About the Wines
The Trim Stinger
Before he was a winemaker, Simon was a professional windsurfer (Hawaii State Champion in 1992), and now he is an avid surfer. And I already mentioned that I grew up in Hawaii, so the surf culture is very much a part of our lives. Simon’s favorite publication ( and very high on my list too) is The Surfer’s Journal. I was reading an article by an aquaintance of ours, Devon Howard (Devon is a professional longboarder who manages the Patagonia store in Cardiff CA) about the concept of trim and how it occurs in surfing. According to Devon, “Trim happens when board, body and wave are in perfect symphony”. 1 I thought as I read the article, trim can occur with winemaking too. Sometimes everything is just right in the vineyard, and then in the winery and the whole process is “Trim”. I decided then that I wanted to make a Trim wine. I also knew that I wanted to use the word Trim in the name of the wine, but everything that I came up with sounded like a diet drug. I can’t even remember now what some of the early versions were, but none of them were going to cut it.
The 06 vintage was so late and so long that I thought I never wanted to grow grapes and make wine again. My girls were in the truck with me most days at 5:30 am to start a picking crew at one of the vineyards that I managed, and after two months of that it gets pretty old for a 33 year old, not to mention the 2 and 4 year old kids that I was waking up and dragging out the door. I promised them that I would take them to Disneyland when harvest was over. I don’t think we actually made it there until February. I am usually on a beach in Hawaii by early November and we were still picking grapes for our own wine in late October. Bummer. I was sure that nothing about vintage 06 would be trim, but I was wrong.
The Grenache from Ohana was better than it has ever been. In the vineyard it seemed to outshine the other varieties. In the winery it was on fire. This was going to be my Trim wine and I knew it a few weeks before the grapes were picked.
When we put the grapes through the destemmer it was the end of the day, probably around 8 pm, but still light out and everything was sticky from processing grapes all day. Bees and wasps were flying all over the place, and they were very aggressive, landing on us frequently. My dad and I were dumping the grapes from the bin with a forklift into the hopper and sorting them on the first sorting table. This is our usual post when we bring grapes into the winery. My dad got stung three times that night as we put the Grenache through the destemmer. As I worried about him and kept Simon as far away from the action as possible (Simon has had an anaphylactic reaction to bee stings in the past, but we will save that story for another installment) it hit me like a ton of bricks. The Trim Stinger!!!! That’s it!
And so my beloved Grenache went down to the cold room for it’s obligatory cold soak and emerged 8 days later bubbling and foaming. Once we moved it upstairs it didn’t take long to get going. The color and flavors were so good that we took it off skins very early not so much to get it off skins, but to get it off the seeds. Now it sits in French oak and although I’m not sure exactly what will make up the blend, I do want it to be Grenache based. It will be bottled in Spring 2008 and released in the summer.
1 Devon Howard, “Trim Perspectives,” The Surfer’s Journal volume 15 number 2: 10-23.