Pictures From Sept 24th Vineyard Visits

Gravel and clay at Uvas Creek that Cabernet Sauvignon loves!









Hand manicured rows at Uvas Creek's lower section.








Perfect grapes at Uvas Creek










Less than perfect grapes removed before harvest at Uvas Creek.











Taking samples in the lower block at Martin Ranch.












Looking through the refractometer getting BRIX readings.








Cabernet in the morning sun.











The old oak at Martin Ranch

In The Vineyards

This weekend it was time to check in on all the vineyards.

I started at Elandrich. First checking the netting and making any repairs that needed to be made, then taking BRIX readings to check on ripeness. The Zinfandel was at 20.1 and the Merlot was at 22.2. They've been gaining about 1 degree per week. I like to harvest each at 25+ so they are still some weeks away.

Next I got a call from Casey Hartlip at Eaglepoint Ranch. He had some Syrah ready to harvest Tuesday, but I couldn't pick it up just yet. So he'll call me again in 7-10 days when the next group of Syrah is ripe.

Sunday morning we drove out to Martin Ranch and met Dan and Therese Martin. We wanted to check on where we'll be dropping off bins, and introduce ourselves. The entire family was busy cleaning bins for 10 tons of Merlot that were coming in. So Stefania and I went out and took our own reading in the vineyard. The upper section Cabernet was at 23.1, the lower section at 22.9. It looked like 2-3 weeks still.

Then we drove over to Uvas Creek. Ted had given my readings earlier in the week, so I wanted to taste the grapes and check on ripeness. These grapes are further along and it looks like maybe 10-14 days.

So starting about October 5th and running through about the 20th, we'll be very very busy bringing in grapes.

All the vineyards looked really good. The growers we work with are the same as us, they've removed any sunburned grapes from this summers heat wave, and have only healthy grapes left on the vines to harvest. Things look really good! Pictures to follow later this week.

How's the juice burbling?

Even though we now harvest and buy tons of grapes from our own vineyards and vineyards around the state, I still like to keep up the first 50 plants we put in at home. It's still a good way to learn and experiment on a small scale. I've also learned to use the little home vineyard as a way to judge how the season is going in the other vineyards.

Because we live in something called the "West Valley Thermal Zone" everything happens at home 2-3 weeks before it happens in the other vineyards, so it's a good signal when I need to do things in the mountain vineyards, like spray, or prune or harvest.

So I harvested the 200 pounds or so of grapes last Saturday and started to make a little wine in the garage. I pick out any bad grapes as I go, and sort through them again before I put then in a food grade plastic bin to ferment.

Then it's I Love Lucy time. I jump in the bin and smash the grapes with my feet. Just enough to release the juice and leave some whole berries.

I've been experimenting with something I've called partial native fermentation. Basically I heat the juice enough (about 95f) so the yeast that are in the garage/winery and on the grapes start to ferment. Native fermentations can give you more complex flavors and better color. The risk of that is that you can get jumping fermentations that go fast and then slow or stop all together ruining the wine.

So I've been letting the fermentation start on its own, then as it starts to slow a bit, I add cultured yeast to finish the job and avoid the risk of ruining the wine.

That was the plan anyway. The juice was stubborn and fermentation did not start on its own, I didn't want to risk spoilage, so I added cultured yeast to kick off fermentation. It's burbling along just fine now, turning into wine.

I good reminder for me, even if you have a winemaking plan, you need to stay flexible and do what the wine needs, and lessons like that are why I keep making that small batch of wine in the garage every year. Every thing you learn, no matter what the scale, turns out better wine in the end.

parlez vous francais?

Saturday morning I harvested the grapes at home. About 200 pounds of Syrah and Grenache. The first thing to do is remove the bird netting, which is a disgusting dirty job. It's so dirty that I don't usually wear a shirt I want to keep when I take the netting off.

About half way through the project I was thinking, "I've never heard the French term for bird netting, or pruners, or twisty ties." All things essential in growing wine. You here wine people say "cuvee", fruits "noir", and "terroir" all the time, but never use French for the dirty parts of wine making.

At that point I decided to rid my speech of French wine terms. No I'm not going to start calling Pinot Noir, New Pine, but the terms used in wine growing and wine making. There's no need to use the French words, English works pretty well, and even when we have a word like 'terroir' that doesn't translate well, I can say "the environment the grapes grow in especially the soil. Not as clean as terroir, but it works.

Maybe I'm on a crazy crusade, but I want wine drinking to be fun and un-intimidating for people. Using a foreign language to describe basic things doesn't help on either account. It just intimidates people and makes wine seem more mysterious than it is and wine more difficult to learn than it should be.

So out with the French terms.

By the way the, the grapes went into the bin ('cuvee') just fine. I picked out the bad ones ('triage') and decided not to bleed off any excess juice ('sangee'). It's fermenting away just fine right now.

Allocations?

I had this conversation with Jerry Anderson at Chaine d Or last year as we took a break during harvest.

