Welcome to Inside Winemaking, your ultimate guide for professional winemaking created for industry insiders and passionate enthusiasts alike.
Dive into the world of winemaking with host Jim DeWayne, that's me, a Napa Valley winemaker with skin in the game, as I interview top industry professionals from California and beyond.
My mission is to provide a unique, informative, and entertaining perspective on winemaking. Each episode explores the backgrounds and expertise of winemakers, grape growers, and technical wine pros.
Whether you're a novice or an expert, you'll enjoy first-hand stories and gain insights into grape growing and wine production.
Join me to explore the challenges of winemaking, share valuable insights, and become part of a community of wine enthusiasts and industry professionals. Hey folks, welcome back to Inside Winemaking.
Today's episode is the special 10 year anniversary show.So I started this podcast back in August 2014.I'm recording this in October 2024.So I'm a couple of months late, but you know, harvest.
What I wanted to do today is go over kind of like the top 10, my top 10 thoughts and ideas that I wanted to share from running this podcast for a decade.So no guest on the show today, just myself, but I'm going to run through the top 10 here.
First of all, number one is just a big thank you.This show works because of all the people that have helped me build it and run it and make it fun.So thank you, first and foremost, all the listeners.That's the majority of everyone.
Also to all the guests that have been on the show, the sponsors, everyone that's come to any of the in-person classes in Napa, thank you so much.I really do appreciate it and I enjoy getting to meet any and all of you when possible.
Okay, so number two. Just want to go over some of the numbers from the podcast.This is obviously a real niche show being specifically about winemaking.So it's kind of small fries in the podcast world, but it's been a very big deal to my life.
This is episode number 182.So there's over 182 hours of content, which includes over 175 different guests. And I've taught over 168 people in in-person classes since I started classes in 2017.
And probably the coolest number of all is the number of downloads and listens.So if you think about it in terms of time, it's over 800,000 hours of listening to this podcast. All right, so number three is just the strangest aspect of this podcast.
It's not unique to inside winemaking, but to sit behind a microphone and have this quasi relationship with the listeners, it's very awkward.It's sort of one to many.
I can feel very lonely at times, but when the circle gets closed, when I get to meet people that listen to the podcast and you know, they share with me, you know, what they've learned from the show, what they like and don't like.
It really helps, I think, motivate me and it makes it fun to keep going because it is very weird to sit in front of a microphone, upload a file to the internet and then hope people are going to listen.
As someone who works alone most of the year, and I literally at CVM alone nine months of the year, either in the cave or working out the vineyards,
It's not lost on me that if 200 people listen in a day, I pictured, at least in my mind, going to an auditorium with 200 people and then talking to 200 people.But that's every day, 365 days a year.
So even though I'm talking and I'm not looking you in the eye, I'm thinking about you and everyone that's listening.That's the way that keeps me sane in podcasting in this manner.Okay. Number four, I want to talk about the opportunities.
So let's start with the video course.So these are some of the different opportunities that are available through the podcast.
Obviously, there's just the audio episodes themselves, which are all free and they're all available on the website insidewinemaking.com, anywhere you get podcasts and the Apple ecosystem, all that stuff.Very easy to find these days.
But I also have, there is the Fundamentals of Winemaking Made Easy video course. That was made by Clark Smith, but you can find links to that on my website.Also, you can get a $25 off if you follow that link and use the discount code.
Some of the other opportunities, kind of the main opportunities, are the in-person classes that I teach.So I'm teaching usually one in the winter around February.This is usually just like a one-day class to talk about.
In the winter, I talk about finishing wines.So things like fining and filtering, heat and cold stabilization, preparing for bottling, and bottling.
In all my classes I do some blending and I'll take all the Q&A that people come with but that's kind of the winter class schedule and then in August I teach deep winemaking which is kind of like the premier class for the podcast that's usually around the first week of August.
That's a three-day kind of total immersion winemaking I'm taking a small group, I have to limit that to eight people so that we can all fit into a sprinter van.
Going around to visit different wineries and vineyards and meeting with some of the guests that have been on this show, winemakers and viticulturists, and picking their brain, getting to see their facilities, talking about all their philosophies, their techniques, their equipment.
