t’s HPM’s FNs. Today on the show: love the wine you’re with.

Believe it or not, Missouri’s a big wine state, but you won’t find Pinot Noir snobs flocking here for tastings. Most of Missouri’s vineyards and wine cellars are relatively young, and so is the cultivation of the state’s official state grape: the Norton. No joke: this is actually the oldest native grape in the country. Around one hundred years ago, Missouri was the second largest wine producing state, but somewhere along the way California became the wine king, and regional Midwestern wineries were sort of left at the bottom of the barrel. Now Missouri is home to almost 400 vineyards that employ thousands of agricultural workers who pick, crush and nurture grapes like the Norton. 60 million dollars worth of Missouri wine is sold each year.

So, what’s a story about wine without a little in your glass?

I met up with local Columbia food and wine writer Samantha Chulik. I thought it would be interesting to talk to her about the humble Norton grape because she found her love of wine in her home state of California...we’re sitting outside at a local wine bar in Columbia, Missouri, and we’ve just opened a bottle of local Norton wine for her to taste.

Most Nortons are Zinfandel like, like a California Zinfandel. They’re fruit forward, but they’re not jammy like a Syrrah. They’re a lot lighter in body than a Cab, but they still are rich, so it will be interesting to see what this brings out.

She gives a few sniffs to the dark purple wine sitting in the bottom of her glass:

Lots of cherry, lots of red fruit, little but of spice. It’s bright, it’s a bright one. Not too much smoke, nothing like that. It just smells like bright red cherries, maybe some fig? And now I will drink it! [Laughing] It’s really soft, in the first sip, but it firms up, and there’s nice acid on the back end, where it’s not too powerful, it’s almost like a pinot!

Chulik lets the glass sit for awhile, and takes her second sip...

It’s really good! It’s surprising. It’s surprising when something from Missouri, which no one really talks about as a wine-producing state is this good! It’s something you could drink on a daily...come home with a steak...even lamb would be great with this. It would be like lamb chops, or something, on the grill definitely, it would be perfect...”

She says after spending some time working for a winery on the West Coast, she realized how much agriculture goes into wine. It’s not just pretty bottles on a shelf...

I have utter admiration for them, because it’s a really hard job and you have to be out in the elements all the time just for us to have a pleasant glass of wine to calm our nerves or something. What it takes to have a glass of wine with your meal.

[GRAPE HARVESTER UP]

A week before my conversation over Norton wine with Samantha Chulik, I was riding along atop a grape harvester on an unseasonably cold Mid-Missouri morning. Larry Lopez, the man driving the harvester, is bundled up in a winter jacket and gloves. The group of three with him has been up since well before 6a riding up and down the rows of grapes.

Well, we’ll straddle over the top of the rows right here, and what those beater rods will do is shake in sync with each other and they will knock off all the fruit...shake it into the canopy and they’ll drop it into the buckets there on the backside.

The harvester is a big, blue metal machine with a hollow center that shakes rows of Norton grapes. They fall off the vine relatively unscathed. It’s the last harvest of the growing season for Les Bourgeois Winery that harvests grapes from this private vineyard. It’s the third largest winery in the state, and it’s just about fifteen minutes west of Columbia.

After four hours of harvesting, the bins of grapes are trucked down to a flatbed truck, the head wine maker at Les Bourgeois, Cory Bomgaars shows up, and we walk the now quiet rows...

Norton is such a challenging grape to work. I think there have been periods in my wine making career where it wasn’t one of my favorite grapes to drink. What I’ve noticed across our industry over the last five to ten years is we’ve really improved the viticulture and we’ve really improved our wine making techniques in Norton. So, Norton has sort of moved from one of these grapes I’ve worked with and made the best quality wine I could out of to something that I’ve actually gotten behind a lot stronger and enjoyed drinking Norton and making wine out of Norton ten fold more than I did ten years ago.

Bomgaars says fifteen years ago, Norton wine just wasn’t balanced enough; too much acidity, too much of a vegetative taste. But, there was still a demand for the wine, but not enough vineyards had the grapes, so whatever was available, at any quality, was purchased and turned into wine.

