is missing is greater national recognition. A stronger effort must be made by winegrowers, through their modest collective instruments of publicity and marketing, to better promote the unique qualities of the region. Terroir means something here. Creative indifference to both fashion and the latest technological innovation is the rule. A barn not a faux chateau is the dominant architectural form. If you like your wine spiked with masking oak, look elsewhere. The preference is for structured, balanced wines, approachable in their youth but, like the winemakers here, in it for the long haul. Indeed, the continuity of the AVAs wine history is unmistakable.
After I had finished my interview with Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard (pt.1, pt.2, and pt.3) and was preparing to leave he volunteered the following meditation on the origins of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA.
Jeff Emery The Santa Cruz Mountains (SCM) AVA is unique in a number of ways. It was the first American Viticultural Area whose criteria was based entirely on geographical and climatological considerations. All the appellations up to that point were generally political boundaries. For instance, Napa Valley. To say Napa Valley on a wine label, on a bottle, you only have to be within Napa county. It is actually somewhat meaningless in terms of climate, soils and geography. Whereas in Europe those things are very strictly controlled based on where you are, that type of thing.
What ended up becoming the Santa Cruz Mountains Wine Growers Association, through a number of different changes, was a group of what was being called the new renaissance of winemakers in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the late ’60s early 70’s. They would get together for these monthly or quarterly pot lucks and discuss the criteria to submit to the government for establishing the SCM AVA.
The main players felt strongly that appellations needed to mean more than they had previously in the US. Appellations here were kind of a farce, a straw version of what they were in Europe. They really needed to have reasons why. The main people involved in that push were David Bennion of Ridge, Ken Burnap of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, Val and Dexter Ahlgren of Ahlgren Vineyard, Bob Mullen of Woodside Vineyards, and I’m sure I’m going to miss some people…, Jan and Nat Sherrill of an outfit called Sherrill Cellars, long gone now; so this core group of people, we would get together and meet. I was a teenager when I came to this group in the late ’70s. The main focus was developing this AVA criteria. We had endless meetings about what to do with vineyards such as Bates Ranch which has an upper portion and a lower portion, and the lower portion would have been kicked out of the appellation based on the criteria that the upper was in. So a little gerrymander was made for that one….
In short, the boundary is much more complicated than this but generally the West side of the Santa Cruz Mountains the elevation has to be above 400 feet with the idea being that if it is below 400 feet it would be too cold for quality grape growing. And on the East side of the mountain range the vineyards have to be above 800 feet, the idea being that below 800 feet it is too hot for quality grape growing. There are a whole bunch of exceptions to that but, by and large that’s the deal. So when you look at a map of the SCM AVA it’s this incredibly squiggly line because it follows the contour lines. The most arbitrary limits, perhaps, are the northern terminus at Hwy 92 [Half Moon Bay] and Hwy 152 in the south [Watsonville].
So this group got together to establish this. The appellation was approved in 1981 by the TTB or what was called the ATF at the time. Now, they’d gotten used to meeting together and had, in and amongst establishing the appellation criteria, they had also done some marketing things and some tastings here and there, done some collective efforts like that, so it just naturally evolved into a marketing group for the Santa Cruz Mountains. Then, I’m sketchy on the dates, a group of folks started a Santa Cruz County group that was much more marketing-based than the Santa Cruz Mountains group, and it was sort of a sub-group. But as time went on they became more and more similar, in fact, a whole bunch of us, about half the membership, were in both. And it was decided that it was redundant and silly to have these two organizations duplicating efforts. The two organizations were merged, that was at the time the Santa Cruz County Winegrowers Association and the Santa Cruz Mountains Vintners. They became the present-day Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association (SCMWA). I was president of the board at the time when that happened, so you’d think I would know when that was but I cannot recall off the top of my head! I was chosen primarily because I was in both organizations and they wanted someone to sort of unify the groups and get it together.
Now we’re an organization [SCMWA] of over 70 member wineries from around a dozen in those days. We don’t do potlucks in people’s homes because there are too many of us! But we still do meet at least twice a year.
The SCM AVA does have one sub-appellation…
JE Yes.
In a conversation I had with Bob Mullen he was quite opposed to any further sub-appellations.
JE Interesting…
He believes it would dilute the branding. On the other hand there are so many microclimates…
JE I don’t know that sub-appellations dilute appellations. I mean, does a vineyard designation dilute the Gevry-Chambertin AOC in Burgundy? It’s a difficult question because it is such a broad appellation, certainly in terms of microclimates. And there is not just a single varietal that says this is what’s grown here. So it’s very hard for the consumer to get a handle on what Santa Cruz Mountains is. This is what the SCMWA has been struggling with for decades as far as what is the AVA’s identity. To an extent I could make a case for sub-appellations as helping with that. But I also don’t know that it needs to be that specifically legal called out. When you get into an application for an AVA you going to have to spell out the exact boundary. It’s like a property line deed. And we all know that applying such rigid, objective things to such a subjective, organic process like growing grapes is never going to be perfect. What I’ve heard proposed more recently that I think is a good way to do it, and to an extent winegrowers have started to promote it this way, is to talk about the different districts within the appellation, and their different characteristics. The wine group that has done a very good job of doing that is Appellation America which is an on-line presence that looks at and judges wines in the context of their given appellation, tries to pick out the different styles and then the sub-regions within that. They just did a whole thing on Pinot Noir…
Yes. Clark Smith and Laura Ness wrote a wonderful series…
JE Right. They developed these different regions like Corralitos and what they’re calling in our old area, the Vine Hill area, Los Ranchos, the Summit area, Skyline… so you can do these different plots and regions, and I would say you could do that in general with the Woodside, the Saratoga, the Corralitos…
Without a formal sub AVA…
JE Yes, without formal subs and formal boundaries because in many cases, within a given varietal, I think you could argue those boundaries would shift with what variety you’re growing, its requirements, heat, exposure, etc. It’s become so cumbersome to do applications for AVAs now that I think it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. In fact the Feds are talking about throwing out the whole process entirely.