And we eat really well, too.I have some really nice lunches and dinners, and also I host a couple of blind tastings on that class.
And then that third day of the three-day class is a hands-on day in the vineyards, so grape sampling, processing some of those grape samples, doing the laboratory analysis, talking about fermentation management, doing a blending seminar.
That's a ton of fun.So that Saturday of the three-day class is also what I teach in the one-day class, which is usually offered, kind of called like a harvest prep class that's usually taught in August as well.
And I will teach other classes as needed.I just need to make sure I can get, you know, a good set of people to come out.All right.
Also, you know, because I've built these itineraries for classes, if you ever wanted to bring a group out to Napa, I'm happy to host a group.I can do a two or a three day tour.We can go.
Number five is the opportunities that this podcast has afforded me, which has been really cool.One of the most frequently asked questions I get from listeners of the show is, you know, what have I learned from doing this podcast?
And I think often my answers are fairly disappointing to people because they usually expect like a list of winemaking techniques or procedures or equipment.And I have had some of that.
But I think the most important opportunity that I received from doing the podcast is the sort of the secondary stuff.So learning to make Pinot Noir and Grenache because I was given the opportunity from Naked Wines to build those wines.Territorium.
So working with my partner Ben Matthews to build and grow and sell wine for Territorium.That's been fantastic and it's allowed me to become great friends with Ben Matthews.
It's a rare thing where you can be friends and work together with someone so well.So shout out to Ben.He's one of my favorite people on earth. Okay, other opportunities that the podcast has afforded me is just a bunch of travel.
I mean, I got to go to Michigan a few years ago to the city of Riesling, really impressed with some of the white wines that Michigan is putting out.I think the world has yet to learn about that.Been able to travel to Oregon to do some podcasts.
And then I guess we can jump to the next one, which is what I'm most excited about going forward, and that's traveling to Europe.So this past summer in June 2024, I basically did the deep winemaking class but in Spain.
So I took a group of eight people and we spent seven days touring around.We started in Barcelona and took some day trips out to Penedès and learned about Cava and Corpinat.I have a lot to say about Corpinat but actually I'm not going to say that.
I'm going to have some guests from the Penedès region come be on the podcast and talk about the production and what Corpinat is because I think it's pretty cool.
Okay, so after we did the Barcelona stuff, then we took a train to Rioja and spent five days in Rioja, which was just absolutely fantastic.We got to see two or three wineries each day.
And by see wineries, I don't mean like normal tourist stuff, but we got a good hookup. We went and met with the owners, the winemakers, got to walk in the vineyards and talk about viticulture.
What I don't like in visiting wineries is just going in through the front door and meeting with the tasting room staff.Because being a production guy, I want to know the real story.I want to go in through the back door, the cellar door.
I want to go talk to the people who are actually doing the work.And so that's what I put together on these trips.And in Rioja, It was so cool.
It's such a beautiful place with all the old fortresses and the old wineries and just spectacular wines being made in some very old traditional wineries to some like state-of-the-art brand new wineries which were just fantastic and like amazingly clean.
I ate so much food.I ate a chocolate croissant every single day for 17 days when I was in Spain. I plan on taking groups to visit winemaking regions in Europe every summer.
It kind of has to be June for me because of my life and family and all that schedule.I have to limit this to usually a group of eight so we can get around in one van.
In 2025, I'm planning to go to Portugal to start in the Douro and then to go up to Galicia in northwestern Spain.I'm very excited about
not only the white wines from Galicia, but also just the sort of the dramatic geography and topography up in Galicia.From what I've seen, it's incredibly beautiful.
And I've also had some insiders tell me that's one of the most underrated spots for visiting in terms of wine stuff. So if you're interested in that, please email me and I can get you on the shortlist.Jim at InsideWineMaking.com.
I'll have some more like flushed out details on that when I can get finished with harvest and start to put that together.And that'll be on the website.And then I usually open those spots in January. Okay, well, so that's Europe.
If I can make it happen, I would like to go and visit some of the Northern Hemisphere regions and go annoy the winemakers there, you know, January and February before they're getting ready for harvest.
See, that's a lot of travel, but I am hoping that we can pull that off in the future.Okay, next.Seven.
