Hungry yet?

Pistachio, Onion, and Hard cheeses – An uncommon combo, but a good one none the less.  This savory pizza is similar to a top-rated pizza at Pizza Bianco in Arizona, which considered by many to be the best pizzeria in the country.

Margherita – Fresh Mozzarella, fresh basil, crushed tomatoes, and our homemade herb oil.

Salami, roasted red peppers, and feta – This one is good…and just works together magically.

We’ve got others in the works, but this is just a sneak peek! 

And the first menu items to be revealed are:

Salami, Wild mushroom, and Blue Cheese – This is one of our richer pizzas and it may find more favor with men than women.  And when I say salami, I’m not talking about jimmy dean Italian flavored sausage.  I’m talking about good, quality salami:

Spicy Pesto Pepperoni – Not too spicy…just a little oomph. 

More to come!

You better cut the pizza into four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six...

I have to start this posting with a shout out to my talented and lovely wife.  If it weren’t for her, our pizzas would be, ummm, less good.  She is the crust master, and the crust is probably 50% of what makes a good pizza.  She wasn’t always the crust master though, so I’ll give myself a shout out here for eating all the experimental crusts that weren’t good enough for human consumption, only husbandry consumption.  I’ll also give one last shout out to our friends Ron and Melissa, who were over for dinner when we served them the single worst pizza we have ever made in our entire lives.  That was a long time ago and we’ve found our champion crust since them, refined our toppings, and have been eating pretty high on the pizza pie hog for many months now. 

Sidenote about the child - Most 20 month old kids probably get to lick frosting beaters or cake beaters, but not mine.  He’s actually licking a pizza dough beater right now.  He’s had many of those.  Never once had a frosting beater.  I wonder if this is related to his refusal to eat hot dogs and chicken nuggets and his insistence on eating expensive cured Italian meats and stilton cheese.  Deep down I am proud that he likes those things, but if he would just take a hot dog once in a while, it’d be so much easier and cheaper. 

Most people have heard of neopolitan pizza.  Neopolitan pizza is actually a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed product in Europe, which means it is like Champagne, Port Wine, Parmesan cheese, Chianti wine, etc etc.  So no one except those in Naples and maybe Sicily can make an actual “Neopolitan pizza,” and no one else can claim to even make a neopolitan pizza.  To make one, you need mozzarella from a special herd of water buffalo, San Marzano tomatoes from Mt Vesuvius, and an oven heated to 905 degrees F (using oak as the fuel).  So it’s pretty tough to replicate, but the high quality and deliciousness are also the reason you see so many “neopolitan-style” pizzas out there.  Our pizza is a neo-neopolitan style of pizza, which originated in New England.  The big difference is in the crust; we use high gluten flour and they do not.

The reason I wanted to write about pizza this week is that I had two experiences with other pizza chains recently.  Last Friday the wife, kid, and I were looking for a place to eat.  The wife wanted to try the new hooters spinoff called Canz.  I did not want to go there but she seemed intent (a joke), so I suggested Punch Pizza.  I knew she would go for that because she rarely gets Punch, on account of most of them being in close proximity to Chipotle.  Despite the gastrointestinal destruction, Chipotle usually wins out for me.  So we went to Punch pizza for some neopolitan-style pizza.  They were both good, but I swear that there was no real difference in taste between the two.  The overwhelming taste was wood fired crust, and that was it.  I thought to myself, this is good, but it’s not what I really want in a pizza.  It also seemed like a cop out to me; no deep thought into topping combinations was necessary.  And it just wasn’t the flavor sensation I was looking for.

My second pizza experience was a ZPizza menu that was delivered to my door recently.   ZPizza is in university square in Rochester.  I looked through the menu and almost every ‘za was some kind of deluxe “featuring” 6 or more toppings.  Most salads I eat don’t have 6 ingredients in them, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get from a half a dozen or more toppings.  Sure, if you shove a lot of things into my mouth at once, it may taste kind of good, but I’m not going to know or appreciate what I’m eating.  It’s more of a pizza smoothie at that point. 

