On the Contrary

Candace's Flowers at 'Chateau Lightner'

Vine:   Well finally I have gone through the last two rows in the upper block of Syrah and thinned the excess shoots and dropped quite a bit of fruit.  With some time off from consulting and a laser enhancement on my right eye last week left me with some free time to get things tidied up in the Vineyard.

Roses at the End of Each Row

I also cut some shoots that were over running the roses and pruned them for another round of flowering.  What does this have to do with growing great grapes?  Nothing, it is just peace of mind.  There is really very little to do now but let them ripen and wait for harvest.  It will be about 100° today and then we will hit a cooling off period where the highs will be in the low 80s.  This is the time of year when you want things to slow down so that the sugar can increase at a rate that allows the tannins to mature also without too much loss of acid.  It is all up to Mother Nature now.

Speaking of Mother Nature, the hoards of birds are now gathering to feast upon my hard work.  I put out my Kite-Birds this week in hopes that they will scare off the free loaders. I put four in the lower vineyard and one in the upper vineyard, strategically placed near the edge of the vineyard where the birds like to sit in the trees before making their foray into the smorgy board.

One of My Fearless Kite-Birds Protecting the Vineyard

Kite-Birds are a kites shaped like Ospreys tethered to a 20′ pole by about a 10’ string.  When the wind blows, which is all afternoon up here, they fly much like the real thing, hovering over a possible meal on the ground.  I have tried just about everything to keep the birds out of my vineyard except load noises and netting.  I can’t imagine using netting on my steep slopes and have this image of myself tangled up in the netting and waiting for someone to come free me.  If the Kite-Birds are not effective I may be forced to resort to loud noises although I don’t think that will work since the birds seem to be oblivious to my loud shouting of obscenities when they are feeding.

Anyway, if things continue to progress as they have been, I would expect to harvest the Syrah about mid-September.  The Mourvedre and Grenache will probably not happen until October.  I will start measuring (other than taste) sugars next week and start tracking the data next week.

Wine:  Wineries have been busy bottling what they put up last year so that they will have capacity for the harvest that is going to start shortly.  For those of you that have visions of owning a winery and sipping your wine while overlooking your vineyards, I would like to remind you of the hard work and constant attention that goes on every day.  It is a 24/7 job and not quite as romantic as one would think.  You have to love the life and the work.  It is also very expensive and you must do most of your own marketing.  As my friend Tom Cooper, owner of Holly’s Hill, once said, “If you want to be a millionaire in this business, start with about five million.”  On the plus side, if you make fine wine’s like they do, eventually it starts to come together.

Last week Candace and I ate out several times because we were having our wood cabinets refinished.  Up here where I live, eating out is always an adventure.  My general rule of thumb is that I want something I can’t cook at home or if I could cook it at home, I couldn’t do it that well.  So one evening we went to the Redbud Café down in Cameron Park.  It has a good reputation and one of my friends raves about it.  I found it disappointing.  My friend is known there and I think she gets special attention that sets the tone for the meal.  Now I am a snob about service.  When we walked in the staff was very friendly, but there is something about “Hi, how are you guys tonight?”  that sets my teeth on edge.  I don’t like to be called “guys”.  The menu was adequate with some good choices but what I had was only okay and I could have fixed it better at home.  I think if you stuck with the simple stuff like a burger with frites you would have been happy.  What really got me going was that I had ordered a beer before dinner to quench my thirst (the high point of the meal) and when my meal arrived, I asked for the wine list.  Then our waitress got busy chatting up another couple and I was half way through my meal before she came back to enquire on what I might like to order.  Candace had ordered a mushroom dish and a green salad.  It turned out that the mushroom dish came with fresh greens.  Shouldn’t the waitress have known that and advised her of that when she ordered her salad?  That is fairly common up here where the wait staff is a little too folksy, too friendly, not that knowledgeable about the menu, and service suffers as a result.  Anyway Redbud is off my list.

