Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Peter and Sarah Botham Growing Grapes and Making Wine  October 26, 2011 UP650  cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW-Madison Biotech Center. I also work for the Extension, Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those organizations and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Alumni Association, and Science Alliance, and PLATO, thank you very much for coming tonight. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to introduce to you both Peter Botham and Sarah Botham, who are the owners and operators of the Botham Vineyards, west of town here. Peter is a Madison native. He graduated from UW-Madison in history and then went on to the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore. After working several years as a commercial draftsman and artist, he threw off his coat and tie, and decided to pursue a career in viticulture. 

After doing some of that work in Maryland, he came back to Wisconsin and established a vineyard here. His buying to bottle approach to wine making follows a "less is more" philosophy. Less manipulation of the wine allows grape character to better exhibit itself. Carefully monitored oak aging and minimal filtration and chemical alteration are practices to which he strongly adheres. I hope we get to hear more about that tonight. Sarah Botham is a writer, editor and marketing and public relations professional. She's the owner and founder of Botham, Inc., a firm that for 25 years has specialized in marketing, branding and strategic planning for business. Her talents are further put to use as the vice president and director of marketing for Botham Vineyards, and as such, she's the architect of the packaging, sales tools, and sales and marketing strategies. Sarah also has a permanent faculty appointment here in the Department of Life Sciences, Communication in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. She is the faculty advisor for the UW-Madison student chapter of the National Agri-Marketing Association and proud coach of its nationally renowned marketing team. 

As a former altar boy, I'm very much looking forward to that wonderful wine. [laughter] Where they said, "Fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become for us our spiritual drink. Blessed be God forever." >> Where's the separation of church and state? >> I'm not sure! [laughter] Oh, my god, it's a plastic chalice. [laughter] It's quite a delight to be able to have this presentation tonight here in some of the most wonderful days of fall and the harvest. Please join me in welcoming Peter and Sarah to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [applause] >> Peter Botham: Thank you, Tom. Thanks for inviting us. Thank you all for coming to listen to us tonight. It's really, at this time of year, nice to come and do something like this. Mostly what I do at this time of year is honestly, not a lot of fun. 

It's hard work. Winemaking is very physical, particularly the crushing and pressing part, which I'll show you as we go through here. But I kind of don't get to come up for air until December. By the time I finish dealing with our own fruit, the fruit that I purchased starts arriving and it's like this never-ending conveyor of doing the same thing over and over and over again. It's nice to be able to get out and do something like this for a change. It's really a pleasure. I'm going to talk about a bunch of things, and talk a little bit about grape growing, because that's a very integral part of what we do. We're going to taste some wine. We brought some wine along with us. We're actually going to-- normally when we do a tour, or when I do a talk like this, we usually hold the wine until the end and sample it all at once, but we found that doesn't always work so well. 

>> It's not as much fun. >> Yeah, it's not as much fun. It's kind of nice to drink wine as you're talking about wine. Sarah is going to kind of walk through, or kind of pass the bottle. If you have to pass the bottle, try to be judicious in pouring your samples. We kind of gave you cups that will kind of put the crimps on you there anyway, but try not to get too ambitious with your samples As a quick note, what Sarah is going to pass around first, and we're going to sample these wines in what is normally the correct order for your palate, which is starting with a dry wine and we'll end with a semi-dry wine. We're not going to taste anything really sweet. This is chardonnay. It's a dry chardonnay. It's fermented dry. 

I'll explain what that entails. There's no oak here. We craft our chardonnay without any oak at all. So this is not a big, fat, buttery, oaky, California style chardonnay. This is more lean, kind of clean and food friendly, I think, style of chardonnay. This is also cold climate grown, hence the name Latitude 43. Those of you who are familiar with geography, know that where we are in Wisconsin is roughly latitude 43. And the Finger Lakes region, where this fruit is grown, also happens to be at latitude 43. So Sarah will pass that around. You can kind of taste this. 

This is a bit of what Sarah's mom calls a velvet hammer. It's kind of a sneaky wine. It actually has a very high alcohol content. The fruit that this, came in very, very ripe, and as a result, you don't have to be that chintzy. Sarah! >> They told me to stop! >> Okay, oh, I'm sorry. [laughter] I'm sorry, okay, yeah. We have plenty of wine. It actually has a very high alcohol content-- That's right, am I getting out of bounds here? Okay. It has a high alcohol content, approaching 14%. So it will kind of, but you won't, like so many high alcoholic wines, you don't get a big rush of alcohol with this wine. 

It's actually kind of nice. Doesn't give you a big slap in the face with alcohol like some high alcohol wines do. But anyway, so on to what we do at Botham Vineyards. First of all, just a quick chronology of the business. I first put vines in the ground in 1989. In 1992, we had our first crop, which was just a teeny, tiny crop, not commercially viable, or anything at that point. In '93, we kept our crop and started producing wine. In 1994, we actually opened the barn that sits on our property as our tasting room, and started selling wine. So that's the quick chronology. The first year of production for wine I think I maybe fermented 2500 gallons, and that might even be a stretch. 

Now we're closer to 25,000 gallons. So we've grown over the years. It's been a very kind of even, measured growth, which has been nice. It hasn't been, you know, out of control at any point in time, which has helped to maintain quality of the product. Today we're producing roughly 20,000, 25,000 gallons of wine. So some of the wine that we produce is produced with raw materials that come from our vineyard. Sarah, how does this? Where do I click? The mouse? Okay.  So this is our vineyard. Actually, I think this picture was taken at roughly this time of year, and many people have the concept of vineyards being this beautiful sort of symmetry of trellis sort of thing. There's the pictures of people in California kind of trotting through on their horses with their dog running beside them, and what have you. 

It's always this kind of idyllic thing. But what it doesn't show you is what it takes to make this happen, which is a lot, particularly in Wisconsin. Grape growing is almost all hand labor. There are very few things that we do by machine. All of the plants get visited on average six to seven times a growing season, and sometimes the visit's very long, sometimes it's very short, but what it boils down to is there is a lot of time spent in growing grapes, particularly in growing good-quality grapes. So this is the idyllic picture most of us have in our brains for growing grapes. This is the reality of it. [laughter] This is what winter is here. And this is what defines, really, what you can get away with in terms of growing grapes in this state. Wine grapes, for the most part, the good ones, are not very cold hardy, and as you know it gets really, really cold here in the summer, or in the winter, so we're restricted in what we can grow with any amount of success by, first of all, winter, which has a tendency to cause a significant amount of bud damage in some cases. 