I said "You know I feel like I'm getting pretty good at grape growing and that doesn't scare me anymore, and my winemaking gets better every year and I'm feeling pretty good about that, but selling wine, that scares me."

He replied "You're worried about the right thing young man."

So I have been worried. Worried for months. How am I going to sell this wine?
I started with a plan I thought was original. I wouldn't make any more wine at first than I couldn't drink or give to friends. I thought it was original until I read that John Alban had the same plan when he started Alban Vineyards in the 1980's. Still, we would keep production small, focus on quality and build up slowly.

I still worried I'd have more wine than I could sell.

So I've had a huge swing in the last few weeks. How am I going to get wine to all these people who want it? My original plan was to have 400 mailing list names by 2008, with 1/2 who would buy 6 bottles per year, or 120 cases sold directly.

We're at 120+ sign ups already, and we've got people asking if they can have full cases or more. I think by the time we release we can easily be up to 200+ names, and I really want to keep cases aside for restaurants and local wine stores.

Now I'm worried about how to come up with an allocation policy so everyone who wants wine can get some. Some might say it's a great problem to have, and it is, but I still worry. I want to have happy customers, people who like doing business with us, and I hate the idea of telling people; "Sorry you can only have 2 bottles".

Reduction and Waitresses

I've written a few times about reduction, and sometimes I wonder if I should not. It's one of the least understood terms in winemaking. People use the term reduction to describe a lot of different things. Some studies have actually shown that people use the term correctly less than 50% of the time.

Reduced simply means that there are smells or tastes of sulfur in the wine. Sulfur is a product of fermentation, so it happens naturally in the wine, and it’s added as a preservative and anti bacterial agent. Usually you add about 25-75 ppm, or parts per million. At the worst you can get Hydrogen Sulfite, which smells like rotten eggs, but you can also get smells of matches, or simply what many people call ‘minerals’.

Reduction happens when the wine is not in contact with Oxygen. Oxygen has a molecular effect on sulfites, which lessen the smell they have in a wine. That’s why if you have those smells in a glass, you can often get rid of them by swirling the glass and exposing the wine to air.

So the hard part for a winemaker is that Oxygen can ruin your wine if you expose too much of the wine to air. So in my winemaking I’ve taken the approach of limiting Oxygen as much as possible, and I taste the wine regularly to check for reduction. If I start to smell sulfur smells in the wine, I then have the wine moved from barrel to barrel.

This is called ‘racking’ the wine, and the exposure the wine gets to air in the process will eliminate the reductive smells and tastes. It’s something you need to stay on top of in the winery and find the right balance.

So my last tasting note on our Syrah was that it was ‘reductive’ and I was going to rack the barrel. We took a sample of some of that wine to share with friends on Sunday night, and just the exposure it had in going from barrel to sample bottle had eliminated the reductive smell. Instead it had a nice nose of violets and blueberries.

Our friends at dinner really seemed to enjoy the ½ bottle and it was met with a lot of enthusiasm at our table. The highlight for me though was we shared a glass with our waitress. She was full of praise and took our card to give to the manager. A small little thing, but that made my night. A big part of our plan is to get our wine into local restaurants and really get the staffs excited about it. So every waitress who really likes it is a great little victory along the way!

Out in the Vineyard, Checking on the Grapes

Saturday morning I headed out to Elandrich in Portola Valley and Llama Vineyard in Bonny Doon. Time to start checking on BRIX readings to see when harvest will come. BRIX is the sugar content of the grapes and it determines potential alcohol. I like to pick between 24-25 BRIX if I can, but having good flavors in the grapes is the most important thing, so I taste the grapes too.

At home the Syrah and Grenache are both above 25 BRIX right now and looks like we'll harvest on Saturday. The seeds and stems are brown, and the grapes taste ripe.

I headed off to Elandrich next.

The sun was out but it was still cool.

I started with the Zinfandel. The first task is to walk the perimeter and make sure the bird netting doesn't need any repairs. There were signs that two doves had been caught in the nets, or at least taken down by the nets. Just two sets of feathers, the work of a hawk that has nested in the oaks near by.































The readings on the Zinfadel were low, just 17.1. It looks like harvest will be the end of October. The grapes looked great though, healthy and with great color.

I trecked down the hill to the Merlot section next. The Brix was a little higher, 21.2 and the netting was in good shape. It looks like Mid October for these grapes.

I drove the long drive to Bonny Doon next. I'm not sure there will be enough grapes to harvest there this year but wanted to check on the vineyard anyway. The Fog was still in at noon when I arrived and the vineyards looked in good shape. Harvest looks like it will go well this year, if a little late, now it's just waiting on good weather.

Cheers,

Paul

Getting that honest opinion

One thing I never expected making wine was how hard it would be to get opinions from people on the wine. It seems people don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or say anything bad or maybe bruise an ego. It seems so many people making wine have egos out of context with reality, maybe that's why getting feedback is hard.