Paso Robles has been involved in quite a long fight over their proposal…
JE Yes, because they are trying to do lots of sub-appellations. We had a big fight years ago when the San Francisco Bay appellation was proposed. That was a situation of applying a bigger, broader based thing on top of an existing smaller one, in this case the Santa Cruz Mountains. The group actually fought pretty hard against the San Francisco Bay. We felt it was pretty meaningless. The Bay is a huge, diverse bunch of microclimates. It was mostly proposed, in our opinion, as a marketing tool for people that distributed world-wide because nobody knew where things were if you didn’t tie it to San Francisco Bay. And in the end the winegrowers group met and came up with the official policy by voting, and it was by no means unanimous, there was a lot of contention about whether it was a good idea, but the great majority thought it was a bad idea.
To my knowledge Santa Cruz Mountains is the only exception in the American Viticultural code wherein a smaller appellation within a bigger one is nevertheless exempt from it. In other words, the Santa Cruz Mountains said, “We do not want to be called San Francisco Bay”. Normally in that case if you were in the small one and the big one you could choose which you wanted on your labels. So, for instance, if you were in the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA under the normal circumstances if you wanted to say [on your label] San Francisco Bay you could. In our case we said we never want to do that because it is ridiculous and meaningless. Santa Cruz is not part of the San Francisco Bay appellation, which did get approved. But we are carved out of the middle of it.
And if you’re below the 400 foot elevation on the western side?
JE Well, you can always call yourself by a county, Santa Cruz County, Santa Clara County, San Mateo, Monterey, or you could do San Francisco Bay were you located in the first three counties. Or Central Coast.
Thank you for your insight, Jeff.
JE You’re welcome, Ken.
Admin
In this final part of the interview Mr. Emery indulges my historical curiosity. He expands upon Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard’s founder, Ken Burnap, and touches on the legendary Martin Ray, an early friend of Mr. Burnap’s.
I would encourage folks who visit tasting rooms, any tasting room, to ask a few questions. Inquire after the winery’s origins. Sure, the person behind the counter may be reading from a hackneyed script and the winery may be little more than the investment of a trust fund baby. That is its own story. Still, persist. Cut through the bull. And ever so often you’ll run across someone like Jeff Emery, someone whose life is coextensive with his work. It’s all about the work. And I believe the living culture of wine, especially the labor of its making, is the better part.
Any fool can rate a wine. But it takes a special fool to remain indifferent to a vinous history in which they nevertheless participate.
pt 1
pt 2
Admin Would you tell us a bit more of the historical origins of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard? And of Ken Burnap specifically.
Jeff Emery Ken Burnap had been interested in wine very early on. He got started in kind of a backdoor way. He lived in Texas when he was a late teenager, in his early twenties, and he took a gal from the prom to the best restaurant in San Antonio at the time. He tried to order a bottle of Bordeaux and completely butchered the French pronunciation of the wine. The waiter, a snobby sommelier, made him feel about two inches tall. And in a classic early twenty-something attitude Ken vowed he’d go home and learn as much as he could and show the bastard! The more he learned about wine the more he became fascinated by it.
He was drinking first growth Bordeaux in San Antonio at a time when the neighbors basically only drank bourbon and martinis. He said they would literally put their empty bottles in paper bags before they put them in the garbage because only winos drank wine! That was the attitude at the time.
So it was through his love of wine all those years that he had come to find that he preferred Burgundy, pinot noir, of course. Now fast forward to what Ken said before [pt 1], “Why does California produce pinots that are so flabby and uninteresting compared to Burgundy?” He decided it had to do with where it was grown.
But he had no intention of ever being a winemaker or starting a winery. He had started a restaurant called The Hobbit in the city of Orange, California, which is still going today, his partner’s son still runs it. Ken had done that because of a real love of food and wine. He was the sommelier and his partners, Howard and Bev Philippi were the chefs. A single seating a night, eight to ten course meal, and the wine was priced at retail. Not at a high mark-up. And he sold more wine per table per night than any restaurant in L.A. in the second year of business. He had a lot of interaction with winemakers, that’s where he got a lot of his information and developed a lot of his ideas about Burgundy and California pinot.
So, as a hobby he started looking at maps (we go back to the meticulous Virgo thing). I have in a file every quadrangle of the Santa Cruz Mountains in great detail, with every patch shaded in that looked like it could be potentially a good vineyard site. He had done this before I met him. And as a hobbiest, with no conscious intention of ever being involved in the wine business, he would get out of Southern California and come up here and drive around pretty places to look at vineyard property. Or property he thought would be good for a vineyard. He did that for a number of years.
Then he stumbled across this property on Jarvis Road that he ended up owning. It had just been planted with pinot noir. It was owned by David Bruce. He and David Bruce were buddies because they had similar philosophies on pinot noir when they met. As Ken says, they put a realtor between them to save their friendship! David had planted it to pinot, he had intended to have it as a second source on into the future. It had 80 years of zinfandel on it when David pulled the zin in 1969, ‘68 was the last crop of zinfandel from the vineyard. David was in a divorce at the time and had to divest himself of some properties. David never saw the production from that vineyard, the pinot noir he’d planted. Ken bought it in 1974; the first crop was ‘75.
So before he bought it Ken sat on top of the hill of the vineyard, it had met all his criteria, he had this whole list of criteria that a vineyard had to have to meet his idea of the perfect site; he drank a bottle of champagne on the hill thinking, “Ok. This would be it”.
Did he finished that bottle? Something people will not often admit today!
