On the Contrary

Vine: We finished up the leaf cover thinning (now two weeks ago) and by the picture you can see how the leaf cover on the morning (cool) side of the vine exposes the grapes to sun for maturing, but in the hot of the afternoon and late evening they get protection from full leaf cover on the afternoon side.  Back to a little wine making/grape growing 101.

There are three things you look at as a grower/vintner to judge the quality of your fruit:  sugar, acid, tannins (flavoids also).  As the grapes ripen the sugar levels increase and the acid levels decrease (making the grapes tasty little morsels for birds).  Different styles of wine making look for different ratio balances, but as sugar increases sooner or later you have to harvest.  This is directly related to temperature and sunlight.  But the ripening of the tannins and flavoids is more a function of hang time.  In a perfect world, they all come together at one time and you harvest.  But if you experience too hot a weather pattern, the sugar/acid balance will be reached before there is full development of your flavoids and tannin ripening.  When it is too cold, the sugar never gets there and neither do the tannins and you have to add sugar (to get optimum alcohol levels for aging) and find away to reduce the acid.

Side note:  The vintner is looking for a certain acid level measured in PH and TA that enhances the fermentation by increasing the extraction of flavor and preventing bad things to grow in the must.  They are also looking for a grape with tons of complex flavors and tannins that are ripe and not harsh.  He/She can adjust acid and sugar (not allowed to add in California, but usually not necessary, but can reduce by adding water), but the flavors are what they are.

The whole idea of growing up here is that we get a longer growing season so it slows down the sugar rise, acid fall, and allows hang time to develop the tannins.  Now hanging fruit too long will get the fruit too sweet (high alcohol content), the acid to low, and the wine with an overly jammy flavor that overwhelms the complexity and subtleness of a good wine.  The ideal is to get them all in the proper balance through nature because there is only so much you can do in the winery.  So all of this leaf cover management and fruit dropping is a way to try to adjust to what nature delivered this year to get the best crop.  We will see in about 4 weeks if I got it right.

Wine: Oh, I have so much to report.  We were off to the Russian River Valley to enjoy great pinot with two other couples (Ron Mansfield and his wife and Mike Ward and his wife).  Ron is a Syrah lover and my vineyard advisor, but he was willing to try pinots if we promised him roast leg of lamb. Carolyn tolerates some wine and ends up our designated driver when we tasted one too many.  Mike and his lovely bride have been oenophiles and their opinions are highly informative although Fran can be a little competitive playing Mexican Train.  Actually Carolyn is more competitive than Fran as indicated by her response to the advice, these games are suppose to be fun:  “Winning is fun.  Losing sucks.”  Maybe not an exact quote.

So I will give you a quick rundown.  Friday we all met in Windsor about 4:30.  Candace and I started out early that morning and drove through Napa and up 29 to Calistoga, enjoying some of the beautiful wineries on that route.  If you are going to stop pick only 3 or 4 and just enjoy the beauty of these great wineries.  We stopped at Dean and Deluca just outside Calistoga for lunch.  Then we cut across the mountains to Santa Rosa, just below Windsor.  Friday night we went to a little restaurant in Healdsburg call Zin.  We had already broken open a bottle of Siduri Pinot we bought at Big Johns (in Healdsburg which is a semi undiscovered great grocery/deli/wine store) and it was delish.  Zin was delightful and had a very good wine list at very reasonable pricess.  There was a very reasonable Hook and Ladder Pinot that went well with everything.  You can peruse the menu for yourself.  Staff, presentation, and quality were excellent.

