Curds and Wine - Making Wine and Cheese in San Diego

Interested in making your own wine? Want to try your had at making cheese? Here in San Diego, you need look no further than Curds and Wine, a wine and cheese-making supply shop that friends of ours opened this past November.

Conveniently located on Clairemont Mesa Blvd. just off of the 805, they carry everything you need to get started. They have all kinds of wine kits:



and all of the required wine-making equipment (those red things are corkers):



The also have everything you need to make your own homemade cheese. Rennet and assorted cultures for all types of fresh and aged cheeses are stored in the fridge or freezer and there is plenty of equipment like thermometers, curd knives, cheese molds and books.



In addition to stocking equipment and supplies, Curds and Wine is also set up for people to do wine-making on premises under their guidance and using their equipment.

Soon after they opened, Sherry got a couple of kits started - an Italian Pinot Grigio and an unoaked Sonoma Chardonnay.

The process is quite simple. First, you stir in a little bentonite, a fining agent which will help achieve a clear wine:



Pour in the concentrated grape juice:



Then you top it up with water, pitch the yeast, cover it, and let the yeast do their thing.

After about a week, the wine is ready to be racked off the sediment and into a secondary fermenter:



After racking, you need to wait until fermentation is complete (usually another 10 days) at which point you'll stir in some stabilizers and another fining agent. Then, once again you wait. Depending upon the kit, the wine is ready to bottle in as little as two weeks or as long as five.



Before bottling, the wine gets run through a filter to clarify it. Filtration is optional, but can really make a wine sparkle.



Then it is time to bottle. They have a fantastic bottle filling machine that makes the process a breeze. Corking is also a snap. We had friends visiting on bottling day, so we were happy to get them to do most of the work allow them to participate in the wine-making experience.



To finish the bottling process, Curds and Wine has a label printer for creating your own custom look. We went pretty simple with ours, but you can use any image that you like.



With thirty bottles of each, I think we're set for a while...

Hopped Wine

When Sherry was bottling her second batch of wine (a South-African Chenin Blanc), a crazy idea occurred to me - what if we added some hops? We had a plug of Centennial hops left over from our last batch of beer, so we put some in two of the bottles.

We had no idea what to expect, but it actually turned out pretty well. As is the case with dry-hopping beer, the hops added aroma and flavor, but no bitterness. The taste was intense enough, however, that it was hard to drink too much of it. Rather than drink it as a wine, it is probably better used as a aperitif.

Fallbrook Syrah Harvest

We have some friends who are way more serious about making wine than we are. Recently, they have been starting with whole grapes rather than using juice concentrate from wine kits. This year, they purchased Syrah grapes from a small vineyard in Fallbrook.

Last weekend, the timing was right and we were roped into providing free labor for given the opportunity to experience the grape harvest. We hauled ourselves out of bed at 5:00 (!) and groggily made the drive up I-15 to Fallbrook. The early hour and a bit of cloud cover provided a reasonably cool temperature. Given that the respite from the heat was temporary, we wasted no time getting to the grapes.



We were given a quick lesson on evaluating grape clusters (discard them if they are predominantly dried up and elongated rather than round) and then it was time to grab our buckets and shears and get to it.



What our group of amateur harvesters lacked in talent, we made up for with numbers. A little over an hour after we began, there wasn't a grape to be seen on the vines.



The total came to around 250 pounds of grapes. That was less than had been anticipated (the same vineyard produced four times that amount last year), but the hope is that the juice will be of a higher quality.



With harvesting finished, it was time to de-stem. Fortunately, modern equipment makes this a pretty painless process.



The grapes go in the top:



The stems shoot out the side:



And the grapes themselves funnel nicely out the front.



At this point the grapes were broken up a bit, but not fully crushed. To keep them cool for the trip back to San Diego, they were packed in big plastic buckets with dry ice (further crushing and yeast addition would happen back home).



The freshly pressed grape juice had a very nice sweet, clean taste. We're looking forward to tasting the wine in a few years.

Operation Cheap-Ass Summer White

Sherry has been wanting to make wine for a while now, but I've been reluctant. I just wasn't convinced that we could make a wine that we would enjoy as much as wines we can buy at the same price point. To be honest, I wasn't convinced that we could make a wine that we would enjoy, period!