When it really gets cold, we can actually get trunk damage, particularly on young vines. So that's an issue. And we work around the climate here by growing varieties that will tolerate winter. The first stage in the process of growing grapes in any growing season is pruning. Typically in a spring season about 90% of the prior season's green growth comes off, and this is the longest visit that you do with a grapevine in the growing season. As you can see, there's a lot to remove there, and it's all done by hand. This is all I do, all winter long, really starting in February and all the way through till bud break, which is typically in may, is pruning vines. I do use an electric pruner now, as you can see there, it's hooked up, you can see a cable. Because carpal tunnel can really become an issue. I used to actually prune the whole vineyard by hand, with a regular hand pruner, squeezing. 

Those days are long gone. My arm can't take that anymore. So this is how I spend my spring. It's the first step in the process. Pruning controls my crop volume. Depending on how much I leave behind will largely determine how much fruit I have at the other end. Now, there are a lot of factors that, you know, can play in on that. As the summer goes along, things can go wrong and they almost invariably do to some extent. So I control my crop vine, typically, by pruning. I keep our crop value at somewhere, I target between two to three tons per acre. 

You can get way more than that. The varieties of fruit that we grow will produce considerably more than that if you let them. But I don't. For a couple of reasons. First of all, smaller crops typically get ripe. Large crops always have an issue of the vine just not getting there in the time frame that we have. The back side to winter here, of course, is that our growing season is really, really tiny. So that's the first issue. The other issue is if you have a really, really large crop hanging, and you have a not-so-great growing season, and the vines work very hard to try and ripen that fruit, and then it gets cold quickly after harvest, you have kind of tired vines. Ripening fruit for a vine is hard work. 

So if you go into winter with a vine that's kind of worn out, and then you get one of those winters like we get every now and then, you can actually end up with a lot of dead vines come springtime. I think it was, what year was it, '94, '95, I can't remember what it was. But we had a huge crop the season before that followed by a really, really hard winter. In the springtime, when I started pruning, it was like, wow, I can't believe this. Probably two-thirds of the vineyard was dead to the snow line. It was just gone. So we have to be kind of careful about that. So that's the idea behind pruning. This is incredibly boring work. I mean, it is so, I know, in the springtime, after, like all of us, I get cabin fever, and I'm all set to go out and get outside and work. 

But after about 4,000 or 5,000 vines, it's like, boy, this is not so much fun anymore. >> Especially when you know you still have 3,000 to go. >> Yeah, especially when you have a long way to go. Pruning is just part of it. I have to clean up everything that I cut. That all has to be removed from the vineyard. When I'm done, there are a lot of things that are kind of flopping around, and those have to be tied down properly for the growing season. It's a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. Part of the problem, again, with growing grapes in Wisconsin is that you have to leave pruning till springtime. In California, Oregon, whatever, the minute they get a frost and the leaves drop, they can start pruning, because they don't have this whole issue of winter that we have here. 

So if I open up pruning wounds now, it's disastrous, because the cold will just invade those pruning wounds over the winter and really cause some significant damage. So I have to wait until the thermometer is actually going back on the upswing, which it does in Wisconsin in February, so that's when I start, but it compresses a lot of work into a short window. Anyway, that's springtime. The rest of the summer, after pruning is done and what have you, is maintenance mostly, keeping the vines healthy, and there's a bunch of jobs that we do. Vines don't like to grow, like you see here, with a single trunk and a nice arm going in each direction. They really want to grow as bushes, mostly. So you have to do a lot of maintenance to keep them growing in what is a commercially manageable plant. If you just let them go on their own, they become problematic. We have to tie them. We have to keep the trunks clean. 

They have a tendency to throw shoots constantly. We use own root plants. The plant that's in the ground is also what's fruiting up on top. A lot of vineyards use what are called grafted plants, where what's in the ground is not what's producing the fruit up on top. So those are usually designed to counteract some, either soil nematodes or other issues that present themselves in various growing regions throughout the U.S. Here we use own root plants. At the end of the summer, which was a month or so ago, we harvest. Like everything else we do, it's done by hand. Harvest is an intense amount of work in a very short period of time. Three, four days we like to get our vineyard harvested in, and if we get 30 or 40 people a day, we can usually hit that without too much trouble. 

Again, harvesting is done by hand. As you can see, each harvester gets a yellow bin. Those are called lugs. They hold about 25 pounds of fruit each. As they fill those up-- Whoops, where's my-- There we go. As they fill those up, that fruit, I had this like little-- I feel like a hockey goalie, because the TV guy told me I can't leave my little zone here. [laughter] Have to stay here and kind of point at what's going on. But the fruit gets transferred out of those small yellow lugs into that red hydraulic lifting bin dumper. Sarah, how do I go backwards, back to where I was? There we go. When we do harvesting, all of the initial processing with our fruit, and just as a little note here, in the winemaking process that I'm going to describe to you, we're going to be talking about red fruit. 

We're going to make red wine. Because our vineyard is entirely red fruit. We don't grow any white fruit here at all. I'll explain to you why, if you really want to know. I'm kind of a curmudgeon about white fruit in Wisconsin. Anyway, in the red winemaking process, everything is initially done outside. So what we do is we grab tanks from inside the winery, which you're looking at now, and we take them outside. The first machine that's involved in the first processing that takes place with the grapes involves crushing the fruit. This is our crusher/stemmer. It does exactly what the name implies, is it breaks the berries and removes the stem. 

In one end of the machine goes the stems. I'm in my little goalie area here, if you look in the lower left corner there, out of that port, goes this kind of, yeah, it's like a slurpy in its consistency. It consists of grape skins, grape juice and grape seeds. Wine grapes have lots of seeds, they haven't been hybridized out to eliminate the seeds, because typically, you're not doing this with them. That gets pumped into one of the tanks that we've moved outside. As you can see here, I have tanks stationed outside. And our winery is set up so we actually built a specific area for crushing fruit. It's our crush pad. >> Let's take a break and have you describe this, so we can be drinking, please. >> Sure, okay. 