Our pizza philosophy is as such – we make a great crust, give it a little of our homemade pizza sauce, put 2-3 authentic toppings on (which make each pizza distinctive), and then finish with interesting and unique cheeses.  We want to put just enough toppings on that you have to look at your pizza before each bite so that you get and taste a little of each ingredient every time.  These pizzas are not bathing in cheese either.  The cheese is an ingredient as well, flavorful and high quality.  Not everyone will like every pizza, but we hope that everyone will find a few pizzas that they LOVE. 

Over the next week, we're going to release information on some of the pizzas we have been working on. You'll be getting an unauthorized peek at our menu!  Stay tuned.

I’m Sweet on this Wine...

And…….. WE’RE BACK!  Sorry for the long delay in getting a new blog up.  My wife gave me a beautiful new ukulele for my birthday and really I’ve just been playing that.  Seriously.  I’ve managed to put it down for now but I still have sandy beaches and fruity drinks in my head.  And I’d like to keep it fruity by discussing sweetness today.  Sweet can mean so much in wine.  Examples:

This wine is sweet – slang for awesome

This wine is sweet – adjective for sugary

I’m sweet on this wine – Idiom for love

Have some more wine my sweetness – noun for person

This wine has so much flippin’ sugar in it, it’s practically a sweet – noun for thing/candy

She sipped her wine sweetly – adverb for the manner in which she sipped it

As you can see from this little grammar lesson, sweetness is very important in wine.  But what does it mean in practical terms?  Well, when wine starts out it is grape juice, and the sugar level is very high.  A pretty common sugar level, or brix as we in the biz call it, is 24.  So if your grapes are 24 brix, that means that in that in every 100 grams of weight, 24 of those grams are sugar.  The remaining 76 grams is most likely water.  When those grapes are pressed, it makes a sugary solution.  When yeast is added, it consumes the sugar and converts it to alcohol.  If a wine is fermented to dryness, that means the yeast ate the sugar until it was basically gone and yeast have basically died of starvation.  Fermenting to dryness is common in your chardonnays and red wines.  Your sweet wines like Riesling and Muscat are usually fermented to dryness as well, but sugar is added back in after fermentation.  With your really sweet, high alcohol dessert wines, there is a lot of sugar present before fermentation, and the yeast will convert that until the alcohol produced is too much for them to survive and they die from drunkenness (not really).  They die, maybe from drunkenness or maybe not, with a lot of residual sugar leftover which is why those wines can be so sweet. 

It’s tough to know just how sweet a bottle of wine is from the label.  If you are buying sparkling wine it may be easier.  You’ve probably heard brut or extra brut, but don’t know what it means exactly.  What that indicates is the sweetness of the wine.  Here is the chart, along with the grams of residual sugar per liter and % sugar.

Extra Brut 0.6% or less, 3 grams or less

Brut  1.5%, 6 grams or less

Extra Dry 1.2% - 2.0%, 15 grams or less

Sec 1.7% - 3.5%, 20 grams or less

Demi-Sec 3.3%-5.0%, 50 grams or less

Doux 5.0% - 10%, 100 grams or less

And for a quick comparison of some common beverages

Coke – 120 grams sugar per liter

Sprite – 100 grams sugar per liter

Orange Soda – 150 grams sugar per liter

Orange Juice – 100 grams sugar per liter

Milk – 50 grams sugar per liter

From these numbers you can see that even the sweetest sparkling wines are no sweeter than some common beverages you would not describe as sweet.  A sweet white wine like Riesling often contains around 20 grams per liter of sugar, whereas a dry wine like chardonnay is usually between 3-8 grams per liter.  Most red wines are relatively dry, so their sugar levels are in the 3-8 grams per liter area as well. 

