Author: Paul

Sunday morning Stef and I got a chance to head to Calero park for a hike that took us about 2 hours. We haven’t been able to go hiking as much as we used to with the weekend demands on our time, but this Sunday was a good combination of free time, and good weather.

Calero is just about 15 minutes from our house. 5 miles actually, but there is no real direct route. The park is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and our hike starts out at about 300 feet elevation. A quick 3/4 mile climb brings us up to about 1100 feet. These pictures are from the high point of the climb, just as we clear one ridge line.

You might recognize the mountain and tower in the background from our label.

Despite clearly being in the Santa Cruz Mountains, this area is not in the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA. When the original lines were drawn up in the 70’s, the people drawing the lines wanted to leave out a couple of low quality producers who were making wines in this area. They drew the line so that those wines could not say ‘Santa Cruz Mountains’, even though as you can see, this is area is by altitude, geography, geology and every other factor, except wine, part of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This is another picture that should look just a little like our label.

This section of the mountains is where our Uvas Creek Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon is sourced from, as well as our new offering the Crimson Clover Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. Those wine carry the Santa Clara Valley AVA, even though they are not really in the valley section, they are in this strip of mountains.

This area is where Stefania and I want to eventually build our winery and plant our own vineyard. We want to be a little south of Calero in an area called Uvas Canyon. I’m not really worried about the AVA thing. We’ll likely just label the wine ‘Santa Clara County’ when the time comes, or maybe if I get the urge I’ll see if I can’t get this area it’s own AVA name. Maybe ‘Uvas Canyon’ would work.

The last picture is just a bit blurry but it gives you an idea how rugged this area can be. Nothing is really ‘flat’ for more than a couple acres, so any planting will have to be in small patches and work with the existing hills.

We have quite a few events coming up.

February 21st – Pick up day and Open House at Chaine d’Or. We’ll be open from 11-3 for pick up of our Winter release and tastings of our other wines. If the weather is nice, bring a picnic and spend the afternoon.

February 28th – San Francisco Wine Chronicle Tasting at Fort Mason.

Fort Mason

We’ll be pouring our 2006 Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon and 2006 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon

March 8th – Twist Restaurant.

Twist

We’ve put together an event for friends coming from out of town. We’ll probably bring a little of our wine along.

March 15th – San Diego and March 17th – Pasadena Family Winemakers:

Family Winemakers

We’ll be pouring at both events….and looking for a party on Monday night 🙂

March 27th or 28th – Nashville TN

Nashville

Probably will be the first tasting of our 2007 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah.

In May we’ll be hosting our Friends of the Winemakers dinner. This will probably be the only public chance to try our 2007 Pinot Noir. There will be a strict limit of 36 seats so if you’re interested you MUST get signed up with the Friends of the Winemakers by following the link on the left. The last dinner had 47 seats sold in one week, so sign up quickly when the dinner is announced.

We’ve put an east coast trip into our budget for this year. Dates to be determined, but September is possible.

A nice review from Dave Tong:

http://scmwine.blogspot.com/2009/01/2006-stefania-uvas-creek-cabernet.html

I think Dave provides by far the best coverage of local wines, certainly better than the Mercury News, and I know that last year the Santa Cruz Sentinel was going to him as a primary source for information.

I’m trying to schedule a time for Dave to come out and do some barrel samples, but with the crazy few weeks I’ve had with my day job it’s been difficult to get the time.

We just finished bottling our 2007 Haut Tubee a few weeks ago. I’ve talked before about how it’s made and the process we go through at fermentation; doing small lots, treating each one as unique and then doing the first round of blending after press.

As the wine ages we also make additions to the blend from the other lots we have. In 2007 we started out with our base wine. We had 1 1/2 barrels of wine from the harvest at our home and the Ottigurr Vineyard. Mostly Syrah, with some Grenache, Zinfandel and Mourvedre in the blend. Enough to make about 35 cases again.

Our first addition was late last Spring. We had 9 barrels of Chaine d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon, one barrel of Elandrich Cabernet Sauvignon, and 4 barrels of Harvest Moon Cabernet Sauvignon. I knew what I wanted to do was blend the Elandrich and Harvest Moon together for our Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon. I also wanted to make sure we’d have enough topping wine to get us through until bottling, and I wanted to increase the percentage of new oak a bit on the Chaine d’Or.

So we pulled samples from all nine barrels of Chaine d’Or. It’s not a simple process though of going, “this is best”, we’re looking for something called ‘typicity’. Typicity means the wine taste typical, like it should. So we were looking for two things. First which one barrel tasted most typical of the Santa Cruz Mountains, but did not have distinct Chaine d’Or typicity. Second, what was the best barrel, that had the least typicity of either Chaine d’ Or or the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was hard but we identified two barrels.