Sarah wants to pour another wine, so before we continue with the winemaking process-- As I told you, we only grow red fruit. You just had chardonnay, so the obvious question is where did the fruit come from? That came from the Finger Lakes region. We did not grow that fruit. That was wine that we made from somebody else's fruit that they grew. The next wine you're going to have is not that way. This is fruit that we grew. This is Field Three. It comes from Field Three in our in our vineyard. It's 100% millot. Not merlot. 

It's spelled differently. It's an entirely different plant, that's for sure. It's spelled M-I-L-L-O-T. They are fermented dry, again. This is another dry wine, red. Very, very, very, very lightly oaked. I kind of like wave the barrel across the top of the tank when it's fermenting. That's about as much oak as it got. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm not a huge oak guy. I like the taste of grapes more than I like the taste of wood. 

That is reflected in my wine construction. That's not to say there's anything wrong with oaky wines, or wines that have lots of oak, it's just not my preference. That's the wines I make. So anyway that is what you're tasting. That's fruit that comes from our vineyard. So onward. Crushing fruit. Actually, we can go forward from here. Crushing fruit's pretty simple. You know, it's just, this part of the job is pretty simple. 

The machines are really doing most of the work for me at this point. All I've got to do is rake the fruit into the crusher, and it does most of the rest of the work for me. Part of the process is removing leaves. Our harvesters, for the most part, of pretty good. A lot of the people that work for us have been doing it for many, many years, and they know to try not to mix too many leaves in it. Leaves don't taste too good. They're not too good in the mix. If they don't get them all, I grab as many as I can out of the mix at the crusher there. This is the crusher actually working. That's fruit getting augered into the bottom part of the crusher where the actual destemming and berry breaking will take place. 

 So that's not the one I want. Actually, that is the one I want. How do I go backwards again, Sarah? [indistinct] Okay. So crushing and destemming takes place. The slurpy-like stuff goes into a tank, any one of those tanks that are sitting outside, and what have you. At the end of the day, when we're all done with the manual part of the job, I take a sample, take it to the lab and I test the juice for a number of things that are important in the wine making process. The most important one obviously is of course sugar, because that's going to translate to alcohol. There's some other things that are important, less so, but significant nonetheless. We're not going to go into that, because we're not going to get that detailed. At the end of the day, I add yeast to the tank. 

We use yeast that's very specific to winemaking. You could probably use bread yeast, and that sort of stuff, but your wine wouldn't be very good. I have a menu of 20 to 25 different yeasts that are available commercially for producing wine. Each one has its own characteristics and behaviors and flavors. If you take identical fruit and treat it identically in the winery, but use different yeast, you'll have different wine at the other end. So this is where the start of what the winemaker has to do with the end product starts to come into play. Everybody starts with a raw material, but what happens to it afterward, this is the first of the factors where I can actually start to manipulate things, although I'm not a big manipulator. I don't like to mess with stuff so much. Usually within 24 to 48 hours, the yeast is functioning, and simply what it does is converts the sugar that's present in the juice to alcohol. It's pretty simple. 

There are a couple byproducts that have to be dealt with, one of which is CO2, which smells good. If you've ever been around a winery when they're fermenting wine, it's a wonderful smell. In fact, it's extraordinary. One of my favorite times of year mostly because it just smells good. The best description, since most of you, I assume, live in the Madison area, if you go out East Washington Avenue, you get to Gardner Bakery? Yeah, it's a red light you kind of want to get. [laughter] You get to sit there and sniff for a while. Well, it's that kind of yeasty smell with a fresh fruit twist added into it. It's wonderful. So the CO2 is not a big issue. It can be if you let it build up inside the winery, yeah. 

As you know, CO2 is heavier than oxygen, and it will displace what you need to breathe, so you have to be kind of careful on that. But for our fruit, dealing with it outside it just gets dispersed around the property and just makes the place smell good. The other byproduct is not so harmless. It's heat, and it has to be controlled. To some extent, it helps you get some things you need out of the fruit, but if left to its own, it can ruin the wine. Essentially, it will kind of burn it, is what will happen. So we periodically have to cool off the fermentations as they progress. They kind of ride this roller coaster thing of heating and cooling. If you've all done this, you shake up a Coke can, the CO2 will rise. If something is sitting on top of that, it will lift that up. 

Now is where we use a tank here. Actually, where I need to go is way, way back. Ah. In the winemaking process, that CO2 effect will lift the skin and seeds out of the wine, okay, and that's not good. You want to get those skins and seeds back down in the mix for one very important purpose. Remember, we're still talking about red winemaking here. Next time you have a red grape, squeeze it and watch the juice that comes out. It's not red at all. It's not even close, usually. Even with a really dark red grape, oftentimes it's a light pink color. 

Sometimes it doesn't have any color. So with grapes, the pigment is in the skin. You have to somehow get those skins back down in the juice so that that color extraction can take place. That's where that heat will help out, to a point. You don't want to overdo it. So there's a number of ways to do that. You notice all of our tanks have a hand hole at the top. Sometimes it's a great big one. Sometimes it's a little six-incher. What those are typically designed for, aside from adding ingredients in some cases is to allow you to, in some way, to get in on the top and push that stuff down. 

You can manually do what's called a punchdown, some sort of tool, a heavy tool with a big, flat bottom that you can get through the hole and kind of and manually push that stuff down into the juice. It's very inefficient. It doesn't work very well, at least in my experience. Typically, the cap gets so dense that you just can't manage it. So what we do instead, and I've got to step out of the box here just for a second. You notice all the tanks have like a drain port right at the bottom. What I do is hook up a pump and actually here's a pump sitting here with hoses, is pump wine out from the bottom all the way up back over the top and in the top of the tank. You know, you just kind of spread it around, kind of like a splash effect. It's called a pump-over. It effectively does the same thing as the manual mashing of this stuff back down If you do that two or three times a day, for about a half-hour at a shot, you'll effectively get what you want out of the mix. 

So that's a pump-over. So this whole kind of process of heating and cooling, and pumping over takes place for, depending on the wine you're making, and depending on the fruit and how easily it renders up its color, riper fruit is much more good about that than green fruit, six to ten days, depending on the wine. At that point, usually about two or three days prior to the termination of fermentation, or the punching down stuff, I stop doing all that pump-over stuff, because I actually want some separation. I want the skins and seeds to get away from the juice at a certain point. That's when we're going to start pressing fruit. And this is evil work. Yeah. Yeah, this would be an appropriate place to start. So when I'm ready to press fruit, again, I got to step out of the box here, you notice all the tanks are all designed the same way. There's a temperature gauge, and there's a sight gauge on the outside here that the picture isn't showing. 