Let’s say there are fifteen people who could make Norton, only two of them every vintage would have great Nortons. The rest of them would be mediocre. I think what we’ve done is there are thirty wineries making good Norton, and twenty of them are making great Nortons every year. And a lot of that has been with collaboration between wine makers and grape growers.

Right now, there’s not much a difference in taste throughout the Mid-Missouri growing region, but ten years from now, as techniques continue to improve, wine from St. James might have distinct notes from Bomgaars’s wine in the Rocheport area.
We have some Norton that we worked on from last week that we’re bringing out from the tank back out to the press, so today we’ll be able to see the whole cycle, so which will be sort of cool.

A twenty minute drive from this vineyard is the Les Bourgeois winery where the grapes are brought to be destemmed, crushed, fermented and aged…the scent of the facility is intoxicating; grapes and scent of fermentation fill the air.

[BREATHES IN] Yeah, you can smell wine fermenting you can smell the grapes being processed…

[AMBI OF WINE MAKING lots of machine noises, etc.]

This is Bomgaars’s first harvest in a new processing facility that brought the winery’s production up from twenty thousand gallons of wine to over one hundred thousand. It’s a huge building with over a dozen wine tanks inside of varying sizes. One is big, round and white—they call it Moby.

Outside you can’t miss two grape crushers—if you imagine what an over sized top-of-the-line espresso machine might look like—this is it, they’re massive, stainless steel, made in Italy…really expensive. It has a cylinder that holds the grapes…it rotates over and over and the juice falls below and is pumped into the tank room.

On reds, you have harvest, you have crushing and stemming, then you’d have fermentation, then you’d have some maceration time where you going to leave the grapes in there for a little while and this would be draining and press, this would be your fifth step in processing a wine.

Baumgaars shows me what it looks like inside one of the big tanks…they hold about six tons of grapes. This is not a regular wine tour…I’m up close to this giant vat of grapes and half-way wine, and we’re standing on a narrow catwalk at the very top of the building.

So we’re going to go look inside a tank, open it up.

[TANK OPENING]

Inside there are thousands of round pieces of fruit, no liquid from this angle.

Alright, so we still have some grapes on the skins…the whole reason you put your skins in there is to extract the flavor out of those skins, the problem is once you start fermenting your yeast produce carbon dioxide, the bubbles hook onto the skins and they all float to the top. So, two to three times a day you have to do what is called a pump over or a punch down, you basically have to hydrate those skins.

To demonstrate, Bomgaars takes a long rake-like tool and pushes into the layer of grapes that have floated to the top of the tank, he pushes hard, and the point is to break down into some of the juice…

[GRAPE SUCTION]

What’s amazing throughout this tour of the winery is how big the production process is and how little the ubiquitous wine bottle seems. There’s so much work on the agriculture side that goes into a glass of wine. It takes about 18 months to get Norton grapes into the bottle.

Think about capital investment and return on investment and things like that…if we are growing the grapes, you have to grow them for twelve months, you pick ‘em, you have to buy the barrels and all of that, and it could be, from the minute you start paying labor on that crop, it could be 36 months before you get paid on it.

Back outside, the grapes from the morning harvest have come in and they’re ready to go through the entire process you just heard about…and if you’ve ever had a glass of Les Bourgeois wine, here’s something you probably didn’t know: It came into this world with the help of Johnny Cash…they put on a cd, and the first song up is Folsom Prison Blues and the music echoes around the airy plant…

[music up]

It’s probably been a fifteen year tradition that every grape that comes into our winery gets Johnny Cash played for it.

[REPORTER: How did that start?]

I have no idea. We probably only had one cd at the time, and it was probably Johnny Cash. It actually works really well because when everyone is working and setting everything up…whoever it overseeing the crush, he has to make sure he’s actually hooked up on the tank and he’s ready to go, and when we hear Johnny Cash it means we’re ready to go. It’s sort of our call to the positions.

[DESTEMMER UP]

Big bins holding Norton grapes are dumped into the top of the destemmer, and the machine neatly separates stems and sticks from grapes. The process sort of sounds like the noise a big hog would make rolling over in its pen. On the side of building, grape harvester Larry Lopez and his team are laughing and smiling as they celebrate their final harvest of the season with a drink, but it’s not Norton. It takes a lot of cheap beer to make good wine. That’s it for Field Notes…For more, visit HPM.org.

t’s HPM’s FNs. Today on the show: love the wine you’re with.

