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Today Stef, Jerry and I spent the day at Chaine d’Or getting everything cleaned and ready for harvest. From this point out, we’re going to try really hard to have a blog entry every day. I thought I could do that last harvest season and it was very difficult to get one a week out.

I think though the blogs will be short, and pictures may not have narratives with them. We’ll just throw up what content we have and get it out there.

The pictures below show some of the goings on as we scrubbed and cleaned everything today.

We’re starting to narrow in on some picking windows for the start of harvest. I’ve heard that in Napa and Sonoma things are well under way, but we’re still waiting here.

Friday we’ll do our annual clean at the winery. Once a year everything gets a good scrub down to get anything we may have missed during routine cleaning during the year. We’ll also prep, clean and test all the equipment. De-stemmer, pump, press, and the big tanks. Jerry already cleaned and prepped all the plastic bins on Monday.

Saturday will be the first pick. We’ll harvest the Syrah, Zinfandel and some of the Grenache (a couple plants need another 7-10 days) at home for the Haut Tubee blend. Friday night we’ll also test the Syrah and Zinfandel at the OttiGurr home vineyard and pick that Saturday as well.

The Crimson vineyard is close to ready. We may pick that next week. We need to check on flavors first. Those grapes will go to Big Basin Vineyards and we’ll make the wine there.

Jerry is out taking samples today at the Woodruff Family Vineyard. It looks like we’ll be picking all the Chardonnay next week, and some of the Pinot Noir. I may take a ton or so at the same time for us, but right now the plan is to get next weeks pick to Hobo Wines and Stores. Following that we’ll pick for Pax Mahle, then finally Big Basin and ourselves. I may take a little at the same time we pick for Pax, so I can judge picking at different times.

So, off we go………

I’ve added a new link to the blog for ‘Friends of the Winemakers’. FOW for short, is a group Stef and I joined originally as supporting members. Then we converted to a member winery when we started making wine.

The mission of the organization is to preserve the history and support the efforts of winemaking in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Clara Valley. They also have a really, really good time doing it. Stef and I don’t get to go on nearly as many events as we’d like to with the group since the parties and trips are usually on Saturday’s when we’re busy working. If you have free time though, this is a great group to check out.

We also host an annual event for FOW members. Each November we prepare a special dinner and pair our wines with that dinner. I talk about each wine and the food pairing we’ve put together. The cost is under $50 and includes a 4-5 course meal and a sampling of all our wines. It’s really a very fun event.

This year for instance for the main course we’re planing on smalll portion of:

Lamb chop with mint jelly and lentils d’ provance.
St Andre’s bison chesse burger with Stefania’s Blackberry BBQ sauce.
Filet Mignon with pepper/port reduction sauce.

The three will be served on one tasting plate and paired with our 2006 Syrah Eaglepoint Ranch, 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek Vineyard, and a special sneak preview of our un-released 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains. The idea is to be able to sample each wine, with each meat and see what makes the best combo!

So do give FOW a look, it’s a great group of people and we enjoy our annual event with them!

I originally published this on the Wine Spectator Forum in a thread about hurricane Gustav:

I just wanted to indulge myself in a little story.

It was March of 2006. Seven months after Katrina. Stef and I were in a little bar on Bourbon Street. There were maybe 20 people there. Aid workers mostly and construction people.

A few locals, there really were not a lot of people who had returned yet. It was weird to hear the locals talk. The conversation was always the same.

Where did you go to?
When did you come back?
Where did your family go?
Do you know where they all are?
Have any of them come back?

This was friend talking to friend and neighbor. It was shocking really, in that it was so common.

“Do you know where your family is?” Seven months after the storm and it was a common question to ask people if they had found all their family.

The Times-Picayune still was filled with obits. Died 8/29/05. Pages of them, or “Died last week, never recovered”. That was common too.

Stef had brought me to New Orleans the first time in 2001 for my birthday. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s movie, there is a scene where one French Quarter resident says he knew within 6 hours of arriving in the city the first time, he wanted to stay, and he’d been there 40 years.

Six hours after we arrived I stood at Bourbon and Esplanade and said “I want to come back here every year.” And we have, every year but 2005. We were married in Jackson Square in 2003.

That first trip back after the storm, we were the first real ‘tourists’ people had seen. Aid workers, volunteers, students, construction works, but no tourists. People cried when we told them we just came back because we loved the city. The waitress at Louisiana Bistro hugged us and broke down sobbing. Thank you we heard over and over again.

That night in the bar, the guitar player played a song. ‘Katrina Blues’. Lost families, blue tarps, FEMA, it hit every person in the room.

I’d heard the blues before then, but that was the first time I ever understood them.

In the middle of harvest this year, I’ll stop, turn things over to Millie and Jerry, and Stef and I will go back to New Orleans for a few days for my birthday. We’ll see old friends, and make new ones, and I’ll be thankful they’ve made it through another storm season, and hope every one’s family makes it home.

