Smell the Rainbow

This isn't a blog entry about synaesthesia, although that might be something we talk about in a different post. This is an entry about the rainbow mug collection.

The saying is that it takes a lot of beer to make wine. It also takes a lot of coffee. I find that lab work and the morning go together well. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a magical happy scene surrounding the morning caffeine.

This mug is the mug that started it all--unicorn, rainbow, cloud stage left, squirrel, rabbit, turtle, frog, butterflies, bird, and even a little snail. Violets, too! The grass is even pointing toward the unicorn if you didn't notice.

A stunning example of the genre, here. I think if I were doing a rainbow mug I would make sure that there was some optical flaw just so no one would take it seriously. I mean, it's about fun! The rainbow is making two separate arcs and there are clouds in front and behind it--can that happen? Whatever. Balloons aren't usually surrounded with gold borders!

This mug heralded the coming of the 1980s with cursive and rainbows. The order of colors is right, at least, unlike this next mug.

Graphically spectacular, and it's inside out. Any rainbow with the red line on the inside is pretty good.

And here are a bunch of others in the collection:

Help us make great wine by bringing us great rainbow mugs! We'll give you $2 off your next purchase for any rainbow mug you bring.

January 30, 2012 Garage sailing in 1899

The 1899 project is in full swing. We have three barrels of pinot that have never been moved with internal combustion or electricity. We picked them by hand, brought them to the winery by horse, and dropped them using gravity into a wood fermenter using whole-cluster and a hand-crank destemmer.

 They experienced a 10-day cold-soak before their native yeast took over and fermentation took off. We stomped them by foot, pumped out the free-run with a hand pump and barreled them down for the winter.  As they were proceeding slowly through malolactic fermentation in their double-bunged barrels (a technique we learned from Erin and Russ at Evesham Wood), we got a package from Burgundy.  Thanks to my great friend in Burgundy, Peter Julian, Illahe is now in possession of some winemaking tools from the good old days.
 Some of them are going to be easy to incorporate in everyday winemaking—one is a long barrel filler that Gabe has been using to top, and another a double-screw cork puller that you will see at the bar next time you're up.



We have a bunch of wooden racking valves that look cool, but we also got a spectacular bronze one that has a maker's mark, A.D. We'll be racking with this in a few months. We have new metal pipettes (wine thieves). We also scored a pruning hook and a strange screw on a gantry. Hmm...anyone know what this is?

Harvest 2011

How is wine made? It's a pretty simple question, with a rather complicated answer. In my first blog entry for Illahe Vineyards, I will try to explain our process for making pinot noir. But making wine is more than just a process—it's an experience. In this blog, I really wanted to share that experience by talking about the music, the details, and the silly stories that made harvest 2011 at Illahe an unforgettable experience.

Setup: Arcarde Fire - The Suburbs

Most winemakers say that cleaning is 90% of winemaking, and that is especially true during harvest. Harvest means working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks; it is exhausting for everybody, so we try to help each other when we can. Some mornings I would come in an hour early, put on Arcade Fire, and start setting up the sorting line, so we could get off to a good start. That means cleaning the sorting table, where imperfect grapes are removed; then cleaning the destemmer, where grapes are crushed and destemmed.

After sorting and destemming, the grapes go into a plastic fermenters; each fermenter holds about 2500 lbs of grapes, resulting in about 200 gallons of wine.

Punchdowns: Soul Patrol: Can you Feel the Funk?

After we have filled the fermenters with grapes, we let them soak for 2 -5 days before adding yeast. Sometimes, wine will mysteriously begin fermentation on its own—we call this natural yeast or wild yeast fermentation. Once fermentation begins, we perform two or three "punchdowns" per day. Because dried grape skins float on top of the grape juice, we climb on top each fermenter and punch the grapes down into the juice, to keep the skins wet and stir up the juice. It's a strenuous process, and often requires some energetic music to keep you going. Brad has an eclectic record collection at the winery, and this funky album was always a popular punchdown anthem. Extra credit has to go to our harvest intern Jacob, who would often come to the winery alone at midnight to do an extra round of punchdowns.

Pressing: Steely Dan!

After five days of cold soaking, and about two weeks of fermentation, we suck the juice out of the fermenter, and press the remaining grapes in a traditional basket press. While it sounds pretty simple, dumping 2000 lbs. of grapes can be quite a process...one that involves forklifts, snow shovels, and buckets. During one very long day of pressing, Brad played every Steely Dan album in his collection; seven albums that gave us five hours of music - enough to pull juice and press three full fermenters.

