The Vernatsch that gave me nervous moments in 2024 was almost drunk on that one evening with my friends that previous winter. Luckily. It was delicious with fresh orange juice and spices for mulled wine – we finished all I had brought from the garage. After that I only had a tiny amount left. Half of it I dumped on the floor when I accidentally dropped its container. The other half is still in my fridge and gets tasted and disapproved for anything but mulled wine every now and then.
So the question for 2025 was, do I try again?
I had no garage rented anymore, nor another place like it. Neither did I have strong belief in my ability to make a wine.
In May, at a wine fair in Austria (yes, Karakterre, which has become quite famous between Vienna and NYC by now) I met Hoss, a winemaker from Switzerland for second time. I had tried his wines before and was puzzled how good and clean they are – although he was also someone who started to make wine later in his life, after a completely different business career that left him somehow empty.
We talked about my garage experiment. And he surprisingly offered me Pinot Noir grapes.
I couldn’t resist.
Sometimes when time goes by, things are forgotten and left behind. But when September came, Hoss and I made plans and he gave me status updates about the ripeness of the Pinot grapes.
After a long weekend of harvest with some now friends in Rheinhessen in Germany, I drove to a vineyard in beautiful Aargau on a Monday morning and we harvested a plot of Pinot. It was perfectly ripe but many bug bites. The picking took us forever, and again, everyone else in the harvest crew was faster than me. I set some boxes aside and I filled those into my tiny buckets, and loaded the car. I was nervous.
After we were done around lunch time, a beautiful Icelandic tradition was introduced to me: to light an incense stick in the field and thank for the good harvest. I loved it. We had one or two sips of some of his Pinots and then went off to the winery. We squeezed grapes there and I could fill my buckets to the top, to leave little space for oxygen. I put the lids on and made my way home. The 4 hour drive included crossing the border about 5 times and I was so nervous. What would I tell the officers about transporting 50kg of smashed grapes in my little Cinquecento trunk? I did not get stopped.
When I arrived at my home, I dumped all those smashed grapes into my open barrel in the basement of the apartment building. I put foil on it, washed all the little buckets and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep that night and had nightmares about rats finding the sweet juice that was only covered by a plastic foil in the basement with windows open. Like an open buffet for anyone.
The next day, I put a plate on the barrel and a heavy demijohn filled with water on top. I wanted to make sure nothing and noone would be able to get into my sweet must.
On the following weekend, I called my neighbors for sparkling wine and help – we pressed the pinot noir on the first weekend of Oktoberfest and transferred 37 liters to a floating-top steel vessel and a demijohn. We carried the crushed and slightly bubbling grapes, and pressed must up and down in buckets, and did all the washing and cleaning within a couple of hours. I was proud and felt humbled to get such amazing help.
The fermentation was nicely going on and I was unsure what to do.
I waited. After another week it came to me that a barrel would be nice for this Pinot Noir, and I would also have to move it while it is still slightly fermenting, so oxygen wouldn’t be able to attack as much. The produced CO2 during the fermentation would protect it quite well.
So I transferred 20 liters of the nicely fermenting, half dry Pinot into my mini oak barrel and put a fermentation bung on it. The remaining must I left to the steel vessel. As things go in this way of making wine, I needed a new fermentation bung for the steel vessel, because the one I had was definitely not tightly closing it. I asked my friends and received a beautiful delivery of a bung in the mail. I was proud, relieved and happy.
When you imagine a wine fermenting in a vessel, you can expect two things: smell and bubbles. Whenever I entered the basement, there was a slight fizz audible from the steel vessel. The barrel was silent. So you had to open it and listen carefully: there was fizz too. Little, but ongoing. Patience was the trick now.
My measurements showed that fermentation in both was going well, and I was happy. When the values of sugar didn’t drop anymore (a clear indicator that fermentation has come to an end), I tasted both wines again, from the barrel and from the tank.
I almost fell off my shoes. The barrel had an incredible stink to it.
I closed it. Slept over it and was lost.
When I realized what I had actually smelled, I was even more devastated: rotten eggs.
Some research showed that the easiest method to get rid of hydrogen sulfide would be to give it some air. So I splashed the contents of the barrel into another open tank as much as I could. I did that with a tiny hose, and luckily, I had some height difference between the barrel and the tank. Then, I took it out of the tank again, and put it back into barrel.
How is that supposed to change anything?
I can tell now that the method worked perfectly. The wine is finally clean, doesn’t have any bad smells nor anything else concerning. It’s just beautiful, getting ready to become a bit more integrated, calm down its acidity and will hopefully make it to bottle after malolactic fermentation very soon.
Typically, in Beaujolais, the easy-drinking red wines of the current year are released and first drunk on the third Thursday in November. But my Pinot Noir is still a little bit too much on its way for a super early and excited pre-release on Beaujolais Nouveau Day, so I wouldn’t want to disturb it and will give it just a bit more time.