Saturday we had a plan.  Always have a plan.  It doesn’t mean you can’t deviate, but it gives structure to your day and you can pick some of the better pinot vintners.  Plug the addresses into your GPS and you are off.  Our first stop was Hop Kiln because Ron’s son is the wine maker there.  Chuck gave us a great tour of this beautiful and old winery, along with answering some tough questions on both vineyard philosophy and wine making techniques.  Then we went to Rochioli and tasted a delightful Pinot (estate 2007) and a Sauvignon Blanc.  The lovely lady in the tasting room was a little stand offish at first, but when I discovered her love of cooking and food (and wine to go with it), Katy bar the door.  She described a recipe for wrapping shrimp in angel hair pasta and frying it that required a napkin to wipe the drool off my face.  I was about to ask the woman to marry me when my wife dragged me out of there.

Next up was Hook and Ladder to try their wines.  I love a winery that gives discounts to firemen, not to mention making good pinots.  The retired fireman who owns Hook and Ladder is the guy who established and developed De Loach before he sold it to a French company (Cecil De Loach).   The tasting room was fun and their staff was extremely helpful.  Then we stopped for lunch, somewhere, I am not sure where, and I had a beer and a salad to refresh my palate.  Then it was on to Martinnelli and had a delightful tasting with a pourer who knew terroir.  So you could actually taste the difference in the different soil types.  I bought a 2007 Zio Tony Ranch Pinot.

Finally it was off to Papapierto Perry as a last stop.  This is one of my wife’s favorites and of course her palate never fails.  When we entered the tasting room it was packed so I was waiting patiently for a taste when one of the folks there recognized Ron and waved us in the back, as he said, “away from the bar scene for some real tasting”.  He was true to his word and we had just a wonderful experience there.  By the by, there were some young things there that were being given a private tasting by some of the staff and they were quite exuberant.  Somebody was going to get lucky that night.  Those girls will never know that the real pleasure was some of wines they got to taste.  Oh well, youth is wasted on the young.

Then it was back to the condo in Windsor to grill a leg of lamb (my job), fresh tomatoes, mashed garlic potatoes and I will be damned if they didn’t drink my other bottle of Siduri (would have visited the winery, but there isn’t one, only a processing area and by appointment only).  Desert was something that I don’t remember.  Sunday on the return trip we traveled HW12 out of Santa Rosa, stopping in Sonoma for lunch.  It was a great trip and as Mike Ward always toasts:  It is a great day to be alive.

Carpe Diem

Vine: Sorry for the lateness of this, but there has been just too much to do.  I finish the first round of spraying and I do not recommend my approach.  I am spraying Sulfur DF, and Ralley® with an emulsifier to control powdery mildew.  I have never had any up here, but the conditions are ripe with the cool moist days this June so I usually do 2-rounds of spraying.  Now the reason I say I don’t recommend this approach is that I do it by hand.  See the picture on the left.  I have a 25 gallon spray rig that I pull behind my ATV.  I then walk through reach row and spray both sides of the plants by hand with a hand wand.  For my small vineyard this is a two-day process.  For a young man, he could do it in one day, but I find that if I don’t want to have leg cramps, I will break it up into two days.  Note the Tyvek suit, goggles, gloves, and mask.  I do look quite fetching don’t I?  It can get quite hot out there.  The normal way to do this, which would just take a couple of hours would be to use a tractor with a fogging spay unit.  But the financial investment is about $30 grand and so I make due with what I have.

The second task I finally got done with some help from Ron Mansfield’s crew is the pushing of all the shoots in the Syrah up through the wires, positioning them so they are not falling horizontal, and thinning some of the new growth since the last thinning.  This seems like a simple task, but it can become quite arduous and time consuming positioning the shoots and trying not to break any.  Remember that I told you that for the Syrah, you want about 5-6 spurs on each side of the cardon (either side of T shape of the plant.  The cardon is the horizontal piece of the T.  The vertical piece is the trunk).  From those 5-6 spurs you want two strong, fruit bearing shoots.  The problem is you will get many shoots from many locations that are not optimal.  So you have to go through each plant and thin it down to two well position shoots and then push them up through the wires so the stay fairly vertical and allow your grapes to be open to sunlight and not crowded out by other shoots.  In the process you will get some locations that are not ideal, but is your only choice.  In others locations you may get a shoot that is perfectly situated but does not have fruit.  So it is a balancing act where, unlike financial markets, you try to think long term.  The idea is not to maximize to production this year, but to shape a plant so that in a few years, it is perfectly pruned to produce healthy and well-positioned shoots for many years.  The two pictures I have included show the before and after of a second round of pushing the shoots up through the wires and additional thinning.