In receiving email and talking to people and hosting people in classes, I've learned a lot of the hang-ups that novice winemakers have or people, you know, the things that people struggle with as they're learning to make wine.
And one of the goals with Inside Winemaking is always to build a resource, an educational resource for people to be able to learn to make wine.
I'm very proud of the fact that it's free and 99% of the people that interact with this podcast just listen and it's free and that's cool. Meaning the classes are on orders of hundreds of dollars.And so it's not big money.
It's not big money relative to how much money you are going to spend if you're actually going to start making wine.Because it's an extremely expensive hobby.It's a tough business and requires a lot of capital.It's not for everyone.
But for the people that are serious about it, You are my people and I'm very excited to try and help you understand how to make wine.
In doing so, there's some themes that have come up over and over and so I just kind of wanted to spend a couple minutes talking about the things that people get stuck with early in making wine because I think there's some simple solutions and there's some stuff like SO2 that's complex.
But first off is just sourcing grapes. When you start out, a lot of people want to get a hundred pounds and they want to make, you know, five or ten gallons of wine.And that's cool.I'm all for that.
But it's very hard to find a hundred pounds of grapes.Real professional commercial farmers do not want to sell you a hundred pounds.That's a huge pain in the ass for them.Maybe they'll sell you a ton, two thousand pounds.
So when you're starting out, I highly recommend to keep your early stuff small and inexpensive because you're going to make some mistakes and make those mistakes on the cheap.
So starting out with making wine from things like juice kits or frozen must, it's not going to be fantastic wine.Maybe it's drinkable, maybe it's okay, but start small and cheap and do a couple fermentations.
and learn about temperature and fermentation dynamics and get some experience going through an inoculation, watching the dynamics of fermentation, doing your nutrient adds, all that sort of stuff.And then scale up as you can.
I really try and encourage people to get to a barrel.So get to the point where they're getting about a thousand pounds of grapes to make a barrel of wine.Because everything's just, unfortunately, it's easier when you scale up.
Making wine on a small scale is terribly hard.And most of that has to do with the fact that you just have so much oxygen because your surface area of your fermentation is so large relative to its volume.
It's just hard to make good wine at a small scale. Okay, some of the other hang-ups I find from other new winemakers is not understanding how to use SO2 properly, and this is difficult.This is a really hard one.
I think my general advice, and I want to give just the most simple advice I can, it's less detrimental to add to under add SO2 than it is to over add.
If you're adding big amounts of SO2 and you're getting upwards of 150 parts per million in your total SO2, you're going to start to taste that.It's going to taste soapy and metallic, and it's going to get weird.
On the other hand, if you under add SO2, the main problem you're going to encounter is just some oxidation.And that's pretty easy to recognize.That's just acid aldehyde.
is what you're smelling when things are oxidized and it's apples, it's bruised apples.If you're smelling that in your wine, do your best to exclude oxygen and adjust your free SO2 up.
I would say as a general rule of thumb, keeping your free SO2, so specifically free, not total, but free SO2 between 20 and 25 parts per million is pretty cool for 90% of the wines out there.
Obviously there's edge cases like sparkling base wines and Rieslings that are low pH, but anything that doesn't fit that 20 to 25 ppm in storage and at bottling is going to take care of most wines. Extended maceration.
A lot of novice winemakers want to talk to me about should they or should they not do an extended maceration or they often tell me that they're excited to do that.This is kind of missing the fundamentals.
If you're making wine on a small scale or if you're not getting just the most perfect, fantastic, ripe, lovely silky tannin grapes, extended maceration is probably not a good idea. Rule of thumb, press at zero bricks.
That's not fully dry, but press at zero bricks.Don't be afraid to press earlier if your tannins are ripping your face off, if they're coming hard.
But extended maceration is kind of like a, I won't say it's an advanced technique, but it's a technique that's really only useful for really fantastic grapes in the best lots.
Like even at CV, I probably only do extended maceration on about 20% of my best lots of Cabernet. The longer you leave your wines fermenting on skins, the more tannin you're going to extract.
And I've heard a bunch of BS about how extended maceration is going to turn your face-ripping tannins into silky smooth, beautiful wine, and it's not true.You're just going to get more and more tannin in an extended maceration.
