On the Contrary

Vine: It’s hot, damn hot.  We have had a string of hot stifling days, which is my cue to stay out of the vineyard.  Although the nights still cool down to the 60s, I would like to see a little more even weather (highs in the low 90s and dropping down into the 50s at night).  It slows the grapes down and allows the flavors to develop more fully.  Of course the other argument is that since we had such a cool June (I read an article that the tomatoes out here are a month behind), this weather is letting the grapes catch up.  My own uneducated view on this is that I would prefer more even weather patterns with a very long ripening season, but Mother Nature is not one for moderation.

I get asked a lot how my grapes are doing and the reality is I haven’t a clue.  It is true that we have good leaf development, lots of clusters that will require some fruit to be dropped in August, but as far as how the grapes are developing in terms of flavors, I just don’t know.  And I won’t know till about mid-September.  Verasion (turning red for the red grapes) has not occurred yet.  I did start a round of watering in mid July (about two weeks later than last year).  Based on that, I would say everything looks about two weeks late, but a lot can happen between now and October.

As far as work in the vineyard goes, I haven’t done much.  I did replace about 16 plants, mostly Grenache, but a few Viognier.  I put in a separate drip line for the new plants since they will require more frequent watering than the existing vines.  I also installed a separate watering system for my Viognier.  The Viognier are planted in the upper vineyard with the Syrah, but in an area that does not hold as much moisture and I am seeing if some additional water will facilitate more hardy growth.  Soon I will start some thinning of the leaf cover around the grapes.  This involves pulling off some of the heavy foliage around the grape clusters.  Most vineyards do some cover management.  The idea is to get a balance of leaf growth to grape bunch growth.  You want enough leaf growth to support growth of the grapes, but not too heavy so the plant is supporting leaf development over grapes.  I am always guessing.

Wine: Apparently Mourvedres are finally being discovered by the drinking masses.  The Food and Wine section of last Sundays Chronicle had an article on how California was discovering them.  Of the 800 or so acres in production here in California, one is mine.  For those unfamiliar with the wine, here is their description which I think is fairly accurate:

“These are typically hearty, well-structured wines, with deep red fruit flavors and a leathery edge. They bring the power and fruit of Zinfandel but add extra depth. And yet the flavors can be hard to nail down – brighter berry notes at times, darker hues at others. Trademark leathery, animal nuances can step forward, providing a signature; other times they lurk quietly. It is a difficult grape to comprehend, much less embrace.”

Mourvedre grows quite well up here with our cooler growing season.  It was interesting to note that the first two wines recommended were the 2007 David Girard Vineyard Estates Mourvedre, and the 2007 Donkey and Goat’s Prospector, both El Dorado County grown Mourvedres (vineyard manager Ron Mansfield).  Ron is the one who convinced me to plant my Mourvedres.  I have tasted both and they are quite good.  My claim to fame is that the Holly’s Hill 2007 Mourvedre Classique won a silver medal at the State Fair and has my Mourvedre in it.

For a food recommendation, my daughter was up here last weekend during the hot weather so for lunch I fixed a very simple Vietnamese chicken salad, but I substituted shrimp instead of chicken.  The salad uses Napa cabbage, cilantro, and green onions.  The dressing is peanut oil, fresh limejuice, fish sauce, and a little sugar.  The shrimp you peel and devein, coat in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast in the oven for about 4 minutes.  Then you just combine all the ingredients, sprinkle on some peanuts, and serve with a chilled Viognier.  It was light, refreshing, and just the thing for a hot summer day.  Carpe Diem.

Note the recipe (sans the shrimp) is from William-Sonoma’s Simple Suppers.

Vine: Well, finally things are fairly well in hand.  The thinning is done, along with all of the pushing of the shoots up through the wires, and the spraying is complete so now it is just observe the set (pollination of the flowers) and see if I have robust clusters this year.  Right now things look very promising, but I will know more in another week when I see how the Mourvedre did.  The vines are very green and lush this year and as I sit on my front porch writing this, I see a turkey hen with chicks wandering down one of the rows.  The turkeys have never done any damage in my vineyard so until they do, it is live and let live.

This is the time of year that is really fun in the vineyard.  In the late afternoon or early evening when things start to really cool off, it is a great time to walk some of the rows and just do some minor tending.  You can even do it with a wine glass in you hand.  The other thing I am quite proud of this year are my roses.  They are all in beautiful bloom and it is just a beautiful site.  I have yet to add any water yet (except for the roses which are on a separate watering system).  It looks like my first irrigation will not be until about the second week in July.  For those of you who do not follow my blog on the vineyard, I practice deficit irrigation.

The idea is to let the vines almost reach a point of being distressed before saturating down to the four foot level and then repeating.  This usually adds up to three irrigations a year.  I manage soil moisture by using sensors that are strategically placed throughout my vineyard and they measure soil moisture at one foot intervals down to four feet.  When things start to get really dry at four feet, it is time for an irrigation cycle.  I use drip irrigation, 1-gallon emitters and I usually run them for about 96 hours to get saturation at the four foot level.  The idea behind this, back up by some research by U.C. Davis, is that water stressed vines tend to force more nutrients to the grapes (the kids), so that while the production is down, the quality is way up.  Each year I push them a little harder to see what the limits are and I am still learning.

