Paul – Page 7 – Stefania Wine

September 5, 2013

2013 Harvest Update

A quick update on where we are for 2013 harvest. We brought in our first lot of Pinot Noir on 9/1 which was eight days earlier than 2012 and a month earlier than the very late 2011. Weather has been good and the vineyards look excellent with a decent crop load.

One thing we’ve noticed this year is the grapes look to the eye more mature than the chemistry on them is showing once back in the lab with samples. The Chardonnay at Chaine d’ Or was a good example. It looked as I walked through the vineyard like harvest would be 9/8 or 9/9 but in the lab the Brix was 20.0 and pH 3.05. We’re actually likely to pick on 9/14. When we tested the Mourvedre at home it was the same story. The grapes looked like they would be ready in 2-3 weeks, but Brix tested at 18.2. It will be 4-5 weeks before the grapes are ready.

I’ve not really seen this before. Usually I have a good handle on visual, with taste and chemistry but in 2013 the visual is ahead of the taste and chemistry. That’s ok though just likely going to be different from most years where the chemistry is ok and then we wait a few weeks for flavor to be where we want it. This year I think we’ll be getting flavor at the same time the chemistry is right. Normally we just test until we reach 22 Brix and 3.3 pH then go totally off of taste. This year we’ll have to watch that both are on mark at the same time.

September 3, 2013

Chicago

At the end of August we made our semi-annual trip to Chicago. We actually go more often than every other year but those other trips are usually for my day job. This particular trip was all for fun. Our friend Otis hosts a blow out wine party and that would be the main event on Saturday night.

We arrived in town to great weather. There were a few thunderstorms on Thursday but other wise it was perfect. Below is the view from our hotel room along the Chicago River.

We arrived Wednesday afternoon in time to check in to the hotel and walk into the River North area to try out a place new to us called Havana that Stefania spotted on the way in. We had a light dinner and a few cocktails including a really good Pisco Sour.

Thursday was our one ‘working day’. We had a long lunch at the Frontera Grill while we waited out the thunderstorms. We then went to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy wine glasses and then Fox and Abel for cheese and salami for that evening. We hosted a get together of about 15 local Chicago friends and customers to taste 15 of our wines. I brought older vintages and the 2011 Mourvedre and 2011 Santa Clara Valley Cabernet Sauvignon which we’ll release in a few weeks.

We were scheduled to run from 6 -8 PM but actually went from 5:45 to 11:30 PM!

Friday was all about beer. We started the day at Binny’s buying a few things we can’t find in California. The Goose Island brewery is right next door to Binny’s so we had another long lunch there. We met up with a friend who also happened to be there for lunch and he took us to another small beer focused bar called The Map Room.

Saturday we walked down State Street from our hotel and ended up at Hugo’s Frog Bar. A friend in California had highly recommended it and our bartender Chris happened to be from New Orleans. We had a great time and I worked my way through the Bourbon cocktails starting with a Manhattan.

Next up was an Old Fashioned. We had a big long lunch with frogs legs, a wedge salad and gumbo soup. Stef got the prime rib sandwich and I had a rib eye. We ordered a 2001 Cos d Estournel to go with lunch. It would be our only meal of the day so we went all out.

Saturday night we took a small bus up to Northbrook and enjoyed dozens of great wines on a beautiful Chicago night. We had to hurry home on Sunday for work instead of staying to Monday like we’d usually do but had a nice lunch at Purple Pig and flew out Sunday evening.

August 22, 2013

Red Soil

It’s the time of year to start checking on all our vineyards for sugar readings and ripeness. We think everything will be on the early side. Maybe a week eariler than last year, which would be four weeks ahead of 2011 and 3 weeks ahead of 2010. Right now this year reminds me of 2009 or maybe 2007. Our first vineyard we’ll pick is the Under a Lucky Star vineyard in Los Altos Hills.

Like most of our vineyards it’s on a steep hill. The steps below are on the right of the vineyard and go from the bottom to the top. It’s the best way to enter the rows. I took the picture though to show the red volcanic soil. This soil type is pretty rare in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Teresa Foothills. Most of the soil is lift thrust from earthquake activity. There is a small band though of volcanic soils, usually to the west of the San Andres fault. The Crimson Clover vineyard has a band of this soul that covers about 30% of the vineyard. The Lucky Star vineyard though is 100% red volcanic soil.

I love this soil and wish we had more grapes planted on it. The best grapes from Crimson Clover come off this soil. It brings out lots of bright and intense fruit and super dark color. So far the Pinots we’ve made from Lucky Star would fool most lovers of Santa Cruz Mountains wines. They have the flavor profiles of the Santa Cruz Mountains but the fruit is more intense and the wines much darker. Pinots from the southern and eastern side of the mountains, where the soil is sandy, can almost look like a Rose. On this soil though the wines get very dark.