So don't worry about that until you're really at a higher level. Next, sanitation.I've seen some funny stuff in visiting people's cellars in regards to sanitation.And a lot of people are, there's kind of two camps.
There's the over sanitizers and the under sanitizers. We all know who you are if you're under sanitizing, that basically means you're just leaving stuff gross, not even rinsed, at least be clean.
And then the over sanitizers are people I think don't have a good understanding of yeast and bacteria.And I'm going to put a little point there, like make sure you understand the difference between yeast and bacteria.
We talk about it a lot in this podcast. I just want to make a point, make it clear, like yeast have a very different function in wine than bacteria and they are not, should never be confounded.They're two very separate things.
But okay, back to sanitation.I think the easiest rule of thumb is if you rinse something and let it dry, it's going to be decently sanitized.
Maybe sanitize is not the right word, but if something is dry, it's never going to grow a biofilm of lactobacillus.You're not going to have microbiological problems if you rinse and dry.So that's the starting point.
And then some people get crazy and sanitize with chemicals, which are important in the right situation.I mean, if you're in a custom crush facility with different wineries and wines everywhere, you have to do a lot of sanitation.
If you're battling Britannomyces, by God, pull out all the stops and sanitize aggressively.You know, when I hear people sanitizing, doing their wine processing, then sanitizing again, And then before they do the next wine processing, sanitizing.
So sanitizing two times in a row.At that point, you're wasting water, you're wasting chemicals.Let's calm down.So rule of thumb here, rinse and dry.I really like things to be dry.
I hang all my buckets, all my hoses, everything in the winery that I can.I orient sort of slopes so water can fall off and things can dry.It's just easy, cheap insurance for sanitation.Okay.
You know, and keeping freeze between 20 and 25 ppm is a good rule of thumb.I do want to address one other thing, and that's molecular SO2.You'll find this in a lot of the literature, in enological books, or some of the stuff you can read online.
There's this fascination that came from old school stuff about getting your molecular SO2 up to 0.8 ppm. because at that point, your molecular SO2, which is the sub-fraction of free SO2 that has the power to inhibit bacteria.
It's not necessarily gonna kill bacteria, but it's gonna inhibit a lot of bacteria, most bacteria.That powerful form of free SO2 is important, but 0.8 ppm means you're gonna have to have a really high free SO2 in most cases.
It's dependent on your pH.The lower pH, the less free SO2 you need, and the more is going to be in the form of molecular SO2.But 0.8, it's too high.
It's getting, you know, if you have a wine with a pH of 3.7, 3.8, then achieving 0.8 molecular is just insane.And I can say that in my 14 years making wine at CV, I have never hit 0.8 molecular on any in time ever.
You know, and I'm dealing with higher pHs, so that's part of the story, but calm down on the molecular 0.8.It's old and it needs to go away. Okay, let's talk about other things that need to go away now that I'm ranting.
I've got a list of three things that I have to talk about a lot because people have questions with and I tell them just don't do it.People are uncomfortable when I say that.Starting off, rehydration nutrients for your yeast.You don't need them.
Maybe they have a place when you're dealing with stuck fermentations or a really high risk fermentation, something with super high potential alcohol.
You know, if you're making rosé with a potential alcohol of 13% and you're inoculating with commercial yeast, by God, you don't need yeast rehydration nutrients.This is oenological suppliers just selling you shit you don't need.
Number two, speaking of shit you don't need, nutrients for malolactic fermentation.Waste of time, I don't think it helps, you don't need them.And the third thing that I really would like to see go away is Velcron.
For those of you who don't know, Velcron is, it's the industry name or the product name for dimethyldicarbonate.This is a preservative that's used usually at the time of bottling to kill yeast.Yeast specifically, not bacteria.
I don't like Velcrin dimethyl dicarbonate because what it does is you dose it into your wine as it's going to the bottling line.
And when I say you, it's not you because you have to bring in a contractor to do this because it's really noxious, terrible, poisonous shit. that has no place in a winery as far as I'm concerned.
And you have to warm it up because at room temperature or cool cell temperature, it could be solid, but you got to warm it up and you got to have a doser.And so this breaks down to water and carbon dioxide and methanol.
