Author: Paul

Wine Amplified main stage, our cabana was where the blue orb light is, just left of the stage!
And there is Paul smiling in front of our cabana before the event.

I was at the Crimson Clover Vineyard earlier this week and pulled samples, it’s ready for an early Sunday morning harvest. I saved a robin that got caught in the netting.

Closer view of the Crimson grapes, don’t look for the robin, he’s long gone…

The “estate” Mourvedre grapes were harvested and tossed in with the rest of the Haut Tubee grapes from three other little vineyards.

The Haut Tubee Syrah, and just under that a close-up, not to show how awesome the grapes look, they do, but to show why I don’t like to use any tape, twine, or other device to tie the cordons to wire. The green tie is cutting into the vine. We had to tie them that first year of retraining, but after pruning I’ll go back and properly wrap the cordon around the wire.

Testing TA on the pinot…sugar came in a little high.

The pinot.

Teaching Jerry how to play gin rummy while we waited for the 2nd bin of pinot.

Our sales guy Ron is always asking me about recycling wine bottles and how that works, so just for him, I’ll copy over some text from a mailer that arrived today.

According to The Wine Mirror, Recycle Glass Week was September 12-18th (just got the mailer today, 10/6).

Glass containers, such as wine bottles, beer bottles, and glass jars, are endlessly recyclable without a loss of quality or purity. The recycled crushed glass, known as cullet, is used to replace or supplement raw materials, including sand, soda ash and limestone. Turning recycled glass into new containers requires an average of 40% less energy than is required for raw materials alone. For every six tons of recycled container glass used, a ton of carbon dioxide is reduced in the process.

Regardless of color, all container glass can be recycled. To produce Flint (clear) glass, cullet needs to be color-sorted in order to avoid putting too much colorant to finished glass. Optical resorting systems allow us to do this but, ideally, glass should be sorted by color as in some countries, such as Switzerland and New Zealand.

SGCI 2010 * Special Issue, A Verallia Publication

I pulled that directly off the mailer – there are a few other tips, like removing metal capsules from the glass before recycling, but that’s about it. I looked up Verallia.com and found a link to their recycling info page, http://www.verallia.com/all-about-glass/recycling/?lang=en

Ok, so they are in France and it’s not directly relevant to recycling in the U.S. but mostly I wanted to poke fun at receiving the mailer three weeks past the date of the event. :-p

Here’s a recap of the past few days.

Thursday we spent all day at the winery.

Friday we started the day with picking Chardonnay at Chaine d’Or. Most of the Chardonnay had been damaged by sunburn so we knew this would be a difficult process. We set up the shaded table below to cut out sunburned berries one at a time. It was a long slow process and at most we think we’ll have enough Chardonnay just for personal use at parties from 2010.

When we were done at the winery we had to drive down to Aptos to drop of bins for the next days pick. We got home after 9PM.

It was a long, slow day of mostly waiting. We finally left the vineyard at 3PM with only half the grapes we were expecting. We couldn’t wait any longer. There’s not enough outdoor lighting at the winery to work in the dark and it is an hour drive from Aptos to Woodside.

We processed just under one ton of Pinot Noir. The fruit was very ripe and we had to add about 14 gallons of water to lower the sugar to a level that will ferment ok. This will be a hard wine for us to make. Usually we just take initial readings, add yeast food and then check Brix daily. With the high Brix, and water addition on this we’ll have to take full readings all along and continue to add yeast food through fermentation.

Saturday we also had to transfer the Chardonnay out of the settling tank and into a tank to ferment. We’re going to do a stainless steal fermentation this year. Mostly because the amount is so small.

I know I’ve talked before about how we wrap all our bins in plastic to keep bees out but I’ve never posted a picture before. Here’s what the bin looks like with the top on and sealed in plastic wrap. There’s a ton of Pinot Noir fermenting inside.

Sunday we had another busy morning of punch downs and taking readings at the winery. We also had to be at the truck rental at 7AM to return the truck from Saturday.

Monday the last 3/4 of a ton of Pinot Noir came in and we processed it in the morning. The Brix was not as high but we still added 8 gallons of water. It was just Stefania, Jerry and I working but we still managed to get home at 3PM after cleaning the winery.

Tuesday I’ll be back at my day job. Stefania and Jerry are going to harvest and process three of the Haut Tubee vineyard (home, Church and OttiGurr) on their own. I’m not sure yet how I feel about it. It will be the first processing I’ve ever missed. Stef knows her stuff inside and out though and I know she’ll do a great job, it’s just weird to miss it. I hope they will make it home before 5PM.

Mostly I’m trying out the new camera and netbook. So far just a minor drama or two. We arrived about 8:30 this morning at the winery and started getting ready for picking this weekend.

Below Stefania and Jeryy are cleaning our picking bins. They get muddy and dirty after sitting outside since last year.

I also have to get our tempermental Italian Press going. This morning it was about 45 minutes of fiddling with it. Jerry had to reset the breakers on the power and the final magic technique was a ‘Fonzie Hit’ on the control panel that got it working.

