See that smiling face ? Could be the glass of wine in his hand, or the steaks on the grill, but either way, that’s what finishing a giant task looks like around here!
Yay Team Stefania!
I’m certain some folks did not receive the Spring Release announcement, because for the first time we didn’t mail hard copies. Paul sent out email offers in waves to each tier of customers. If you missed it, or lost it, or deleted it, that’s ok, you can still pick up some wine. The great news is that it’s now available online through this website!
And while orders were being packed and boxes were getting shipped, I pulled out my paint brushes and started in on a huge project. Painting the house, by hand, one brush stroke at a time. Not like there was much vineyard work to do, in this photo the vines are still dormant.
If the Colonel were still alive, he would be 81 today.
We had a distant relationship after my parents divorce, but I always made time to visit him on his birthday and fathers day. No regrets other than he never got to try our wine, he died before the first vintage was in bottle. He liked Paul a lot and the only time I did miss his birthday was the year Paul and I got serious about dating.
Over the weekend, friends invited us to join them on a tour of military vehicles in Portola Valley (just a few yards from two vineyards we have tended). The picture with me standing next to a tank is what sparked this silly blog. The tank is for sale: $40K.
Next photo is of the tank that inspired the tour for us. It’s a fully restored Panther. We happened to catch a video of it a few years back but didn’t remember or notice or pay attention well enough to see that at the end of the video, it refers to the restoration location in California. Well, our friend saw the same show just recently and noted the location and called them up.
As it turns out, you can tour the collection, Field Trip!!
I can’t tell you how much fun I had. Chalk it up to being an Army Brat, but I got to spend almost all day long with Dad, in spirit.
Paul and I had winery work after the tour and we were in the neighborhood. Glad we cranked out the two hours of prep work on Saturday, because Sunday was a long day working.
All I could talk about the whole time we were working was the tank exhibit, I’m still talking about it!
This all ties back to my dad in a round about way. See, that tank is for sale, and something in my gut tells me he would have bought it.
Here is Paul in the courtyard prior to the start of the tour. We walked through 4 “barns”, giant warehouses actually, over the course of a couple hours and barely glimpsed the collection…it is Amazing.
Anyway, Happy Birthday Dad, I had a great weekend thinking about you. I better get back to my day job and start growing some grapes.
So a quick update on the kitchen tractor. I fixed it! Ages ago actually, but here are some pics totally in random order. I’m using this blog as a test, to see how the new platform work outs, seems like when I get really comfortable with a program it gets changed (and not always for the better) but I digress.
First photo is the completed repair with the new metal transmission cover, next to it the lube-y goo so it works smoothly, and top right is “in the shop” pending receipt of parts.
Bottom two pics are the guts cleaned out and waiting for new gears, not sure why I didn’t take a pic of the new parts in place before the lube-goo, must have been excited.
The very last photo is of the parts in order of assembly, a reminder that I needed to replace the pin in between the two gears.
And yes, that is a bottle of chardonnay on my work bench with a botched label on it.
Ok, figured out how to get text down here finally. I’ll get the hang of this soon. Lots of other pics to post up and chatter about.
The big news for 2013 is that things are going along wonderfully in the vineyards and the winery. The lab work for the 2012’s came back solid and we’re starting to see bud break in the vineyards.
We’ve made a few changes to the website. First we changed hosting companies so you may notice a few pictures off on the blogs. We’ll fix these as we can. The most obvious change is missing featured photos right now.
We’ve also added some new wines that will be release shortly. Ordering for those wines will go live later this week. The wines are live now here but won’t be in the shopping section for a couple of days. With those changes done we hope we will have some more blogs soon.
It’s been cold for California this January. It is a time we have to be outside a great deal. We probably spend more time in the vineyards in January than any other month of the year including harvest time. As long as it is dry though it’s not bad to work in the cold. We just bring lots of layers and we actually stay pretty warm as we work.
