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I’ll be very honest, I was on the verge or a major meltdown all week long because Paul had to be at the day job today and we were scheduled to bottle 3 lots of wine.

I wasn’t melting down over him not being there, it was my own anxiety about “what if something, anything, goes wrong”. The biggest item of contention was getting there by 7:45 a.m. For one, I’m never on time and I almost always get lost when I’m on my own, ok, that’s an exaggeration, I mostly do ok, but still, it’s a long windy road from home to Big Basin and I wasn’t looking forward to a solo ride.

As the sun was coming up and the sky was a pretty pinkish hue, I was still grumbly and cursing but trying to talk myself out of the anxiety attack that I was on the verge of. I was trying to put a happy spin on being up a such an early hour. For example, the only other time I get up and go mobile that early is if we’re going on vacation and we have an early flight. So there, that cheered me up, I talked myself into believing I was headed to a mini-day vacation, afterall, this isn’t really hard work and it still beats a traditional day job.

The drive was fine, and I only got stuck behind a couple of slow moving vehicles twice, not long enough to make me late.

I did manage to arrive on time (woohoo!), my crew showed up just after me and we started the line around 8:30. The experience compared to the last two times was about a million percent better. Holy moly, let me tell you. Maybe it takes three times of doing it, or maybe we finally got a guy that knows how to run the line. Yep, guy. One of them.

The last two nightmare bottlings with a billion delays had 3 guys running the line, plus our help inside the truck.

Anyway, my apologies for not taking a single photo, I didn’t have Pauls slick iphone and didn’t remember to grab my own camera this morning.

In all we processed about 290 cases of wine today. Now in bottle are the 2007 Pinot Noir Santa Cruz Mountains, 2007 Haut Tubee Red Wine, and the 2007 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah wines.

I headed down the mountain around 1p.m., got some yahoo poophead in a red sports car right up my rear bumper on the windy road for just a short while (until I could find a reasonable turnout) and he zoomed off ahead of me. Mind you, I drive fast and aggressive when it’s just me in the car, but I wasn’t in a little zippy sportster so I minded my own business and kept a steady beat. I caught up to him once, he was stuck behind a pick up truck hauling trash bins, then he over took him too. Zoom. Whoosh. Zip. Gone.

At the crossroads, I got onto highway 17, headed south, and was crawling along at the pathetically slow speed of 55 (cruise control set. boring.) and I get just to the bottom of the hill, make that first bend in Los Gatos and there he was. The Sucker got nailed by a motorcycle cop.

I waved.

It was a great bottling day.

I’m pretty sure Paul took pictures of us the other night drinking our own wine but then he didn’t post them. If I can distract him enough today maybe I’ll get him to upload to this posting.

I was goofing off the other day and took a picture of my baking station, since so many people have asked me if I’m using a bread machine. The answer is no, I’m not using a bread machine, I’m using the KitchenAid stand mixer, as seen on the kitchen cart below:

If you’re familiar with the wine forums at all you know that people have their own monikors that they go by. Some of them are pretty cool and keep within the theme of wine. Well, the same goes for the Kitchen Aid forum I found out. But it’s not the names they go by on the forum, it’s the names they have assigned to their stand mixers. While some people have named their stand mixers, I have not. We just call it the Kitchen Tractor, which is kind of a name I guess.

Long story longer about this thing — I bought it after visiting friends (correction, Paul bought it for my birthday) who had one and they made this great dessert with it. After watching it perform I declared it a Must Have for whipping cream at home. Yep. Whipping Cream. Well, I unpacked it, I read thru all of the recipes that came with it and the first thing I tried was bread.

Since then, just over a year ago, I’ve baked hundreds of loaves of bread and whipped cream maybe twice. I’ve also made raviolis, spaghetti noodles, ground pepper relish, ground pork, beef, chicken, and juiced citrus. This is, in my opinion, the best kitchen tool you can have.

I’ve been taking all sorts of bread photos, and the latest and greatest was an olive loaf with roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, and kalamata olives.

I pretty sure Paul thought I would be a bored housewife without a formal “day job” to go to, but between the pruning, the bookkeeping, the bottling, and logistics of managing it all and then some, AND getting to stay home and bake fresh bread, I am anything BUT bored. Not to mention I get to drink wine at this job…if I could sit still long enough to enjoy it.

That mostly sums it up for the first round of pruning.

Actually, I don’t think anyone was sunburned at Crimson Clover the other day despite record high temperatures and full bright sun! It was a gorgeous California winter day. If you recall last year when we pruned at Chaine d’Or, we bailed out midday because of freezing rain. The following day it snowed in the foothills, and we definitely felt that coming!! Brrrr.

The blisters come with the territory, you toss another bandaid on and keep going. I was glad this year to notice my new work books were a bit more broken in and less rigid on my heels. Paul loves telling the story of us at Mel Cottons and asking the clerk for waterproof boots for me. She came back with some cute little slip on plastic clogs… He was very patient and explained that no, this wasn’t some tidy little garden to putter in, that it was heavy duty farming and the boots needed to be sturdy and waterproof.