We’ve just stopped for lunch and are drying out a little. We still have about 20 picking bins to clean plus the press and crusher. We will also prep an inside tank for the Chardonnay tomorrow and turn on the chiller. The last steps will be to set up everything, crusher, press, tanks, so we can just start picking in the morning.

Here’s our first little attempt at video. It’s Jerry loading up the bins from the storage area and a little shot of the vineyard. Now that I know we can make it work I’ll try for a few more exciting things this weekend.

We had a great time in Vegas. Unfortunately the frustration with our iPhones meant I didn’t feel like taking the thing out and taking many pictures. The show Saturday night was a blast. I though Locksley was the best band of the night. We meet a ton of great people.

Next year we have to make it a party and have people join us. The set up had us inside a cabana on the beach. There was plenty of room for us to have guests in the cabana and just sit back, enjoy the wine and music and take advantage of the great space.

We spent all day Sunday by the pool, swimming and watching football on the tv. We had a nice dinner at Hank’s inside the Green Valley Ranch resort.

We flew back Monday morning and then Tuesday we headed over to the Verizon store as soon as they opened. It took a little longer than I though it would but we both left with new Samsung Fascinates which so far have worked out well. It took us a little time to figure out how to get photos off the phone, but we did that today.

The best thing is I have a signal again in San Jose! For a few weeks now I’ve had nothing from AT&T. One day last week I dropped a call 11 times driving down highway 87. Voicemails were showing up 2-3 days after they had been sent. Verizon has had a good signal at both home and work. We’ll try it out in the winery tomorrow.

The camera is also nicer on the Fascinate and includes a flash which means we’ll have pictures from inside the winery this year as well as early morning harvest day pictures. Better yet there’s video! We’ll test that out tomorrow but expect us to have a few harvest related videos on the blog soon.

We also walked out of the store with an HP mini. Our hope is that this will allow us to connect in more spots during harvest and get up pictures, videos and blogs in ‘real time’. We’ve set it up with 3G service and so far it’s gotten a good signal in tough spots (like my office). We’ll try that at the winery and out in the field this weekend.

Which brings us to the ‘Back in the Game’, part of the Blog today. Tomorrow we’ll be in the winery prepping for our first picks of the season. We’ll be cleaning picking bins, and prepping the crusher, tanks and fermentation bins. We’ll stage the pump so everything is ready for Friday.

Friday morning we’ll harvest three of the Haut Tubee vineyards; Home, the Church and the Ottigurr vineyards. We’ll then head up to Chaine d’Or and harvest the Chardonnay there. We’re not expecting much Chardonnay, most was damaged by sunburn in the August heat wave, but what is in good shape we’ll bring in.

After the Chardonnay has gone through the crusher we’ll process the Haut Tubee grapes. Then we’ll clean everything up all over again and prep for Saturday. Our last task for Friday will be to drive down to Aptos and drop off picking bins for our Pinot Noir. I expect a 12-14 hour day.

Saturday morning we will be picking our Pinot Noir and getting it back to the winery for processing. We’re expecting 2 tons. I think it will be a slow pick. The clusters are small and light with few on each plant. That will slow the picking crew down. If all goes well we’ll try and take Sunday off (except for punch downs) and watch some football.

Watch the blog and see how we do with live updates.

We’ve written a lot about our iPhones and used them a great deal. I’m afraid that’s all coming to an end though this month.

First there was a terrible experience with Apple, the Apple Store and Apple Support this month in an attempt to purchase an iPad.

I found the iPad totally and completely defective. It is NOT wireless compatible. Unlike other devices it only meets a limited number of wireless standards. I found this out after we purchased one and I was not able to get it to work on our home network. I also tried it at 7 other network points and was only able to get it to connect to 3 of the 7.

When I phoned support (after hours of self help), the friendly but totally unqualified support person’s only suggestion was that I buy a new router. When I told him I would not do such a thing and that would not fix the problem with the other networks his response was. “Well I bought a new router and I love my iPhone.” I replied that I could not buy a new router every where I need to use this device and he replied “That’s to bad it’s a really neat toy.”

Neat toy.

Useless toy.

I returned it the next day. Apple wanted to know why I didn’t like their service and gave them low marks on their survey’s. Well no they really didn’t give a snot. They called once. I returned the message and said I was traveling but they could call back when I returned. Some low level manager marked it off their tasks to do and I never heard back from anyone at Apple, the Apple Store or Apple Support about their lack of ability to give me a working device.

And then they charged me $50 for a restocking fee.

That’s one lost customer for life. Enjoy the $50, I’ll never spend another dollar with Apple as long as I live. I’m mean that way.

So that brought our ongoing problems with AT&T to a head. AT&T claims they cover 97% of America.

BS.

Among the place I don’t get coverage:

The light rail station at 1st and Tasman. That’s the main light rail terminal in San Jose.

The airport in San Jose. My signal drops every day when I drive by the airport. That’s at 101 and 87 (Google Map it), or just about the busiest place in San Jose.

My office – which is near 1st and Tasman and 1/3 mile from the HQ of a little company called Cisco.

My living room or anywhere else in my house or backyard. We live at Blossom Hill and Snell in San Jose. Next time your in town ask someone where that is. It’s one of the busiest intersections in town and 1 mile from the second biggest mall in town. Everyone will know.

