Category: General

Yesterday morning we set out to check on the ‘southern’ vineyards.

We visited the Epperson’s ‘Sesson’ Vineyard to see how they are doing with their Cabernet Sauvignon planting. The vines are in year two and look right on schedule.

There’s just over an acre planted right now, and yield should be around four tons from this site starting in 2011.

This is a warm site very similar to Crimson Clover and Uvas Creek.

We also visited Crimson Clover, which is in need of a re-tucking of the vines. I did a few plants as we walked around.

Over all the vineyard looked very healthy and the fruit set was good.

You can see the clusters with berries starting to fill out. The clusters from this site are usually pretty small.

Some of the ‘dappled sunlight’ that we are after on our clusters.

Stef did one row of tucking also to give an idea what it will look like when completed.

Both vineyards looked really good, and we were happy with the progress at each site.

In case you haven’t been following Rachel’s blog updates I thought I’d add a few pictures of the work we’ve had her doing over the past few weeks.

Basically she’s been turning this:

Into this:

With flowering now done she’s been thinning the rows and getting everything tucked up into the wires. Chaine d’Or is the last vineyard to flower and the last to tuck up. She’s been worried that she goes so much slower than Jerry, but she’s actually gotten pretty fast, and we’re worried about doing it right, not doing it fast.

It’s been great having her this summer. She’ll be headed back to Georgia and school soon. Too bad she’ll miss harvest and getting to see the rewards of her hard work, but we’ll make sure she gets samples of the wines in the years ahead.

Ok, hang in there with me on this one…..

A few years ago we had a really bad problem with Powdery Mildew in a vineyard. I tried everything, and still we had problems (see the previous tree blog). The next winter I asked everyone I talked to in the business for advice. One thing I was told was prune by the moon cycle.

I did a little research and found that from Roman times vines were traditionally pruned after the first full moon of the year and before the holiday of Paganalia (Jan 22nd). If pruning wasn’t finished by the 22nd, it would stop and resume after the next full moon.

Well I figured what the heck, it can’t hurt and we tried that. We tried about four dozen other things also, so it wasn’t a scientific approach, but you know what? The next year was much better in every vineyard we had. I’m not one to mess with success, even if you can’t prove it scientifically, so since then we’ve done all our pruning on the moon cycle.

In the grape growing business this is hardly flacky, wacky or unusual thinking. Everyone growing grapes is aware of this moon cycle stuff, and I’ve never talked with anyone who didn’t put at least some credence in it. We’re all just really waiting for the science to catch up with the practices we’ve ‘rediscovered’.

So last night we did a small private event at the Capital Club in San Jose. We poured our 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains. Something I’ve always enjoyed in this wine is the note of mint and eucalyptus. The odd thing is though that sometimes it seems more pronounced, than other times. That could just be variation between bottles, but I’ve noticed it at times when we’re opening multiple bottles like last night.

I’ve wondered if maybe it could be a moon cycle thing? There is some thought now on Internet chat boards that the moon cycle effects the flavors and structure of wine in the bottle. Last night the minty flavors were very forward and the wine showed really well. By total coincidence a friend in New Jersey opened a bottle last night and also had a great report.

So I’m going to start tracking the moon cycle on this wine:

http://www.tutiempo.net/en/moon/phases.htm

I want to see if I do notice a difference at different cycles of the moon. If you have some bottles of this, play along with me. I’ll open a bottle Sunday, two days before the full moon and post a note on it to get started.

At first these three things may not seem to have anything in common, so this is going to take a little bit of time to link together.

Every day at work I eat lunch at my desk and work through the lunch hour. I try and use that hours time to get in a morning walk and an afternoon walk instead. Most days I’m able to get in 2-3 miles around the little neighborhood at work. I’m hoping that those walks, with the gym training and our weekend hikes, will have me ready for our Grand Canyon trip next spring.

Every day I go by this set of trees. You can’t really see this in this picture but I wanted to give some scale to the size of the trees

The trees are covered in Powdery Mildew. Powdery Mildew is our main pest enemy in the vineyard. It attacks the fruit and leafs of vines and trees. If left unchecked it will eventually kill the host (tree or vine) by shutting down all photosynthesis in the host. All of the green area is eventually infected and the plant can’t process sunlight. Even a little on fruit can block flavor and sugar development.

It’s a tough little mildew too. Once it gets started, or to an advanced stage like this, there’s really nothing that can be done to stop it, or reverse the effects. Everything is in prevention. The mildew is actually fairly un-hardy. It doesn’t like it too hot (over 90), or too cold (under 70), or too windy, or too damp. Those though are exactly the conditions you want in a vineyard. Between 70-90, with no wind and no summer rain or humidity. Powdery Mildew loves vineyards.

It spreads through spores that attach themselves to the green parts of the plant. That’s why it doesn’t really like wind. Too windy and the spores can’t attach. The spores are hardy though. They can survive hot and cold spells in a dormant stage and then go active when the weather is right.

