Long story about the possum, we didn’t actually serve that for dinner lastnight. We did however open the following wines:
2008 Stefania Chardonnay 2006 Stefania Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet 1999 Laurent Perrier Brut 2003 Joh.Jos Prum raacher Himmelreich Auslese 2005 Dmne de Baumard Coteaux dLayon 1988 Cos d’Estournal 2004 Dmne Santa Duc Prestige de Hautes Gigondas 1979 Santa Cruz Mountains Vineyards Cabernet Bates Ranch 1994 Woodside Vineyards Cabernet Kings Mountain 2004 Woodside Vineyards Cabernet Kings Mountain 2004 Dmne de Beaurenard Chateauneuf du Pape 1977 Carneros Creek Cabernet Fay Vineyard 2000 Chateau Siran Margaux 1982 Chateau du Tertre Margaux
My personal notes are personal. It became apparently clear to me in this line up that I’ve been drinking a lot of young wines and my palate is happier with brighter fruitier wines. I still don’t like sweet wines (2005 Baumard), and we were disappointed with the corked Cos D’.
My top two wines of the night were the 2000 Margaux and the 2004 CDP. They both paired well with the tri-tip and orzo meal and held their own without food.
Rick Bakas of St Supery winery has organized a virtual wine tasting of California Cabernets for Thursday February 11th. Information and registration details can be found here:
The event first came to my attention when Dave Tong wrote a blog about it last week and then a follow up blog this week. Dave was upset that the Santa Clara Valley AVA was not listed or covered at all in the event. He asked that local wineries that make Santa Clara Valley AVA wines participate in an effort to promote the AVA.
We registered this morning and will participate on the 11th. I don’t twitter, so our update will be here on our blog and on Facebook. You can participate with any California wine, but I’d encourage as many people as possible to open one of our Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon’s. That wine is a Santa Clara Valley AVA wine.
Personally I’d rather share the wine and taste with others. If there is significant interest locally (that means more than Dave and I), I’d suggest we gather at a local spot and I’ll provide a vertical of our Uvas Creek Cabernet to sample.
We still have lots of rain and the moon is now out of cycle so we’ve stopped pruning. Not much going on for us right now in the vineyards.
Today is St Vincent’s day. St Vincent was a 4th century saint from Spain. His feast day is celebrated as the patron saint of vine growers in Spain and France. I did my yearly trip to the Catholic Church this morning to drop off wine. Father Bennett wasn’t there this morning so I left the wine at his door.
In France they usually leave their cheapest wine for the priest, but I left a couple bottles of Uvas Creek Cab and hope he’ll remember to bless his little vineyard for us. I hope he remembers its St Vincent’s day, I usually have to remind him each year. We don’t celebrate a lot of feast days in the U.S. so he’s usually a little shocked that I do.
We may do some work in the winery tomorrow, but SUnday will be a football day. Go Saints!!!
It’s that time of year to take inventory and figure out taxes. Most of the time I do pretty good on allocations and we don’t have a lot of wine left. Ok, 50% of the time I do pretty good. 🙂 For some reason I kept way too much of the 2006’s at the winery. We ran out of 2005’s the summer before and didn’t have anything for people to taste when they came to visit. In a great over reaction I set aside four times more wine the next year.
That would be bad enough but I set aside four times more of twice as many bottlings! Instead of the eight cases of wine that had not been enough, I now had set aside 64 cases of wine. We don’t have 64 visitors all summer! That was about 45 cases too many. Last year I seemed to get a better handle on what to keep aside for events and visitors but still we have some items from older vintages still at the winery.
Here’s a breakdown on the 2006’s
2006 Syrah Eaglepoint Ranch $35- We have 8 cases left. Close out of $300 per case 2006 Haut Tubee $20 – Sold Out 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek Vineyard $37 – We have 12 cases left. Close out of $300 per case 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains $40 – We have 7 cases left. Close out of $325 per case
If you’re interested in any of these send me a note at [email protected] We’re going to offer them first here to our blog readers and then I’ll send a note out to our mailing list in a couple weeks.
How cold was it when we left after coffee this morning? So cold I couldn’t keep the camera straight. It was 42 when we left the house.
It’s 37 miles from our house to the winery. It’s mostly freeway, but the last few miles are very steep and curvy. The seal on the dash board keeps me from taking the turns too fast up the mountain. ‘Keep the seal safe’, and not moving. This is Highway 85 about 10 miles from our front door. That’s Montebello and Mount Eden in the distance.
This is what we came to do. This is a Cabernet plant that has been successfully retrained. This is one we retrained in 2008, so it’s three years in.
Stefania and I walked each row to finish up the sawing and retraining where it was needed. We do have to stop and play ball from time to time with the dogs.
The vineyard looked very good. At this point I think we are 97% done with retraining. There are still a few plants that we will have to pull new shoots on next year. It was just a matter of not having anything in a good position this season to restart a cordon. On those plants we left a new start again and will hope we have a good cane to pull down next year.
The storm clouds started to come over about 12:30. We had planned to leave at 12:45 though so that we could get home in time for the Saints game at 1:30.
We’ll be back tomorrow. There are about 30 plants in rows 1 and 2 to check still and we can do that in the rain if we need to. We also have some work to do in the winery tomorrow that will keep us busy for 5 or 6 hours.
We have storm front after storm front scheduled to come in this next week. Kind of a bummer for us. I have a three day weekend and we were going to prune all three days. Luckily Jerry and Stefania will just about have wrapped up Chaine d’Or by today.
