Author: Paul

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Road Tripping Part I

Last Friday Stef and I headed out to visit her brother and mother in St George Utah. We got on the road and took our traditional picture. 5:44 AM and 44 degrees. Most of the trip would have temperatures in the 40’s or lower. A cold front was passing through the desert as we traveled.

Our first stop for gas was in Tahachapi Pass. In all we’d go through about two dozen mountain passes on our trip and almost all of them had snow. On the way to the Central Valley we saw Tule Elk along the road. Interstate 15 had the worst drivers I’ve ever seen. Friday afternoon from Los Angeles to Las Vegas brings out a terrible group of drivers. There were always 15 cars in the fast lane for every car in the slow lane, which meant the slow lane moved faster. Still no one would get right.


We made it through Vegas with just a slight traffic delay and passed through the Virgin River Gorge. We rested that night and the next morning went out visiting and then on a hike to Snow Canyon in the Red Rock Mountains. The storm was breaking up and it stayed cool with high clouds all trip.

One of the trails on the trip was called ‘Butterfly’, so I kept my eyes open for caterpillars and spotted this little blue colored one almost right away. I was thwarted in all attempts to figure out what this little guy is because ‘blue caterpillar’ is a character from Alice in Wonderland and every Google image was either from the movie or scores of mommy blogs featuring their little precious dressed for Halloween.

The desert was in full green bloom. A pretty rare thing from my trips through and this little cactus I particularly liked.


We hiked out to an overlook of the main valley and across a series of lava flows.

Stef and I took turns taking pictures of each other.


I spotted this little tunnel and climbed up the rocks to get a better view.


This was the view from the top after the tiny bit of rock climbing.

And these little red flowers had just bloomed in a crack in the rock.


The activity was full justification for Stef’s brother to BBQ up a huge plate of ribs for dinner that night!


And he opened one of my favorite wines a 2001 Cline Mourvedre Small Berry Vineyard.

Saturday afternoon we visited a few art galleries in St. George after the hike. Sunday we packed up and had brunch with Stef’s mom then headed out across the desert, deciding to avoid the Interstate’s. More pictures tomorrow.

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Mineral Hill Update

Sunday morning the whole crew was out at Mineral Hill to complete the installation there. Jerry and Millie had finished the wiring on Saturday morning after Millie spent all day Friday prepping the wire and connectors.

My job was to dig holes. Stefania was officially the ‘supervisor’. She made sure all the wire work was polished off, trained the homeowners on how to plant (they did 90% of the planting) and see to all the details including pounding in 90+ rebar supports. Millie finished up support nails for the catch wires and rigged up the drip line so it was off the ground. Jerry cut rebar for Stef and helped with planting.

I also planted a few of the plants including the three table grapes at the end of the vineyard. The table grapes need some expert care and pruning so that’s how I ended up with that job. Below is me finishing off hole #91. I did about 60-70 of the holes. Stef is in the background making sure the catch wires are attached correctly.

It was a really great morning. Blue skies and temperatures in the high 60’s and low 70’s. Great conditions to work in. Below are a couple of shots of the almost finished vineyard before we started digging holes to put in the plants.


The site is now complete. We installed 5 additional plants as a nursery in case any of the main plants don’t grow. We also set up a watering schedule for the first few weeks. For the rest of the summer we’ll have a few check ups to do to see on progress.

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Open House Review

Last Saturday we held our Spring Open House. Usually we send out an announcement to everyone on our mailing list within the Bay Area. This year though we had rain the entire week before the open house and one day in particular that Jerry said was the most rain he’d ever seen in a 24 hour period.

The net result was that the little field we usually use for parking was too wet to mow and too soft to park in. We decided rather than trying to do traffic control on the street, or worse have to tow cars out of the mud, we’d cut back on the email invites and just send them to people who had checked off ‘hold for pick up’ on their order forms.

This gave us a small group of visitors and a much more low key event. The first picture I took was for some people on the Wine Spectator forum. There was a question about ‘gunk’ in wine and I thought I’d take a picture of some Syrah we have in a carboy. This is the net result of letting 5 gallons of gross lees settle for a few months. The lees are on the bottom and the wine is on the top.

Now a better picture of our hostess with a bottle of wine in the cellar getting ready for visitors.