Of course coverage is spotty in the vineyards and winery. We expect that, but we can’t really run a business with a service that can’t get coverage in the 9th largest city in America.

If you have suggestions for alternatives please send us a note. We are out shopping now for new phones and a new provider. Apple and AT&T might be ‘Neat Toys’, but we need a reliable business tool.

I put up a brief note earlier that we’d be pouring at an event in Las Vegas this weekend. We are all set to go and booked for the event. It will be Saturday evening at Mandalay Bay starting at 7PM.

Check Wine Amplified for ticket information and discounted hotels. The lead band will be Third Eye Blind and it should be a really great time. We’ll be pouring our 2007 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon and a special preview of our 2009 Chardonnay Santa Cruz Mountains.

Stef and I are arriving Saturday afternoon and staying through Monday. We will be at the Green Valley Ranch Resort. It’s a bit out of town, but neither of us are big gamblers and the attraction of a great pool and a nice cabana pulled us there. We’d visited the hotel at our last Rock and Roll Wine event and really liked the set up and hotel.

We have a cabana reserved all day Sunday so if you happen to be in town please let us know!

Saturday we went out to check on the Crimson Clover Vineyard and the Chaine d’Or vineyard. At Chaine d’Or the red grapes are finally starting to turn colors. It’s too late. They need at very least 45 days after they complete the change before harvest, and we’ve found 75 is really ideal to get the grapes properly ripe. Right now that will put the harvest date at December 15th. The plants will have shut down and lost all their leafs well before that date.

That means no Cabernet from Chaine d’Or this year. The Chardonnay is in a little better shape but still suffered a great deal of sun burn. It looks like we’ll try to pick what we can around the 1st of October. There is probably only enough to make a single barrel. That will make wine making really hard as we won’t be able to use any of the chillers in the tanks to get the wine to settle and keep it cool. There just won’t be enough volume to reach up to the cooling jackets on the tanks.

Crimson Clover looked much better and we took a few pictures. In 2008 we harvested here on Sept 28th and in 2009 in was Sept 29th. This year it looks like we’ll pick around October 20th, or almost 4 weeks later. The crop load looks good and the vineyard is clean. We did a little leaf pulling to help fight mildew and everything is coming along well.

The clusters are larger than they’ve been the last couple of years. Tasting the grapes we could tell they were not close to ready yet. The flavors are past the green stage (green bean and bell pepper) but just now in the red fruit stage. We will want to wait for plum, black cherry and berry flavors to show up. The tannins also are still very astringent and will need more time to soften.

We did pull samples off and Stefania ran BRIX tests on the juice. She used a refractometer and hydrometer and the readings from both were 20.2 We’d like to pick between 23.5 and 25, although we’ve usually picked this particular vineyard higher in the 26-27 range. You can see the juice is pink still and not showing ripe color.

All this means we have a lot more time to go. Stefania thinks it will be even later than the 20th. We’ll start to taste test now pretty regularly and watch the weather closely. We definitely will not be picking in September this year though.

The Haut Tubee blend began on September 13th with the harvest of the Home vineyard and the Ottigurr vineyard in San Jose. The grapes were picked in the early morning and transferred to Chaine d’Or for processing. They were destemmed and crushed into a 60 gallon tub and fermentation was on native yeast. The initial picking included about 450 pounds of grapes with 70% Syrah, 14% Grenache, 13% Zinfandel and 3 % Mourvedre. About 10 pounds of mystery pink grapes (likely Pinot Gris) from the Chaine d’Or Estate were added whole cluster on 9/20.

On September 27th 250 pounds of Zinfandel and 50 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon from the ‘Roxie’ vineyard, a neighbor of the Crimson Clover Vineyard were crushed and started in their own tub.

The initial blend was pressed in a wooded basket press on 9/30 and transferred to tank to wait for the other lots to complete. The Roxie completed on 10/15 and was blended into tank with the first lot.

On October 24th 22 gallons of Elandrich vineyard was added to the tank and the entire blend transferred to a single new Sequin Moreau barrel. In May of 2009 the wine was racked into a used barrel as we felt it had achieved the level of new oak influence we were after.

On May 3rd 2010, the final blend was assembled. One barrel of 2008 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon was selected and blended in tank. In addition ½ barrel of new oak Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah was added as well.

Final breakdown at bottling:

Merlot 15%
Zinfandel 10%
Syrah 36%
Cabernet Sauvignon 37%
Grenache 2%
Mourvedre (trace)
Cabernet Franc (trace)
Petite Verdot (trace)
Pinot Gris (trace)

Final Alcohol 13.8% pH 3.72

Dark red the color of a ripe Bing cherry. Wow nose of cherries, plum, licorice and herbs. Very southern Rhone in the mouth with soft and ripe tannins. The wine seems to show Grenache even though that’s a small part this year. Very ripe fruit and spice in the mouth with a long, fresh, juicy finish. Kind of a cross of the 06’s juicy fruit and the 07’s excellent structure.

Release Price: $60 per 3 pack, $120 per six pack