JE (laughter) Yes! And he was alone at the time. And through the course of drinking that bottle he realized we all tell ourselves “If only… then”. If only I’d saved this much money; if only when I do this, I’ll do that. If only… Well, he just decided… he was incredibly busy and overworked with his businesses in Southern California, he just decided to jump in with both feet and buy the property and make the wine. He then spent two years commuting, 104 flights a year on Air California, three days a week here, four days a week in SoCal. He got invited to Air California picnics because the pilots saw him more often than any staff member! And he started the winery. He did the ‘75-’76 production year while commuting back and forth.
He sold his contracting company which was his main business. He had to, at the time, sell the restaurant. The Tied-House restrictions were such that he couldn’t own a winegrower’s license and an on-sale license at the same time.
Tied-House restrictions?
JE Yes. They were put in at the repeal of Prohibition to keep mostly Mafia-based monopolies from controlling production and sales all the way through. It was broken by Domaine Chandon when they wanted to have their restaurant. They brought the legislation to the state to get it changed to where you could simultaneously produce and sell wine as the same entity. But Ken had to sell by law and he says it was a blessing in disguise because he probably would have tried to keep the restaurant, to do both. Much too much work. So he sold his interest in The Hobbit in order to start the winery. He moved up here in 1977.
And there is an intriguing Martin Ray connection…
JE I don’t know that much about it. I do know Ken spent a fair amount of time visiting with Martin Ray when he was first looking at property. Realize that at that time, as Ken points out, having been the buyer for this restaurant, that in 1969 there were something like 12 to 15 wineries in the Napa Valley. He knew the dogs’ names, he knew the kids’ names, he knew all these people. The group of wineries was very small, in the Santa Cruz Mountains even more so. He became very good friends with Bob Mullen, Martin Ray, all the folks here at the time.
I know that Ken went to Martin’s place a few times. I do remember a couple of stories where Martin was a real showman. He liked things to be very classy. Ken and his wife were invited for a luncheon at Martin Ray’s place and when going up that dirt road, still a dirt road today, part way up there is a kind of a pull out and a view of the whole of the Santa Clara Valley. There was a table set up with a linen tablecloth, champagne in a champagne bucket, and two flutes… you were supposed to stop there, admire the view, drink the bottle of champagne, enjoy that before proceeding further up to the house for the luncheon. That was the kind of thing Martin would do.
Delightful. What is your advice to young winemakers?
JE That is a very open question…. Don’t believe the stereotypes, trust your palate and your tastes. Learn from as many different approaches as you can, talk to different people. Try different wines, try the wines of the world. Don’t stay within California. Realize that wine is a subjective thing, everybody’s taste buds are different. The mission should be to demystify wine, make it fun and accessible. Remove the dos and don’ts, how you should have it, how you should drink it, how you should open the bottle… By and large I think that’s naturally falling by the wayside as the younger generation comes to wine. They are less worried about that….
Would you ever go to screw cap?
JE I have nothing against screw caps for something like the verdejo I produced in August and will be selling next month. But I don’t own a screw cap machine and I own a corker and my own bottling line. I’m not about to go out and buy another piece of equipment. So in my case it is that simple.
I would not use screw cap for the long term aged pinots. I would still do traditional cork. I think screw cap make absolute perfect sense for shorter term drinking wines. And there should be no stigma attached to that.
I’d like, lastly, to ask about your adopted child. Would you be willing to say a few words?
JE Oh! Yes. We have a little girl we adopted from China in 2005. She’ll be five this coming February. We couldn’t have children for various reasons. We looked into options. We like the China connection. We looked into the US program but there is this legal limbo period where the court may or may not grant you the child. We didn’t want to go through that uncertainty. People ask why international when there are kids here, that’s one of the reasons.
We were torn between Russia or China. My wife is a Russian major, speaks Russian, so that was attractive. In the end, children of China are healthy, they were available only because of their gender, not because of any family/social issue. And Russia is a drinking culture. There can be some alcohol issues there…
She’s a joy! The timing was interesting. We were doing this just as I was officially taking over the business from Ken. You have to do things for both alcohol licenses and adoptions. Finger prints, background checks, that kind of thing, so I had these two forms going to the FBI office to get these background checks, one for getting an alcohol license and one for adopting a child! (laughter) It really cracked people up!
Thank you very much, Jeff.
JE A pleasure, Ken.
Admin
In part 1 of my interview with Jeff Emery, owner/winemaker of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, we concentrated on more general and historical matters. Part 2 gets closer to Jeff’s practice as a winemaker and as an experimenter. Intellectually curious, respectful of the past, Jeff looks forward by understanding from where he’s come.
Part 3, the conclusion, will post early next week.
Admin Would you say a little about your barrel program?
Jeff Emery I’ve been experimenting with that a lot in the past four or five years. Of course, it’s different for different wines. For Pinot Noir, as good an American barrels have gotten compared to a few years ago, I still don’t like American wood on Pinot Noir. So, I’m using Hungarian and French and in some cases Russian oak. American barrels have come leaps and bounds from where they were twenty-five, thirty years ago when they were basically a modified Kentucky Bourbon barrel that wasn’t charred as much. I’m very pleased with some of the newer barrels out there, and I do use some amount of American oak on Tempranillo, Merlot, Cabernet, a tiny bit on the Durif, what we call Petit Syrah. So, it depends on different wines.
The last four or five years I’ve done many side by side experiments of the same forest source of a barrel made by three different coopers with the same wine. Or three different forests, the same wine in barrels made by the same cooper. I’m trying to do some semi-controlled experiments on that and learn something about the different sources, how they play with the different wines.
How long do you use your barrels?
JE I use the barrels indefinitely as a container. I have some barrels that were actually in Ken Burnap’s original winery. But in term of giving wood character to the wine there is, of course, an exponential drop-off. The first year you get a lot, second year you get a fair amount, third year to fourth year, if you leave the wine in there for its entire 18 month cycle
you’ll notice the difference over an inert barrel, but not much.