Wine:  Not much to report on the cooking or wine scene since I was on one of those consulting trips where you work 16 hours a day and then collapse in your hotel room with a sandwich from Subway.  Actually there is a great market in Burlingame call Lunardi’s and I usually get some cooked meat (chicken, ribs, or some other dish), a salad, and a 24 ounce beer, and then collapse while watching Rachel Maddow summarize the day’s events.  But I did pick up a good pinot while I was in San Francisco.  I had visited David Bruce’s winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains a few years ago, happening upon it by accident, and was impressed with his very reasonable Pinots.  This particular one is a 2006 Santa Cruz Mountains and it has a complexity that just lasts and lasts for one of the best finishes in a Pinot I have ever had.  It runs about $32/bottle and for a pinot, this is one great bargain.  I also got a Siduri, which is also one of my favorites, but have not tried it yet.

While I was in San Francisco, we did go to a restaurant called Crustaceans which one of my fellow workers raved about.  It is up on Polk street near the Civic Center.  I found it just okay.  I ordered some tiger shrimp and they made the ultimate mistake of overcooking the shrimp.  I would not go back.  I did find a reasonably priced 2006 Tori Mor Oregon pinot on the menu that was quite nice and soothed my poor palate.  That is about it from Lightner Vineyards.  The temperature on the front porch has dropped to a comfortable 78°, the vineyard looks beautiful in the beginning sunset.  I am a very lucky man.  Carpe Diem.

Note:  The Damn system still won’t let me post photos.  Just once I would like to have an electronic thing that actually worked reliably.

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.

There have been a few hits on my site from those interested in pruning their vines.  Please note that all of the pictures that I post are high resolution and you can click on them and they have ample capacity to be enlarged for a close look at the pruning technique.  These pictures can either be found in past Vine/Wine Fridays (just click on the category on the right) or you can visit the vineyard pictures (mostly from last year). I have also included the picture above to show the budding on a head trained (single stake) grenache. The plant is about 5 feet tall and has six spurs (or seven) evenly spaced around the trunk both vertically and around the circumference.  What you are looking for is that the shoots can grow unimpeded by other shoots and evenly space around the plant (balance).  What you are looking at in this picture is one short spur (last years new wood cut back to two buds) budding out and the flower quite apparent (this years grapes if they are pollinated.  They won’t “flower” until June).  There is also some unwanted growth on the trunk which I will remove once I am sure the other shoots are healthy.  These buds will grow to about 8′-15′ in length.  Okay I feel better now.  I have done my educator duty.  Back to sipping the end product.  Happy Friday.

Vine: Okay so it is Saturday morning.  Such is my schedule lately.  Those crazy contractor people think this is a great time to build stuff in Afghanistan so I have been busy with the how.  But back to the vineyard.  I don’t think Northern California gets spring any more.  It has been cool and last week it dropped down to 29° in the vineyard.  I don’t believe there is any damage because things have not really leafed out yet. The only thing at risk was the Viognier which is the closest to real bud break.  Los hombres returned last Wednesday to finish the pruning of Mourvedre so the pruning is complete, but I still have the debris to clean up in that block.  It is suppose to be 85° tomorrow and if that weather continues, well besides breaking out the shorts and sandals, everything will leaf out.  That is when the plants will be at real risk of frost damage, when we have young tender green shoots.

This is what I call the wild season in the vineyard.  The cover crop of grasses and clovers is getting tall and I would love to mow it to make my vineyard look nice and neat, but these are annuals and they need to germinate if I want a cover crop next year.  The cover crop does several things in a vineyard.  First it holds in the soil on my steep slopes that are subject to erosion.  Second, it provides a habitat for good insects like ladybugs and later, praying mantis.  Finally, the clover actually increases the nitrogen in the soil.  If you are interested (and if you are you must lead a very boring life) there is a whole science around cover crops that you can lookup at U.C. Davis.  I actually bought a whole book on cover crops, but you can save yourself a lot of time and just talk to some of the other growers in the region who know what works and what doesn’t.

So for the near term there is not much to do in the vineyard except watch for leaf out, hope we don’t get a freeze, hunt the ever present and terrifying gopher, and repair any erosion damage from last year.  Once the shoots really start to develop, I will go through and thin them out (remember you only want two to a spur and you are going to get five or six), and for the trellis grapes (Syrah) push the shoots up through the wires.  Probably won’t have to water till June.

Wine: Last week I went to a birthday party for my good friend Mike Ward (tonight we are going to have a venison dinner there) and the food fair was definitely eclectic, cheese plates, salami, olives, clams, muscles, oysters, and lasagna.  My friend Ron Mansfield brought a Bandol which I found to be the most interesting wine there.  Bandol is a region of France (Provence) known for predominately their Mourvedre.   It is one of the oldest growing regions in France and was planted some 2500 years ago by the Romans.  What I found interesting about French Mourvedres are their more tannic and complex flavors than what we produce here in California.  California Mourvedres, at least the good ones, are very fruity (cherry) with some tannins, but generally a very mild wine.  French Mourvedres seem to have less up front fruit, but a ton of complexity and tannins with a longer finish.  I think most found this wine that Ron brought a little big, but I found it very interesting and was a great food wine.  Some wines are made to drink alone, and some are made to go with food.  This wine would have been exquisite if served with tonight’s faire, venison.  Just try to keep in mind that when you taste wine there are many styles and in one circumstance a wine can just be so-so wine and in another, exquisite.  Learn to inform your tasting with how this wine might be served and it just might expand your horizons on what you like.  Carpe Diem.