It's just a clear tube that goes up the side of the tank so I can see volume without having to look inside the top. Then there's obviously a door for me to get inside the tank for cleaning. There's a sample port up on the upper right corner. That's for getting samples for lab work, or a glass of wine for dinner. We already talked about a drain port. That's just for emptying the tank. But then there's this kind of oddly located port. It doesn't show it so well here, but that's situated just below the door of the tank. When I'm ready to start pressing fruit, if everything is working right, it's supposed to, the skins and seeds will separate well from the juice, and I open that port and start pumping wine away. At this point, it is wine, because most of the alcoholic fermentation is done. 

Anyway, I start pulling skins and seeds through that door, or through that port. I know, or I don't know, because it doesn't always work this way, but theoretically at that point you anticipate that all the fluid is below the door, right, and you can open the door without getting nailed. [laughter] Well, I've discovered it doesn't always work as planned. [laughter] Sometimes a bubble develops inside, and as you open the door, the bubble pops. And, man, you can just, yeah, you get nailed, yeah. And this is why we do all the crushing and pressing outdoors. It's a horrendously messy process, and sometimes things go wrong, like bubbles in wine tanks. But the idea behind it is fairly sound in principle. It just doesn't always work out the way you want it to. So, I open the door and what's left inside goes into a press. 

This is simply, you just shovel it out. There's really no other way to do it. It's really hard work. It's like shoveling wet snow all day, for days on end. It's really not a lot of fun. But you notice the prior picture of the press, we use a bladder press; this is a three-quarter ton press. It holds about three-quarters of a ton of fruit when it's full. Okay, go ahead, Sarah, next one. The bladder is inside. Essentially it's just a really stout balloon, is what it amounts to. 

As I load the press with material, the balloon gets crushed. Go ahead. This is the press when it's set up to go. And as you can see here, I have a catch tank for what's going to run off, and the press is empty at this point. It's all nice and clean and looks good. Doesn't look like that about ten minutes later. Anyway, I open the door and start shoveling, and I fill the press and this is what it looks like when it's full. It's actually full up at the top there. The photo isn't doing it full justice here. But up on top there that's full. 

And as you can see, it's actually juicing on its own already. There's some free-run juice coming out of there without any pressure being applied at all. Just the weight on the fruit on what's below it is already doing some crushing on its own. Anyway, you close the lid and then we inflate the bladder with air pressure. It really starts to squeeze, and the result is juice that comes off. Some wineries actually separate the free-run juice and the stuff that was pumped off without any pressing to make a separate wine. We don't. We combine free-run pressed juice and the stuff we pumped off all back together again. We don't really get quite that detailed in our wine making. There's a lot of juice left in that stuff. 

So go ahead. This is what's left when you're all done, and when the press run is finished. It really actually turns it into a pretty darn dry cake. It does a really nice job. The nice thing about bladder presses is they're very gentle. It's an easy press. There's lots of presses in the industry. Some are screw presses, that come down from the top, very hard, and press that way. Some presses are situated horizontally, and they rotate and then squeeze, and then rotate again and squeeze, all in the idea of getting as much juice out of it as you can. Well, I don't get quite that-- I don't need to work it-- [inaudible] it gets composted. 

I don't know who asked the question, but yeah, this stuff just gets composted. It ends up in Sarah's garden sometimes, yeah. The catch is that the seeds are incredibly hard. You could sell them for BBs in a BB gun. They are really very, very hard, and they are very bitter. The one thing you don't want to do in pressing is press too hard, because the interaction of the seeds against each other in a really hard press, actually crack some of those seeds, and then you'll get flavors in the wine that you don't want. We press to about four bars. Any further than that, and you start to get stuff you don't want. That's the pressing operation. We'll get the to filtering in a minute. 

After you're done with primary fermentation, where you made alcohol, you crushed and pressed, now you have a purely liquid product, or mostly liquid product anyway at that point. At that point, its biggest enemy is oxygen. You have to, from there on, keep the oxygen away from the wine. The best example, because we've all done it, you know how you bite an apple, or you peel a banana and you take a bite and you set it down, you do something else, and come back and it's turning brown. Exact same thing happens to wine. It's just fruit juice, you know, and water and alcohol. That's really all it is when you get right down to it. So you always have to keep the oxygen away from it here on. During fermentation, CO2 is taking care of that for you. It's displacing all the oxygen away, so it's not a concern at that point. 

But from now on it is. Anytime you have a tank that isn't full, you have to displace the oxygen that's in the tank. If you have any kind of head space, I use a CO2 Nitrogen mix that I pump into the tank and it displaces the oxygen. But you always have to be on the outlook for oxygen. You can also use, and we do, a potassium metabisulfite, that's an oxidation inhibitor. It's also a bacteriological inhibitor. In most wines, ours included, on the label you'll see it says, contains sulfites. Well, that's that. After this is all done, the wines kind of sit all winter long. The wine making part is done in the fall, because that's when the fruit is harvested. 

In North America, it's always in the fall. The wines just kind of sit all winter. >> They get tapped for dinner. >> They do, yeah, they occasionally get tapped for dinner. They get tapped for dinner a lot, actually. [laughs] Yeah, it's a bonus. One of the advantages of making wine is you get to drink it in a raw state, which is actually much nicer than a finished state, and I'll explain to you why. It has to do with this machine right here. Some things take place over winter to the wine. We cold stabilize our wines. 

We heat stabilize our wines. I'm always monitoring for its health, bacteria-wise. You don't want things growing in the wine that will make it funky. There's nothing that's going to grow in that environment that's going to make you sick. For the most part, the alcohol takes care of that issue for you. But there are things that will grow that will make the wine funky, taste bad, smell bad, what have you. So keeping the oxygen away and the sulfites, and keeping your winery really clean. I mean not just kind of clean. I mean really clean, is really the best antidote for all that stuff. Come springtime, or sometimes summer, or in the case of some of our wines, the next year, you have to start thinking about getting it in the bottle, because you got to sell it at some point in time. 