Racking: The Radha Krsna Temple: Hare Krsna

2011 was an exceptionally late harvest, and had to scramble to get all our reds in barrel before Thanksgiving. The weekend after Thanksgiving is the busiest tasting weekend of the year in the Willamette Valley, and Thanksgiving day was set to be our first day off in six weeks. To do that, we had to get all of our wine in barrel by Tuesday, clean up on Wednesday, and relax on Thursday. While this seemed like a reasonable goal, our barrel washer broke the Friday before Thanksgiving, and by Sunday night, panic was setting in. Monday we got our barrel washer back, and Tuesday we spent 14 hours racking 52 barrels of wine - almost 90% of our pinot! As the night wore on, silliness set in, and soon we were blaring the Hare Krsna anthem while dancing in the cellar.

Cleanup: James Brown: Hot Pants!

Cleanup usually happens around ten o'clock at night. If you're crazy enough to enjoy working ten hours a day, seven days a week, then you're probably crazy enough to enjoy scrubbing equipment at the end of each night. Everyone grabs a beer, we crank up the James Brown, and we scrub the winery until it shines. Hopefully we get 5 or 6 hours of sleep before coming in the next morning, putting on the Arcade Fire, and setting up the sorting line for another day of winemaking!

The only thing better than making wine while listening to records is drinking wine while listening to records. So Friday, February 11th, we will be having a Wine, Fondue, and Vinyl Valentines Day Party. We will pair some Brazilian Bossa Nova with Gruner, Riesling, and Cheese Fondue, and some smooth 70's jazz with Pinot Noir, Tempranillo Port, and Chocolate Fondue. If the weather is nice, we might even have horse drawn vineyard tours! We hope to see you there.

American Art Icon James Siena Designs for Illahe

James Siena is not a household name in Oregon, though he is a household name if your house is in Manhattan and you have an interest in art. His work appears in the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, the Whitney, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Hammer in LA, and many other of America’s great museums. And now it also appears on the Illahe label.

How so? All thanks to our friend Dan Schmidt, also a New York artist, a few bottles of the earliest Illahe products showed up at James’s studio lunch table on Canal Street. Now, James is a huge fan of Burgundy and Bordeaux, but it was the viognier that he enjoyed so much that he offered to design a label for us.

He worked with Ruth Lingen at Pace Prints (Pace Gallery represents James), and they came up with a label, now our reserve label, that incorporates letterpress fonts from the 19th century and a ‘necker’ with the vintage. Ruth, the “Letterpress Queen of Brooklyn” found a beautiful font designed by Emil Rudolf Weiss to type ILLAHE. Don’t try to find this font on the internet—it comes directly from the antique type, perhaps from the famous Bauer type foundry.

We love how the label matches what we’re trying to do at the winery. It is an old American design to match our Oregon terroir; simple, not showy; and, on James’s insistence, it emphasizes vintage variation in the necker’s circle.

Best of all, James redesigned our logo based on the word Illahe from the Duployan script that Merry Young found for the winery. James is still drinking Illahe and hopefully he enjoys our output as we transition our label.

Thank you, our sophisticated friends!

Illahe Reserve Pinot noir - Hits Like a Bombshell

By Guest Contributor Jean Yates, Avalon Wine

We taste a lot of wine at Avalon and it takes a lot to impress us. Last week, Illahe's Reserve Pinot noir 08 hit us like a bombshell. It's a contender for our list of the best of the famous 2008 vintage, and a wine that you want to know about.

I wanted to get some confirmation of my impressions from outside the insulated little wine world we inhabit. So I tried it yesterday with some customers and friends. These are not professional wine people - some of them drink Pinot noir regularly, some don't. I'd decanted the wine a few hours before we got together, and a lot of the tightness that the best of the young 2008's always show had dissipated. It had opened up beautifully.

General consensus among friends and neighbors? "Delicious" dominated the discussion, with "can I take the rest of the bottle home" a popular question. Blackberries and " dark berry" were the consensus main flavors, with "spice" "walking in the forest after it rains," "cherries," and "cedar" also mentioned.

"This wine just got better and better and better, the longer I tried it" Dorothy said. "The more I tasted it, the more flavors, the more richness."

Here's our tasting note - A nose of blackberry, cedar, forest floor, and sweet spice only hints at the intense, round, tremendously impressive dark fruit and spice box flavors. Even though it's clearly young, there's so much to enjoy - the juicy blackberry and dark cherry fruit floats above a deep, dark sweet spice base with five spice, cedar, and forest floor in the mix. Unusually appealing in a young wine from the 2008 vintage, the silky tannins balance well with the fruit and acid. The core is a bit tight and there's a strong sense that this wine has a lot more to offer with time in the cellar.

The Illahe Reserve Pinot noir 08 is a definite hit of the vintage and a wine to start collecting.

- Jean

Jean Yates sells Oregon Pinot noir at Avalon Wine in Corvallis, Oregon.