Harvest is getting closer and things are really starting to shape up. Look at those beautiful 777 Pinot Noir clusters.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Harvest is getting closer and things are really starting to shape up. Look at those beautiful 777 Pinot Noir clusters.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
I wanted to put up a couple of pictures of our Pinot Blanc. You can see the spots of Botrytis on the clusters. My estimate is that 5-10% are currently affected with low to moderate severity. You can see it as a browning of the skins as they lose their integrity split and slip off easily. Also if you look carefully in the first picture you can see our cleanup crew, ants and wasps, hard at work. We do strive to maintain bio diversity in our LIVE certified sustainably farmed vineyards. Beneficial and predatory insects can help reduce the impact of vineyard pests and pathogens. We did manage to put on our OxiDate organic eriadicant today and will be working hard to keep this under control.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
We had a few people out at the winery this weekend to help us with some of our first fruit. Merlot came in from Washington for our Soleggio Super Tuscan blend. We sorted just over 1.5 tons of fruit and ran it through the destemmer into a small fermenter. The first step on its way to a one week cold soak prior to fermentation. Chuck one of our assistant wine makers discussed the importance of cold soaks and punchdowns over a Sangiovese fermenter and then everyone had a turn with the punchdown tool.
Friday, October 7, 2011
It was a very productive day in the vineyard and winery today.
We contined to cold soak our first fermenter of Sangiovese; picture at left. The cold soak extends the amount of time that juice is in contact with the skins helping to extract every bit of flavor and color into the wines. This is especially important with thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir but helps to build bold deep flavors in all red wines.
We also kicked off the fermentation of our second frementer Sangiovese; with one of our favorite yeasts isolated by the Consorsio del Brunello in Siena. The perfect yeast for this VCR 6, Brunello clone Sangiovese. Yeast can have a huge impact on wine character and in this case it brings out the varietally typical flavors of berry and cherry with very full mouth feel.
At the end of our day our 4 bins of frozen viognier from Seven Hills vineyard came in and went straight into the press for our Dolce Vino Ice Wine you can see the white frost on the berries. The freezing concentrates all of the flavor and sugar and the juice we use to make this wine is typically at about 36 brix .
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
A little more rain in the vineyard today our total so far is about 0.5” over the past few days. It’s definitely shaping up to be a challenging Pinot Noir vintage. Fortunately we have pretty solid cover crop over about 90% of the vineyard and all of those plants will help sponge up a good portion of the water so it doesn’t all end up in the vines.
Look at those nice tight small Pinot clusters in the picture. We've been blessed at our site with consistently small clusters even in our Pommard clones. Our average cluster weight is around 115 grams this vintage. I have seen some massive clusters at many other vineyards with average weights of 200 grams or more. Pinot means small and since most of the flavor is in the skins you really want the smallest berries possible. This is especially important in thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir. So I’m very happy to see we don’t have the monster clusters that are showing up elsewhere.
You can also see the bird netting we’ve put up on all of the Pinot so we won’t experience the heavy losses we had last year. We lost over $10,000 in fruit last year to the birds and that really helped justify the netting investment. It truly is the only effective means of controlling bird damage and I hope this investment pays off this year.
Harvest is going to be late this year and I don’t expect to start picking anything on our site before October the 20th. The real challenge this year will be botrytis. Even the cleanest most meticulously managed fruit zone will develop mold with enough rain. So far we are looking good but I’ve been hearing about mold already showing in vineyards and with more than two weeks and a chunk of rain to go it is going to be dicey.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Merlot should be coming in on the weekend or early next week and we'll be kicking off our Sangiovese frementers Friday, and more pictures to come soon.