Here is our little low key tasting table. I actually forget sometimes I’m supposed to do the pouring and tend to think people will just help themselves. Not your normal tasting room experience I’m sure. I was feeling like celebrating the opening of a new Chavez Supermarket near our home so the treat were chips, red salsa, nopales salsa and queso fresco.

I opened 5 wines in total the three from the current release: 2009 Chardonnay Chaine d’Or Vineyard, 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Crimson Clover Vineyard and 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains. The other two wines where a 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek Vineyard and 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains.


The Uvas Creek was best after being open about an hour. I think that means it’s almost out of the odd stage that this bottling has always gone through from age 3 to 4. If you want to open one over the next few months I’d decant it for about an hour to let the cherry fruit open up. Right out of the bottle the fruit is a little muted but with air it comes back around. I saw this in the 05 and 06 also at about the same age so I think it’s something with the aging profile of this particular vineyard.

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Bud Break at the Home Vineyard

I’ve been having some terrible issues getting pictures off of my Samsung Fascinate so I’ve been slow on putting blogs up. Verizon and Samsung like to send out updates to the phone regularly. Here’s a picture of the Engineering and QA teams at Verizon and Samsung preparing for their next update.

So basically every updates totally and completely breaks picture transfer and it takes hours to sort it back out. With that little rant out of the way, here’s some happier thoughts.

We’ve had bud break in all the vineyards now and as usual the home ‘Haut Tubee’ vineyard led the way. This is a Thompson Seedless vine in the front parkway. One of our neighbors asked us if we would plant some table grapes so we did.

This is one of the remaining ‘old boys’ from the original planting. This is a Grenache. That’s Italian Parsley growing around it. Stefania planted all kinds of herbs and flowers around the vines. We’ve been using the parsley a lot and I actually discovered that the stalks get pretty thick and if you peel them they are a good addition to stews.

This is a Mourvedre vine with some California Poppy’s in the foreground. This little plant will send runners down the line this year that will become cordons. The plants in the background are a mix of Crimson Clover and wildflowers. It will be another two weeks or so for the colors to really start coming out.

Here’s a more mature vine closer to the house and some Crimson Clover that’s already started to bloom. This plant will send out the start of spurs this year and should produce about 10 pounds of fruit.


This is one of the ‘old boys’ in the backyard that we’ve retrained to cordon and spur training. I used this particular plant in past blogs about pruning and thought I’d give an update on how it looks this year.

Another one of the ‘old boys’ in the backyard sending up two new shoots from its spur. This little growth here will eventually produce four clusters of grapes that will weigh in at about 6 pounds. Everything in the backyard now is Syrah.

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Tasting Notes on Older Wines.

Last night we opened two wine from the 2006 vintage.

2006 Syrah Eaglepoint Ranch. – This is in a really good drinking window right now. The tannins are soft and lots of secondary flavors coming through with the plum and berry fruit. Originally I put a shorter drinking window on this and I think now to 2013 is prime for this wine.

2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek Vineyard – The was also really good last night, with round tannins, lots of berry and cherry fruit and a long finish. Worth trying at 5 years old and rounding out really well. There’s a nice spice on he finish.

I’m going to open a 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek soon. The 05 and 06 both went through rough patches from age 3 1/2 to 4 when they seemed disjointed without a long decant. The 07 has been the same for a few months now and I want to check if it’s coming out of that.

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Shipping Update

We’re almost ready to start shipping for our Spring Release. Stefania has cleared out the garage and tabulated the orders so far. She placed an order for boxes and those will arrive next week. As soon as the boxes arrive she’ll start having the wine picked up from CWT. I’ll probably do this in the FJ Cruiser after work as CWT is on my way home. We can only handle about 40 cases of wine at a time in the garage with all the shipping material so we’ll have to do a few runs.

She’ll pull the wine and pack boxes and we’ll send them to UPS in groups of 10-15. More than that and it overwhelms the UPS Store. Shipping will be on Mondays and Tuesdays to avoid having the wine sit in any warehouses over two weekends. That means the entire UPS portion of the process will likely spread out over three weeks.

California, Arizona and Nevada Orders will go out via GSO. We have more options with those as it’s overnight (CA) or two day (NV, AZ). That means we can ship out Monday through Thursday. The GSO driver also is able to handle more cases at a time, so it’s possible all the CA, NV and AZ orders will be done in a week and a half or so.