But Sherry was persistent that she wanted to give making wine a shot. Surrendering to the inevitable, I theorized that the best path to success would be to do a simple, inexpensive white wine. My reasoning was that a style that generally isn't messed with much would be harder to mess up, and that the inexpensive end of the spectrum was more likely to give us a better value than we can buy. Not to mention that if it ended up being a complete bust it would at least be an inexpensive complete bust.

Thus began what I've dubbed "Operation Cheap-Ass Summer White". Sherry bought an Italian Pinot Grigio kit online from Fine Vine Wines, snagged some wine making equipment that a friend wasn't using, and soon had 6 gallons of grape juice fermenting away.

It is now ready to drink, and I'm happy to report that it turned out pretty well. I'd say that it tastes on par with the less expensive whites we buy, which run about 6 or 7 dollars a bottle. And how much did it cost to make? Here's the breakdown:

Italian Pinot Grigio kit: $67
Corks: $6
Shrink wrap capsules (foils): $4
6% sale discount: -$4.60
Shipping: $9

Total: $81.40

We got 29 bottles out of the batch (it was supposed to yield 30, but we lost a bit while racking off sediment at bottling time). That puts the per-bottle cost right around $2.80. Cheap-ass indeed.

Road Trip - Tobin James Barbecue In Paso Robles

Our final stop on our road trip was at Tobin James Cellars in Paso Robles. Our friends Arne and Gisela are members of their wine club, and invited us to go to an end-of-summer barbecue at the winery. Lots of food, free-flowing wine, what's not to like?



In addition to barbecued oysters and ribs, they had a pizza oven going. I want one!



An evening of wine consumption made for an amusing shuttle ride back to the hotel. Here are Arne and Gisela in a not uncharacteristic pose...

Road Trip - Beer Tasting in Sonoma County

Don't mess with my Pliny!

After visiting Sierra City, we spent a couple of days in Santa Rosa with brewery visits at the top of our todo list. We stayed at the Hotel La Rose, which was a great place and also conveniently located.



Located within stumbling distance of Russian River Brewing Company, that is.



When we aren't drinking local San Diego beer, Pliny the Elder holds one of the top spots on our hit list. It helps that the Liars' Club almost always has it on tap. At the source, however, you can get pints of Pliny and its little brother, Blind Pig for $2.75 during happy hour. It's pretty hard to beat that.

You've got to love the first column on their beer chalkboard listing original gravity.



Less to love was the service at the brewery. It is a surprisingly large and busy place, and was understaffed during our visit. Vinnie, I loves me the Pliny, but I think I'd rather drink it at my local.

Less easily obtained in my neighborhood, we also sampled the five Belgian style beers they had on tap. We are acquiring a taste for Belgian yeast, but aren't quite there yet. Our favorite of the bunch was the Damnation.



We weren't in the mood for the food at Russian River (they basically just do pizza), so we stopped into Josef's, the restaurant in our hotel, and shared three appetizers. We had a smoked chicken dish, mussels, and some escargots. All three were very good, but we particularly liked the chicken. They also had quite reasonably priced wine by the glass.

The next day we did a short road jaunt up to Healdsburg to visit Bear Republic Brewery. We liked the atmosphere here much better than at Russian River.



Their Racer 5 IPA is one of the first aggressive IPAs we ever tasted, and remains one of our favorites today. It was great to have a pint of it on its home turf.



While we were there, we ran into two other couples on similar beer pilgrimage circuits and engaged in some serious beer-geek conversation.

That evening, we again had dinner of appetizers. This time we visited a wine bar called Wine Spectrum just around the corner from our hotel. Our favorite dish was this heirloom tomato soup.



During our Sonoma visit, we also hit up several wine tasting rooms in the area. We were mostly appalled at the trend of the more successful wineries charging more and more for tastings ($10 was not uncommon). We did have a few pleasant stops, however, the best being at Kendall Jackson (right off of the central square in Healdsburg) and Seghesio (a short walk to the edge of town). In both cases the people pouring were both friendly and knowledgeable.