The last step in the actual mechanical process of finishing the wine is to filter it. When wine starts out in the fermentation process, there's all sorts of stuff in it. It's very cloudy. Even white wine as it ferments, it's almost like milk. There's all kinds of things floating around, pieces of grape skin, there's yeast in there. There's dirt from the vineyard that gets in the mix. But gravity over winter will pull a lot of that out for you. But it doesn't get it anywhere near bottle clean. It will get it fairly nice, but not ready for bottle. So the last step in the actual mechanical part of the wine making is filtration, and this is a standard plate and frame filter. 

You'll find them in beverage industries worldwide, not just wine, beer. Anytime you have a fluid that you need to clarify, these things can be found. Out of the box I go again. Sorry. But you notice there's a port inlet and outlet, and these series of plastic plates. The way the filter works is I select filter pads of the correct grade. When I say grade, that just denotes porosity, to install in between there. We push the wine under pressure through the system. As it passes through the pads, which are typically made of cellulose, depending on the porosity of the pad, you remove either big chunks, or in the case of a polish filtration part of the bottling, you remove really little teeny, tiny chunks. That's the last step in the process. 

Typically we filter wines twice. You usually can't get to where you need to be on one filtration. So the catch, and there is a big catch with filtration, and this is why we drink a lot of wine out of the tap. A lot of that stuff that's floating around in a much more raw wine than what you'd typically get in the bottle smells good and it tastes good. By doing this, you actually don't do the wine any good. You actually do it harm, really, at least to my mind. Some people would argue differently. Filtration is kind of a necessary evil. It makes the wine cosmetically a nice thing, but doesn't do any good in terms of taste, and smell, and what have you. So it's a necessary evil. 

But I filter as loosely as I think I can get away with. In other words, I leave as much stuff behind as I think is going to be all right, that you're not going to get scared away by a cloudy wine. We did try one year, we produced our Dry Red Reserve, which we didn't bring with us tonight, unfiltered. We ran into a lot of-- There's things in the wine and, you know, gravity, it never sleeps. So no matter how clear your wine is, there will always be sediment in an unfiltered wine. And savvy wine drinkers know that that stuff is okay, and they just pour around it. But a lot of people go, oh, there's something wrong with this wine. We met actually an astounding amount of resistance to that. We went back to filtering all of our wines. Anyway, so we just made red wine. 

That's kind of the Reader's Digest, big, chunky version of how you get from the vineyard to a bottle. As I said, we make red wine. The only difference between making red wine and white wine is one step in the process. Remember we crushed and destemmed the fruit at the outset? But we fermented red with its skins and seeds. With white fruit, you would have gone straight to a press. It goes from the crusher/stemmer and into a press, and the skins and seeds are eliminated at the outset. So what you ferment with white, is actually a juice and not that pulpy-like mess with red wine. I already explained why. The whole color issue is not such a big deal with white wine. Pardon? [indistinct] Oh, yeah, because we actually brought one with us tonight. 

It's more rosé than a blush. Actually, this is the perfect time to pour it. We didn't want to short change people that like semi-dry wines, so we brought one semi-dry wine with us. This is going to be the last wine Sarah is going to pour. Of course, appropriately enough, this is Badger Blush. Before you pooh-pooh, I don't drink blush wines, because yeah, the white zinfandel thing, yeah, there are a lot of bad white zinfandels, and they're not good. But this is really a lovely wine, actually. It's really quite nice. It's actually more of a rosé than a blush. But this is an appropriate moment to tell you how that comes about. 

If you take red fruit and treat it in the winery like white fruit, in other words, crush it and press it right away, that's what you get. You get a blush wine, partial color. In the case of this wine, I crushed it and destemmed it and let it cold soak on its skins and seeds for a couple days before I actually started up the fermentation. It was pressed and then the fermentation was started. So we get that color, as opposed to a Field Three that you had at the outset, which was much more red in nature. But, you know, this is a wonderful wine. Even if those of you who only drink dry wines, I think you'll find this a really astoundingly wonderful wine. It's very refreshing and seems to have just the right amount of acidity. It's just a very well-balanced wine. So, anyway, so that's how blush wines are made. 

And the very last step, of course, is you got to get the wine in the bottle. And this is our bottling line. You can see most of it here. There's still some more off to the left here. It's a fully automated system for the most part. Empty glass goes in on one end, and a finished product comes off at the other end. Everything that needs to happen, happens along the way. Our bottling line tilts along at full speed, at about 1500 bottles per hour. We have it dialed down from that to about 1200 bottles per hour. We tried it once at full speed, with two people. 

This is a two-person bottling line. One person works at this end, one person works on the right side, there. The person on the left just dumps empty glass, it's really easy. It's lightweight. Empty cases don't weigh much. The person that works on the right side, and I'm going to leave my box again one last time, this person has to pick wine, those bottles off of that tray, stack them in the case, send the case through the taper, pick up the case at the other end, stack it on a pallet, run back here and grab another case and get over to that station again. It's like Lucy in the chocolate factory with 1500 bottles per hour. You can't keep up with it. So, we have it dialed to a very comfortable pace. That's the last step. 

That's the way the wine gets into the bottle. So, the last thing. I always talk about two last things. Now that we know how wine has gotten into the bottle, we need to know a little bit about what's on the bottle. This is Labels 101. You can learn a lot about a wine if you know how to read a wine label. And most people don't. There's some very, very important information on wine labels. Some of it's just mandatory stuff that's on every bottle, that contains sulfites thing, and the government warning. That's mandatory stuff. 

Of course, you have to give the address of the winery that's responsible. And typically alcohol can be stated in percent by volume, or you can just say table wine, or what have you. There's all sorts of different government things. Typically-- I forgot the name of those things on the right, the bar scan things. >> Barcode. >> Barcode, there you go. But then there's some kind of detailed stuff that's really, really important, and it will tell you how involved the winery really was in making this product. So in the case of a wine where the winery has grown the fruit, fermented the wine, and put it in the bottle, the winery gets the privilege of vintage dating the wine. So there's a vintage date, 2009. Over here it says grown, produced and bottled by. 

You can also put, if you want, estate bottles. That's the same way. It's just another way of saying that same thing, grown, produced and bottled by. But you have to meet all that criteria to do that. It also allows me to designate a viticultural appellation, in other words, where did this fruit come from. You have to encompass all the possibilities of where that fruit came from. So in this case, it's Wisconsin dry red wine. Okay. So that's the "I did it all," "I'm bad" kind of approach to wine making. >> It also gets you a vintage date. 

