Blog contributed by Elisa Jones, co-owner and winemaker, Elisa Christopher Wines
Editor’s Note: October is Texas Wine Month, a time to celebrate 100% Texas-grown wines and the people behind them. While wine lovers visit tasting rooms and gather to share a glass, the work of shaping this year’s vintage continues in the cellar. This month’s post offers a firsthand look at the decisions that follow harvest, from preparing barrels to getting sparkling wines ready for their second fermentation, along with perspectives from fellow Texas winemakers and TWG members. We invite you to visit a Texas winery and bring friends together any month of the year, but especially during Texas Wine Month and gathering with friends as part of Come Over October.
The last grapes may be off the vine, but in the cellar, the work is far from finished. In fact, some of the most important decisions of the vintage are just beginning. Once the excitement of harvest settles down and the cellar gets a little less crazy, we start looking at what came in, how each wine is developing, and what each one is telling us about where it wants to go next. This is the part of winemaking that often happens behind the scenes, but it is where the character of a vintage really begins to take shape.
This harvest was a little bit of the fast and the furious. We had smaller quantities than we had hoped for, but the fruit that did come in was beautiful—and the quality was high. And that is one of the interesting things about winemaking: just because harvest is finished does not mean the decisions are finished. In many ways, post-harvest is when the real decision-making begins.
When yields are smaller, some of the plans made before harvest may need to change. A wine you intended to put into a certain number of barrels may not fill them all. A few barrels may sit empty this year. The upside? We probably will not need to purchase as many next year! For a winemaker, post-harvest is about looking at what actually came into the cellar and asking one simple question: Now what?
The Wine Has a Plan—Sometimes You Just Have to Listen
Change is constant in winemaking, and post-harvest is when we begin looking at the big picture. Which barrels are we going to use? What does our oak program look like based on the fruit we actually received? If we want a certain percentage of new vs neutral oak, do we need to change anything based on the volume we ended up with at press?
Because we make sparkling wine, there is another component we are looking at: deciding which wines are ready to go en tirage—into bottle for their second fermentation. This year, I made four varietals for sparkling wine. Interestingly, the order in which they came into the winery is not necessarily the order in which they will go into bottle. Every varietal is a little like a kid. You can raise them all the same way, but somehow, they still turn out completely different!
Making sparkling wine really is a year-round process. Post-harvest, we are looking at which sparkling storage cages can be freed up, getting those wines riddled and disgorged for release in late spring, and then determining the order in which this year’s harvest will go to tirage. We also make sparkling wine for other producers, so I am balancing our wines with our clients’ wines. We always put one of our own wines through first. It gives us a chance to test the equipment, work through any issues and adjust before moving on to a client’s wine. Right now, that means doing yeast checks, looking at what we already have on hand for second fermentations, and evaluating which yeast will work best with each base wine based on its flavors and characteristics.
So, how do we decide which wine gets bottled first?
Getting Sparkling Wines Ready for Bottle
One of the first things we look at is which wine appears to be clearing the fastest. White wines can remain cloudy after fermentation, so we cold stabilize them. This means bringing the tanks down to approximately 25–32°F and allowing the wine to chill and clear. Cold stabilization also helps remove tartrate crystals, so they do not later precipitate in the bottle.
Once the wine has stabilized and cleared, we rack it—moving the wine out of the cold tank and into a temporary tank or IBC totes. We then shut off the glycol, clean the original tank and filter the wine back into it. At that point, the wine is ready for another round of testing. We retest the chemistry and determine whether the wine is ready to go to bottle for its second fermentation.
But chemistry is only part of the equation.
It’s Not Just About the Wine
There is a surprising amount of logistics involved in getting sparkling wine into bottle. I am checking the wine, of course, but I am also asking: Do we have enough of the bottles we need? Do we have enough storage cages? Do we have enough bidules (inserts that collect yeast sediment) and crown caps for each lot? And holy moly, why on earth did shipping costs for those bulk glass bottles go up over 70% from last year?!
Sparkling glass is purchased in bulk, with the boxes purchased separately, so even something as seemingly simple as bottles and boxes requires planning. Our storage cages hold 500 bottles each, or approximately 100 gallons. That means physical logistics can quickly become part of the winemaking decision. Sometimes, freeing up a cage means moving wine from a storage cage into a riddling cage because that wine is next in line to move closer to the end of the process.
It is a good reminder that making wine is not just about what happens in the vineyard or what is inside the tank. It is also about having the right materials, equipment and space ready when the wine tells you it is time to move.