In the vineyard we use something called Integrated Pest Management to control the mildew. Basically that’s putting a complete and complex system together that understands the life cycle of the pest and tries to deal with it with as few chemical applications as possible for complete control. The first step we do is to remove any infected plant material from the vineyard at pruning time. This removes a great many of the spores that would be present.

This is actually easier than it seems. If you’ve kept the mildew out of the vineyard during the year, there is no infected material to remove at the end of the year. When we take on a new vineyard though, there will be material to remove.

We also plan on short growing cover crops. The grasses and plants in between the rows can harbor spores so we try and select plants that grow short. Most spores spread by falling from above and attaching to a lower part of the plant. By keeping the vines the highest thing around we don’t let spores fall.

Then we do all the thinning and have a pruning strategy to open up the plants to airflow. Since the spores like calm air to spread, we try and open the plant up to the wind. The idea is that a little wind will prevent the spores from attaching to the leafs as they fall.

The final part of the plan is to use sprays. All the available sprays do basically the same thing. They create a barrier on the plant surface that prevents the spores from attaching and or activating on the plant. Timing the spraying is key. You have to watch the weather closely. If it’s going to be really cool, or really hot, you won’t need to spray. UC Davis has a tool that will help a grower figure out when the mildew is dormant, and when it will go active. You need to spray before it goes active. You also have to watch for rain and moisture. Many of the sprays will wash off in the rain.

There are many organic sprays: sulfur, mineral oil, baking soda, that are effective. They work by creating a barrier on the leaf that ‘zaps’ the spores before they can get attached and going on the leaf. The in-organic sprays tend to work by getting inside the plant tissue and creating a barrier from the inside out. That means they generally won’t wash off in the rain as well.

I always say “we try to be as organic as possible’, and I know people usually wonder why I’m qualifying that, or what I’m hiding? Well, it’s the trees. No big secret, it’s just hard to explain in 10 seconds or less.

In our vineyards I prefer to use mineral oil and baking soda as treatments. I don’t really like using sulfur if I can avoid it and I’ve found the oil to be very effective. These treatments are organic and I only use products that have been certified as organic in those cases. But in some vineyards we have had trees. Big trees, that hang over the vineyard. Big trees that were as infected with Powdery Mildew as the pictures I took today.

In those cases the organic treatments where just overwhelmed by the pressure from the trees. There was too much mildew to control with oil, sulfur and soda alone. It would have required so much spraying that I would have had to go over the maximum amounts recommended for each product. It really comes down to a simple choice; use something that can penetrate the plant and protect from the inside out or cut down the trees.

That’s a very hard choice for most homeowners we’ve worked with. Usually they ask if the trees can be treated. They can, but it has to be done by airplane, which is not something you can do in a suburban area. So then I have to find an alternative that’s as safe and low impact as I can. That’s why I say “we try and be as organic as possible.” As long as there are not infected trees, we’ll be organic. If a tree gets mildew and overhangs the vineyard, we’re probably going to spray something non organic to save the vines. That’s pretty rare these days, we don’t have any tree issues this year, but if it does happen we’ll have to treat at least the overhang area, and that’s why I qualify the organic statement.

Disclaimer for my friends at the SCC DPC – This should not be considered advice on treating Powdery Mildew, only a licensed Pesticide Advisor can give you advice on treating or preventing Powdery Mildew. This is provided as editorial comment on my practices only and should not be taken as consultation or expert opinion, which would require a license I don’t have.

If some other government organization is concerned that I may be giving unlicensed hiking advice, or walking advice, or some other advice that requires a license and fee, that statement was given as personal editorial comment only as well.

As I listened to a restaurateur talk about her wine list the other day, she said something that made me wonder.

She said that she has a hard time selling a Santa Cruz Mountains appellation wine because the guest ordering wine can’t be sure of what they will get. Could be awesome, could suck. And she’s right. She also said that collectively and generally speaking, 2005 was a great year in Burgundy and so if she has that to offer on her list next to a SCM pinot for example, she’ll sell the devil out of the Burg.

Why?

I mean, really. I’m asking, because here is what I was thinking while I listened to her. You picked the wine. You tasted it. You determined it to be of similar or equal quality to the other wines on your list. So then, why are the guests not trusting that? If they see a 2005 Burgundy that they are assured will be superb, why not assume or at least give the restaurant credit for the other selections as being on par with a known standard?

I think I know the answer, but I really wanted to put this out there for people to think about.

I’ve chronicled my Ranch 99 exploits a few times:

http://stefaniawine.blogspot.com/search?q=ranch+99

This week fresh live lobster was $7.99 a pound. What to do?

Party!

I picked up seven of the beasts on my way home last night and we had a small group of friends over to feast. These things where huge! The biggest was over 3 pounds, and all were at least 2 pounds.

I like this picture because there’s just one crawling around randomly in the background.

I usually give the lobsters names, but totally forgot to last night.

The claws were hand size, biggest I’ve ever had.

We did open a lot of wine, but I started with this:

Great night!

