How Do YOU Bottle Wine? Like a Teutonic Knight.

[Special Post Co-written by Andrew Reetz]

Today, it seems far too seldom that average consumers engage in the production of their food and drink. Sure, it is evident that they are deeply concerned with questions regarding what to buy, where to buy it, and how these products can be understood in ways that appeal to health and diet concerns, not to mention the allure of good taste. When going to the store, consumers know more or less what they want. However, do they have the chance to comprehend with pure transparency the food they buy and the methods used to produce it? Whether it be a staple grain like rice or the coveted commodity of wine, it is often difficult to interpret how items that are allowed into consumers’ grocery bags— and their stomachs— are produced.

But what if you were given the chance to participate in the production of your favorite food goods, and in this case, wine? As student researchers and aspiring counterparts of the international wine industry, McKenzie Phelan and Andrew Reetz had the chance over the month of July to take part in the bottling and vineyard processes thanks to a local winemaker at Teutonic Wine Company: Barnaby Tuttle. Barnaby, his wife, Olga, and his assistant, Annie, were looking for workers to help out and Phelan seized the opportunity. Later, Reetz dropped into the exciting mix.



On July 16th Phelan set out on the country roads outside of Portland in search of a barn where Teutonic Wine Company was rumored to be bottling their 2012 red vintages. She drove past a cardboard sign with her name on it and knew she was in the right place. She stepped out of the car and tapped on the giant garage door, hoping that her knocks would be heard over the ambient noise of a hard-working generator nearby. A confused looking man of about her age peered out the door and ushered her in to the (quite cold) barn. She had been warned that it was going to be perhaps less glamorous than her time spent in Parisian wine bars and salons, and that prophecy proved to be true. All around her were cases of empty and bottled wine, forklifts, broken corks, wine stains and the roaring beats of ACDC. She received a warm welcome and was quickly ushered to the first ‘station’, if you will. Here, her job was to grab cases of empty bottles (there are 12 bottles in a case, in case you were wondering) and flip the box upside down in order to the bottles to land right-side-up. Next, she drew her CO2 gun (it kind of felt like a gun, but, more akin to a small garden hose) and sprayed a small amount of CO2 in each bottle to sanitize it just before the wine was put in the bottles.

That’s the next step, and also the step that determines how quickly the vats of wine are emptied. The whole 4 step process can only move as fast as the bottles are filled. Fortunately, Barnaby Tuttle, the winemaker (who is fantastically passionate and tells gripping stories) manned the ‘bottler’ with the honed skill reserved for those who have bottled thousands upon thousands of wines. Only one other actor plays as critical a role as Barnaby, and that’s gravity. All the wines are kept in giant vats (fear not, my friends, they’re not fermented there) suspended above the barnhouse floor by a fork lift and as the wines are bottled, one can see the level of the wine fall little by little. Phelan bottled for over twelve hours straight and swears that by the end of those twelve hours, the level of the wine remained as fixed as the horizon. The wine flows from the vats down through a tube and into the machine where six bottles at a time can be filled to about two inches below the rim.

Next, the full bottles are passed to the person manning the cork machine. Air is sucked out of the bottles while the cork is plunged in. Sounds simple, right? Faux! For some, it might not pose too much of a problem, but for Phelan, however, the corking machine proved to be quite the foe. If the cork is ever so slightly stuck at an angle before being thrusted down into the bottle then it cracks in two and the bottom half of the cork has to be fished out of the bottle and recorked. Standardly, this “cork-folly” might occur in one in every two hundred bottles, but around 10pm, when Phelan was in charge of this step, it was more like one in every thirty. As much as she enjoyed that particular step, it, undeniably, wasn’t her forté and she had to be demoted back to the CO2 gun.

The final process of bottling (not including the subsequent labeling that needs to happen) is putting the wines back in cases and building stacks of the similar varietals. The day that Phelan participated they bottled three Pinot noirs, from different slopes, and in some cases, even different AVAs (American Viticulture Areas) and one Pinot meunier.