But here's the deal. There's no such thing as "handcrafting" a wine. You can't really craft anything about wine. It's not something you can just deconstruct and put back together if you don't like the way it is coming out.

The truth is winemaking is you make a lot of little choices all through the life of the vine and the wine trying to get an end product you like. How much do I prune, how many bunches do I leave, do I weedwhack or use Round Up, Sulfur or Eagle, do I totally crush or use whole berries, how long until I press, how hard do I press, what kind of oak, new oak or old, do I blend the wine, do I rack it? All things you have to choose on. Each one effects the outcome. But it's very hard. They all work together, and none of the results are immediate. You have to wait and see how it comes out.

With the Syrah last year I planned on using 25-50% whole clusters. But the grapes came in and I tasted the stems and inspected them and said, "No 100% destem. The stems are not ripe, I don't want them in my wine." I had no idea how that choice would work out. Would it be right, would it be wrong, did I do the right thing? It turns out it was the right thing. Crushpad made a barrel with the same fruit after me and left 50% whole clusters. I tasted that wine in June and it was scared with a stemmy green streak and high acidity. But I didn't know I had made the right choice until then.

So I want honest opinions about our wine. Even if it's a critical, and even if it's negative. It's the only way I can judge if the choices I've made are turning out right, and knowing that is the only way I know to make changes for the next harvest.

Not enough color? I can do thing different this year to get more color. Not enough fruit? I can make changes.

It's not going to hurt my feelings, I want to make better wine every single year, every single time I make it. I want to keep improving, keep making changes and keep making better choices. When it's 35 degrees and raining and I'm out pruning, I want to make sure I'm doing it honestly to get better grapes, and when it's hour 18 of a 20 hour day of crush I want to make the right call at the crusher. I can only do that if I hear from people how the finished product is coming out.

So as the barrel samples start coming out, and the wine heads to bottle, I want to hear what you think. Tell me, I'll make it even better next time and you won't hurt my ego, I promise.

Barrel tasting the 05's

Friday Stefania and I drove up to San Francisco to taste our 2005 barrels.

It was a trip I was a little worried about. I have not been happy with the 05 Cabernet. It's been a nice wine, easy to drink and I think would fall into the 82-84 point range. Not bad, but as Stefania has said "It's a $10 wine."

I couldn't really afford to bottle and release a $10 bottle of wine, my production costs are in the $18 a bottle range. So, this was a make or break for the Cabernet. If it had not shown improvement, I was likely going to sell it on the 'bulk' wine market. I don't want to release just 'nice' wines, I want them to be better than that.


(searching for our barrels)







(giving Dave topping instructions)



So we started the tasting with Dave Gifford who always guides us through the barrel room and takes down my instructions.

We started with the 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah. The wine had just been sulfured so we were expecting some reduction notes. Wow. This wine is turning out great. Some of the rustic edges from 3 months ago are smoothing out. It's a dark, rich, layered wine. Lot's of complex black fruit flavors and notes of black pepper. The 25% new oak adds some really nice sweet spice flavors without showing obvious oak. This was just what I'm after. It's not a little Syrah, and I think it will be best after 3-5 years in bottle. I was very happy with this and I think people will really enjoy this wine.


(Finding the Syrah, pipe in hand)



(Zebra barrel, 50% new oak)








Then off we went to the Cabernet barrels. Stefania knew I was worried about these barrels so it was hushed as we tasted.

The first thing that surprised us was the change in color. This wine has gotten much-much darker in the past 3 months. It's now a deep red. A dramatic change from the light red of June. The nose was much more pronounced. A green spice/currant note that is typical of young Cabernet, then lots of red juicy fruit. It also had nice notes of anise and cinnamon and much better length and depth. The 50% new oak had added a lot of backbone to the wine.


(The red labels mean we sourced these grapes ourselves, they are not 'Crushpad grapes')








(tasting the Cab, notice the color!)





We then did a quick blend of about 5% Syrah with the Cabernet. That was the magic combo. The Cab got darker still with black fruit.

I left Dave with instructions to rack the Syrah. I want to avoid any reductive notes from getting in. I also told him to start topping off the Cab barrels with the Syrah. This should bring it up to about 3-4% Syrah at bottling, and and the color and black fruit the wine is short of now.

We then headed South to Bistro Elan in Palo Alto with some samples to share with friends and get some non-biased opinions from the wine manager there. The Syrah showed well, and the kitchen staff polished off the bottle! We showed the Cab last, waiting for feedback on our problem child. The verdict: "It's a nice cab. Not too heavy, and with good red fruit. It needs a bit more color and some length and breadth of fruit, 88 points."




(tasting with food at Bistro Elan in Palo Alto)





I went home happy and finally not worrying about what to do with the Cabernet. 10 more months in barrel and the 3-4 % Syrah should add what it's short on right now, and lift that 88 points to the 90+ range I'm after. I was feeling much better, that in a year the Cabernet will be drunk as quickly as the Syrah was that night.

Cheers,

Paul