Thinning at Crimson Clover

Friday I took the day off from the day job. We had traveled up to Sonoma the day before and I thought there might be more touring around on Friday but there wasn’t. We thought about going hiking but decided to help Jaye out at Crimson Clover instead. We had sent her out to thin the vineyard and it was going much slower than we counted on.

Stefania and I arrived about 9 am. We started by raising the wires on the first nine rows. We stopped on the 10th though and started helping Jaye thin. The growthwas much shorter starting in row 7 or so and we figured out that the crew had made a pruning error this winter.

Many of the spurs were removed and this was what was slowing Jaye down. Instead of removing one or two extra shoots from each spur she was having to pick one shoot out of dozens to reestablish the spur.

It is a set back for the vineyard. We’ll lose somewhere between 1000-2000 pounds of potential fruit this year. That would mean a ‘good’ yield will be about 3000 pounds. We counted on about 5000 this year. It’s bad but not tragic, the vineyard will recover.

I took the picture below of Jaye and Stefania working while I took a water break. We were able to finish thinning by 3 PM or so. We’ll go back in a couple of week and raise the rest of the wires as the shoots get longer. We’ll be busy thinning in all the vineyards over the next few weeks. It’s something we like to finish before flowering starts. We don’t want to do any work on the vines while they flower to avoid shatter.

It is also much harder to thin after flowering because the base of the shoot becomes hard. After flowering you need to use clippers to remove extra shoots. Right now we can just snap the shoots off with out hands.

Memorial Day Tours Part II

Saturday morning we headed to the vineyards south of us outside of the town of Morgan Hill. That includes the Crimson Clover vineyard, source of our very popular single vineyard Cabernet. The vineyard had a little drama earlier with the gates being open and some deer damage. It looked though like the damage was limited to about 20 plants.

The view above is from the top of the vineyard out across the valley. It looks like we’ll need to do a new fertilizer sprays on the vines soon to make up for some low nitrogen. I’ve gotten to prefer using teas and sprays on the leafs to ground applications. I think the uptake is better with less waste. Fruit set looks low again this year. The wind in the little valley helps limit vigor and we usually get just about one to two tons of fruit per acre.

Our second stop was at the Peacock vineyard south of the city of Morgan Hill. This vineyard is doing very, very well. It will need to be thinned and suckered still, but overall looked really great. There is much more fruit than we figured the site could produce in its fourth year. A real rough guess at this time is about 1800-2400 pounds.

The owners were not 100% sure what they had in the vineyard. They thought it was Cabernet Franc, but also thought it might be Zinfandel as the crew lead who installed the vineyard told them Zinfandel. We’re 99% sure right now it’s Cabernet Franc and not Zinfandel. The leaf is wrong for Zin. We’ve only handled a little Cab Franc though in the past, just about 20 plants, so I won’t be 100% sure until we see some fruit bunches.

Cabernet Franc is an earlier grape to get ripe. There is already good flowering here and it would not surprise me to have this be the second vineyard we harvest this year. Maybe as early as September 15th or so. I’ll have to redo some winemaking plans for the year. We figured on 700-1000 pounds based on the 300 that were harvested last year. I had just planned to add that to the Haut Tubee.

With the potential though for up to 2400 pounds we could make three barrels of Cab Franc. I will replan to ferment and age this wine on its own if we can get three barrels. If it holds up we may release it as a single vineyard wine. I think more likely though is that we will use it to blend out some other wines. We can add up to 15% to our Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon and that wine always benefits from having some Merlot or Cab Franc to round it out and soften it. We may also consider a Santa Clara Valley Cabernet Sauvignon blend as a new wine. That would include fruit from a few new sources. There’s also the very good chance that it will go into the Haut Tubee though and I suspect at least some will go into the Haut Tubee.

Memorial Day Weekend Tradition

The namesake

Every Memorial Day weekend Stefania and I go out and visit each vineyard and inspect it in detail.  We do this so we can plan out the work that needs to be done over the next six to eight weeks.  It really helps to see all the vineyard in a short time to see how they are doing relative to the others.

Our first stop was the ‘Church’.  Just 20 vines at Santa Teresa Church that we take care of.  The vines have started to flower as you can see below.  This is the process of the hard green grapes getting pollen on themselves and turning to real grapes.  This is a sensitive time in the vineyard and if the vines shake too much the flowers will fail in their efforts and the resulting clusters will have ‘shatter’.

Cabernet vines flowering

Stefania did clean up some suckers in the little vineyard and tucked up the growth in the wires.

clenaing up suckers

After a short stop at a wine store that wanted to try our wine we headed up to the Mount Eden area of Saratoga to inspect our vineyard there.  This is a view across the little valley from our location.  The vineyards on the far left are Mount Eden and Peter Martin Ray.   In the center is Copper Garrod – Francville, George’s, Lone Oak and Valley View. To the far right is Kathryn Kennedy.

Vineyards across the valley

This is the view down the vineyard looking out at the Santa Clara Valley and downtown San Jose.  The vineyard looked in pretty good shape. We need to handle a gopher outbreak and the vines need suckering and tucking, but that’s what we expect in June.  There were no signs of mildew and the Cabernet was just starting to flower.

looking down the vineyard across the valley

It’s a good hike to the bottom of the vineyard and back, probably a 150 foot drop.  The rows look really nice though and will look even better once we get everything tucked up.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is it is better to single task a crew rather than trying to do many things at once.  So here we’ll start by sending out Jerry to weedwhack under the rows.  Then we’ll send out a little crew to sucker the vines.  Finally we’ll do thinning and tucking in another effort.  I’ve found that if you have a crew out trying to do all those things at once, none of them really get done perfectly.  It’s better to do one at a time, do it once, and do it right.

looking back up the vineyard

Next we checked on a little 40 plant Merlot vineyard outside of downtown Los Gatos we just took on.   As I was inspecting the plants I heard a noise behind me.  I went; “what the f… is that?”   I turned around and this little hen was pecking at my leg.

The red hen makes her appearance

We hadn’t had a name for this vineyard yet.  We’d just been calling it the ‘Los Gatos’ vineyard.   Now though we’ll call it the “Red Hen Vineyard”.

The namesake

Stef loves chickens.  She had to play with these ones as we cleaned up the vineyard.  Stefania and I will go back and do the suckering, thinning and tucking here on our own.  No sense sending the crew for 40 plants.  We’ll have some after pictures soon to see the changes that happen as a vineyard is cleaned up in June.

birds in the vineyard

Our final stop was at the Gurr vineyard in suburban San Jose.  There are about 40 Syrah and Zinfandel vines here that go into the Haut Tubee blend each year.  There’s a new house under construction in the background.

Syrah and Zinfandel

Today we will go out and check on the southern vineyards and have pictures of those tomorrow.