At one point I over asserted myself with the vine cutting and jabbed it right down onto my thigh. See, there is this thrusting motion you do when you’re disengaging it from the wires, and I was perhaps a little overzealous about it. I have this fantastic welt and bruise, but I know it’s temporary, just a glaring reminder I need to be more careful.

Pruning Crimson could have been more peaceful and I would have been able to let my mind wander about to other interesting thoughts, but the fumes from the neighbors gas chainsaw were a bit distracting. So was the roaring rip of each tree branch he cut. Just about the time we thought he was done, he fired up the chipper….

The greatest highlight was watching Truffles (Jazzy) play with the vineyard dog Rascal. They’re about the same size, she’s a French Bulldog (that snorts like a piglet, which is why I call her Truffles), and he’s some type of Terrier mix. They were a cute ball of fur chasing each other about in the short grass.

I’m not sure if Paul or I have a picture of her yet, but we’ll put one up soon.

Yesterday was a beautiful day to be outside. It was sunny but cool and no wind to speak of. We were working with the same crew from the day before. We’re still way ahead of schedule and we thought we could probably finish this vineyard in one day, including clean up of the cuttings.

The Crimson Clover vineyard is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains just outside of the town of Morgan Hill. The crew always likes working in this vineyard because it’s a moderate 4-5% slope and a clean VSP system. We’ve managed this vineyard since 2007. At first it was a mess of suckers and poor training, but we got it corrected that first year, and now it’s fairly easy to maintain.

This is us wrapping up for the day. Jerry is hauling out the cuttings. This is the worst part of pruning. It’s like playing ‘Pick Up Sticks’ with 15,000 sticks, or roughly 1000 deep knee bends. I’m still sore today.

This is a picture of a finished vine. You can see the vines are still pretty young. This vineyard was put in in 2005 but since the pruning wasn’t right the first two years it’s really more like a 4 year old vineyard than a five year old.

The vineyard owners were out to see how things were going. I told them we’re very happy with this vineyard and we think it will be a star for us. Tasting the 2008 wine in barrel before Christmas I thought it was the best wine I’d made at that stage. It’s deep, dark and multi layered with tons of ripe fruit. We have it in 2/3 new oak right now, and I think this will be a great wine. I’m really excited for this vineyard in 2009. We’re going to put in even more work with it this year.

We’re hoping we can get the yield to about 3 tons, and make 150 cases or so. That will be the limit for this site though so it will always be a small production wine for us.

And the final picture is my self portrait for the day. I was actually trying to take a picture of the Crimson Clover coming up, but what the heck.

This has become our standard first picture. A comfortable late start at 8:06 AM, enough time for it to warm up to 36 degrees.

The entrance to the Arastadero Vineyard. We take care of this vineyard for Big Basin Vineyards. They use the fruit for a private client. This hill is very steep and difficult to work on.

Here’s an ‘after’. The clipping we left for Jerry to pick up later when we’re under less of a time crunch. We’re trying to complete all of our pruning before St Vincent’s day on the 22nd. That was the traditional pruning schedule, and since we’ve done that, we’ve had great luck with our vineyards.

The next stop was the little Harrison vineyard about a mile away. We installed this two summers ago with 170 Syrah plants. It took us just 30 minutes to finish here as well. The plants were pruned back to two buds this year to start their arms. Usually in year two you would have arms, but because we planted this so late the first year (after the 4th of July) it’s more like a 1 1/2 year old vineyard than two years.

Our final stop for the day was Vista Verde, our newest vineyard. This is about 1 1/4 acres of Pinot Noir on a very steep hill. We thought this might take us two days to do because of the slope. Here’s Stefania, with Kathy and ‘Jazzy’ in the background. You can see how steep this site is.

Here’s Jerry working in the same area of the hill. When we’re restoring a vineyard like this, I prefer to only use experienced pruners who know how to deal with ‘do overs’ and ‘restarts’ on plants. Our crew yesterday was Millie, Kathy, Jerry, his wife Estella, Stefania and me.

Estella, Jerry and Millie working in a little bowl of the vineyard. In the summer this bowl will actually catch the afternoon sun, but in the middle of winter it was still shady at noon.

Here’s a ‘before’ picture, and a good example of why a new vineyard can take so long. The pruning here was not terrible, it just wasn’t up to our quality. There is too much growth in the center, that encourages mildew, and some shoots are too long. That weakens other shoots and the plant spends its energy growing leafs instead of getting fruit ripe.

Here it is after fixing the problems. The center of the vine is now cleaned up and the spacing is right. This vine will now grow 10-12 shoots.