We still do have wine left from the Spring Release. We’re very low on Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon, but have good number of Chardonnay and Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon left. It’s not too late to get an order in and we usually get a little grouping of orders right after Tax Day on April 15th.

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Small Vineyard in Monte Sereno

There are just about 40 plants in this vineyard just outside of downtown Los Gatos. The address is Monte Sereno, but it’s just 2 blocks from the main drag in Los Gatos.

The plants are Merlot from our best guess and are about 15 years old. There’s a mix though of cordons from very mature to brand new which makes me think the vineyard was probably not taken care of at some point in the past, then restored.

Stefania and I went out and did all the pruning a few weeks ago. It took both of us about 35 minutes to finish and carry out the cuttings. We’ll have more pictures from this vineyard as we go through the year.

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Snow!

This was from the storm that came through February 25th – the one that got everyone excited that it might snow on the valley floor. No such luck down below, but the foothills got a nice coat of the white stuff.

Everyone asks if the snow is bad for the vines and the standard answer in California is “not really”. Frost on the other hand can zap an entire crop if the tender buds and shoots get burned.

I threw a couple of snowballs for the dogs to chase but after the second one they were on to me and then went back inside the winery to see what Paul was up to. We spent just a few hours in the morning racking the ’09s and catching up on paperwork, a really light day which was nice.

We hit the Chavez market by our house and grabbed lunch at the taqueria before heading home to the kitties.




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New Housemates

Meet the new kids:


This is Rupert aka Fat Cat.
She’s enjoying her new couch and in/out privileges. Most afternoons I
can find her sitting among the roses just keeping an eye on things.

And this is Buster aka Little Bubba.
When he’s not getting into mischief he’s a social little lover with
plenty of purrs. For awhile I was calling him my my little alarm
clock. He gets up very early and likes to talk.


Rupie in the garden….


Little Bubba on the couch…

It’s been just over four weeks and so far everyone is getting along. There have been minor adjustments to our normal routine but nothing dramatic. They’re a lot of fun and great company to have around. I’m learning that computer work in the afternoon is impossible until Mr Loverboy gets his 15 minutes of purring and attention out of the way before he settles in for another nap. Fat Cat is happy being solitary and would prefer I not pester her all day long with constant pets, attempts at mouse play and general house noise. She’s very interested in food and treats though.

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The Peacock Vineyard

One of the new vineyards I didn’t get a picture taken of last week was this small 250 plant vineyard in Morgan Hill. Coming up with a nickname for a vineyard can be a little tough sometimes. It’s also hard to describe them to Jerry so he knows where I’m sending him. So we might call something a fanciful name like’ ‘Vista Vineyard’, but Jerry will know it as, “The Vineyard with the Crazy Lady’.

This new site though was pretty easy to come up with a nickname for and the nickname will be an easy way for Jerry to remember it too. A muster, and they are called musters if it’s mixed males and females, of peafowls have made this backyard their home.

Here’s a closer view of the lead Peacock. Peacocks are completely unafraid of humans when they are feral in California like this group. I don’t know how they behave in India but here they largely ignore human’s, cats, cars, and any other distractions.

Stefania and I were out at 8:00 AM Sunday morning (It was 32 degrees when we arrived) to show the owners how to prune. They had a vineyard management company who put it in and was taking care of the vineyard for them but this year they wanted to do most of the work themselves.

That’s something we’re happy to help out with. We’ll answer emails and phone calls when they have questions and go out and show them how to do key things in the vineyard like pruning. Sunday we spent about an hour showing them how to prune these three year old vines.


The site is actually similar to our home vineyard. It’s on the eastern side of the Santa Teresa hills in deep rich black clay. The vines will have a lot of vigor and yield well with little watering. The owners aren’t actually sure if it was Zinfandel or Cab Franc that was installed. Their paperwork says Cab Franc, but the lead installer told them it was Zinfandel. Right now it’s hard to tell the difference. It looks like Cab Franc to me. As soon as the plants get leaves I’ll be able to tell the difference very quickly.

We’re hoping the yield will be high enough to process the grapes on their own. Right now it’s likely going into the Haut Tubee blend. In the future though with other vineyards we have coming on line it might be part of a Santa Clara Valley Cabernet blend.