Believe it or not, Missouri’s a big wine state, but you won’t find Pinot Noir snobs flocking here for tastings. Most of Missouri’s vineyards and wine cellars are relatively young, and so is the cultivation of the state’s official state grape: the Norton. No joke: this is actually the oldest native grape in the country. Around one hundred years ago, Missouri was the second largest wine producing state, but somewhere along the way California became the wine king, and regional Midwestern wineries were sort of left at the bottom of the barrel. Now Missouri is home to almost 400 vineyards that employ thousands of agricultural workers who pick, crush and nurture grapes like the Norton. 60 million dollars worth of Missouri wine is sold each year.

So, what’s a story about wine without a little in your glass?

I met up with local Columbia food and wine writer Samantha Chulik. I thought it would be interesting to talk to her about the humble Norton grape because she found her love of wine in her home state of California...we’re sitting outside at a local wine bar in Columbia, Missouri, and we’ve just opened a bottle of local Norton wine for her to taste.

Most Nortons are Zinfandel like, like a California Zinfandel. They’re fruit forward, but they’re not jammy like a Syrrah. They’re a lot lighter in body than a Cab, but they still are rich, so it will be interesting to see what this brings out.

She gives a few sniffs to the dark purple wine sitting in the bottom of her glass:

Lots of cherry, lots of red fruit, little but of spice. It’s bright, it’s a bright one. Not too much smoke, nothing like that. It just smells like bright red cherries, maybe some fig? And now I will drink it! [Laughing] It’s really soft, in the first sip, but it firms up, and there’s nice acid on the back end, where it’s not too powerful, it’s almost like a pinot!

Chulik lets the glass sit for awhile, and takes her second sip...

It’s really good! It’s surprising. It’s surprising when something from Missouri, which no one really talks about as a wine-producing state is this good! It’s something you could drink on a daily...come home with a steak...even lamb would be great with this. It would be like lamb chops, or something, on the grill definitely, it would be perfect...”

She says after spending some time working for a winery on the West Coast, she realized how much agriculture goes into wine. It’s not just pretty bottles on a shelf...

I have utter admiration for them, because it’s a really hard job and you have to be out in the elements all the time just for us to have a pleasant glass of wine to calm our nerves or something. What it takes to have a glass of wine with your meal.

[GRAPE HARVESTER UP]

A week before my conversation over Norton wine with Samantha Chulik, I was riding along atop a grape harvester on an unseasonably cold Mid-Missouri morning. Larry Lopez, the man driving the harvester, is bundled up in a winter jacket and gloves. The group of three with him has been up since well before 6a riding up and down the rows of grapes.

Well, we’ll straddle over the top of the rows right here, and what those beater rods will do is shake in sync with each other and they will knock off all the fruit...shake it into the canopy and they’ll drop it into the buckets there on the backside.

The harvester is a big, blue metal machine with a hollow center that shakes rows of Norton grapes. They fall off the vine relatively unscathed. It’s the last harvest of the growing season for Les Bourgeois Winery that harvests grapes from this private vineyard. It’s the third largest winery in the state, and it’s just about fifteen minutes west of Columbia.

After four hours of harvesting, the bins of grapes are trucked down to a flatbed truck, the head wine maker at Les Bourgeois, Cory Bomgaars shows up, and we walk the now quiet rows...

Norton is such a challenging grape to work. I think there have been periods in my wine making career where it wasn’t one of my favorite grapes to drink. What I’ve noticed across our industry over the last five to ten years is we’ve really improved the viticulture and we’ve really improved our wine making techniques in Norton. So, Norton has sort of moved from one of these grapes I’ve worked with and made the best quality wine I could out of to something that I’ve actually gotten behind a lot stronger and enjoyed drinking Norton and making wine out of Norton ten fold more than I did ten years ago.

Bomgaars says fifteen years ago, Norton wine just wasn’t balanced enough; too much acidity, too much of a vegetative taste. But, there was still a demand for the wine, but not enough vineyards had the grapes, so whatever was available, at any quality, was purchased and turned into wine.