As a generous ‘thank you’, Phelan was able to take home three bottles of wine. She had to drink one of them within a few days because it had two corks in it (her fault, naturally, as we’ve already learned that the corking machine was not her friend). It was a very different experience opening that particular bottle of wine that she had spent several hours with. To have been apart of a small step of it’s production really had an impact on the appreciation she felt for the final product and all the effort that had been invested in it. Barnaby shared that the average bottle of wine has had human hands guiding it through its processes at, perhaps, a thousand different times between the vines and the shelf. Even though Phelan was just one of these hands, she felt a deeper connection to the wine and had discovered a new way to value it. Reetz, who also aided in bottling, also spent time in the vines a few days later.

Teutonic wine company sources most of its grapes from producers at other locations around Oregon, but among their most prided grapes are those from just two of their own vineyards: the Alsea grapes and the Wilsonville grapes, which were the vineyards from which Reetz and Phelan bottled the wines. Both feature unique terroirs. Wilsonville is located on the property of a suburban neighborhood where the Tuttles were asked to maintain the vines planted by a previous owner of the residential plot of land. The Alsea vineyard is extremely unique; to the Tuttles’ best knowledge, it may be Oregon’s closest vineyard to the ocean, which means the land lends itself to a host of climate conditions unlike the rest of the the Willamette Valley.

At the Alsea vineyard, located in Benton County, Oregon, the growing season is colder than other locations further east where grapes ripen more quickly. Olga Tuttle mentioned to Reetz that they harvest in late November. This last-minute harvest allows the grapes to ripen slowly without harsh temperatures and excessive heat. Still, the grapes contain high acidity that leads to the making of wines reflecting the styles expressed in Mosel, Germany. This is where Barnaby studied winemaking and fell in love with light, acidic Pinot Noirs, which are what he calls (along with many others) a white wine.

Reetz had the chance to work the Wilsonville vineyard in mid-July, less than an hour from Portland. The task: moving the movable trellis wires up a notch and then ordering the vines. At the base, this is a simple task but this was Reetz’s first time touching the grapevines he had been studying for nearly one year, so it took a little time to get the hang of how the vines grew in relationship to the cordon, or “mother vine” as some might call it.

The cordon, originally a French word meaning “cord,” is a the greyed perennial section of the vine that sprouts laterally from the vine’s main trunk. From the cordon sprout the fruit-bearing canes, also known as shoots. The canes usually grow vertically. See the diagram below (drawn by Reetz):

If you can imagine, the vines’ growth must be managed to allow for optimal plant health as well as for the vintner’s best interest in treating and harvesting along his vines throughout the season. Reetz’s first step was to verify that all the canes were growing upward. If they had fallen out of the movable trellis wires used to contain them throughout their growth, he would rearrange them accordingly so that they were pointed vertically while re-containing them. It was then necessary to slide the wires upward to account for the growth of the vines since the last time the trellises had been maintained in the spring.

Reetz would then make a second pass down the trellis, rearranging the canes in the order that they sprouted from the cordon. This makes harvest easier later on while allowing the vine to remain properly ventilated by the wind, consequently fighting against moisture-seeking molds and vine diseases.

Contain--Arrange--Repeat. In short, the day consisted of this seemingly infinite cycle. Not all viticulturalists work this way, but in Oregon where moisture, even in the summer months, is still relatively plentiful, the vines sometimes require such attention to remain healthy.

Maintaining one’s crops this way allows the harvesting teams to spend less time at the end of the seasons searching the vines for grapes, which translates to more precise harvests with more homogenous grapes. If it takes a full week to harvest the grapes that will be used for a particular wine, the grapes harvested last may have a different composition of sugars, acids, etc. than those first harvested. The vintner makes the decision to pick based on these principles but if the harvest takes too long, his decision to harvest may be all for nothing. Sure, this can be combated by larger harvesting teams or machine-driven harvests. However, considering the economic interests and the scale of Teutonic Wine Company’s small vineyards, this is not necessarily practical.

It was a pleasure to take part in both the bottling as well as the vineyard management side of the wine industry. With wide eyes, Reetz and Phelan took on the sometimes-challenging experience that proved incredibly beneficial for their future careers as well as for their basic understanding of winemaking practices in and beyond the vineyard. There is large thanks in store for Barnaby, Olga, and Annie at Teutonic Wine Company for allowing inexperienced students come out to work for them. As they mentioned, it doesn’t necessarily take a formal education to learn how to make wine. It takes hard work, logic, and you have to know when to just do what you’re told. Reetz and Phelan will remember this lesson in the year to come as they continue their search for experience in the wine industry and beyond.