I’ve actually read The Crisis by Thomas Paine. The class was ‘American Political Thought”. The reading list was extensive; Notes on the State of Virginia, The Federalist Papers, The entire Lincoln Douglas Debates, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Fortunately as tough as the professor was, he also had a weakness for good food and beer, and he would always take a small group of us out to dinner after class. I learned perhaps more from the debates we’d have at those dinners, than even the reading list.

We learned to sharpen our arguments, and organize our facts in those Socratic, beer inspired debates. We also learned a great deal about intellectual strength. Sticking to what you know to be right in the face of popular pressure.

Every year in September we go through trying times as grape growers. Without fail we will have a heat wave in September every year. All around us panic starts to break out. People worry about rising sugars, and the pressure builds to harvest early.

It is a trying time. You have to stick to what you know is right, and let the grapes hang through the heat. Even as you read about harvest starting, and picking beginning, you know the grapes really are not ready. You have to have the guts and intellectual strength to stick with what you know is right.

It’s very hard. A mistake and the resulting wines can have too much alcohol or burnt flavors. What if the heat doesn’t end is always a concern? It gets worse as more people start to pick, and they always justify their panic with all the reasons they think it’s the right thing to do, and how wrong it is to not pick.

We’ve got to stick that out. Hold on, do what we know will be right; “Simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense…divest yourself of prejudice and prepossession, and enlarge your views beyond the present day.” Or for a more modern view: “We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got…We’ll give it a shot. We’re half way there”

Which I would bet is the only time you’ve ever seen Thomas Paine and Jon Bon Jovi quoted in the same blog.

We’re two weeks in and doing well. Good thing we started early too, because harvest looks like it will be 2-3 weeks early this year from the past few years.

The Expresso.net bike says I’m over 56 miles in two weeks and the scale says I’ve dropped 8 pounds. I’m really focusing on the things we’ll need for harvest; leg strength, endurance and lifting 30-40 pounds over and over again. I’ll also have to watch out for the hand problems that come with harvest. Scrapes, hangnails, cuts and sore hands all come with harvest time. I’ve got to start now with using moisturizers and remember to wear gloves as much as possible.

There are a lot of people who work at wineries who say harvest doesn’t official start until you bleed. Once you have a cut on your hand that requires a bandage, harvest has really started. The sting on your hands from 3.5pH juice in open cuts is one of the little parts of harvest that isn’t very glamorous.

I thnk both Stef and I are feeling we’re doing well right now. We’re getting to the gym every other day or so and getting good workouts done. We should be ready once things get going.

We’ve started to take BRIX (percentage of sugar to juice) readings in our vineyards. I like to harvest grapes at between 23.5 and 25.0 BRIX. It depends on the vineyard and other factors exactly when we pick, but those are the ‘numbers’ I look for.

We also look for ‘secondary’ signs of ripeness. The pips or seeds should become brown and crisp. The petiole, where the cluster connects to the vine, should harden and turn brown. The skin should start to dimple on the grapes, and when you eat a grape the flesh should tear with your teeth and the pulp should separate easily from the seeds.

I also check for flavor development. Grapes change flavors as they get ripe. Syrah starts of very citrus like, with pineapple, and tropical fruit. It then gets very peppery with raspberry and cherry fruit. Next it starts to develop deep cherry and berry fruit, the pepper gets more like black pepper and finally you get fruit flavors like wild berries and dark plums. If you leave it on the vine long enough, you’ll get prunes, dates and raisin flavors.

I like to pick when the flavors are in the middle area, with still a hint of red fruit, but moving into the dark fruit flavors and before the prune flavors show up. In our vineyards that usually happens right around 24-25 BRIX.

Right now most of the vineyards are right below 20 BRIX in the ‘warmer’ vineyards, and 18 in the cooler ones. That means we are still 3-4 weeks away in the warmer ones and 6-8 in the cooler ones. Secondary signs are just starting to show, and flavors actually seem a little ahead of the BRIX. We’ll probably pick the grapes around our home, the Haut Tubee, in about two weeks. That is always our first pick of the season.

There’s been talk and reports this year about a lot of ‘shatter’ in vineyards. What the heck is shatter? Basically it’s the result or outcome of some problem at flowering that prevents individual grapes on a cluster from being pollinated. The end result is a stringy cluster with empty spots where there should be grapes.

The picture below is of a cluster at the Crimson Clover vineyard in Morgan Hill that has shatter. You can see that the cluster looks like it has missing spaces where there should be grapes.

The grapes can also get a condition called ‘Chicken and Egg’, or ‘Hen and Egg’. I don’t really know why it has that name, the name doesn’t make sense, but what you end up with are some fully mature pollinated berries (chickens), and little hard un-pollinated green berries (eggs). We haven’t really seen that this year, so no pictures of that. Maybe it’s because pollinated eggs become chickens, but grapes never look like chickens. I think it’s a silly term. There’s a French term for the condition also, but I prefer to just say “poor fruit set’.