Tomorrow morning I’ll go out and finish up some of the old vines that need retraining that they have left for me. There’s also a few hours of work to do in the winery. We’re going to try and be home in time for the Saints game though at 1:30.
If I don’t finish in the winery Saturday then we’ll go back Sunday. Likely we’ll just work in the rain and finish up any pruning that’s not done. Monday we’re scheduled to go test our wine that is at Big Basin in the afternoon, so more inside activity. It looks like we won’t finish pruning before St Vincent’s day. Not too big a deal, we’ll just wait on the weather now and for the next favorable moon cycle and prune then.
Saturday night when we finally got home from our long day I checked email before bed. I wondered why we would have gotten 7 new sign ups on a Saturday in January. Could be that the Haut Tubee won a gold at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition
Saturday morning we lounged in bed until about 9 AM reading the paper and drinking coffee. We decided to go easy on the mornings this weekend and not get too worn out with pruning. We made it to Chaine d’ Or by 10 AM though to start pruning.
Every day in the vineyard at Chaine d’Or starts with greeting the puppies! Ghillie is bigger than Sofie now and spent both days by our side out in the vineyard. She never tires of fetching the ball when I throw it. Sofie will go and hide the ball now to get a rest after about 15 minutes.
We worked down the hill each time, but there are still lots of trips back up. By then end of two days your legs will be sore. We had cloud cover on Saturday and a little on Sunday. The temperatures were not bad though and we never got too cold.
The main reason just Stefania and I went out was that a large number of Cabernet Sauvignon vines need retraining. It’s something I have to do myself. Each plant that needs retraining first has to have new canes selected, then pulled down and debudded. I also have to saw off the old canes and remove any excess shoots.
It’s a slow process and means I have to do about 300 squats each day. If we have a full crew in the vineyard they will prune about 75% of the plants before I can get to them to retrain. Over the past two years we’ve gotten about 50% of the plants retrained, but this year I was hoping to get us up around 90% total retrained.
This is a plant with new canes pulled down and the retraining started.
This is the old canes I removed. I got my size 14 boot in the picture to give some scale to the size. It takes a fair amount of time to saw through the old vine and remove it from the wire. To do a retraining like this takes 8-10 minutes per plant. That compares to about 45 seconds to prune a regular plant.
Here is one of the owl boxes we installed. Still no sign of an owl, but we’re hopeful. They usually move into new homes in January and February. We had a good assortment of birds in the vineyard including Mountain Bluebirds.
We left Saturday about 3PM. We headed home, got cleaned up and headed to a friends commitment party. This is what Stefania calls a ‘Double Day’. Two full days of activity pushed into one. The venue was the old Paul Masson / Martin Ray Mountain Winery. They are replanting the old vineyard.
The ceremony was held up in Napa during the week, but our friends had the party Saturday evening closer to home. The top level of the old winery is set up for events now. This used to be the fermentation room. We had a great time and even got some dancing in even with our tired legs.
The next day we worked about 6 hours. I spent about 30 minutes in the winery getting the batteries on the forklift recharged and then joined Stef for more pruning.
Below you can see some of the progress we’ve made. This was also a very good example of the high spurs I’ve talked about at Chaine d’Or. When we took over in 2007 all the Chardonnay plants had spurs this high. You can see it’s well up into the first set of wires.
Over the past three seasons we’ve worked to lower the spurs. It’s not an easy process. We have to prune the plant as normal and hope for a shoot lower on the plant. When that shoot comes out, we have to make sure to leave it during green pruning, then come back the next season and remove the old spur.
You can see in this picture the job is almost done. About 95% of the spurs are now lowered onto the fruiting wire and out of the first set of catch wires. It also gives a great perspective on how high the spurs were compared to were we are now.
Stefania is back out in the vineyard today and Jerry is joining her to help.
A few years ago the Catholic church around the corner from us got all new landscaping. One of the things installed was a little vineyard of 20 Cabernet plants. Stefania and I drive by a lot on our way to our local coffee shop or the gas station, and the vineyard looked like hell. The plants were not pruned properly, and they never got around to finishing the wiring.
Two years ago I called the priest and volunteered to take care of the little vineyard. At first it was a little hard to get him to understand that we’d just do it for no charge, but we did.
We cleaned up the plants, and tried to get them retrained correctly. Jerry and I also installed the correct trellis supports and installed a 5 wire catch system.
Last year the vineyard got a little fruit and we harvested that and used it for our grape stomp. The rather bizarre rules of the state of California mean we can’t spray anything on the vines, so they do get mildew every year and we won’t end up using the grapes for anything but stomping.
Stef and I had backyard landscaping ideas while we were doing the pruning this year. We let the vines get pretty wild last year with a lot shoots. When trying to retrain a vineyard this usually works best because you have more options on shoots you want to keep and work with. Here’s a vine before we started.
You can see we have the starts of a cordon and spur VSP system going. Each spur threw two shoots, we just had some extra shoots to remove.
On some plants we are still pulling down new canes, and here’s one we have started now.
The finished spurs from the plant above. These vines should fill in nicely this year and it is one of the better looking parts of the landscaping now.
On some plants we left three spurs, on others four. It just depended on the spacing. One thing we have to be careful about is leaving two spurs from different plants too close on the ends of the plants. Then you end up with four tightly spaced shoots and that increases the risk of mildew.
Here is a new spur, and our trusty FJ Cruiser.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.ACCEPTRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