Sweetness and people’s perception of sweet varies greatly.  I have learned through many wine tasting and detecting classes that people do actually taste things differently.  If someone hates onions, it’s not because they are lame, it’s because their tongue is weird, i.e. unlike yours.  My Four Daughters associate, Patrick, will choose a Bartles and James over a beer every time.  He’s a self proclaimed daiquiri man.  It’s possible that his taste buds are just geared towards sweet.  Taste is a very personal thing.  Now that you are all armed with this information, I don’t want anyone to go out and act like a humongous jerk to anyone that says “I don’t like Riesling, it’s too sweet.”  I know you’ll want to come back at them with “Milk is twice as sweet as Riesling, you wiener” but you won’t, cause you know better.

2 Minute Pruning Workshop

Patrick and I have been busy in the vineyard this week.  I thought you might like to see a little pruning as we remove the grow tubes.

Zac Efron and the Bible

If you had to describe how blessed and happy you were to someone, how would you do it?  If you are anything like me, you would invoke some happy go lucky things like puppies and kitties and stickers and lollipops.  Maybe some androgynous child with golden curls in a sailors outfit could be playing hopscotch somewhere.  Unicorns could be jumping over rainbows, the music of Jennifer Lopez never existed, and no one ever discovered putting barbecue chicken on a pizza (I’m a pizza purist!).  The bible liked to describe happiness and blessings as well, and there is one particular item they refer to as a blessing over and over.  I’d like to show you some verses so you can see what I’m talking about, but I don’t want to tell you what the great mystery item is just yet, so I will substitute something else really great and cool that brings the world lots of happiness.  Since the Minnesota wine industry is dominated by women, for now we’ll call the mystery item a Zac Efron (or Ricky Martin circa 1998 if that was as good as it got for you).

Psalms 104:14-15 He provides grass for the cattle, and crops for people to cultivate, so they can produce food from the ground, as well as Zac Efron that makes people feel so good, and so they can have oil to make their faces shine, as well as food that sustains people’s lives.

Deuteronomy 14:26, Then you may spend the money however you wish for cattle, sheep, Zac Efron, beer, or whatever you desire.  You and your household may eat there in the presence of the Lord your God and enjoy it.

Psalm 4:7 You make me happier than those who have abundant grain and Zac Efron.

Jeremiah 48:33 Joy and gladness will disappear from the fruitful land of Moab.  I will stop the flow of Zac Efron from the winepresses.  No one will stomp on the grapes there and shout for joy.  The shouts there will be shouts of soldiers, not the shouts of those making Zac Efron.

Zechariah 9:17 How precious and fair! Grain will make the young men flourish and new Zac Efron the young women.

HAHA, I love how that last verse turned out.  If you haven’t guessed it yet, the mystery item is wine!  Wine is all over the bible.  27 times wine is explicitly described as a blessing from God, and 19 times a lack of wine is called a curse.  Now if those verses actually read the way I wrote them, with Zac Efron replacing wine, you would think Zac Efron would be pretty popular with Christians.  Alas, it is not, and I don’t understand that.  There are 40 negative references to wine in the bible, and all but one warn against too much.  The other one tells Christians not to be a stumbling block to other Christians, i.e. don’t drink in front of recovering alcoholics or those that can’t control themselves.  So wine seems to be a gift from God, and an indicator of good and happy times.  Obviously too much gets you drunk and that’s a bad thing, but too much Zac Efron can be intoxicating as well you know.

Let’s not forget that Jesus was also a winemaker.  In John 2: 1-11, Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding.  If wine or alcohol were inherently evil, why would he turn this water into the best wine men ever drank?  Why wouldn’t he turn the dirty water into drinkable water or a sherbet punch fountain?  The head waiter at the wedding said that usually you serve the good wine first and the bad wine when everyone has had too much to drink, but you have saved the best for last.  So Jesus made wine—and he made good wine.  I often wonder how good it was.  I doubt that he was bound by the wine making knowledge of his day—this was probably Opus One he was serving up.