>> I already said that. >> Oh, sorry, I must've been out of the room. >> So here's the next step. Field Three, the wine that you had, the second wine, the dry red you had, that's a fully, I did it, kind of deal. The next step, next tier down in the system, you notice the grown is gone. Now it just says produced and bottled by. And what that tells you is, I didn't grow the fruit anymore. I bought the fruit from somebody else. I made the wine. I produced it. 

I'm still making the wine. I just didn't grow the fruit for it. So I've also lost the vintage date at this point. You notice the viticultural appellation got real big all of a sudden. It's not just Wisconsin anymore. Now it's the entire United States. Because of the way I buy my fruit, I buy it via a broker, and he sources it from different places. That's what I have to do. The appellation becomes very, very large. If as a winery I contract directly with a grower, let's say you're growing grapes, and we sit down and make out a contract, and you're going to sell me grapes, then I can go back to the vintage thing. 

But I still would not be able to say grown, produced and bottled. I'd be able to vintage date it, because I knew exactly where the fruit came from. I can verify when it was grown, all that kind of stuff. Now there's another tier. This is the one that drives me crazy, and people that approach wine making the way I do. We don't have a sample, because we don't do this. But you will see on some bottles that even the word "produced by" is gone. It will say, in some cases, cellared and bottled by, or vinted and bottled by. Sometimes it will just say bottled by. They don't even pretend to fool you into thinking that they made the wine. 

But those wines, the winery didn't make the wine. They bought bulk wine that was produced by somebody else and put their label on it. Yeah, it's one of those things that just drives you crazy. To my mind, it's almost fraud. >> Well, the real issue is that lots of times they aren't forthcoming with that information. >> Yeah, that's the thing. >> So if you as a consumer, aren't aware or don't understand what produced and bottled means versus grown, produced and bottled, versus cellared and bottled by, or vinted and bottled by, and they don't say to you, well, I didn't really make this wine, I just bought it in bulk and slapped my label on it, and I'm pretending it's Wisconsin wine, because I'm selling it in Wisconsin. That drives us crazy. It's not just a Wisconsin thing. It's everywhere. 

>> It's not just a Wisconsin issue. This is an everywhere issue. The next time you're in a liquor store or grocery store, start picking up bottles. Now that you know what to look for, and see how many of them are just bulk wine that's anonymous. You will be astounded at how hard it is to find a wine where the winery actually made the wine. It's really astounding. One time I went into a store, I picked up ten bottles. I found two that were actually at a minimum produced by the winery. This was just random. I wasn't looking for names that I recognized or anything. 

But that's one issue in our industry that really is troubling, but I don't make the rules. >> Perhaps the most frustrating part about it, though, is that there's no legal differentiation. >> No. >> So you're a winery if you cellar and bottle it as much as you are a winery if you grow, produce and bottle it, by law. >> With the federal government, you are. Mostly, honestly, the federal government, all they want is excise tax. Everything else is kind of secondary. And you know, get your labels with all the mandatory information on it. But mostly all of the reporting I do, both to the federal government and state government, is all about money. They just want to make sure they get their excise tax paid properly, and what have you. 

So that's the Wine Labels 101. So now you know when you're buying wine that's actually produced by the winery or anonymous wine. And in all fairness to this-- This is not fairness. This is another kind of downside to this. Sometimes, when you buy a bottle of wine, bottle A, and you buy wine bottle B, and this is ten bucks a bottle, and this is 15 bucks a bottle, you don't know it, but sometimes it's the same wine in those bottles, yeah, coming out of the same silo in California. It's a little scary sometimes. But it's a marketing thing. It allows huge bulk wine producers in California, particularly when there's overflow and too much wine to get into the pipeline, to disperse their products in a way that isn't so great. But it's part of the industry. >> Did you skip all my slides? >> No. 

I was going to show them corks too, before we go. >> Go ahead. >> I'm just kind of anticipating a question, because I know somebody is going to ask, what about corks? Here's the deal with corks. I'm going to pass these around. Sorry, I'm out of the box again. I can't manage to stay where I'm supposed to, but if you'd just pass these back. [indistinct] Actually, the state is greedier than the federal government. I'm going to toss it. There you go. >> Good catch. 

>> I can't remember. The federal government taxes it by the gallon. I pay about half of what I pay to the state to the feds, or maybe about two-thirds. It's fairly sizable, actually. I pay it monthly, because when you bottle wine the way I do it, when we bottle it, we pay the excise tax. You don't actually have to pay the excise tax until it leaves your facility, technically. But logistically, it's really hard to keep track of it, so I pay it when I bottle it. The state takes it by liter. They're really small numbers when they're laid out, but when you hit the adding machine, they get really big. >> I don't have any idea what the answer to that question is. 

That's your gig. >> We pay thousands of dollars in excise tax every year, both to the state and the federal government. But anyway, the cork thing. There's a number of different ways to seal a bottle. The idea, of course, is going back to the oxygen thing. You want to keep the oxygen away from the wine. So you want a seal that's air tight, or almost air tight. It turns out, you don't want it completely air tight, in some cases. So, there are a number of different ways to do that. The first, of course, you're all familiar with, is just a regular standard cork. 

It's just a piece of tree bark, is what it amounts to. The trees are harvested every seven years, it's a renewable resource, all that sort of thing. It's a very green product. But if fails at an outstanding rate. You know, even very high grade corks have little pock marks in them. None of them are perfect. And in those little pock marks and cavities, and what have you, bacteria can get a foothold. The offending stuff is called cork taint. It has a scientific name that's really, really long. I don't know how to pronounce it. 

I just call it cork taint. It fouls, regular corks, industry wide, they have a rate of about 5%, which is a lot. That's a lot of bad corks out there. So, typically the wine gets consumed long before the cork taint that's present in the cork ruins the wine. That's when a wine expert says oh, this wine's corked, that's he's talking about. It's that cork taint has fouled the wine in some form. Typically, it's evident on the nose first with a funky smell. So, how do you fix this issue with regular corks? The way we do it, is we use a technical cork, which I passed around to you. If you look closely at that, it's actually pieces of cork that are glued together in a mold. The advantages are that the small pieces, when they're cut up, can be sterilized better. 

