Vine/Wine Friday
Vine: Veraison is about complete now in the vineyard with most of the grapes looking purple. I checked out the Tablas Creek web site and they indicated that there is about 6-weeks from veraison to when they harvest. It is probably more like 8-weeks up here so that would put me around the first of October. It was also good to note that they thought the harvest was about 2-weeks behind the last two years, but the production is up. That is what I am finding up here. Many of my vines are second generation cuttings of Tablas Creek cuttings (Mourvedre, Viognier, Counoise) and most of their cuttings came from Chateau Beaucastel.
Work in the vineyard is really very little. I am trying to get a crew up here to help me thin the fruit and remove secondary growth. I just started a second round of irrigation and this will take about 3 weeks. I drip for about 96 hours in each block to ensure that the saturation zone is down to 4’. One problem I have is that I always think I need to water more than one block at a time, but my water pressure won’t support that. This is probably a good thing because I end up holding back more water than I would normally and the plants appear to do fine. I expect to see A Donkey and Goat (Jared Brandt) up here around the first of September to check on the grapes (Grenache, Syrah, Counoise, Viognier) and get a feel for quantity, quality, and timing for harvest. Holly’s Hill (who buys my Mourvedre) will probably not be up here until late September because the Mourvedre is always late. As always, once the brix gets above about 22° I start sending them weekly updates (I’ll explain about brix in a later blog).
I have included some of my pictures of roses at the end of the rows. I planted them a couple of years ago and they are a beautiful addition to the vineyard. I put them on a separate watering system, but the vine right next to them is piggy backing on the more frequent watering and so the growth is prodigious. Not a route to quality grapes, but one plant at the end of each row is a nice tradeoff for the beauty the roses provide.
Wine: There is always the debate about screw tops versus corks and as I have stated before, I think I have a bias toward corks simply because of the tradition. Screw tops have the ability to truly prevent any oxygen entering the wine which for some, will keep the fruits very fresh. On the other hand many reds require this slow micro oxygenation to mellow the tannins. I was reading from the Tablas Creek web site where they did some taste tests. Jason Haas of Tablas creek commented:
“Overall, the results tended to validate the choices that we’d made, as the whites and rosé tasted brighter and fresher under screwcap (and were generally preferred by the group) while the reds tended to taste softer and lusher under cork (and were generally, though not universally, preferred by the group). I made sure I wasn’t involved in pouring the wines so I could approach the tasting truly blind.”
“Looking back through the notes, I see a few threads that are consistent. The cork, on the positive side, seems to add darker tones to the wine, give a sense of sweetness, and lengthen the finish. On the negative side, the whites and Rosé under cork all betrayed a hint of oxidation. Granted, none of these were meant to aged long-term, but there was a heaviness in the cork version that there was not in the screwcap. The screwcap, on the positive side, maintained a brightness and freshness in everything. On the negative, it tended to shorten the finish and make (keep?) a wine less complex, and a few of the wines under screwcap betrayed a plastic character that I didn’t find appealing.”
The answer here like all things in life, is there is no simple answer. For some wines screwtops are the right choice and most probably for the deep complex reds I love, it is a mistake. So much for arcane thinking about wine.
Carpe Diem