Some wineries use spent barrels for fermentation…
JE No, we have not.
Your yearly case production?
JE It’s about 3,500 cases.
How much is sold by subscription? How much is foot traffic?
JE Well, it’s changed a lot in the past few months since we have our first tasting room in 33 years! I think we’ll only build on this [Surf City Vintners] little complex where we have so many wineries within walking distance here. I actually haven’t run the numbers more recently. But it’s been traditionally, let’s say, two-thirds wholesale and the rest the internet, wine club and direct retail. Even without a tasting room we did still sell a fair amount by appointment in the old regime. We sold a fair amount through the mail.
Have you enjoyed the tasting room experience?
JE I have! I really like the marketing lab opportunity it gives me. It’s fun to just literally sit down at the computer the night before and print out the wine list we’re tasting for the weekend, play with different things to see what people like… it’s interesting.
And what a variety of wines you have, not only your current releases but also your Library wines. I have never seen in a small winery with such an extensive and deep list of vintages…
JE Well, Ken Burnap believed very strongly in that. Especially if you’re making wines in the style we’re making them where they can age for decades, something we’ve proven, we’re still drinking Pinot Noirs from that first vineyard, from the 70’s, today. They are very much alive and well. Ken kept five to seven cases of everything red we’ve ever made throughout the course of the business. When we moved out of the old winery building on Jarvis Road in 2004 he realized that there was more wine there than he personally could drink in his lifetime. It would be a shame to have those wines go over the hill without people experiencing them. At that point we did a hand pick of our long-term customers and offered library wines. Some went that way. And I’m launching a new program here in the tasting room where I’ll be pouring on the second Saturday of every month one or two of them. And offering them for sale. This is Ken’s stock and he’s given me the green light.
All the way back to ‘75?
JE There is probably precious little left of ‘75 but certainly through the 80’s vintages.
I find that just thrilling.
JE I don’t understand why so many modern wineries sell off to the last bottom case of what it made. Maybe that makes sense if it’s an early drinking style of wine, but some of these wines of the Santa Cruz Mountains can age for a very long time. You don’t learn anything about your winemaking technique and how it applies long-term unless you keep some of your things back and try them now and again. And look at… well, this was a drought year, this was a rain year, this was a different barrel regime, you know, what’s working twenty years out. It’s interesting to me as much as what’s working three and four years out.
So Mr. Burnap was an exacting note-keeper?
JE He’s a self-described anal retentive Virgo. I have the winery diaries, the entire history of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard. The first vintage was 1975. He used those little composition notebooks. That first book went to, like, 1985. The first two-thirds of the volume of that book is of the first vintage. He took notes on absolutely everything; temperature probes at eight or twelve different levels in the fermentation tanks, he plotted all of that. An unbelievable amount of data collecting.
Perhaps it’s destined for the Bancroft Library Wine Archive! A few details about the Crush this year?
JE It was a tough one. We’re in this new building so, first of all, we entered Crush already worn out! We took possession of this 3,100 square foot raw space in mid-May, Denis Hoey, my employee, and I. (He’s worth far more than I can pay him.) We spent 2 1/2 to three months playing ‘contractor’. We had to put in the drains, the lights, the walls, sheetrock, paint, everything. Now, harvest came early this year. We saw our first fruit on August 14th. We were in nothing but triage mode from June 1st until about three weeks ago. It was basically scrambling to take care of it all. We had the year that is one in ten where everything came at once. We had arrive 70% of our annual production in twelve days. I damn near killed us! That’s a 30 year record in my career. The other one was crushing five varieties in one night, I’d never seen that before. We had fruit in the parking lot just stacked up by type so that after it was dark we didn’t screw up and put the wrong variety in the wrong bin.
How much control do you have over when the grapes are harvested?
JE I pretty much have the say on that with most of my vineyards. In some cases it’s a crew issue so if I’m taking a very small amount I can’t just pick one day that is only for me, I’d have to piggy back on someone else. Generally, I have a hands-on relationship as to when I get the fruit. This particular year it was more a matter of how fast we could process it. We were pushing the edge of getting things too ripe for my taste. About that, we had a solid two weeks of heat the first two weeks of September. The cold snap that came at the end of that period came not a second too soon. We would have lost control of quality with even two more days of heat.
So, it tested the new space! The good news is we found out very quickly we can ferment a lot of grapes here, much more than in any other place I’ve been. We had 36 tons fermenting at once under the roof. Insane!
We had quite a few fires this year. Any smoke issues?
JE I’ve read a lot about that. Some of the labs have come up with smoke-testing protocols for grapes. We did have a Mendocino Grenache as it was first crushed and early in its fermentation, I got a smoky, cardboardy kind of thing. We were quite concerned about that. I was going to send it to the lab, but by the time it finished to dry two weeks later that had seemed to go away. That was the only thing I saw, and that was my only Mendocino fruit. Fortunately, none of my other sources were in any smoky area.
You’re starting a new line of Iberian wines called Quinta Cruz….
JE Yes. After making wine for so many years and after a couple of trips to Portugal for pleasure, I fell in love with some of the varietals there. They are so entirely different from the wines were used to drinking. By chance I was perusing the Wine Country Classifieds, an industry journal, there was a listing for a vineyard that had just planted Portuguese varietals. I still don’t know why to this day why they put the ad in when they did because they didn’t actually have fruit yet. I think they were just looking to see what the interest was. I got connected with these folks very early on, the Pierce Family down in the San Antonio Valley; it’s a new AVA, only two years old, by Lake San Antonio and Lake Nacimiento, off Jolon Road in south western Monterey County. It’s a good region for warmer climate fruit. So I started working with them from their first crop on some of the varietals: Tempranillo, Touriga Nacional, Touriga Francesa, Tinta Cão. That relationship has continued.
