The fog along the California coast is alive — it flows from the Pacific Ocean up through passes in the protective coastal ranges and into the valleys like a tide. It rises into the hills and breathes before slowly receding to the valley floors and retreating through the mountains, across the sands and into the ocean waters. Toward the north, these fogs nurture the redwoods, and all along the coast, they provide relief from hot daytime temperatures for many wine country vineyards.
The Niner Estate vineyards are near Paso Robles, about 20 miles from the Pacific Ocean. They are protected from the cold maritime winds by the Santa Lucia mountain range that parallels the coastline. One of the valleys the fog creeps through is the nearby Templeton Gap. For over a decade, Niner Wine Estates’ winemaker Patrick Muran has been crafting the Fog Catcher Bordeaux blend that he says is “named after the cool banks of fog we often see drifting over our vineyards on early mornings in the fall.”
Muran grew up not far away, surfing the cold Pacific waves around Arroyo Grande and Pismo Beach, before going on to study microbiology at UC Santa Barbara. He was on a path to a medical career until he took a summer lab analysis job at a winery. “That was my first foray into wine, and I never looked back,” he says. “My whole family is in the medical field, but they told me to ‘Go make wine. You’ll have a lot more fun doing that than what we’re doing.’ So, I stuck with it. That was in 2000, which makes this my 25th harvest. It’s been a great journey.”
The last fifteen of those years have been at Niner Wine Estates. Founder Dick Niner was one of eight children in a West Virginian subsistence farming family. Although he went on to study at Princeton and Harvard and spent his career in venture capital, his roots in the land led him to recognize that farming and winemaking were an integrated pair. From the beginning, Niner worked to treat the land with respect. Today, the Estate’s Paso Robles and Edna Valley AVA vineyards are SIP-certified, which means ‘Sustainability in Practice’ both in the vineyard and at the winery.
With the impact of climate change looming over agriculture, the Niner team’s attention is on healthy vines and resilience. In farming, they compost and use cover crops and organic fertilizer to improve the soil biology and nutrient cycling. In the winery, circularity is a priority, with all water and waste recycled and reused in the vineyard.
Andy Niner, who now leads Niner Wine Estates, shares his perspective. “Sustainability is integrally tied to how good your wine is and how long you can make great wine. I would like to retire knowing the land is healthier than it was when we started, and we didn’t negatively impact the local area — we actually built it up and left it a better place.”
Muran joined Niner early in its development because of its long-term vision of quality. “They wanted to achieve the highest potential for quality out of a new region instead of investing in a more fully realized region like Napa,” he explains. “We run everything we do through the filters, ‘Does this improve the quality? What is the added value?’”
Muran had been moving the winery toward automation and decided that purchasing 36 Bowpeller automated low shear pumps by McFinn Technologies and dedicating each pump to a single fermentation tank offered both quality and value. His highly skilled team would no longer have to move pumps from tank to tank, thus reducing the risk of error, which can be high during harvest, and microbial cross-contamination. The smaller Bowpeller pumps meet that parameter, are more affordable and save energy, effort, water and time lost to routine cleaning and sanitizing.
“We’re using the Bowpeller pumps in an automated system that hooks up a fermenting vessel and sets it onto a schedule we change daily,” he explains. “This lets us match the extraction rate to the tank sizes. The sole function of the Bowpeller pumps is to do automated pump overs for each of our 36 fermenting vessels.”
Muran emphasizes that automated pump-overs work well for Bordeaux varieties because targeting the exact extraction timing can be critical. With a tight window to extract color from these grapes and a limitless opportunity to extract tannins, the Bowpeller allows winemakers to easily adjust the timing and sequences to maximize color extraction while capping tannin extraction.
“Bowpeller pumps fit our scale, are affordable and provide the automation we need to hit that window,” Muran stresses. “We can measure our success with an analytical tool that lets us see the color and tannin extraction curves – it doesn’t depend on guesswork.”
Learn more about how the Bowpeller by McFinn Technologies can help your winery at: https://mcfinntech.com/