John 15 is an oft quoted chapter, it is where Jesus said, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.“  The analogy is about Jesus being the trunk and cordons of a vine and we the shoots or canes (the new growth that bears fruit).  God the Father is the pruner.   Here is a link to a little grapevine anatomy for those that want a visual: click here.  He did not have to use a grape vine to make this analogy, but he did anyway.  This does not overtly imply that wine is a good thing by talking about a vine, but it’s interesting to note that grape juice did not really exist back in these days.  Here’s why - Grapes are the fruit of choice to ferment because they are the easiest to ferment.  Everything you need for fermentation, the conversion of sugar to alcohol, is present in and on every grape.  There is naturally occurring yeast on the skin of every grape, that yeast eats the sugar in the grape, and you have alcohol.  You do not even need to crush the grapes to start this process, whole grapes can start to ferment on their own.  The only way to stop this from happening is to add a preservative like sulfur dioxide or keep the temperature below 50 degrees.  Neither of these were an option at the time, and it was pretty hot in the Middle East, so any grape juice more than a day old was turning into alcohol.  So if you have 6-8 pounds of grapes, you can either a)eat the grapes right away and probably ralph some up later because you can’t eat 6-8 pounds in one sitting b)make raisins out of the grapes, which is really dumb since clean water is at a major premium in 30 A.D. Israel, or c)make one bottle of wine and become popular with your neighbors.

Wine is one of the pillars of the ancient human diet.  There is just something about wine and alcohol that makes certain human interactions better.  If someone were to ask me if wine had supernatural powers, I would not say no right away.  I believe olive oil does something for the body that science cannot understand.  It is entirely possible that wine may do something for the soul that is not tangible.  Wine is a gift, just like many other gifts we are given that can be abused.  There are certainly reasons to abstain, be it alcoholism or just as a show of faith and dedication.  However, based on the scriptures I have read, I don’t think a potential for abuse means we should not use.  I am told that an abundance of wine is a blessing, and we are meant to enjoy each other’s company over some good food and good wine.  That is what Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery is all about.

Welcome to the Vineyard side of Four Daughters!

Welcome to Four Daughters!

You've heard from Justin, our winemaker, so let me tell you a bit about another side of the winemaking business: viticulture, better known as grape growing. As the vineyard manager, I'm in charge of maintaining the vines, managing the vineyard, and in general producing large quantities of high quality wine grapes.

As a growing vineyard, this is an exciting time for us. Our vineyard has 600 established grape vines, and we have been working hard this spring planting five more acres. This gives us a total of almost 3000 vines to tend, so we'll be busy! Wine grape vines generally produce their first crop during the third growing season, so we have some time before we'll be using grapes from the vines we just planted. Don't worry though, we're working with a number of local growers to provide enough fruit for some delicious wines in time for our grand opening this fall!

Here are a few stats about acres to bottles. An acre of vines in our area usually contains 500-600 vines, depending on how they're spaced, and produces anywhere from 2 to 7 tons of grapes. At an average yield of 3 tons per acre, our 6 acres should produce 18 tons of grapes. Each ton of grapes can make around 60 cases of wine, so our 18 tons of grapes can be made into about 1000 cases of wine, or 12,000 bottles. I know I had always wondered just how many grapes it took to make all that wine, so now you know.

Here in MN, we can't plant the typical varieties of wine grapes that you may be familiar with. Most wines worldwide are produced from vitus vinifera grapes. This includes all of the famous varieties such as Chardonnay, Zinfandel, the Pinots, Cabernets, Reisling, etc. In our climate these varieties have a tough time surviving the winter cold, so we have to plant cold-hardy varieties specifically developed for our climate. These are often variations of our native vitus riparia wild grapes that can be found growing all around the wooded areas of the upper midwest. The University of Minnesota and other cold climate researchers have developed a nice mix of white and red cultivars that thrive in our climate and soil conditions.

