Bottling Chardonnay

We’re excited to give you an update on the Chardonnay we blogged about earlier this year. After 11 months, we emptied the barrels in January, and now, after stabilizing it and giving it appropriate time to settle in the tank, we are bottling it at last. It won’t be long before you can pick up a bottle of Babylonstoren Chardonnay!

Captive pears

Readers of this blog may remember this post about the process we started a while back: Whilst the pears on our trees were still very small, we placed them inside bottles, leaving them to grow there.

Well, things have moved along, and this Tuesday we harvested the pears – now grown full size inside the bottles – and we started the process of creating pear brandy.

We started by cleaning the bottles on the inside with a sterile solution, after which we filled them up with one of three alcohol solutions, namely:  clean Vodka, pear distillate, and plum distillate sweetened with fructose.

We’re letting the pears stand for a while before we sample the results, and once we’ve decided which combination works best, our pear brandy will be available for sale in the farm shop.

Emptying the tank

Today, we emptied our red wine tank, and as you can see, we really got stuck in!

While hard at work, our head winemaker, Charl Coetzee, put together this photo story to let you in on the behind-the-scenes process of red wine making.

With red wine, the fermentation happens on the skins of the grapes. As soon as fermentation starts, the skins form a cake which rises to the top, leaving all the juice underneath.

So when we want to empty the tank, we subtract all the juice at the bottom of the tank, pumping it away, leaving the skin cake to settle on the bottom of the now-empty tank.

We then open the tank to make sure that all the juice has been pumped away and that only the skins are left over. We would also dig out some of the skins into the basket of the basket press to make emptying the tank a bit easier.

Of course, when making wine, we have to taste all the time to make sure that everything is fine with the newly-fermented wine. It's part of the job you'll seldom hear complaints about!

PS: Just to let you know, the wine in this tank is a Malbec and is not about to be bottled. It will only be available for use in one year, as it is part of a future Bordeaux blend. We’re sure it’ll be worth the wait!

Owl Spotting

As is the case at any farm, we have to deal with gerbil and mouse populations, and of course, we’d like as natural a solution as possible. That’s why we turned to owl expert, Lianda Naudé of the Skova Owl Research Project to help us increase our owl population here on the farm.

Lianda spent a day and evening with us, pointing out existing signs of owl activity, identifying the local species and sharing ideas for how to encourage owls to hunt and breed here.

The first signs of owls we found were droppings that look like white paint splatters on the edge of the fish pond, against the gable of the historical wine cellar in the Werf and in the vineyard too. Also, just below a recently-placed Barn Owl box, we found owl feathers, as well as regurgitated pellets of fur and bones. Looking more closely at these pellets, we could see the remains of gerbils, which seemed promising.

Visiting the same owl box after sunset, we were lucky to see the Barn Owl flying out of the nest, and later in the evening we heard the thin screeching call of the Barn Owl, as well as the familiar hooting of the Spotted Eagle Owl (click the links to hear audio clips of these two birds’ calls)

Barn Owls are expert rodent killers and can breed up to four times a year with two to five eggs in a clutch. To encourage the young offspring of the existing owls to stay, we plan to place a few more Barn Owl boxes in strategic places at least 500m apart. We’ll also erect a few raptor perches, which are poles about six meters high from where raptors can get a good view for hunting.

So all you mice and gerbils at the farm had better watch out! The owls are coming to Babylonstoren.

Opening barrels

Yesterday, we emptied the Chardonnay that we’ve had in barrels for just over 11 months, which was the moment we’ve been anticipating all that time.  Over the 11 months, we’ve been monitoring progress through monthly tastings, and our most recent taste confirmed the good news that it was time to open the barrels.

We will now stabilize the wine and plan the bottling.  It will still be some time before we release the Babylonstoren Chardonnay, because our planning includes taking out our Shiraz in the second half of 2012, and we’re looking forward to launching both at once.

But after we’ve finished bottling maybe,  just maybe… when you come on a cellar tour we might decide to open an unlabelled bottle for a sneak preview!

Cheers! To an auspicious date

Last year on 11 January 2011, we celebrated the first day of harvesting in the current history of Babylonstoren, when we harvested Chardonnay to make base wine for our MCC.  Ripening of grapes is entirely dependent on weather circumstances, so one can never predict the exact harvest date.

Well, one year later, on 11  January 2012, the same block of Chardonnay was ready to be harvested again, which meant that on one day we were able to celebrate the one year anniversary of winemaking in the cellar, as well as the beginning of our 2012 harvest!

Most thrilling of all was that, while last year we had to go out to buy wine and sparkling wine to toast the beginning of the harvest, this year we were able to do it with our very own wines. Cheers!