Let’s say there are fifteen people who could make Norton, only two of them every vintage would have great Nortons. The rest of them would be mediocre. I think what we’ve done is there are thirty wineries making good Norton, and twenty of them are making great Nortons every year. And a lot of that has been with collaboration between wine makers and grape growers.

Right now, there’s not much a difference in taste throughout the Mid-Missouri growing region, but ten years from now, as techniques continue to improve, wine from St. James might have distinct notes from Bomgaars’s wine in the Rocheport area.
We have some Norton that we worked on from last week that we’re bringing out from the tank back out to the press, so today we’ll be able to see the whole cycle, so which will be sort of cool.

A twenty minute drive from this vineyard is the Les Bourgeois winery where the grapes are brought to be destemmed, crushed, fermented and aged…the scent of the facility is intoxicating; grapes and scent of fermentation fill the air.

[BREATHES IN] Yeah, you can smell wine fermenting you can smell the grapes being processed…

[AMBI OF WINE MAKING lots of machine noises, etc.]

This is Bomgaars’s first harvest in a new processing facility that brought the winery’s production up from twenty thousand gallons of wine to over one hundred thousand. It’s a huge building with over a dozen wine tanks inside of varying sizes. One is big, round and white—they call it Moby.

Outside you can’t miss two grape crushers—if you imagine what an over sized top-of-the-line espresso machine might look like—this is it, they’re massive, stainless steel, made in Italy…really expensive. It has a cylinder that holds the grapes…it rotates over and over and the juice falls below and is pumped into the tank room.

On reds, you have harvest, you have crushing and stemming, then you’d have fermentation, then you’d have some maceration time where you going to leave the grapes in there for a little while and this would be draining and press, this would be your fifth step in processing a wine.

Baumgaars shows me what it looks like inside one of the big tanks…they hold about six tons of grapes. This is not a regular wine tour…I’m up close to this giant vat of grapes and half-way wine, and we’re standing on a narrow catwalk at the very top of the building.

So we’re going to go look inside a tank, open it up.

[TANK OPENING]

Inside there are thousands of round pieces of fruit, no liquid from this angle.

Alright, so we still have some grapes on the skins…the whole reason you put your skins in there is to extract the flavor out of those skins, the problem is once you start fermenting your yeast produce carbon dioxide, the bubbles hook onto the skins and they all float to the top. So, two to three times a day you have to do what is called a pump over or a punch down, you basically have to hydrate those skins.

To demonstrate, Bomgaars takes a long rake-like tool and pushes into the layer of grapes that have floated to the top of the tank, he pushes hard, and the point is to break down into some of the juice…

[GRAPE SUCTION]

What’s amazing throughout this tour of the winery is how big the production process is and how little the ubiquitous wine bottle seems. There’s so much work on the agriculture side that goes into a glass of wine. It takes about 18 months to get Norton grapes into the bottle.

Think about capital investment and return on investment and things like that…if we are growing the grapes, you have to grow them for twelve months, you pick ‘em, you have to buy the barrels and all of that, and it could be, from the minute you start paying labor on that crop, it could be 36 months before you get paid on it.

Back outside, the grapes from the morning harvest have come in and they’re ready to go through the entire process you just heard about…and if you’ve ever had a glass of Les Bourgeois wine, here’s something you probably didn’t know: It came into this world with the help of Johnny Cash…they put on a cd, and the first song up is Folsom Prison Blues and the music echoes around the airy plant…

[music up]

It’s probably been a fifteen year tradition that every grape that comes into our winery gets Johnny Cash played for it.

[REPORTER: How did that start?]

I have no idea. We probably only had one cd at the time, and it was probably Johnny Cash. It actually works really well because when everyone is working and setting everything up…whoever it overseeing the crush, he has to make sure he’s actually hooked up on the tank and he’s ready to go, and when we hear Johnny Cash it means we’re ready to go. It’s sort of our call to the positions.

[DESTEMMER UP]

Big bins holding Norton grapes are dumped into the top of the destemmer, and the machine neatly separates stems and sticks from grapes. The process sort of sounds like the noise a big hog would make rolling over in its pen. On the side of building, grape harvester Larry Lopez and his team are laughing and smiling as they celebrate their final harvest of the season with a drink, but it’s not Norton. It takes a lot of cheap beer to make good wine. That’s it for Field Notes…For more, visit HPM.org.