The first barrel was blended in with the Harvest Moon and Elandrich to become Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet. The other barrel was split. Half went into the Haut Tubee blend, half became topping wine.

Our next blending choice was a few weeks before bottling. We wanted to sample all 9 barrels of Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah we had. Again we were looking for typicity first; what barrels tasted most like Eaglepoint, and very important for us, what tasted like our Eaglepoint, since we think our version of the vineyard is more floral and less brooding that other peoples. It was difficult to do, and we did a lot of blending of samples as well, but we finally picked out a barrel we didn’t think was typical.

It turned out the barrel was a special experiment I had done in 2007. It was a new Hermitage barrel, specially designed for Syrah and given extended air aging. The wine was actually spectacular. It had dark fruit with rich mocha and toasted peppery notes. I thought it was very simliar to wines from Betz in Washington or the ‘scorched earth’ notes of La Mission Haut Brion. A great barrel of Syrah. But, it wasn’t typical for us. It did not taste like our Eaglepoint Ranch, and when we blended it in with other samples, it brought a smokiness to the wine that we haven’t had in 05 or 06.

So we decided that that barrel would go into the Haut Tubee. The end result was pretty amazing and it gave us much more Haut Tubee than we had in 2006 when we had to limit people to 3 bottles each. We’ll release the wine in the Fall this time, not the Spring. With the dose of Chaine d’Or Cabernet it will need some extra time in bottle, and it’s a more serious wine than the 06 version. More suited to cold winter nights than hot summer days. Still appropriate for the hot tub though, and it will still be $20.

We’ve had lots of people post tasting notes about our wines on CellarTracker, Wine Spectator, Wine Library, Vino Cellar, Chow Hound, and Wino Depot, but I think this is a first on the Robert Parker site:

http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/showthread.php?t=192707&highlight=stefania

Not sure why we’ve never had a lot of chatter there, I know a lot of our regular customers visit the site. Maybe it’s just we are a little more casual and relaxed about wine than the tone of the Parker board? Not really sure.

Anyway, Jeff has been a long time supporter from our very first release and I’m glad he put the note up. Check it out!

Giving a primer after pruning is done may seem weird but it really is better to see finished vines. I hope this will explain some of the terms we’ve been blogging about over the past month.

This is a young vine after pruning. This particular vine is two years old. At this point you want to leave two buds on a spur with the idea of growing two canes for the new year. In California we are usually able to get to this stage after one year, but this particular vine is in the shade on our front porch.

Here’s a good close up of all the parts. The lighter wood is last years growth, the darker wood is older growth. Last years growth was called a ‘cane’ after it grew to full length. Right now as you see it pruned, with two ‘buds’, it’s a ‘spur’. The rings around the new growth and the small dark bit sticking out are the ‘buds’. They will grow this year into new ‘canes’ and will be the part of the plant that produces fruit.

These are the ‘head’ trained vines in front of our house. Head training is when there are multiple ‘arms’ coming from one ‘trunk’ and each arm contains ‘spurs’ with ‘buds’. On these plants we’ve left one spur and two buds per arm. Most head trained vines have many more buds left, but we train these up a single poll and tie the new canes upright, so we leave fewer buds. Usually in California the canes are left to flop and that creates a ‘bush’ like look. So those are often also called ‘bush’ trained. In the northern Rhone valley the vines are tied up a single stake, and that’s how we do it.

This is the last of the original Haut Tubee vineyard in the front yard. Each vine ready for new canes to grow, and you can see the single post they will be tied to.

In the backyard we are converting the head trained plants to a V.S.P system. That means Vertical Shoot Positioning. We are retraining the vines into a ‘cordon and spur’ system. Below you see the first step. We encouraged a new shoot from an old vine and have pruned it back to two buds. These buds will produce a cane each that will be tied to a wire, called the ‘fruiting wire’. After one more year the wood will be older and that will become the ‘cordon’.

Here’s what it will look like after one year. This vine has two ‘canes’ pulled down and tied to a wire. The buds will send up shoots this year, and next year those shoots will be pruned back to ‘spurs’.

At this point this training method is actually called ‘Guyot Simple’. Named after the 19th century Frenchman who invented it. The cane is pulled down and will send fruit producing shoots. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are often trained this way. One spur is left on the vine and next year the cane that spur produces will be pulled down and tied up this same way after the old cane is cut off.

We won’t do that here. We want the canes to become cordons and produce spurs. This picture gives an idea of the ‘vertical’ in V.S.P. We have nicked out the buds that face downward (That’s where the phrase ‘nick it in the bud’ comes from.) This will only leave shoots going up, or ‘vertical’, and into the supporting wires.

This picture is at the Church Vineyard. Here you can see the start of ‘spurs’ on a three year old plant.

And the final picture of the new Haut Tubee vineyard. There will be 25 Cordon and Spur trained Mourvedre vines in a 5-wire V.S.P. system. Now you know what all that means.