I’ve had Tempranillo on the Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard label since ‘03, and with the ‘05 release in about two weeks, that will move to the Quinta Cruz label. Quinta Cruz is a brand simply devoted to Iberian varietals, of Spanish and Portuguese origins. I did that because I got deep enough into these other varietals that I thought it made sense for the brand not to muddy the waters to where people would say, “What’s he doing? Pinot or Portuguese?” Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Pinot remains the flagship line. Quinta Cruz can be more experimental. I’ve added Graciano. It’s the third variety that goes into Rioja, Tempranillo, Garnacha being the other two. Graciano is the base player, its the Mourvedre in the mix, deep, dark, spicy, brooding…. Around 3 to 12% in Rioja, but I will have a 100% varietally labeled wine. There are fewer than a dozen in the world. I know of only five.
I’ve not done white wine in over ten years but now that I have a tasting room it seems prudent. In my world it wasn’t going to be Chardonnay, so I’ve produced two Iberian white varietals, Verdejo and Torrontés. Torrontés is better known as coming from Argentina, but it comes to Argentina via Galicia, Spain. The Verdejo will be available before the end of December, the Torrontés will be out sometime next Spring.
End of pt 2
Admin
Jeff Emery, owner/winemaker of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, is a very fortunate man. For those of us asking after the history of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA you would do well to listen to him. He was witness to many of the informal discussions of a generation of winemakers who founded it. Mr. Emery was in the right place at the right time. The reasons will become clear over the course of this three part interview.
He began as a cellar rat working at the right hand of Ken Burnap, a no-nonsense pinot pioneer in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Over the course of years Mr. Emery has come to understand what the AVA has to offer, its strengths and weaknesses. He is an unassuming man, a man of quiet confidence. Expertise and clarity of conviction will do that.
I interviewed him at his new winery on 334-A Ingalls Street, Santa Cruz.
Enjoy.
Admin Tell us a little of your early history with Ken Burnap, founder of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard?
Jeff Emery I was a sophomore going to UCSC in a Geology program in 1979. I knew somebody who worked for Ken and helped him out once and a while. Well, his wife went into labor that morning and he said, “Oh! I told Ken I’d go help him bottle. Can you go help him? Here’s an address. Bring a sleeping bag, they’ll feed you.” It was to be a two day deal. I went up there and bottled the ‘77 Cabernet from Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard. I had an incredible meal. The other person bottling was a professional chef; had amazing wines, which I knew nothing about because I was nineteen years old. Then Ken said, by the end of the second day, that he was at the point where he needed some extra help now and again. So I started working part-time, finished my degree, I thought that was important, and have been with Santa Cruz Mountain eve since. I have never written a resume, never filled out a job application.
What ensued was a terrific 25 year collaborative apprenticeship with Ken. He wasn’t the classic home winemaker who becomes a professional winemaker story. He was more the meticulous researcher. He had developed his own theories about how to make Pinot Noir primarily. He also had an incredible cellar of Burgundies which he was very generous with. I did a lot of my learning by drinking old world versions of Pinot Noir with Ken. I lived at the winery with Ken for some nebulous 15 to 18 year period, literally at the winery. I’ve never looked back. Ken and I worked together for 25 years, up to his retirement in 2004.
Ken Burnap strongly believed in the use of gravity, he built a three-tiered winery. What are the advantages of using gravity?
JE He felt the less you could do to screw up the wine the better it was. The winery was technically 4 tiers. We crushed on the roof. The fruit would come in through these hatches he built in the roof directly into the fermentors down in the next level. Then there was the settling tank room we would press into and where we’d also stage the wines for bottling later. And then the barrel cellar at the bottom level.
We changed that philosophy slightly over the years. We realized that with big, tight mountain red wines some air early on is not a bad thing, it can be a good thing. But certainly, the gentle handling, not whipping it up with pumps is good. We didn’t even own a pump until we started making white wine sometime in the mid-eighties. We would do absurd things like siphon the barrels into a tank we had on a truck and drive the truck to the top of the hill in order to have it flow downhill into the tank to bottle. [laughter] We literally did that!
What kinds of fermenters did you use?
JE We used big open top fermenters, one of them is sitting in here, six ton capacity open tops, seven foot in diameter, six foot high, three of those, and one four ton fermenter. Ken had them made. He was an industrial contractor in his former life and had many fabricators at his beck and call. He had a lot of it made for him.
So what is it about the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pinot?
JE Well, it’s one of those places in the world that has a very good climate. Because of the marine influence where we get warm enough days to get things ripe and fully developed with mature flavors, but cool enough nights that we keep the natural acidity and structure. The character of Pinot Noir is very ephemeral and easy to burn out with heat, especially overnight. So you get these valley floor situations where it’s hot all night long. You then lose the acidity, you lose that bright black cherry-berry fruit character in pinot.
This is precisely why Ken Burnap got into making Pinot Noir. He loved Burgundy and couldn’t figure out why California Pinot Noir was so flabby and uninteresting in comparison. Of course, we’re talking what was in the market in the sixties. And in those days, it was primarily the Napa Valley where grapes were grown, almost exclusively. We now know Napa is too hot to grow good pinot, and if it has a Napa appellation it’s Carneros on the cool end. But that wasn’t the case then.
Ken set out to find regions he thought would produce better pinot than where they were being produced. And his two short-list answers in talking to winemakers and looking at climate were the Russian River and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Mind you, this was the early 1970’s, long before Russian River became a ‘thing’.
And the clone selection he preferred, that you prefer?
JE That’s a whole different topic! I have my own opinions about some of these modern clones that I think are more negative than the general market view.
Dijon?