This was a hard vineyard to work. It was steep and needed a lot of expert care. One of the funny things from the day was that there are parts so steep, you need to get a running start at the vine, jump up the hill and grab it by the base. You then dig in your knees and prune. When you’re done you slide back down off the hill and do the entire thing over again.

Still we had a great crew and we finished by 3 PM. More on today’s pruning coming tomorrow.

I started canopy management yesterday. Most people call it pruning, but as I was cutting the vines, I remembered the problem areas from last year and spent extra time visualizing the growth.

There were plants with spurs too close together that I opened up and some on the upper hillside that are shaded thru much of the day that needed thinning. Proper pruning now means less time going back and cutting green growth.

One thing I’ve learned for certain is that the vines will grow no matter what you do to them, they persevere. A bad prune job, they grow anyway. Bad training, they grow anyway. Too close together or spaced too far apart, they grow anyway.

I like that as I’m working with each plant, it will tell me what it wants. When I pull a cane down to retrain the cordon, it will let me pull the one that is directionally meant to be used. With little or no resistance.

As I was working yesterday I kept myself amused by thinking of past day jobs and the trivial annoyances of working in an office environment. Nobody jammed the photocopier yesterday, the printer didn’t run out of toner, no worries about the fax machine paper supply, I didn’t have to drink bad coffee, and there were no extra perky in-your-face-first-thing-in-the-morning people with their sing-songy Good Mornings.

Just me, Gerry, the clippers, and the vines.

We’re heading out again this morning, with Paul, Kathy, Millie, and Truffles, and Gerry will bring Estella with him. We’ll finish Arastradero then make our way up the hill to Vista Verde to get started. With this size crew today we may even finish VV. I’ll make sure that Paul takes pics while we’re there so he can upload them tonight.

We’ll be adding a new vineyard site for 2009. Located at 1300 feet off Alpine Road near Summit Road this is a 7 year old vineyard of Pinot Noir.

We’re calling it Vista Verde, after the small development of houses it’s located in.

The vineyard is on a steep slope and is just over 1 1/4 acres. Total yield should be about 1 ton this year and 1 1/2 -2 tons long term. The trellis is a good VSP 5 wire system.

There was a landscaping crew there when we stopped by putting in some native ground cover. You can see the slope of the vineyard well in this picture.

There was frost on the ground. This will be a cool site for us. Just right to get Pinot Noir ripe. The vineyard is just about 2 miles from Chaine d’Or, although it’s on a separate ridge line so driving between the two takes about 20 minutes.

Here’s the vista in Vista Verde.

The vineyard has a good drainage system in place and is paved from top to bottom which should make working in it just a little easier for us.

There are about 15 dead plants we need to replace, and some poor pruning and training we need to correct, but over all the vineyard is in good shape. We expect a smaller yield this year as we fix the training and pruning on about 100 plants. Most will be ‘do overs’. On those we will restart the cordons from the trunk, and those plants will only have 1-2 clusters instead of 8-10. Next year though they will be ready to produce back at normal levels.

Just the other day Paul and I were in the kitchen doing chores and he startled me telling me to look outside, “quick!”. I thought the neighbors cat was getting into something again, or up to no good. The cat in reference is one we are doing battle with since a recent pooping incident on our lawn…a cat that poops like a dog, so annoying.

Grape growers never say there is such a thing as a bad year. We say “It was a great year, I hope I never have another one like it again”.

As I close out the year with a cold that’s keeping us home, there are some good things for sure. The wine we made was very good this year. Our sales went up again, almost 200% for the year. We had a lot of fun, made new friends, and had great times with old friends. The 49ers fired Mike Nolan, and America refused to hire Sarah Palin. (I called the combination of the two events a sure sign we are turning away from admiration for stupid people.)

We had visitors from Vermont, New York, France, and places in between at the winery this year. We also had some great parties. Gerard holding a possum by the tail is still a highlight everyone talks about. My day job went very well. We really turned our group around and customers noticed. We got by on one car, and one day job, and kept things afloat.

It wasn’t a bad year. It was a hard year. And it reminds me of stories my grandparents would tell. They laughed at the stories, and remembered times with friends and family fondly, but they were hard times, times they didn’t want to see again.

I think the right way to send out 2008 is the way Stefania has sent things out she hasn’t liked since age 4. If you know her, and you’ve seen her mad, you’ve seen this face. 🙂

Here she says good by to 1973, and 2008.

The trellis wires were the perfect place to hang “stained glass” cookies for a photo op.

More cookies on the wire…

These are the “Hot Tub” vines, you can kind of see the infamous tub in the background.

Originally the vines in the back were head trained, like the ones in the front, but we’re also re-doing the backyard. We had Jerry pull out more than half the vines in the back so that we could train the existing ones on a new trellis system. The posts and wires are in, but it looks goofy until we prune. When I do the Suburban Vineyard Backyard photos you’ll see before and after.

For now, enjoy pictures of the holiday cookies Kathy and I made hanging on the wires.