Pruning is the major task in January. We will also do maintenance on the trellis systems though as well. It’s a good time to replace any broken posts and repair any damaged wire. One big task for this January has been changing the pruning at Chaine d’Or. Over the last few years the yields on the Chardonnay plants has gone way down. The plants are 25 years old now and that is the point when yields do drop. The drop though has been dramatic. Some plants had only 4-5 clusters per plant instead of the 20-25 we’d expect.
Last year I spent some time researching the issue and after a lot of reading wondered if we should use the Guyot training method instead of the Cordon and Spur method we were using. In Burgundy on old plants they use Guyot and I thought there must be some reason, although I could not find anything specific about yields.
I selected about a half dozen plants last year and pruned and trained them in the Guyot method as an experiment. The results by the end of the year were dramatic. At best on the Cordon and Spur training we saw 8-10 clusters per plant and the average was about 6. Some plants had less than 4 and many only had 1-2 clusters. All the clusters were very small as well. With Guyot training cluster sizes were 50% larger and we had at least 12 clusters on every plant.
We decided to change over the entire vineyard starting this year. We did about 40% of the lower section. We chose plants there based on the position of the canes and overall health of the vine. If we could make the conversion we did. If we couldn’t we left the plant for next year.
In the upper section though we did a 100% conversion. In the first step Stefania and Millie went through the vineyard and removed all of the canes from the plant except for 2 or 3 closest to the center of the plant. The goal was to end up with two left, but they often left me 3 so I had options on where to cut. Below is an example of what the plant looked like after they went through.
I spent a lot of time with the chain saw. The cordons are too thick to remove with pruners and have to be sawed off. It’s a delicate thing to do. I have to make sure not to cut the canes we want to leave, or too much of the plant off. I also have to avoid hitting the wire with the saw, which is hard because the cordons rest on the wire. I ended up cutting the wire once and bucking the chain of the saw about 5 times.
Once the Cordons are off the plant looks like this. Herrardo followed me around as I cut and removed the wood from the vineyard. He’d also replace the chain when it came off. With the amount to be cut I’d switch chain saws every 30 minutes or so to let one cool while I worked with the other one.
The final step is to pull down the canes and tie them to the wire as you see below. In this case I was able to leave one renewal spur for next year. In the Guyot method you have 4 canes total on the plant. Two are pulled down and two are cut to two nodes to provide canes for the next year. In our situation though we had no plants yet with 4 canes in the right position so we’ll do the step of having renewal spurs next season.
Normally such a dramatic change, and the missing renewal spurs would mean a huge drop in yields. Since yields were already so low though we thing we might actually have more Chardonnay this year than last.
For New Years we took a 6 day trip to Seattle. It was a perfect break before pruning started and we were back at work in the vineyards. It seems like every time we’ve been to Seattle we had fantastic weather. This was the skyline one day we went out walking. You can just make out Mount Rainier. The plan was to get a condo in Belltown and shop the markets every day for dinner. We also hit the international market and some art galleries.
We planned on walking almost everywhere. Seattle is a nice town to walk in and even though there are a few hills to climb you can walk to most everything in 30 minutes or less.
It was still chilly but we bundled up and spent a lot of time walking the town
Everyday included a trip to the market to shop for fresh ingredients for the nights dinner. In all we ate out for dinner once. Most days we had lunch out and dinner in. We really loved getting something fresh from the market everyday.
This was the view down 1st street in Belltown from the condo we rented. The market was about a 15 minute walk.
And this was the view out the front windows of the Olympic Mountains and Elliot Bay. There were a few nice spots just on the block we stayed including Belltown Pizza where we watched the Seahawks game and Rob Roy where we had some great cocktail.
Some of the food actually had to come home with us. This is a veal chop and Fois Gras we packed and had when we got home.
We’ve been working on getting an online ordering system up and in place for a little while. Harvest work, regular work, travel and now pruning have all delayed us being able to work on it. Today though was a rainy wet and cold day and we called off pruning for the day. Stefania and I used the time to get caught up on other tasks and I used the time to get a Beta of on line ordering going.
