Wine Making at Crushpad: Wine Plan with Tom Leykis

Mike: I am Michael Zitzlaff, Chief wine maker at Crushpad and welcome. The purpose of this introduction is to give you an overview of the wine that we’re making for one particular client. His name is Tom Leykis, from the tasting room show in L.A. We would like to show you some of the steps and some of the early phases of making that wine as we go through the blue print or the wine plan that talks about alcohol and the various factors of making a wine from the vineyard, all the way through the fermentation, aging, through to the final product. Tom: For me a red wine is something that should go with the meat, food, or fatty pieces of meat but not necessarily it doesn’t have to go with delicate item. Mike: He is making a wine, the Syrah from Premier Coastal Vineyard and it is a beautiful site and his style is definitely one of pedal to the medal, big, extractive and pretty right. Michael: Alright Tom, so here we are. Kind of first step of wine making and it really all starts with a plan and so one of the most challenging things in making wine is trying to figure out where you are going. I think once you know where you are going and you know where your fruits are coming from, at least you got a pretty good shot in getting there. I think a lot of times, people discern up with fruit, it comes in and then they freak out and not quite sure what to do. And so, what we’re really trying to do is to find two things. One is the style of the wine and we created a structure that helps us kind of define roughly the style of wine you want to create. And when you get in to that technical wine making decisions. Base from the vineyards, we’re going to use the technical wine making decisions that we think we are going to make in order to achieve that stuff. And of course, during the wine making process, things changed, fruit comes in more ripe, less ripe, lots of different things occur in the wine making process so you need to nimble but it is nice to have at least the blue print to start with. Let us start of by talking a little bit about the kind of the overall styles. Something tells me you do not like a demure, elegant wine. Something tells me you like something a little bit bigger. Tom: I like something big and over the top. I definitely do big fruits, good balance of oak. Mike: So, Tom wants to make a style of wine that is big, bold, pedal to the medal. Now, that is very much one of the styles that we make for some of our clients. We want big fruit, a lot of tannin, a lot of extract, and probably all red wines is like that. So, what are some of the factors that we need to consider to make that style of wine. One of the key ones is alcohol. Generally a pedal to the medal style is slightly higher in its alcohol. Even very high than its alcohol depending upon what the client want. Alcohol gives you a richness to the palate and so it is a pretty important factor. Michael: So, let us talk a little bit about alcohol. Again, we talk for the pedal to the medal, knowing like the hot wine. Tom: Well, in terms of percentages, they’re generally, recently in California seem to be 15%, 16 on the outside. Mike: The PH and the TA of the wine and you’ll get to see some of the details later on but the PH of the wine is very important because these two factors affect the acidity. The brightness or the softness of the invar scale. So, a lower acid produces a wine that is fairly soft. A higher acid makes wine that’s a little bit most structured and designed for aging. We are also looking at a few of the other factors that we need to think about. Oak, the requirements for oak. A lot of oak. A lot of tannin. And that could come from the grapes and also come from the barrel that we aged the wine in, average of two years of oak barrel aging. Michael: In the fermentation, you got the CO2 generating out of the user generating CO2 in alcohol, the CO2 pushes up the cap so, what is happening is all but a good stuff in the skin, all the coloring and tannins and so on, you want it to get that back into the fermenting wine. So we do two things, one is the punch d