At this point, the big work in the vineyard is done.  I will still have to do another round of spraying either next weekend or the following week, but things are pretty much under control now and with most of the shoots now position in the wires (and the Mourvedre and Grenache thinned-same concept of two shoots per spur, but head trained plants (no wires)).  The only real tasks now since the plant can’t out grow my efforts are to thin as the plant grows (cover) and do some positioning on the wires as they grow more slowly.  In other words, the big push is over.  I still don’t know how the set went and will check in about another week to see what grapes were pollinated and growing (set).  I was down at Holly’s Hill which is about 500’ lower in elevation than my vineyard and the set was quite apparent.  I would say my vineyard is about two weeks behind them.

Wine: I had a delightful wine tasting experience this weekend.  All of you wine lovers enjoy wine tasting, but the real learning occurs when you are in the company of other trained palates who will give you their opinions, and especially if you can do flight tasting so you can compare wines side-by-side.  Holly’s Hill, which grows Rhone varietals and buys my Mourvedre, had their annual Holly’s Hill versus the Rhone Valley taste-off.  What they do is a blind tasting with eight wines in two 4-glass flights.  All you know is that you are going to get six southern Rhones and two Holly’s Hill Rhones (Patriache 2005 & 2006). Note Southern Rhones are blends usually of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre, but they can have other Southern Rhone reds blended in smaller quantities.   But you don’t who is who.  So they pour the first four glasses from bottles that are hidden in a paper bag and you are given about twenty minutes to swirl, sniff, and taste, record your findings and discuss with your tablemates.  Then you rank them one through four.  Then the whole gathering gives their comments and we vote for the 1-4 ratings.  Just as an aside, this is not easy because French wines are very complex and tend to really change in your glass so that a first impression is usually a throwaway.  Then we repeat the process for the second flight of four and then you rank all of them, one through eight, attempting to identify which are French and which are the Holly’s Hill.  Finally you find out what each wine is, its cost, and how it was rated by professionals (Robert Parker and others) to see how your rankings matched up.  Josh and Carrie (wine makers at Holly’s Hill) also give you their impressions and their rankings.

When Ron Mansfield and I arrived (Ron is my vineyard consultant and world renowned (no, I am not kidding) grower up here (we were running late because I was late out of the vineyard), the couple we sat with last year had noted we were coming and save us seats.  Now that in it self was a good omen because they have great palates, have traveled extensively in France, and they valued our tasting judgments.  I’ll just ignore that Ron’s palate is way better than mine and I also was a valued team member.  To make a long story short, my one and two picks were the groups two and one pick and my first choice was a 2006 Clos Des Papes ($110) rated 98 by Parker.  My second was the 2006 Patriarche which I would have bet my life was French.  This one has not been rated yet but rumor is Parker did rate it and we are waiting for the results.  So all in all, it was nice to know my palate is still working and the other lesson is that you usually get what you pay for when you buy wines.

I had 24 fresh pacific oysters on ice in my truck, so Ron and I drove over to our friends the Wards, who love oysters and have treated us to them many times, shucked and ate them with French bread and a nice Holly’s Hill Roussanne.  All in all, as Mike would say, it was a good day to be alive.  Carpe Diem.

The Mourvedre is the Block with the Changing Leaves

Vine: Well its over for another year.  The Mourvedre was picked last Saturday, and the pictures tell the whole story. This year it looks like I harvested about 4.9 tons, down from 5.2 tons last year.  I actually increased the Syrah production, but both the Mourvedre and Grenache were down, the Mourvedre down almost .5 tons.  I will have to look at the pictures from last year, but I don’t get it.  Maybe the numbers were off last year.  This is a beautiful time in the vineyard and as you can see from the picture the Mourvedre has already change color and will soon be dropping its leaves.  Meanwhile the Grenache and to a less extent the Syrah is staying green.  I think much of this is that we have not had any freezing weather yet and instead is in the 80’s every day.  Global warming anyone?