You’ll now see a link to order wines we have in stock on the Wines page and the Orders page. Right now just wines from previous releases that have not sold out are listed. In the next few weeks I hope to get the wines for the Spring Release set up and allow people to order those on line. It will take a bit to figure out the allocation system.
On the order page you see a discount of 20% for Wine Club members. We don’t have a wine club set up yet on line but will also be adding that soon. Until now we’ve limited our Wine Club to sign ups local to the San Jose area who sign up live at events. We’ll be expanding that this year. We will also be moving Futures ordering on to the on line system.
Our plan is to still send out letters to those who want them and we’ll start in the Spring with letters asking people to log in and order. There will be an option to receive future offers by email or an option to continue to receive the postal letter.
The pride and joy of my kitchen has suffered a major set back. The tractor died on Saturday. *Sigh* On the agenda for Saturday night was ground rib eye burgers with cheese and mushrooms…that was until the tractor quit on me. It wasn’t the screeching grinding halt of a noise that I’ve read about on other blogs. Nope, I could tell right away from the sound and behavior that I lost part of the gear, it was stripped. There are theories that the plastic housing is to blame, that it’s not durable enough for the speed of the motor and that it flexes, causing the gears to grind. I’m going to disagree, at least in my case, because it would appear to be improper alignment.. After pulling the head off and observing the guts, I still can’t figure out where the rough grinding sound is coming from. See, there was a ton of gooey grease in there. I think there must be ball bearings underneath the assembly unit where the dough hook attaches. I didn’t want to do a full tear down, I’ll leave that up to the shop. In the meantime I’ve been looking around online for a professional grade (restaurant grade?) meat grinder. Bread making is also on hold, but I can manage doing that manually if I get desperate.
Yesterday we hosted a small Open House for Pick Up Day. Always fun to hang out and visit with the regular locals and even better is when someone new shows up! We got to meet a couple new faces this time and overall I think everyone had a good time. The afternoon was crisp so I had Paul light a small fire and that seemed to brighten up the gloomy winter day.
We had been shopping the day before for vinyl and Paul played several of his jazz and blues records. We stayed away from Christmas music, seems like everyone is already burned out on holiday tunes.
Through the front window I snapped some pics of the soggy vineyard:
White sage and red blooms on the pineapple sage:
I rotated the head to capture the non-worn part of the gear:
We lingered over coffee and the newspaper, then just before 8 Paul fetched the little trailer from Uhaul while I took the nets off the “estate” mourvedre vineyard. We harvested the house and church and met up with Millie in Los Altos.
She went up with 10 bins to get started and was almost done by the time we arrived.
In all we brought in 840 pounds of fruit from the three vineyards. We were undecided about processing until we finished the pick. Rather than run everything thru the crusher we decided to leave all the fruit whole and foot treaded instead. The fruit was sweet and sexy and the skins this year are very richly tannic. There are always a bunch of clusters of syrah in the back yard vineyard that raisin so I toss them in to off-set some of the green stems you see in the header photo.
This was my first real harvest from home and I was more than a little excited about taking the fruit off. The yield was still really light, just 120 pounds, but I only have about 1/2 the vineyard fruiting right now. The rows under the magnolia tree are competing for resources; water and sunshine. I’ll do another round of fertilizer treatment this fall and next spring. I have been a water miser but will be a little more generous in 2013 to give them a little boost.
Just take the picture already, this is only the first bucket! I dropped acid at the winery, thusly such the holes in my Def Leppard shirt – my official cruddy winery/work shirt since the acid incident. (Lab chemicals, I don’t actually drop acid recreationally, my imagination needs no help thankyouverymuch).
Syrah grapes from the back yard vineyard next to the Hot Tub.
Bubby is Paul’s official supervisor. He was very curious to know what we were doing with “his” grapes.
Quickie pic of Paul and the two rows of cabernet at the church.
And below: the syrah at Harrison’s vineyard in Los Altos Hills.
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