The Long Game in Red Wine – Getting the Barrels Ready
What do we need to do to get barrels ready for the new vintage of red wine? Well, it involves a lot of cleaning—and a fair amount of waiting!
If we are reusing barrels, we have already cleaned and sulfured them when we bottled the previous wine or we made the decision to take the barrel out of service. Even though the barrels we decided to keep are clean, they still need to be cleaned and hydrated again before we can put new wine into them. We steam the barrels to both sanitize them and hydrate the wood, but it is not a particularly fast process. We can steam only one barrel at a time, typically for 8–10 minutes. Then we quickly turn the barrel upside down to drain any remaining water and bung it while it is still warm. Once the barrel has cooled, it is ready to be filled.
And filling the barrels is not quite the end of the process. Wine naturally disappears from barrels over time through evaporation. A small amount of wine also gets absorbed into the wood, and as the wine ages, that loss creates headspace in the barrel. If we leave that space, it can allow too much oxygen to come into contact with the wine, which can lead to unwanted oxidation. That is why we regularly top our barrels with additional wine, keeping them full and minimizing headspace as the wine ages.
That also means we need to have topping wine available and ready to go. So, along with preparing the barrels, we clean and sanitize the kegs that hold our topping wine. It may sound like a simple detail, but keeping enough topping wine on hand—and having clean kegs ready for it—is another important part of managing a wine through its time in barrel.
What Are the Neighbors Doing?
I asked a few of my winemaking neighbors what they are thinking about during this post-harvest season, and to possibly include any movie or TV titles or quotes that sum up this vintage and next steps and their answers reinforced just how much this time of year is about adaptation.
Janet Miertschin at Portree Cellars described this harvest as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Bad weather. Ugly yields. Beautiful fruit. She loves the quality of the fruit this year, and she also emphasized one of the most important lessons in winemaking: you must be prepared to pivot.
Conditions change. Varietals behave differently. Every vintage brings something new. And sometimes those pivots lead to wines you never would have planned at the beginning of the season. Janet is excited that some of the changes this year may lead to new and exciting wines.
That is one of the things I love about winemaking. The unexpected does not necessarily mean something went wrong. Sometimes it means you have been given an opportunity to make something you did not know you were going to make.
Mike Nelson at Ab Astris Winery is also deep into the post-harvest process. Mike described this year’s harvest as the movie title, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Mike remarked on the exceptionally high quality of the fruit but that this harvest was done quicker than in the past. Now, Mike is testing his wines to make sure they have fully converted their sugars and malic acid, working to get wine into barrel, determining which oak to use for each wine, and topping both the new vintage and previous vintages to ensure there is no headspace. His whites from this vintage will be bottled after six or seven months, while the reds will spend considerably more time in barrel—approximately 20–28 months.
Reagan Sivadon from Sandy Road Vineyards had another way of describing this harvest. For him, it was a reminder of who is really in charge of the vineyard: Mother Nature, who made us work hard this season.
I asked Reagan for his TV/Movie title or quote for this harvest, and Reagan chose Dwight Schrute from The Office: “I am ready to face any challenges that might be foolish enough to face me.” Honestly, the same could probably be said about post-harvest.
For Reagan, post-harvest is when he begins looking at the cellar as one complete wine program and thinking about how all the pieces fit together. He is tasting each lot from this harvest and making decisions about style, oak, aging and blending, while also considering which wines have the character to stand on their own. For Reagan, it is a time to step back, look at the bigger picture and let each wine help shape the plan for what comes next.
Letting the Vintage Lead the Way
That may be the biggest lesson of post-harvest: the plan is never completely set in stone.
We start harvest with an idea of what we want to make. Then the fruit arrives, and it begins telling us what it can become. From deciding which sparkling wines are ready for their second fermentation to determining which reds need more time in barrel, every decision builds on the one before it. The work continues long after the last grapes come in from the vineyard.
And that is part of what makes this time of year so exciting. Right now, there are wines in tanks and barrels that are still becoming themselves. Some will take months to reveal where they are headed, while others are already giving us hints of what is to come. We get to taste them, watch them develop and adjust along the way.
The best part is that eventually, these wines will leave the cellar and make their way into your glass.
If you have not visited us recently, October is the perfect time to come see what is happening in the cellar, taste through the wines we have available now, and get a glimpse of what is still to come. Whether you are a longtime friend of the winery, or any of the Texas Wine Growers or have never stopped by any of us before, we would love to share a sample of the current vintage with you. You can taste the work, decisions and surprises that went into getting it there.
Come visit, pull up a glass, and taste the vintage for yourself. We will see you in the tasting room!
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