I’ve been mulling this over for a couple of days now. Our friend Wes loaned me a copy of “From Ground to Glass”, a winemaking video with great scenes and fantastic interviews with winemakers. One of the common themes that kept coming up was “The Lifestyle” and how many people felt blessed to be able to live it. I was trying hard to figure out what that really means. How does that translate exactly?

One thing I stopped saying last year was “Good Food, Good Friends and Good Wine” because I kept seeing it everywhere I went. It was in print in a food and wine magazine, on the wall at Trader Joes, and on at least two other winery websites. But as tomorrow approaches and Paul and I get ready to celebrate St. Vincents Day with friends, it really comes down to that.

We’re going to smoke some pork (with used barrel staves), there will be homemade bread (I’m leaning toward rosemary rolls), and other treats that our friends are bringing.

The best part will be having a house full of friends, the food will nurture our bodies, and the wine will complement it all.

The lifestyle is a combination of many things, it’s not any one thing or moment in time. It’s pruning in January and observing the vineyard at the beginning of the season, it’s watching the buds break, the flowers bloom, and the fruit set. It’s having parties and breaking bread. It’s sharing our craft at lifes celebrations, cheering each other on through good times and bad, having a tangible good to share with others. It’s very personal. It’s time spent in the winery or the lab, it’s time spent washing barrels, tanks, hoses, and pumps. It’s being hands on. It’s cuts, bruises, and scrapes. It’s friends showing up to help in any capacity or situation. It’s the support and encouragement from friends, family, others in the industry, everyone we meet. It’s being up at sunrise and harvesting then processing until after dark. It’s late night pizza parties when we’re still dirty and unwashed and totally exhausted.

It ends up sounding corny, but I do feel blessed to have this opportunity to connect with so many people on so many different levels. It’s great to feel a belonging to a community, to my local community, and one on a much larger scale.

The economy may suck right now but we’ll always have food, wine, and friends to share it with.

And that, in a nutshell, is The Lifestyle….

Last year I did a short post about St Vincent’s Day, which grew out of the Roman holiday of Paganalia. It’s that time of year again. Today is Paganalia.

This year the natural cycle seems to be working better for us. The first full moon of the year came on January 10th this year, giving us 11 days to prune, vs the one day we had last year. We didn’t get it done in a day last year of course, and the vines seemed out of cycle all year.

The weather also cooperated. We had sun and moderate temperatures all through pruning. We didn’t have a drop of rain. Good for working outside, but I’ve been a little worried about the lack of rain. Then right on schedule it started to rain yesterday.

Bottling went very well, and we got out offer letters with out incident. I think the only thing we’re hoping for is good sales. We need that to keep things going of course, and we’ve heard many wineries are struggling right now.

We really wanted to purchase some new equipment this year. A shaker table for the de-stemmer, and a lift – sorting table combo. Right now though we’re being conservative and holding off on those things until we see how the next two releases go. We still may decide to pay down some debt instead of getting the equipment. We just aren’t really anxious to take more bank financing with things the way they are, and would rather hold off or offer equity in the business for the money to buy equipment.

Hopefully the moon will keep cooperating, and it will all work out in 2009.

Our label says “We enjoy wine with friends, over special meals or on quiet nights at home.” When we started making wine it was really important for me to make wine that fit our lifestyle. Stef and I like to open a bottle before dinner and have a glass as we cook. We will then sit down and enjoy the wine with our meal, and Stefania in particular like to have just a little left at the end of the meal to savor.

That means the wine needs enough friendly fruit to stand on its own, but enough balance and acidity to go with food, and finally enough complexity to be interesting when the meal is over. That’s exactly what we’ve tried to make.

The funny thing is we rarely get to drink our own wine on those quiet nights. Most of the time we open a bottle it’s a hectic social event, or a busy wine tasting. We might get to sneak a little sip, but we never get to savor an entire bottle.

A few nights ago though, we decided to make a point to open one of our bottles with a simple dinner we made.

I bought some head on prawns at an Asian market near my work and Stef spiced them with a New Orleans / Cajun style rub. I grilled them over a hot grill and we would peel and eat them right from the skewers.

Stefania loves “plain white rice”, so I made us a small pot. The sweet starch of the rice would help cut the heat of the shrimp. She just bought me these silly plates with cows and pigs and chickens on them. I think they are so kitchy, and I love them.

Stef had put the kitchen tractor to work and we would have some fresh baked, hand made bread also.

I opened a bottle of our 2006 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah and poured us a little in some nice glasses. We enjoyed a little wine as we cooked, then with the simple dinner, and just enough was left to savor at the end of the meal.

It was a simple Thursday night dinner, just the two of us. Just what we are talking about when we say; “quiet nights at home.”