Peerwyn en peerbrandewyn vir Kersfees

Op 17 November is die vyf boepenspeertjies en een appeltjie in wording in glasbottels gehang, nes dit daar in die boom voorkom.

Die idee is dat die babavruggies dan in die bottel groei, om met volwassenheid afgepluk te word by die steeltjie en siedaar – ‘n yslike peer in ‘n klein bottel sonder veel moeite!

In pure Franse tradisie sal brandewyn of wyn in die peerbottel gegooi word om  dit as peer brandewyn of wyn te benut.

Pruim Mampoer

Our distillery is almost ready to start work, so we’ve begun preparing prunes harvested from our trees before firing up our kettle for the first time. It’s the first step on the way to our very first batch of pruim mampoer!

We started by removing the pips, and then Wian and I crushed  the prunes to make a pulp.  This pulp has started a fermentation process now (see below), just as happens with grapes, and once it has fermented (and the distillery is finished), we will put it into the kettle to be distilled.

Ons kan nie wag om ons eerste glasie te maak nie!

Groete,

Charl

In three years’ time…

This winemaking business is not for anyone with an impatient temperament, that’s for sure.  We spent yesterday in our cellars, working on the second stage of a project, the results of which will only be evident in another 3 years!

It all started earlier this year, in February, when we started the process of making our sparkling wine by making the base wine, consisting of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.  It’s this that we bottled yesterday, eight months later (see process pics below).

Now the base wine will undergo a secondary fermentation process inside the bottle, after which it will age on its fermentation lees for another three years. The reason we wait so long is because to make a genuine sparkling wine according to the methode Cap Classique, the wine has to age for at least three years.

So while we love working on each stage, we also know we must bottle up our excitement, in anticipation of the long-term results.

Lekker dag!

Charl

New signs of life on the vines

Our winemaker, Charl Coetzee, tells us what’s happening in the vineyards…

Springtime!  The time of year that the vineyards start to grow again.  New shoots emerge from dormant buds and active growth commences. This is a very exciting time, because when you think about it, this is the start of the new season, the beginning of next year’s wines. After careful and loving nurturing of these new buds, they will turn into strong vineyard shoots, carrying two or more healthy bunches full of flavour ready to be picked and processed in the cellar, and transformed into exciting wines. It’s a real privilege to be able to work so close to nature…

For a good cause

When visitors come to Babylonstoren, whether it’s for lunch or a garden tour, they are sometimes surprised that an entrance fee of R10 per person is requested at the gate. On the ticket, it states that the money collected from this entrance fee all goes to the Babylonstoren Trust.

The Babylonstoren Trust raises funds for community projects, like the crèche where all the kids of our farm workers are cared for, while their parents are working.  The Trust also helps local school children with soccer and netball kit and transport to sports days.  So your R10 entrance fee is contributing to the upliftment of our community here at Babylonstoren, and we all thank you very much for this.

All gardens, great & small

We’re well aware that our meticulously planned, 8 acre garden at Babylonstoren really is gardening on a particularly large scale, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate small-scale – or even micro-scale – gardening. That’s why we love this garden-in-a-can idea from venerable Northern Italian floriculture company, Arnoldi Europe.

These MicroGiardini are packed with a growing compound, seeds or a bulb, and with the addition of water and light, a flowering plant or herb will grace your windowsill after just a month of care.  Gardening’s fun, whatever scale it’s at!

(via coolhunting)

The slopes of the Simonsberg

There’s a new development in the Babylonstoren farm shop. We are now selling a selection of wines, all from the cellars that share the slopes of the Simonsberg with us. The wines are all at the same price as you’ll find at the cellars themselves, so this is a nice way to see what the terroir of the Simonsberg has on offer, all in one place!

While you’re in the shop, pick up a map of the Simonsberg, showing the roads and the relative position of every cellar around the mountain.

So, Babylonstoren is becoming a wine destination, and we’re eagerly anticipating the day when we have our own wines on the rack too!

Some ice with your wine?

Before bottling a white wine there are a few things that you have to do to get the wine ready.  One of these is to make the wine Cold Stable, which means we take the wine’s temperature to just below 0˚C. The wine won’t freeze at this temperature, because of the alcohol, but it ensures that all the tartaric acid in the wine will crystalize at this temperature.  The reason we do this is that it prevents the forming of crystals inside a bottle while being chilled in a refrigerator.

When making the wine Cold Stable, a thick layer of ice forms around the stainless steel tank where the cooling jackets are.  It’s quite a sight!

Lekker naweek,

Charl.