When they're glued back together in the mold, you eliminate most of those cavities. You notice that's a pretty consistent surface. It's much nicer in that sense. These are better. The failure is somewhere in the range of about 3%, so they're better. Then of course, you've encountered, well maybe not, but if you haven't, you probably will at some point in time, plastic corks. They're cool in that they come in any color that you can think of. They'll custom manufacture them that way. Of course, they eliminate the cork taint issue, because it's a synthetic surface. In that sense, they're very good. 

Their drawback is that if you don't use vacuum corking, they can actually start to sneak back up out of the bottle, because they're so slippery. Yeah, they have a tendency to work their way out sometimes. It's also a petroleum based product. >> It's not very green. >> It's not a green product. So that's the issue with plastic. Actually, they're more expensive than regular corks in the marketplace. The last closure that you will most commonly encounter is screw caps. They work very well in the sense that they are very good at keeping oxygen away from the wine. In fact, they are perfect at it if they're applied correctly, with the proper machinery and what have you. 

There's no issue with cork taint at all. But they have some issues, like every other closure. The first of which is perception. A lot of us grew up, in this crowd, a lot of us grew up in a time when the wines that were sealed with a screw cap, they weren't the high end stuff, that's for sure. Thunderbird, ripple, all that sort of stuff. >> Boone's Farm. >> Yeah, Boone's Farm, they're really stellar products. It's like $5 for a gallon. So, we kind of carry that with us. It's a little tough to get used to, spending $20 on a bottle of wine with a screw cap. 

>> Or going to a restaurant. >> We'll be talking about the restaurant thing in a minute. >> Let me present this for you. >> We're going to get to the restaurant thing, because that's where I really have a problem with screw caps. But going back to the part about the oxygen thing, remember how I told you the idea is to keep the oxygen away? Well, to a point. Apparently, and I'm not a scientist, I don't work in a lab, or what have you. Apparently there's a micro exchange, a little tiny exchange of oxygen outside the bottle with the wine inside the bottle through a natural cork, and to some extent, a plastic cork. Screw caps, because they seal so well, there's no exchange at all. From what I understand, you can actually develop a reductive environment inside the bottle, which for some wines, does not work very well. In fact, it kind of puts the wines off. 

The only way to find out if your wine is going to work in a screw cap is to bottle it that way and see what happens. Apparently at this point in the industry, nobody's figured out why wines go bad in that atmosphere or environment. So screw caps have a drawback, too, in that sense. And the one that Sarah was just mentioning is the restaurant scenario. When you buy a bottle of wine in a restaurant, you're paying way, way, way more than you can buy it for retail. In all fairness to restaurants, that's how they make their money, so that's okay. But for me, when I spend a lot of extra money for a bottle of wine in a restaurant, I want some show for my money. [laughter] So you know, I want somebody to come and pull a cork, and make a thing out of it. If you're in a really fancy restaurant, where you have sommelier or a wine steward, or what have you, they really make a big deal out of it, with the towel over the arm, and everything, and what have you, and it really gets to become a big production. But you know, that's part of what you're spending the money on, right? >> Entertainment. 

>> The click and pour thing, it's not nearly as entertaining. I always kind of feel shorted with that. I just like to know, that wasn't much fun. Then of course, there's the whole issue of, what do you do about tipping on that? [laughter] We at least have some kind of figure in mind for a regular cork pull, but with a screw cap, it's like, oh, what do we do? [laughter] So screw caps really have a problem in the restaurant setting, at least for my taste. That's not true for everybody, obviously. So, that's closure. That's kind of everything that I can think of to cover. That's kind of what I do. For the most part, I really enjoy what I do. I get to work outside in the summer. 

I get to be indoors in the winter. I don't like winter anymore at all. The older I get, the less I like it. My bones hurt in winter now. They didn't used to, but they do now! I enjoy very much what I do. It's a really wonderful way to make a living. It's always different every year, because the fruit is different every year. It's always a new adventure every spring. Crafting wines is always kind of an adventure, like Tom mentioned at the start. I try to manipulate the wines as little as possible. 

I kind of take the approach to making wines as, if you start out with good raw materials, you should have good wine at the other end. That's really true with all wines. Good wine is not made in the winery. Winemaking is kind of a mechanical process. You get good at it by doing it over and over. It's not a skill you're born with. It's not like being an artist, you know, or a brilliant mathematician. Choosing your parents the right way is not going to help you with being a good wine maker. You learn it by just doing it. I've learned through practice that the less I try and manipulate the wines, if I start with good fruit, the better product I have at the other end. 

My job, as far as I'm concerned, is just to kind of, it's kind of like driving, you know? Keep it between the ditches. [laughter] Just kind of get it to go right down the middle. Sometimes it starts to swerve off to the right, and you've got to catch it and correct it and bring it back. Sometimes it'll go to the left. You know, fixing it along the way, that's where winemaking skill comes into play. Usually, when things go wrong with wine in the construction of it, it's almost always evident on the nose at first. Sometimes I can even walk into my winery and know that something's wrong, because there's this faint smell in the air that's off, you know, that's not the way it's supposed to be. Sometimes it's very, very faint, and you have to kind of figure out where it's coming from, and then correct the process. But almost all things that can go wrong in the winemaking process manifest themselves first right here. Honestly, when I'm tasting a large group of wines, oftentimes, I won't even taste them. 

I just prefer to smell them, honestly. Your nose is a much better assessor than your tongue is. The mouth part is the fun part. It's kind of the reward part. But your tongue is really not a very good assessor of wine. Your nose is really, really good, especially if it's had some practice at it. Honestly, your nose memory is astounding. I'm sure all of you remember, 20 years later, somebody will walk by you wearing a perfume that you remembered from so long ago. It's amazing how your brain will click in on that stuff. The same is true with wine. 

Sometimes we'll taste a wine and we'll go, oh, I haven't smelled that in ten years, and here it is in this wine. Your memory bank for your nose is much better than your palette is. It's a much better assessor. So, enough of me babbling. The really, really important thing in the wine business, and making wine and growing fruit, because it all hinges on this, is you've got to sell it. You know, I could be the best winemaker in the world, growing the greatest fruit on the planet, but if nobody knew that, it wouldn't matter. It's kind of like the bear in the woods thing. If nobody hears it, it doesn't matter, right? So we have to sell our products. The only way to sell your products is one, to do things like this, where I come and make you aware of our products. But we have to do it in a larger volume than this, obviously. 