In our vineyard, you'll be able to stroll through acres of these cold-climate varietals:

Brianna – One of our favorites, this is a white grape that makes for a sweet, fruity wine

Frontenac – A nice red grape developed by the U of MN

Frontenac Gris – A white variation of the red Frontenac

St. Croix – Another red grape useful alone or in blends

Marquette – A red variety that can be used alone or blended with other reds

Edelweiss – A white variety that works well alone or blended with other whites

These should give us a nice mix to enable us to produce a number of different styles and flavors of wine (sweet, dry, reds, whites, rose, and sparkling). We'll also be keeping an eye out for any new developments in cold climate viticulture.

In addition to the vines themselves, we have also been busy getting the vineyard structure built. If you have the opportunity to drive by our site, you'll see a lot going on, primarily trellis posts in the ground (over 900 of them!). These will eventually form the framework trellis that we train our vines onto to provide the best balance of quality and quantity of fruit while still allowing us easy access for spraying, pruning, and harvesting. Watch for a future blog about types of trellises and why we use what we do.

Now you have a bit more knowledge about the vineyard side of Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery, and about growing grapes in MN. I hope you're all as excited about this venture as we are. We can't wait for you to taste the fruits of our labor!

Patrick Sween

Vineyard Manager

Wine, Year One

Hello everybody and welcome to the Four Daughters wine blog.  My name is Justin Osborne, and I am your winemaker at Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery.  This is the first of what we hope will be a weekly blog which covers our perspective on wines, the winemaking process, wine in general, food, what's going on at the winery, and maybe a little philosphy thrown in for good measure.  I thought I'd take a break from adding an additional 5 acres onto our vineyard to get this blog off the ground.

So I'm guessing you are all reading this because you all kinda like wine.  You are certainly not the first.  Traces of rice and honey "wine" have been found on chinese artifacts dating back 9,000 years.  Today rice wine would be known commonly as sake, and honey wine as mead.  Traces of acid from vinifera grapes has been found in Iranian jars dating back 7,500 years.  What is interesting about this is that there are many different types of grapes and all the traditional grapes whose names you know are most likely vinifera. Examples would be your merlots, cabernets, and chardonnays.  So chances are this wine they were drinking long long ago might not have been that bad. 

Now you can either choose to believe the so called "archaeologists" and "scientists" about where and wine wine came from or you can believe the Greeks.  They believe that this dude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus gave wine to the people as a gift. The Greeks seem to always be in a good mood, so maybe it's better emotionally to believe the same as they do.  If you actually get to the first sentence of the wikipedia link, you will see that in addition to being the god of all things wine, Dionysus was also the god of ritual madness and ecstasy.  Two interesting things, not too unrelated to wine, unfortunately and fortunately (in that order).  Anyway, we hope to be serving up lots of ritual madness and ecstasy at Four Daughters.  If we ever run out of either I will let you know.  I actually have the story of Dionysus on a beach towel.  I was in Greece a few years back, on my way to the beach, and forgot a towel.  So I bought one from a street vendor for 5 euros.  It looked good in the shop, but the second you took it outside, that thing was see through.  I probably would have had more drying capacity with a roll of T.P. 

Thanks to the both of you who read the whole blog to this point (my mom was probably one of the two).  Some intersting topics I'll be covering in the very near future...

The mediterranean diet - Why do people in these regions stay active into thier 90s?  Why don't our doctors encourage us to eat like they do?

Grapes - What makes them the fruit of choice for making wine?

Wine through the ages - The role of wine throughout history.

Vineyard info - Currently under construction.  Our vineyard will have several cool features, including a few things you will not see anywhere else in Minnesota.  We also have some very experimental top secret stuff we're working on.

New equipment - The time is coming where we will be pulling the trigger on some very cool, very nice wine tanks and equipment.  We might, MIGHT, be getting a specialized tank for making that beautiful beverage the french do not want us to call Champagne.

STAY TUNED!!!!!