And I don't want to be alarmist because I think you can have up to 1,000 milligrams per liter of methanol in your wine. And when you dose Velcron at 200 ppm, you get 100 ppm of methanol in your wine, which is well below the legal limit and all that.
But I don't like putting methanol in my wine.That feels gross.I don't like anyone doing it.And the stuff's too dangerous.It shouldn't be in a winery.There are better ways to manage yeast at the bottling line, like filters.
Okay, let's go to number eight.Invitations.Okay, so this is my invitation to you.And I was a little bit hesitant about this early in the podcast days.
I was really kind of uncomfortable about the wall between my work on this podcast and my work at CV Vineyard. But over time, I've really enjoyed meeting people from the podcast who come to, when they come to Napa, they come to CV Vineyard.
It's fantastic to say hi, to hear your stories, to chat for a little bit.So if you're coming out to Napa, please come out to CV and then let me know.I'd love to meet you.
Like I said before, it's awkward speaking into a microphone and then not having that direct sort of personal feedback.So it's one of my favorite thing when people come to CV and then let me know they're there because of the podcast.
And kind of crazy, but after 10 years, it's a very significant portion of visitors to the winery that come because of the podcast. That was not my intention, but CVs are very supportive of that.Obviously, they want more people to come to the winery.
And so breaking down those walls, come see me, please, or come to one of the classes.A lot of people are worried that they're not have enough experience to come to one of the classes.
But I can tell you that if you just have a basic interest in wine, that's enough.I make the curriculum of the classes very fun.So while there is some technical stuff, it's balanced pretty well and it's a lot of tasting wine.
And so if you're just like a serious wine geek, you'll have a great time too.Or if you're early
in your sort of journey of learning to make wine, don't be afraid that you don't know enough because I've tried to do my best to explain things and take some of the tougher topics like SO2 and fermentation management and nitrogen and make it accessible so people understand how to run clean healthy fermentations and how to run a winery.
Okay, that takes us to our final point, number 10. And this is called Record Your Kids.When I began back in 2014, before I recorded any winemaking podcast, I did practice interviews and I just did them at home.I interviewed my kids.
It was kind of fun to listen to right after we did it.My kids enjoyed it too.They were super young at the time.Second daughter was just born.So I really just, I think my first daughter was about four years old.
And so I have my very first podcast, which is titled podcasting with a four year old.
Those recordings now are some of the most valuable things that I own, physical, which is super cool because having been through a number of fires in Napa and having to leave my house in the middle of the night, you got to think about what stuff you need to grab and there's a certain amount of stuff.
But these files, these audio files that I have, they're a treasure to me.I've continued to interview my kids every couple years and when I'm on my deathbed, that's what I want to listen to.So this is my appeal to you.
If you have children or if you're around young kids, they say funny things, record it.It's different than video.Audio is just more intimate.
I don't know how else to describe it, but you can listen to audio and close your eyes, and I think it's just more rich than video in an odd way, even though there's less information coming out to you.So record your kit.You won't regret this.
And to that extent, I'm going to sign off, say thank you, check out the website insidewinemaking.com, and then I'm going to play a little bit of a clip of that first interview podcasting with a four-year-old.
So everybody, welcome to episode one of podcasting with a four-year-old.Today on the show, we have Emery.We call her Emmy, and she's our four-year-old.I am the dad.So what are we going to talk about today, Emmy?
Florida.And why are we talking about Florida on this podcast?
And are we thinking about maybe going there?Yeah.When?
After camping.I think camping is in 39 days. Pretty close.So it means Florida, our trip to Florida is about a month and a half away, about 45 days away.So are you excited?
Awesome.And tell me why.What are you looking forward to?
Dinosaur World.She shows.
Dinosaur World.Tell me about what that is.
Hey dad, remember when there was a big brachiosaurus sitting behind you and you were looking the other way?And then I said, dad look behind you and then you were like looking behind you and then you looked at it and you were like, ah!
Yeah, because he was licking me.Yeah, that was scary.His tongue was bigger than my whole body.So that's a joke, right?
They're all statues of dinosaurs.OK, thank you, everybody.Thank you for listening.And here's to another 10 years.