The next picture shows that this condition is pretty limited for us. You can see a few clusters on this vine have shatter. Most though are fine and healthy.

Basically anything that interrupts the flowering cycle will cause shatter. It can be frost, wind, too much heat, too much cold, shaking the plants, spraying while flowering is happening, or anything that keeps the pollen from hitting the flower.

The culprit in the Crimson Clover vineyard is wind. The vineyard is in a narrow valley in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains at about 300 feet. In the morning the fog burns back out of the valley, creating wind in a south eastern direction. In the afternoon the Santa Clara Valley heats up and draws cool wind down this little valley from the Ocean, shifting the wind to the opposite direction.

The final picture shows a vine at the boundary of the vineyard. At the south-eastern edge of the vineyard where this vine is located, the other vines can’t break the wind. The result is that shatter is worse on the wind exposed edges of the vineyard. You can see the boundary fence in the background of this picture.

Overall though the impact is small for us. Yields go down a little, but we’ll still get about 2-3 tons per acre from this site. The open clusters also help prevent mildew. Since the cluster is open to the air it’s harder for mildew to start. It is also easier to get spray on the berries since they are not tightly spaced together. Finally, the lower yield helps concentrate ripeness and means less thinning for us.

I really like red wine, red meat, and a big piece of sourdough bread covered with butter and olive oil. Combine that with a day job that mostly involves conference calls and emails and its easy to get a little out of breath hiking up the steep vineyard hills on weekends.

Last year before harvest though I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do 15 and 16 hour days of hard activity with out a little prep work. Fortunately there is a little gym at work and I spent a lot of time on the Expresso Bike before harvest started. I felt pretty good as we went through harvest. I’d get tired for sure, but never exhausted.

This year I actually decided to start ‘training camp’ a little earlier, and Stefania joined in. For the next 6 to 8 weeks we’ll be visiting the gym 3-4 times a week and trying to get in a long bike ride or hike on Sunday’s. Harvest is a lot of work. The long days are all on your feet, and hiking through the vineyards. On a harvest day I may lift the 30 pound picking boxes 300-400 times in a day, including up over my head and into the crusher. It takes a lot of muscle stamina to keep doing that.

So that’s what we’ll be focusing on. Building stamina, repetitive strength and endurance. The Total time of harvest, from first pick through final pressing, will last about 10 weeks. It’s a little bit like a football season. 6-8 weeks of ‘camp’, then 10-11 weeks of ‘season’. There will be bumps and bruises along the way and at the end, we’ll need a good rest!

Yesterday started very early. 6 AM we were up and ready to go. It was one of Stefania’s new “winery work” days. She’s now working 3 days a week at her day job and 3 days at the winery. We try and take Sunday’s off, but we do work Saturdays.

Jerry and his wife Estella met us to drive down to the Crimson Clover vineyard in Morgan Hill. Estella is working for us about 30 hours a week now also. I had to get Stefania dropped off and get to work before a 9AM meeting. I needed to go out with them though to show them exactly what fruit I wanted dropped.

The Crimson Clover vineyard is four years old, and not all the plants are at the same maturity level in a young vineyard. That means we have to treat each vine individually and make sure it has the right amount of fruit on the vine. Too much and the fruit won’t get ripe and the vine will be stressed. In old vineyards this is much less of a problem as old vines tend to find the right balance on their own over time. That’s assuming you prune and care for it properly though.

Above you see our little crew getting started. I prefer to do this kind of detailed work with a small, highly skilled crew. The standard is to bring in a large group for day work, give simple instructions and set them loose. With a small crew though I can give detailed instructions and since they will return over and over to the vineyard, they’ll get to learn the detail I’m after as I provide instruction and check on the work.

This is one of the problems we were trying to fix. The plant above is too small to carry all the fruit it has on it. It’s healthy, and on track for a four year old vine, but this amount of fruit will not ripen properly, and will stress the vine too much this year, resulting in a weak vine next year.

We go about removing any clusters that are ‘behind’. That means they are not all the way complete turning colors yet. We also remove clusters from weak shoots, that aren’t at least 24 inches long. On the other shoots, we judge if the shoot is strong enough to carry one cluster or two. If it’s only one, we remove the top or second cluster. We just leave the clusters on the ground to add their nutrients back into the soil.

This is the same vine after thinning and dropping fruit. You can see the load is much smaller, and this plant will be able to ripen this amount of fruit.

By the time we complete a row the ground is filled with discarded fruit. This is a hard trade off for many people to make. We’re literally leaving money on the ground to rot. The trade off though is much, much higher wine quality. The sight is often shocking to both homeowners, and visitors to see so much fruit on the ground. In the end though we know it makes a better bottle of wine.