On the Contrary

Vine: There has been a massacre in the vineyard.  See photo of dropped fruit.  Los Hombres were up here to thin the fruit and the leaf cover for the final push to harvest which is about 6-weeks out. I have explained dropping fruit as focusing the attention of the plant to a reasonable number of grapes to intensify the flavors.  Think about it this way.  The grape’s “brain” is wired by evolution to produce as many children as possible.  There is a certain segment of our own population that does that, but I am not going there.

Now it does no good to deposit all your children (seeds) in one place so the plant is working hard to make as many grapes as possible that appeal to birds.  Birds are wired by evolution with not so great palates, so sweet is sweet to them.  Birds eat the grapes when they are sweet and because of their poor toilet training habits, deposit them all over the place.

Now enter we humans who do have discerning palates, and we want the grapes with the maximum intensity and flavor for our wine and we don’t give a damn about their other siblings.   So we sacrifice the many for the few in a true aristocratic manner leaving the lucky to become the potential for the perfect wine, and the rest wasted on the ground to become raisins for whoever will forage for them.  Yes I get some volunteer grape plants, but then we need to discuss that whole thing of clones versus natural reproduction, and of course rootstock and the casual reader probably has read more than he wants to already.

Leaf cover management is similar.  You want to expose the grape clusters to the sun for ripening and you want to balance the leaf cover so that the plant isn’t spending too much energy maintaining its leaves.  Think of it as the woman who has great attributes but hides them under an unnecessarily gaudy wardrobe.  Remove a few pieces here and there and you have improved the whole picture.

So you want just the leaf cover that is sufficient to support the grape crop.  It is always a big game of balancing.  Balancing irrigation against water demand, balancing number of grapes against quality fruit, balancing leaf cover to fruit load, balancing hot and cool days (you have no control here).  If you get it just right, you have perfect fruit.  Generally you don’t get it right, you just luck into it depending on what Mother Nature provides and then claim credit for it.

This is the last big chore until harvest.  Now we wait and see what this season will bring besides those gluttonous birds to eat the good stuff and not even appreciate it when there are perfectly good raisins for their pleasure on the ground.

Wine: Not much to report this week.  Jared Brandt from Donkey and Goat, and his Dad were up to inspect the grapes.  I asked him what he thought and he said they looked great but that is kind of like when your wife asks if she looks fat in this dress.  The only right answer is that you never look fat honey.  He is starting his harvest on some Chardonnay in the valley, but we both think it will be another month before mine are ready.  Jared foot stomps all his grapes in the French tradition.  The theory is that crushing the grapes that way still leaves plenty of whole grapes and a soft tannin extraction for the fermentation.  I can’t argue with the result.

There is another winery up here called Narrow Gate and they do whole grape fermentation and they also produce a wonderful wine.  The point is that each style of wine making produces distinctive flavors and the fun is learning to enjoy each different style

If you are reading this on Friday, then I am off to Healdsburg and the Russian River Valley for the “great Pinot hunt” for the weekend.  I will report my findings next weekend.

Carpe Diem

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