JE Dijon, in particular. I think they have their place but I think they’re overused in California. They get ripe too early, they were developed in a place, Dijon, where it’s cold. I think there is a whole generation of pinot drinkers who don’t understand what pinot is in the classic sense because these modern clones when they get even slightly over-ripe they just become cola-cherry soda pop. No back spice, earth, forest floor and all those other nuances that good pinot can have.
In Ken’s case he wasn’t specifically looking at clones. Clone’s weren’t that big of a deal in the 70’s. Nobody was really talking about clones. They were talking about location, soils, people were talking about how Burgundy had a lot of calcareous limestone elements in the better, premier cru vineyards. Josh Jensen at Calera was really big on that, saying Calera has limestone. So people were more focused on soils in those days. Clones weren’t on the radar of the circle I was with. And the vineyard that we had had already been planted by David Bruce. Ken came to the vineyard already planted in pinot.
And these days, how are your vineyards selected?
JE It is a matter of what is available out there. I’ve just come upon my two main sources. It wasn’t a conscious, pro-active situation. In the case of the Branciforte Creek vineyard, which is a mile away from our old estate on Jarvis Road, that was a vineyard that a customer of ours who came visiting from Chicago one day years ago and who had thought about moving out here. Loved the idea of a wine vineyard. And they ended up moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains and planting this vineyard in about 1988. We made the first crop off of it in 1991 on our label. But the person who owned the vineyard realized very quickly that he wasn’t a vine tender, he needed help with that; and we weren’t a big enough winery to do that kind of program. But David Bruce was. The fruit went to them. Then in 2003 the grower came to me and said he wanted to make some changes. Were we interested in having the fruit? It was perfect timing. In 2003 I knew I was to lose the Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Estate source when Ken retired and sold the property a mile away. It was pure, fortunate luck obtaining the Branciforte Creek vineyard. It was a little bit older vineyard, planted in 1988. It produces terrific fruit. Pommard clone. We just signed a six year contract to manage it. So we’re back in the vineyard business, controlling all the viticultural aspects.
My other pinot source is yet another mile away, two miles from the old Estate, and it’s called Branciforte Ridge vineyard. This is endlessly confusing for my customers so we call the second one by the family name, Bailey’s, Bailey’s Branciforte Ridge. That vineyard I’ve been connected to since it was raw dirt. There is a very well-established vineyard tender/installer by the name of Rick Anzalone here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He’s been a fan of our style of Pinot Noir and was sort of looking out for us. So when he was contracted to do this project he told us we might be interested in this. I started working with Rick and the owner early on to be one of the two wineries that would have that fruit. Its first crop was 2003. And they are Dijon clones, 115 and 667. The road passes right down the middle; I take one side of the crop, Clos Tita takes the other.
How has the market changed since you’ve been in the business?
JE [Laughter] That’s a big question!
Then let’s take wine styles.
JE The wine business, in my opinion, is always cyclical and pendular. It will go through these lopsided, cam-shaped loops; oak to no oak, butter to no butter in Chardonnay, high alcohol to moderate alcohol. I’ve gone to many of these trends in my 30 years. Probably most obvious is the fairly recent and, in my opinion, dying out approach of really, really ripe California wines, the whole ‘Mondovino’ thing, wines that are 15, 16 percent alcohol.
The Parker palate.
JE Yeah. We’ve always been the opposite of that. We’ve always been very European, making wines that have higher acidity, tighter structure, longer lived; we’re making wines for the table, wines for the cellar. Wines that go with food. The Parker palate brought in a lot of new wine drinkers and we’ve surprisingly overcome France in per capita wine consumption, which I never thought I’d see in my life time. He had a lot to do with these big, juicy, jammy things that were easy to approach, and people got used to drinking them. That’s for better or worse the stereotype of the American palate, that it does not really understand subtlety and that it goes for power. As much as I don’t like to drink those kinds of wines I think they did a great service to the industry by bringing in many new wine drinkers. As new drinkers get more sophisticated perhaps they’ll realize that these wines may be nice as an aperitif, they’re really fun to start a meal, but when you sit down with some food it’s a train wreck!
But then, new drinkers will eventually find out about more traditionally made wines, what I laughingly hear people call ‘lower alcohol’ wines. I make properly balanced wines. They are not over-ripe.
That’s just one example of the swinging of the pendulum. There is also the incredible over extraction of oak, backing off the oak… But we’ve never been trend followers. Maybe we all would have made a lot more money if we did. I think sticking to your guns, keeping your style is the way to go. We have many, many customers on the mailing list who go back more than thirty years.
End of Pt.1
Admin
In this final post concerning the revolutionary innovation of ultrasound for use in barrel cleaning, we may read below Andrew Yap’s breakdown of the step-by-step processes the beta prototype performs. And of the surprisingly low labor requirements. I must say I was impressed by his program. Should you read all three posts, imagine the water savings alone by using the Cavitus system. And imagine the extended life of oak barrels, increasingly expensive if French. Fewer trees might be felled, no small matter. Indeed, energy and resources are saved at every turn with the employ of high power ultrasonics. Whether it is ‘green’, I’ve yet to crunch the numbers. But I am encouraged.
Admin What size winery is the unit designed for?
Andrew Yap For the first unit it is for wineries that have at least 5000 to 7000 barrels to get a return on investment within 24 months. This is the average. Many wineries think this is pretty good. To get a return on investment on capital equipment is usually around three years. To get it back within two years we think is a pretty good deal. But of course, that is for this equipment, Wineries may decide they want to use selective components to retrofit into their systems.
Now, this is only a one-head system, so you clean one barrel at a time. Although you’re cleaning one barrel at a time the maximum time is only governed by the time you take to sonicate that one barrel. When the barrels come along the conveyer one is being filled, one is being sonicated, and one is being emptied. There are wineries that want to have a four-heads at a time. They can do more barrels in the five minutes required for sonication.