So the marketing part of our business, which is really important, is handled by Sarah. So she's going to get to say a few things here about how we get you aware of the fact that we're making a product that you should go out and buy. >> Sarah Botham: Right. So, we have two ways of marketing our product. The first is, of course, on-site at our vineyard. This is inside our tasting room. It's a really fun place to visit. It's pretty eclectic. It's decorated in sort of an interesting mix of antique displays. >> And car stuff. 

>> And airplane stuff, and keepsake diamonds, and a clean restroom sign up here in the corner. It's a very eclectic and interesting place that is built inside a more than 100-year-old barn that we sort of saved from great ruin and turned into our tasting room. This is our tasting bar. The other way is out the door via wholesale. We have two wholesale distributors that work on our behalf. One is Frank Liquor in Madison, which you may know well. They do an extraordinary job for us. They have worked with us since the year our son was born, which was 1997, our son was born. I remember carrying him into the Frank Liquor office in the little car seat tote thing. Now he's like this big. 

They have done an extraordinary job in growing our business and helping us growing our business, and building awareness, and building market share for us, and helping us locate our wines in many, many retail grocery and liquor stores around this part of the state. Our business has grown exponentially because of them. The other wholesale distributor we have is called Badger Liquor. They're headquartered in Fond du Lac. They serve like the Milwaukee, Fox Valley and northern parts of the state that Frank Liquor doesn't cover. But they have a lovely working relationship between one another, some sort of magical business thing that goes on between them. I'm not sure what it is, but they take very good care of us. As a result, you can find our wines most anywhere you really need to, or would like to. You won't always find all of our wines. We make ten. 

But you will usually find at least a nice selection of three or four, all over the area. So, those are the two ways that wines go out our door. We hold several events each year at the vineyard, one of which has become the most popular, I would say, or one of the most popular, you can't quite see it. It says Vintage Celebration across the bottom. It it held the second Sunday in August each year. It's a celebration of vintage cars and wine. Yes, drinking and driving, but we don't promote it that way. [laughter] We typically draw between 100-150 really beautiful very high-end premier vintage cars and display them against the backdrop of the actual vineyard. We have live music and outdoor wine service and picnic food. It's a really fun wonderful day. 

The proceeds benefit a charity each year. The last few years, it's been the Iowa County Humane Society. I think for ten years prior to that, it was the St. Mary's Infant ICU, which our son spent some time there when he was born. We try to do a little good by doing well by doing good. But we hold lots of events each year this is just an example of one. We do a spring open house and a fall event. We do Mother's Day events and Father's Day events. Lots of live music. And this weekend, for the first time ever, we're doing a Halloween event on Sunday. We've paired with, Halloween just happened to fall on the right Sunday, or Halloween Sunday, Packers have a bye, and we are actually releasing the new vintage of Latitude 43. 

So what would be our 2010 vintage, correct? >> Yeah, you guys didn't know it, but you were guinea pigs. You were the very first to taste this. It hasn't been released yet. [indistinct] [laughter] >> So, we're having an event. There'll be live music, costumes, fun and all kinds of crazy things going on. We do that, actually in an indoor portion of our facility that I sadly don't have a photo of, but we call it the back barn lounge. It's the raw space of the barn that our tasting room is built in, that we turned into a kind of an eclectic, interesting, rustic, fun part of the barn, indoor seating, and there's a stage. It's interesting and fun. So, often in the summer, we have music on the terrace, live music. You can see the view is pretty spectacular. 

I always say come for the wine and stay for the view. Our events gather lots and lots of people most days, especially when the weather cooperates. In the autumn, there is just absolutely nothing more breathtaking than the view from the terrace. This year in particular, it was quite spectacular. Sadly, it didn't last very long, because a big wind came and kind of pushed all the leaves off the trees. >> This was a spectacular year for leaves. >> This is the entry to the barn, into the tasting room. You go up a little ramp. We have picnic tables and you can bring a picnic or you can buy food from inside the tasting room. We don't have actual restaurant service, but we have cheese boards and sandwiches, and you can buy blocks of cheese and crackers, and all that kind of stuff. 

We encourage families to come. You can bring a soccer ball or a volley ball and play in the yard. We just like to have people come and visit. The other part of the marketing that is my responsibility is our packaging and labeling, which has evolved over time to its current state. The logo on our label is actually the cupola from the top of the barn. Lots of people in the early days mistook it for a religious symbol. It's not that. As much as we believe wine is a religion. It is the cupola from the top of our barn. It used to be a much smaller logo in a circle. 

We kind of freshened it up four of five years ago, and made the packaging kind of newer and fresher. You'll see this bottle and this bottle each have pictures of a boy on them. This is Big Stuff Red and Big Stuff Two. This is the same child. He would be our child. He was 13 months old in this picture, and I think about two in this one. But the wine name is called Big Stuff Red. It's named Big Stuff, because his nickname is Big Stuff. He earned that because was born eight weeks premature and he was really tiny, so he was anything but big. His dad nicknamed him Big Stuff. 

So when we went to introduce this wine, we wanted to name a wine after him, and thus it became Big Stuff Red. It is by far our biggest selling wine. It is a semi-dry red wine that's very fruity and big bodied and quite bold. It has almost a cult following. It's very, very popular. You can find it almost everywhere. >> It's perfect chilled. >> Yes, it should be consumed chilled. >> Which is odd for a red wine. >> It's brother wine, or sister wine, as you might look at it, is called Big Stuff Two. 

That's a white wine that we introduced a few years ago, just as a partner to that wine. The others that you see here, we still carry all of them, except Seyval Blanc. >> That was replaced by a chardonnay. >> Latitude 43 replaced this wine last year. So the packaging, labeling, and some of this has evolved over time also. This wine looks a little bit different now. It doesn't have the X on the bottle. It's called Vin 10. But otherwise, they pretty much look like that. I also do all of our media relations. 

The press that you see in the newspaper or on the television, or our social media, is all generated by me and by the people that I work with. That would be me, myself and I. [laughter] And that's where we are. We are awfully glad that you came to listen to us blather on this evening. >> Yes, thank you. [applause]