The vineyard is just about ready and I think we’ll be picking on August 31st or September 1st. About 5 days ahead of last year. This site is always our first and always 1-3 weeks ahead of Pinot from the eastern sides of the mountains. Because the vineyard is so steep we’ll use our regular ‘A’ team of pickers with Millie, Stefania and I helping out. This vineyard is just to dangerous for inexperienced helpers. Usually for people who want to come out and help we invite them to the Crimson Clover vineyard which is mostly flat and has lots of shade around the vineyard.

Brix was at 21.1 on Saturday and we’ll pick at between 23 and 24. The flavors are not ready yet. Stef said the grapes taste ‘plain’ still. It will take the additional few weeks to get more fruit flavors to develop. Yields look about the same as last year. This is a vineyard we’re still doing some recovery work on so we think yields will stay low for another year or maybe two as we strengthen and retrain the plants. When that work is complete the vineyard will yield 1500-2000 pounds a year or about two barrels. Right now it’s getting about 800-1000 pounds or one barrel.

August 17, 2013

Tucking at Crimson CLover

These are actually pictures from about a month ago. We generally let the vineyard get a little crazy in the late spring and early summer. We’re trying to not touch them while flowering and fruit set is going on so we don’t disturb that process. I also like that at this stage the young fruit is protected from the direct sun if we have a heat wave. In the picture below you can see Stefania at the back of the row. Millie, Stefania and I went out to do the tucking

It has been a good year for vine growth so things at Crimson Clover where the thickest we’ve seen then since 2009. The objective here is to remove any extra shoots and then get the vines tucked up into the wires. We also cut off any really long tops on shoots.

We accomplish a lot with this effort. The plant can then focus on getting fruit ripe and not on growing extra shoots. The maturing fruit will also get more sunlight now. This also let’s us see if there was any mildew present and treat it. There was not as we’ve had a pretty easy/good spraying schedule this year. The final thing this does is get the vineyard ready to put on bird nets

At Crimson Clover the process goes pretty easy as we have movable wires. You move down the row and pull both sets of wires off the trellis stakes. One person then lifts the lower wire and places it just above the fruit zone. Once this is complete you go back and take the second wire and raise it to the height of the growth. In this case we were raising it to the very top. The other two people then follow behind and tuck and cut anything loose. The hardest part is removing the wire since the vine wants to attach to wire.

When it’s all done you have nice clean rows. Millie came back a few days later and cleaned up the last of the weeds under the rows with a weedwhacker and we were already for netting.

August 15, 2013

A Couple of Pics

My schedule has been terribly busy but I made a pledge to set aside two hours a week to blog and keep the website updated. We’ll see how well I do at that but it’s a start. It looks like WordPress has finally made some improvement to how photos are uploaded so that should make it a little easier. Part of being able to keep up on the blog was really derailed by the need to spend 4-5 minutes editing each photo before it went up. 6 photos was 30 minutes before a word was even written and then try to get them set right on the page was another 15 minutes.

Anyway we’ve been pretty busy, me with the day job and Stefania keeping the winery and vineyards humming along. We did just recently complete a bottling of our first 2012 wines. We bottled our 2012 Pinot Noir and 2012 Chardonnay.

Below the Chardonnay barrels are drying before being sterilized. We had already put the wine in tank for cold stabilization.

After cold stabilization the wine is filtered. We rarely filter red wines but do filter the Chardonnay. That makes it a big challenge to remember how to set up and run the filter since we only do it once a year for an hour or so. Last time we did it though Stefania took pictures of the set up which she taped on the walls for us to view as we set it up this time. The filtering went very easy.

This is the kind of stuff most wineries don’t want to show but being honest about production is not something we ever shy from. This is the ‘gunk’ at the bottom of the tank after filtering. Mostly it’s dead yeast. For a red wine this isn’t such a big deal. We rack a few times to get as much of this gone as we can but some will end up as sediment in the bottom of the bottle. In a white wine though it looks a little sludgy to leave this stuff behind.

One final unrelated picture. This Saturday at 5 PM we will be at the Silicon Valley Roller Girls bout http://svrollergirls.com/ We are the official wine sponsor and they will have our 2009 Chardonnay and 2010 Crimson Clover Cabernet by the glass. Hope to see you there.

June 21, 2013

Onion Chutney and Sausage Making

It’s been a pretty good growing season so far and there really isn’t that much to tell you about the grapes or activities at the winery lately.

I take that back, it’s been an amazing grape growing season so far. Veraison is just around the corner and soon the bird nets will go on, the last spraying for mildew will be over then we watch and we wait.

In the meantime, we’ve been having a great time in the kitchen.

I dabbled with a mostly made up recipe for curry onion chutney using the ingredients below.

The next photo is the onions reducing in the vinegar, sugar, apple mixture.