Saturday we were sitting around outside because everything in the house was tarped over, so we decided to go down to El Dorado Hills Town Center and maybe catch a movie and a light dinner.  Well, after perusing the movie list, we decided on just getting dinner.  My first choice was a Grill (I don’t remember the name), but the wait was about 45 minutes so we went to a little place called the Wine Konnection.  We secured seating outside overlooking the little lake and fountain and proceeded to have just a wonderful dining experience. The waiter was extremely knowledgeable about the wine list and I had a flight of Pinots and Candace had a flight of Red Blends which of course we shared.  We split a wonderful cheese and sliced heirloom tomato salad.  Candace had a perfectly prepared Kobe steak and I had a vanilla braised beef short ribs.  Both entrees were about $15, were perfectly prepared, and just delicious.  I ordered a bottle on Novy Syrah and it was just perfect.  So I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.  If you want a folksy experience where everybody knows your name (but they aren’t paying attention to the details) Redbud is your choice.  If you want exquisitely prepared food, where the waiter is spot on his knowleged of the menu and the wine list, the Wine Konnection is your choice.  I will be returning there.  Carpe Diem.

Vine:   Remember when I told you we would “drop” some fruit.  Well it’s time and it is always painful.  The picture below gives you an idea of some of the damage.

Dropped Fruit

Why do we drop fruit?  Well you have to understand that grapes and humans have two different goals.  Grapes want to be as prolific as possible because each grape contains the seeds of its progeny.  Grapes get red and start pushing their sugar, not because they love us and want to give us the best wines possible, but to attract those winged devils that eat the grapes, fly off and leave deposits here and there with the seeds of the grape’s progeny.  Now birds have the taste buds similar to those who think who think food is grub and wine is red.  They don’t care just give me some.  So the obliging grape pushes out as many grapes as possible.  The fact that all the flavoids have been diluted to grow so many grapes is lost on the dumb birds, but not on the discerning humanoid.  So we go through this time of year and drop fruit to focus the plants efforts on the crop that is left to provide the best possible and tasty grapes.  What you are looking for is two bunches per shoot, assuming the shoot is well developed and well leaved.  Additionally there is a lot of “secondary” growth which are grapes that developed later and are never going to get fully ripe.  So, snip, snip, snip.

Now you think the birds would eat the grapes on the ground, but oh no, let’s focus on the money crop.  Maybe they can discern the good grapes because they know when the brix is about 24° (indication of sugar, we usually pick around 24-28).

Tasty Syrah Just Begging For Bird Attacks

The bastards wait until you have this beautiful crop and then it is binge time.  I will be putting out my Kite-Birds next week. These are kites that fly in the vineyard and look like hawks.  I will post pictures when I get them up.  I have tried streamers and other devices, but the kite-birds seem to do about the best.  The point is that we are in that time of year when you have selected who the crop is going to be and you are left with sitting back and letting nature take its course.  It is an exciting time because the harvest is not far off and the crop is beginning to look really good.  I won’t know for a few more weeks as I taste through the vineyard and see what the sun, the wind, the water, and this wonderful soil have wrought.  Nature is a wondrous thing.

Upper Vineyard from the Front Yard

Wine:   This last weekend I was having a real hankering for roast beast.  I also needed some social interaction.  I have been working on another consulting job and siting up here in a beautiful vineyard, but I needed social contact.  So I got a really good looking rack of pork ribs and an organic chicken.  I called my good friends the Wards and said I am cooking roast beast, come on over.  The Wards are wonderful people to be around and they are one of those rare couples that don’t require high maintenance.  Either they can be there or they can’t, no complications.  They always ask one question:  What can I bring, and I always say nothing, and they always bring a special bottle of wine.

Now cooking both is fairly simple.  I prepared a rub the night before.  You know, the usual suspects, paprika, thyme, cayenne, garlic, salt, pepper, sugar, etc.  Throw in what ever hits your fantasy at the time, rub both the ribs and chicken, wrap well in aluminum foil and put in the refrigerator over night.   I have a deep barrel barbeque so I get the charcoal going, with some mesquite mixed in, with the coals piled up in one end.  Then I put the ribs in about 3 hours before we are going to eat, all the way on the other end where the draft will pull the smoke across as it finds its way out the barrel chimney.  Then about two hours before you are going to eat, put in the chicken on one of those vertical roasters.  I used to use a beer can, but technology has caught up with me, and now there are plenty of stainless steel roasters available.  Fill the cup shoved in the chicken breast with about half a bottle of a good ale (drink the rest to make sure it is not gone bad and then get another just to make sure), add a little rub and put it with the ribs off the direct heat.  Then just take them off at eating time.  People will think you are a genius.