If I’ve read your paper correctly one of the advantages of ultrasonics is the uniformity of brett destruction/inactivation as opposed to high pressure hot water treatments.
AY Yes. That’s because the spray system does not target every spot within the barrel. There are various systems in operation, the main one, the static one, has a rose-like appearance which chucks water into the air and you hope that it will hit every part of the barrel. But it doesn’t. With the rotating head type they are a bit better than the static spray. I must point out that in Australia when we talk of ‘high pressure’ we are talking about 1000 psi to 3000 psi. Here in the states it is more common for wineries to use 100 psi. Our trials are at 1000 psi. If brett cannot be killed and tartrates cannot be removed at 1000 psi at 60 degrees centigrade then you can imagine what 100 psi does. Unless you clean your barrels several times a year, which some wineries do to maintain cleanliness. That’s fine but one of the concerns with winemakers is if they apply 1000 psi or 3000 psi you can remove off-flavor compounds. Now, we’ve already shown that at 1000 psi that doesn’t happen. At 3000 psi, some wineries in Australia do that, the smooth surface actually becomes furry after such a treatment.
Essentially destroying your barrel. And multiplying the surface area for spoilage bacteria, yeasts…
AY Yes, yes. Their argument is that they get an absolutely clean barrel (laughs) at the expense of ruining the barrel!
And all toasting must also be gone.
AY Yes. And in terms of hot water, I forgot to mention to you that we heat the water to 60 degrees centigrade (140 fahrenheit). We’ve found that 60c combines well for cleaning and killing the brett. In fact, both can be achieved at 50c, there’s data that shows that, but if you only wanted to clean and not kill brett then 40c is quite adequate with high powered sonics. So the high powered ultrasound works quite well at 40 to 60c. But if you want to kill the organisms at the same time as cleaning then what you want to do to ensure that the temperature is adequate for both processes.
About the power output?
AY In our previous lab trials we were using small units, about 10 to to 50 watts, but our unit here is 4 kw. Here we are talking about 225L, so the larger the volume, the power per ml, that is what is important. The larger the vessel, 225L versus puncheons, which are 400L, you need either to have the barrel sonicated a longer time or have a more powerful unit in place. The reason we’ve chosen a 4 kw unit is that the larger the unit the thicker the sonotrode, the rod you insert into the barrel bunghole. If it becomes too large it won’t go through the bunghole. An 8 kw unit would shorten the cleaning time to two minutes but the sonotrode would not pass through the hole. There is no manufacturer who can do that.
Will you be at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium this year?
AY Yes. For people interested in looking at the technology we will be at the Unified, a booth there, and we will have a warehouse in Sacramento, we’re not sure where, we’re looking for one. If you know of one let us know. We will put this unit there so people can come along and have a look at it on the exhibition days. They may see it in operation. We’ll take barrels, open them up so people can see what they are like before cleaning, and after cleaning we’ll open them up again. If people want advance information they can email me and I will provide them with the date and time, the place where the demonstration will take place.
Will you be in attendance?
AY Oh, yes.
So, may we walk through the unit in all its stages.
AY This is the full unit. It is designed to have all the components for the system to work independently of what the winery may have. It has all the bells and whistles. It contains the hot water heater, the filtration system so the water can be recycled 40 times. Indeed, there’s a lot of energy savings because you only have to heat the water once, to 60c, and then it is maintained at that temperature.
Now we see the conveyer system, where the barrels are introduced, from the right hand side. The movement of the barrels is all automated. As they go through the door they go through filling and then sonication. This is the prototype. Four sonicating heads may be added, as well as other modifications, for puncheons, for example. The customer will be free to determine what size barrels they would want to clean. The proper equipment would be provided.
Here you can see the sonotrode going into the bunghole, and on the right you see the barrel being filled. The red hose introduces the 60 c water into the barrel. We set up this system whereby the water level is predetermined, it will stop filling automatically when the proper level is reached. The sonitrode is introduced through the bunghole and into the water. Any water lost will be topped off using the blue hose which you can see on the left side. Water must be all the way to the top where the opening is because this is an area where brett infection is usually very pronounced. Because the barrel is completely full you would get cavitation bubbles right throughout the volume of the water, in every nook and corner. The barrel would be fully cavitated. There would be no escape for any micro-organism present in any part of the barrel, either on the surface, subsurface or in the pores.
The water is then drained from the barrel into a trough from which it is the sucked into a recycling tank and goes through a membrane filter and the filtered water goes back into the water tank and reheated back to 60c. Normally the temperature of the water after sonication is probably a degree or so below 60c. Very little energy is required to bring it back to 60c.
The last hose dangling is for water to remove any debris sticking onto the walls of the barrel. The remaining debris would be just tartrates. Any yeast cells would be dead. We recommend giving it a quick spray.
The unit may be run single-handedly, the whole system. During the sonication time, about five minutes, he can load more barrels and take off the clean barrels. The filling time is only about two minutes, and emptying takes about one and a half minutes.
This model is not the most refined for any particular winery but it is a ’stand alone’ model. It can be bought by a winery which is without reverse osmosis water, or a filtration unit, or a hot water heating system. Larger wineries may want to retrofit ultrasonic units into their system. And with four ultrasound heads, for example, you could clean four barrels in five minutes.
Can a Tom Beard system be retrofitted?
AY Yes. As you know Tom Beard systems already have four spikes that will clean four barrels at the same time. They come from underneath. So to replace this all you need to do is standby for a processing unit with four sonitrodes. Four barrels can be then be sonicated at one time.
Thank you, Andrew, for your time. Have a safe flight home.
AY Thank you, Ken.
Admin.