For the last few weeks Rachel and Jerry have been busy in the vineyards with what I always think of as the last work of Spring. After flowering has finished in the vines they need to be tucked up into the wires and extra shoots thinned out.

It’s not really hard work, or too technical, but it is critical to get us through the summer. The tucking will allow us to do some logistical things like get the tractor up and down the rows, and hang bird netting. Most important though it allows the sun to start working its way on to the new little grape clusters.

The simple way to think about the suns effect is that heat creates sugar, light creates flavor. That’s the reason for the thinning. Fewer clusters and shoots means that the heat of summer will concentrate on the remaining clusters. In many parts of California that’s not a huge deal as sugars get plenty ripe. But for our vineyards at high altitudes we can go into late October to get up to 13-14% potential alcohol.

The thinning also exposes the clusters to light. Not direct light, what we are after is dappled sunlight. Too much light and the flavors will get ‘baked’ or over ripe. Too little light and they will be ‘green’. This is of particular concern at Chaine d’Or which can have green bean and bell pepper flavors in the Cabernet into early October.

It’s really a balancing act. We want to leave enough leaves and shoots to get the alcohol ripe, but not too ripe, and we want to get the flavors past the green stage, but not get them to the baked or stewed stage. If we’ve done a good job now, it will show in the wine in bottle with good body in the wine, but no alcohol burn, and fruit flavors with complex notes.

There’s really not a lot you can do once the grapes are in the winery to get those things right, you have to do the work right now, in the late spring and early summer. Get it right now, and the wine will just need looking after in barrel and not ‘fixing’ later.

I’ll admit it, we have a gardener. He comes every other Thursday to do the typical suburban Mow ‘N Blow. We had a terrible clover and weed problem in the grass in the back, so we’ve been treating it and alternatively adding a lot of fertilizer and watering like crazy.

The gardener came and went this past Thursday and the yard looked so great that I dinged Paul on IM and said hey, I have an idea for this weekend….

What if we hike on Saturday instead, and take Sunday totally off. Then we can fire up the smoker, put some music on, sip lemonade, kick our feet up, read, nap, relax, whatever. A day off. Sounds good yes?

We did just that. Saturday morning early, we headed to Grant Park (Joseph D Grant County Park if you want to look it up) in the Eastern foothills, paid the fee, found the parking lot nearest the trailhead of choice and hit the trail by 9:45.

Temperature was middle 60’s, light breeze, and only three cars in the parking lot. It was kind of eery actually walking through knowing there weren’t very many people around.

The trail we picked is a hard climb up for about 1,000 feet, which we did in just under an hour. We stopped at the overlook, stretched, took a couple photos and saw our first person go by, this one on a bike. The park is mountain bike friendly and after looking at some of the trails I think it could be fun to explore on wheels next time.

We cruised the rest of the way at a steady clip, it was moderately hilly and very scenic, super quiet, and mostly deserted. We hiked just over 3 hours, and just under 7 miles. We saw 5 people on the trail and five more that were in the campground.

We walked up the hill…

Made it to the overlook and stretched…

Looking West at the Santa Cruz Mountains…

Lots of old wood fences surround the property…

A unique view of Mt. Hamilton and the observatory (need to click on the photo to make it bigger to actually see what I’m talking about)

Paul taking a break…

Sunday’s Reward:

I marinaded the leg of lamb for an hour in fresh lime juice, garlic, rosemary, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Then it went on the smoker for three hours, and finished on the gas grill for 45 minutes.

Paul rubbed the beef ribs with his special beef pepper mix (he uses cinnamon, star anise, and cloves along with black pepper), and smoked those for four hours then finished on the gas grill for 45 minutes.

Opened a 2000 Chateauneuf du Pape Boisrenard, sides of steamed chard and wild rice.

Paul called his dad after dinner and I reminisced about mine while we ate the lamb…

It was a great Sunday.

No, not a blog about s-e-x, but real birds and real bees. BEES!

I took Paul out front lastnight (while the wine decanted) to show him two volunteer rosemary plants I spotted. I was doing my daily walk-through in the morning checking on each vine, and there they were, in the middle of the row.

It was probably around 7pm, the sun was low, and there was the usual evening breeze that blows in from the coast when we stepped out the front door. We both spotted the movement right away and exclaimed, Bees! Lots of them!!

The Crimson Clover was buzzing, literally. I spotted a couple of wasps too, hmmm, and we’ve had a couple of large bumble bees all along. Even our neighbor commented awhile back about the lack of bees in our neighborhood – ha ha! Not anymore, we are loaded!!

I recently put up the humming bird feeders, and the phoebe has made our backyard a local feeding spot for her brood. The mockingbird has been singing day and night and I think the doves have finally moved on. At least I don’t remember hearing them through the night or into this morning. It’s been a wonderful Winter and Spring with the birdlife that has come through our neighborhood but I’m definitely ready for Summer to kick off.

Happy Early Solstice and Welcome Summer!

Bzzzzzzzzzzz