And while I am busy tinkering with chutneys and pickles,

Paul has been learning the fine art of sausage-making.

The first attempt at sausage making was a huge success!

Spicy Italian

Sweet Italian

Boudin Noir

May 17, 2013

Trees

So, I didn’t realize how many tree pictures I was accumulating this year, apparently I have a thing for trees in 2013. I’m happy to share them with you. Call it a vineyard intermission of sorts while we are busy doing manual labor thinning, tucking, spraying, repairing drip systems, etc.

May 10, 2013

Chicago

The Picasso image was taken at the Art Institute. It’s from the “Original Etchings for the Texts of Buffon” display, and dated 1936. I liked that he captured the grapevine, leaves, clusters, and tendrils so completely. I also snapped a couple more photos from that particular grouping and a handful of other very colorful paintings of his. I’m not sure yet how I feel about the folks with iPads snapping photos of all these famous works…I think it’s great we can share art across many mediums, and although it wasn’t really intrusive, I wanted it to be rude and it wasn’t.

Thank you Windy City for blowing my hair all crazy on our walk over to the Art Institute.

That’s Mrs. Oleary’s cow, they blame the cow for knocking over the oil lamp that burned the city down (that’s my quick summary about the cow). It’s actually a horrible story, a lot of people were killed, and miles of the city were destroyed.

Random photo of a perfect ice ball in an Old Fashioned. I have become obsessed with the perfect ice ball…

Another Picasso etching, I’m a Capricorn and have a thing for goats and goat art…

Paul took me to a Cubs game. It was cold. We drank beer and ate hot dogs. It snowed. The Giants won. I’d like to publicly thank our friend Allison for suggesting we take blankets, they saved our frozen butts. Did I mention it snowed? At noon, at a baseball game, in late April. Snow.

We met friends at Caro Mio in Chicago, a lot of friends actually. I’m not sure I could begin to describe the scene, but for 20 people, there were easily twice that many bottles of wine that we opened. The food was family style Italian and perfect for the event. Good Food, Good Friends, Great Wine!

We did get to showcase our latest release and some of our previous vintages for newcomers to try. Only a handful of new faces this time, we are becoming regulars to Chicago and getting to be very close friends with more folks, this winemaking gig has been a lot of fun, I won’t lie.

May 3, 2013

LadyBugs!

I know Paul already wrote about the new pruning method in the Chardonnay section at Chaine d’Or, and let me tell you what, the bud break this year is AMAZING!

As much as it sounds crazy, I kept telling Paul that I was getting a “vibe” off the vineyard when the old cordons were cut off. I could feel the vines go “aaahhhh”. Well, they are definitely loving having all that dead weight gone, they are THRIVING!

Bud break is out of control (in a really good way) and I’ve already gone through and thinned them. I already dropped a ton of fruit, the shoots all have teeny little grape clusters on them already. Crazy Good, Exciting Good, Really, Really Good!

Can you tell I’m excited?

Oh yeah, and there are ladybugs everywhere! Not just at Chaine d’Or either. I saw them on the vines at the church, and the ones at home. It’s the first time I can remember this many of them.

My rose garden is the healthiest it has been in years, I have a great feeling about this growing season. We are going to have strong, healthy plants all across the board, not just vines.

April 26, 2013

Roller Derby

Allow me to introduce you to some of our new friends:

Captain – Patty Hearse – #74
Co-captain – Skater Tots – #1212
Avida Sane – #L8R
Belle Wringer – #203
Brigid Fitch – #0K
Bullet Sucker – #950
Culo Whippin’ – #125
Demanda Rumble – #10
Fightmaster Flash – #31
Foo Bar – #F00
Jem Jones – #8
Jentropy – #1337
Jessika Rakkit – #190
LauRawr – #789
Leigh Featherstone – #6
Lizapalooza – #217
Mad 4 Gravy – #4
Mad Eye Molly – #22
Mongoose – #609
Spankin’ Firecracker – #M80
Surge – #426
Take-Out Dinah – #49
Unleasha Moore – #5150
Volcanic Ash – #2000

Forgive me for the really poor blurry image, but these women move FAST!!! I’ll take better photos at the next bout.

On a whim I bought tickets for their first home bout on February 16th. The official beer sponsor at the event was Strike Brewing, and as of this blog post, Stefania Wine is the the official wine sponsor for the season.

<— that’s Luna Chick in front of me, she and husband EiPhilTower (sp?) were guests at our meet and greet party last month. We’re looking forward to entertaining the team this Spring/Summer, finally people that eat carbs!!

We’ll have our specially designed banner hanging in the Beer Garden at the next event. We’re very excited to sponsor these women!

Home Bout Schedule:

February 16th, May 11th, June 22nd, August 17th, and September 28th

http://svrollergirls.com/schedule/2013-bouts/

San Jose Skate

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San Jose, CA 95123
(408) 226-1155