The Harvest

In a way, and I know this is a little strange, but I miss my grapes.  You spend seven months, pruning, weeding, watering, thinning, training, managing canopy, dropping fruit, and then finally when they are truly beautiful, they are gone.  Kind of like children.  But unlike children, there will be a new batch next year (unless they come through with some grandchildren and that does not look promising).  I did enjoy savoring their flavor with each walk through the vineyard, and watching them reach the peak of their maturity.  Now all I can do is enjoy the color and watch the leaves fall.  Everything but the Mourvedre is crushed, fermented, pressed, and stored away in oak barrels.  The Mourvedre is fermenting as we speak, and is about a week away from its rest in neutral oak.  So with all that said I won’t be saying much more about the vineyard this year until spring when we start again.

Fall Bounty

Wine: The pictures pretty much tell the story of the harvest and their beginning trip to Holly’s Hill Classique Mourvedre, but I will give you a layman’s tour.  The grapes are picked into half ton wood containers.  They were picked by 9 a.m. and trucked (after weighing) directly to the winery with crushing starting at 10 a.m.  The grapes are destemmed and lightly crushed (not pressed, just breaking the skins) with a rubber drum.  They are then (juice, skins, seeds) pumped into another half ton container (continuous process) where they will be inoculated with about 50 parts per million of sulfites to prevent unwanted yeasts and bacteria and then they will be  rested over night.

Josh Delivering the Grapes to the Crusher/Destemmer

In the morning, Carrie or Josh will test the brix, TA, and pH, adjust acid if warranted, and then add the yeast for fermentation.  Now this is somewhat of an over simplification, but that is the general process.  They may add an enhancer to kickstart the fermentation (just high-octane food to get them going).  Adjusting acid is always tricky because many of us have high TA and high pH.  Think of it this way:  You are trying to establish the very best environment to ferment your wine, prevent infections of bad things, extracting all the wonderful flavors, and getting the right balance of flavors, tannins, acid, and alcohol in the final wine.  This means a balance in the chemistry in the must.  I won’t bore you with the numbers, but the adjustments are to create that perfect chemistry if

Carrie Adding Sulfites, Isa, Marin, and Carrie's Father Tom Cooper - Its a Family Affair - Holly, Carrie's Mother was busy Tending Esme

possible.  As a grower you are always hoping your grapes come in with the magic numbers, but they rarely do so it is left to the magic of the vintners.  But it gets tricky.  For the situation where the TA and the pH are both high, adding acid will lower the pH to the appropriate levels, but raises the TA to levels higher than are optimal.  Some vintners cold soak their wine later in the process to hopefully drop TA crystals out of the wine.  Some just live with it and add a flittle more sulfite to protect a low pH wine from infection.  Okay enough already.

Red wines ferment on their skins (to extract tannins and color) and their seeds.  When the process is complete, Carrie will taste to see if during the fermentation process they have extracted enough tannins, and if not leave them in their macerated state to extract a little more and then they will be pressed off (juices extracted leaving behind the seeds and skins) and then possibly have their sulfite levels adjusted to prevent unwanted infections

Let's not Forget Ron who Planted my Grapes, Advises me Every Step of the Way, Harvests them, and Gets them to the Winery

in the new wine and then its off to neutral oak for about 9 – 12 months.  Once again, a gross oversimplification, but you get the drift.  I will leave the pictures to tell the tale, but note that the whole family works in this process and it is hard work.  But up in the tasting room  is the fruit and bounty of their labors which Ron Mansfield and I did excused ourselves to after delivering my babies and watching them start their journey to fine wine.  Carpe Diem.