In part 2 Andrew Yap, Director of Oenology and Industry Marketing at Cavitus, passes through a modest series of more technical and commercial matters. Especially interesting is Mr. Yap’s discussion of the potential use of ultrasonics to purge TCA from corks and to increase the extraction of color and flavor from certain grape varieties grown in challenging warm-climates.
Part 3 will focus on the nuts and bolts of the HPU unit itself. Mr. Yap will walk us through each step of the sonication process.
Admin Could you say a few words about Darren Bates?
Andrew Yap Sometime after 2002 I came upon Darren Bates who is our Director of Technology and CTO [Chief Technical Officer]. He is the world-wide expert on ultrasonics. In fact, if your winemaker friend wants to know more about ultrasonics he should contact him, as may any winemaker. He is knowledgeable about all aspects of ultrasonics, whereas I am an oenologist applying the technology to barrel cleaning, to color and flavor extraction, defoaming, fermentation management, and a range of applications in the wine industry.
Your experimental trials used 225L barrels. Can you tell us something of the water use required, and is this technology scalable, can it be used to clean larger barrels?
AY It is scalable. The Beta Prototype that we have designed is contained within an eight foot by ten foot container for a very good reason: we have to move it from winery to winery and from country to country. So, all the components of the system are within this [container]. Now, if you already have got a system in place and you don’t really want this container, you want some of the components because you already have your hot water system, you’ve got your filtration system, you can utilize all these and retrofit the ultrasonic equipment into your system. And this is what many of the big wineries plan to do.
But if you don’t have a cleaning system, or have one of those mobile, hand-held high pressure hot water cleaning systems, then our system might be the one you want to employ. The other advantage of this system is that you can drag it around from winery to winery and provide a mobile service to small wineries.
Do you plan a rental service?
AY We’re looking to appoint service providers here. We haven’t come to any arrangements yet. The service provider may not be the distributor but some organization which is already doing this sort of mobile service, like bottling, dealcing, whoever they are. We plan to have such services in the different states. In fact, during the Unified Symposium in February this year there were people from Washington state, from New York state and other places interested in using this facility but yet too small to justify buying big equipment like this. So, one way to use this application is to get a mobile provider to come around to your winery on a Sunday and clean x number of barrels for a fee, just like what is now being charged for cleaning services provided by other people.
Now, coming back to the barrels, the barrel size for this unit is for 225L and 228L, those are barriques in the Burgundy style and Bordeaux style. One is longer and slightly larger than the other. So this unit will accommodate those two. Once you take away these outer parts [pointing to the front face of the unit] then you can use it for any barrel size up to hogsheads and puncheons.
Is the toasting level of the barrel an issue when you apply high power ultrasonics?
AY No, no, that shouldn’t affect it. Now, if your barrel is very heavily tartrated, of course you’ll remove the tartrates and expose the sub-surface layers to the ultrasound, the ultrasound to the brett to remove any residues in the pores and from the grain.
Has there been any analysis of the effect of HPU on the oak flavor?
AY We exacted the wash water after sonication and we couldn’t detect that any oak flavor compounds had been removed. That is a very positive thing. Now, having said that, we presently have a trial at a winery in the Barrosa Valley where they’ve cleaned barrels of different ages with high powered sound and at the same time cleaned them with high pressure hot water. As a base line we used clean and new barrels, so we have a big range. Then we put wine into these barrels and we’re looking at the extraction of the oak flavor compounds over twelve months. So, it’s very early yet, we started in August, I think, so only about three months worth of data. Whereas with the new barrels we could see a very rapid extraction of oak flavor compounds, with the barrels cleane
And just as ancient. Indeed, the recent discovery in the Amazon Basin of what are called Terra Preta do Indio soils confirms biochar’s Pre-Columbian use, soils dating from 500 BC to 1400 AD.
One leading manufacturer of a biochar machine/kiln, Best Energies, lists the wide variety of organic inputs that may be used to produce biochar: Poultry litter, dairy manure, greenwaste, nut shells, paper sludge, straw, wood waste, woody weeds, distillers grain, cotton trash, rice hulls, and switch grass. You get the idea.
H-PS I have my own domaine in Switzerland, Domaine Mythopia. And this is a kind of research domaine, very small, it’s only about 5 hectares, 2, maybe 2 1/2 hectares of grapes, 3 hectares or so of aromatic herbs, fruit trees and wild, native plants.
H-PS They are kind of old vines, about 50 years. I took it over a couple of years ago. And we do the research there. But I also organize the research, the ecological research for a company that is called Delinat. It is an organic wine seller working with about 40 different winegrowers all over Europe. I am occupied to organize the ecological renewal [of the vineyards] for these winegrowers. They do all organic wine growing, but organic is not enough for us. We are looking for more biodiversity, for more respect of the terroir and a climate neutral agriculture. So, it is my job to organize it for these other winegrowers so that they become climate neutral, that they make better terroir wines, and so on.
With respect to the biochar, is it disced in? How is it applied?
H-PS Pyreg [site in German].
My idea is to achieve a general diversification in agricultural production. In fact, not only to bring biodiversity into the vineyard, with flowers, planting trees, but also to have other cultures around and in between vine rows. For example, we do bees, we produce honey, a second product. And we produce aromatic herbs for herbal teas, and different fruits. So we have four, five supplementary products within the vineyard. So thinking in the longer view you could always have enough material to produce all the green stuff needed to produce not only biochar but also energy.
AY Yes. For people interested in looking at the technology we will be at the Unified, a booth there, and we will have a warehouse in Sacramento, we’re not sure where, we’re looking for one. If you know of one let us know. We will put this unit there so people can come along and have a look at it on the exhibition days. They may see it in operation. We’ll take barrels, open them up so people can see what they are like before cleaning, and after cleaning we’ll open them up again. If people want advance information they can email me and I will provide them with the date and time, the place where the demonstration will take place.