This was a simple dinner with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers out of the garden, some good bread dipped in olive oil, and some saffron rice.  For wine I chose a nice (turned out to be fabulous)  pinot because it goes good with meat and chicken.  It was a  2006 Migration (Anderson Valley).  It had complexity and depth that was stunning.  For dessert Mike and Fran brought a wonderful 1999 Boeger Pettite Syrah that was served with sliced peaches fresh from the orchard, and double chocolate brownies.  As a finisher we opened a bottle of 2006 Holly’s Hill Tranquille,  So we sat on the patio overlooking the vineyard ate this wonderful food and drank this wonderful wine, watched the sun go down, and laughed the night away.  As Mike always toasts, “It is a good day to be alive” and he ought to know.  Carpe Diem

8-15-2008 Hot Summer Days

Vine:   Veraison is here big time.  Veraison is the turning of the grapes from green to red.  It is almost totally complete in the Syrah with big black berries.

Syrah Going Deep Purple

In the Mourvedre, that latest to turn we have a salt and pepper effect so far.  Grenache has turned, but they do not have that deep dark purple that the Syrah do. No they are not anywhere near ripe and you can always tell because there are no birds yet.  Juicy ripe grapes and birds are nature way of spreading the seed.  I usually lose about 10% of my crop to birds when it happens.

Various States of Veraison in Mourvedre

But it won’t get close for another month.  Assuming we continue fairly mild weather, which by the way is very good, I expect the Syrah to be ready mid to late September, Grenache in early to mid October, and the Mourvedre, in late October or early November.  But if we get a bunch of really hot days that could change.

What we want is some long slow ripening.  The old saw was to get a magical balance between sugar and acid.  As the grape ripens the sugar increases and the acid decreases or the old rule of thumb was a magical right level of the two.  If it gets too hot the sugar gets too high too fast and the other important wild card are the tannins and their ripeness.  When you consider all three, two of which, the sugar and the acid, you can measure, and the tannins which must be tasted, the ideal season is a long slow ripening so that the tannins can catch up with the sugars before the sugars get too high and the acids too low.  By the way if you are not sure of what acid tastes like, taste one of the grapes now.  You will get a mouth full and if you chew the seeds and skins you will get a very unpleasant lesson in green tannins.  More on this is wine.

Wine:    One of the old truths is that a good aged wine (assuming it is an ageable wine) is the best experience in wine tasting.  French wines were famous for their aged Cabs.  They had to age them because they do not have the amazingly warm summers we have here in California and it took a few years to tame the tannins.  What you were looking for was an aged wine that had retained some fruitiness, but the aging had mellowed the tannins and produced a complex and interesting wine.  With modern growing techniques and our focus on higher altitude cooler climate growing, the goal is to pick our grapes with a deep fruitiness, but not too plumy (hanging too long), but with mellow and ripe tannins that add a complexity to a fairly young wine. Note: The really good Syrahs should have about two years on them, almost a year in the barrels (old oak), and about a year in the bottle before release.

Here in California you get two distinct styles in the Syrahs.  The big fruit, hit you in the face, jammy flavors, but no complexity or subtlety in the finish.  These are grapes that have, in my opinion, hung too long in hot weather.  They are characterized by high alcohol contents reflecting their high sugar.  The other style is a much lower alcohol content Syrah that has fruitiness, but does not get jammy, has complex tannins and a long finish.  These are the Rhone style Syrahs that are being produced in many places in California today:  Paso Robles, some vineyards in the North State, and most of us up here in El Dorado County.  If you want to taste what I am talking about, I would suggest a Holly’s Hill East Slope Syrah, Madroña’s Reserve Syrah,  or Mira Flores Methode Ancienne.

The other suggestion I have for you is to look at the Rhone Blends.  If you are a white wine drinker, and who isn’t when the temperature hits 100°, try a Roussanne/Mourvedre blend, or the Grenache Rosé.  Some excellent examples would be A Donkey and Goat’s Isabel’s Curveé Grenache Rosé,  Holly’s Hill Patriarche Blanc.  On the Red side (dark red) I would suggest Holly’s Hill Partriarche (double gold at the State Fair), and a Donkey and Goats Three Thirteen both of which are a blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre.  Disclaimer here:  I sell grapes to both, but there is a reason for that.  They make damn good wines.  Carpe Diem.