From Winery Disaster to Top Prize Winner,
The Behind-the-Scenes Saga of Longview's Cab Franc Reserve

by Joel Goldberg

Winemaker Shawn Walters and owner Alan Eaker hold their Best of Class trophy

Only Herculean efforts by winery owner Alan Eaker and winemaker Shawn Walters salvaged Longview's 2005 Cabernet Franc Vintner Reserve from the defective wine scrap heap and turned it into a Double Gold medal winner and Best of Class Dry Red at the Michigan Wine Competition.

Backpedal to early 2006. Eaker recognized his 2005 Cabernet Franc as an outstanding wine that would improve with lengthy oak barrel aging. But practical concerns intervened; the brand-new Longview Winery needed wines to sell and the cash flow that accompanies them. So he and Walters bottled most of the wine after just four months in oak, leaving three barrels to continue aging for a Reserve bottling.

Eaker proved prescient about the wine's quality. Longview's 2005 Cabernet Franc went on to take a Gold medal and win the Judges' Special Award at last year's Michigan Wine Competition, and quickly sold out at the winery.

Back in the cellar, the three remaining barrels continued to improve. Eaker and Walters finally bottled the 65 cases of wine they contained as a Vintner Reserve this Spring, after a total of 18 months in oak. Trying to retain as much natural character as possible, they decided to bottle the wine with no filtration and a very low preservative dose of sulfur. 

Then disaster struck. Longview's tasting room staff opened the first bottles in late May to find them "gassing off", with noxious aromas emanating from the bottle and a light carbonation in the wine.

2005 Longview Cabernet Franc Vintner Reserve

They were wrong. A sample sent to a California testing laboratory quickly confirmed the situation. Less than 1/4 % sugar remained in the wine -- but that was enough for the unfiltered yeast to resume its fermenting ways inside the bottle. Gas from the fermentation process had produced the off-flavors and aromas and, with no place else to go, forced carbonation into the wine.

Eaker and Walters faced a dilemma. They could try to sell the wine as-is, knowing it was flawed. They could give it up as a lost cause and simply throw it away. Or they could attempt to salvage the defective wine by filtering out the yeast and letting the gas escape.

They quickly rejected the first option. "Don Coe [General Manager of Black Star Farms] has said we're at a point in Michigan wine where we can no longer bottle our mistakes," Eaker recalls. "And I have a policy of satisfaction guaranteed -- selling a product that meets or exceeds the consumer's expectation."

Eaker considered throwing out the wine "only as a last resort. We were committed to making the wine a success, not just saying there's a problem and it's a lost cause."

So Eaker and Walters began the arduous task of uncorking more than 750 bottles and returning their contents to a tank at the winery. Then came two rounds of filtration, as they first pumped the wine through an ultrafine filter pad, followed by a micropore membrane.

They knew this would remove the yeast and stop the fermentation. But a more important question remained: had the bottle fermentation, followed by all the additional handling and filtering, irreparably damaged the underlying wine? Only tasting would tell.

"We knew that the problem would be elimiinated," said Eaker. "But we still had to make a decision on the quality of the wine. We didn't want to compromise the quality of something we were going to call Vintner Reserve."

To their surprise, Eaker maintains, the major impact they observed in the highly-tannic young wine was a positive one. "The additional oxygen exposure it received was the equivalent of aging the wine for about another year, making it more approachable, closer to being ready to drink than before," he said. So after another light dose of sulfur, they rebottled the wine.

But the process wasn't without its costs. In addition to the time and labor involved, the filtration and rebottling processes resulted in the loss of about 7 cases of wine, or 10% of the total production.

Were the results worth it? Alan Eaker laughs. "After the Wine Competition, this is a wine with an additional pedigree -- validation by a panel of expert judges."

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