Category: General

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.

After a very cool Spring and Early Summer, August has come with a mini-heat wave. It has not been super hot, just steady temps in the 90’s for two weeks running.

Right now it looks like not only are we caught up from the cool Spring, we’re actually ahead of schedule. That really doesn’t mean much though right now. Last year it looked like we were two weeks ahead of schedule and then we had cool weather and some rain come in early October. Some people were worried it would ruin harvest. The grapes were not just ripe yet and if the cool rainy weather stayed, we’d have unripe grapes.

The weather cleared though around the 15th and we had 5 weeks of warm sunshine. We mostly harvested three weeks later, in the last week of October. So an ‘early year’, became a normal year. Maybe even a week later than normal.

In 2005 we thought we might have an early harvest, but everyone was worried that the plants were behind schedule. That may seem confusing, but what had happened was the grape sugars, were well ahead of flavor development and everyone worried they would have to pick before the grapes got ripe flavors because the sugars would be too high. Then September came and we had 9 weeks of mild, sunny weather. The rush, turned into harvesting at leisure.

This year a lot can still change things. But sitting here in mid August, looking at the grapes and starting to taste them, we may be 2-3 weeks earlier than the past few years. We’ll wait and see though, nature has a away of making its own schedule.

Last Friday we finished up netting at the Woodruff Family Vineyard. That’s our biggest netting project with 8+ acres to cover. This week we moved on to the Arastradero Vineyard. That vineyard needed some thinning and a little spray. The winemaker getting fruit for it also wanted us to drop every shoot to just one cluster.

It took a day and a half to do the prep work and then two and a half days to do the nets. The vineyard is very steep, so even though it’s only about 3/4 of an acre, it takes a long time to work the site compared to the flatter sites.

Monday we’ll net at Chaine d’Or. That should only take one day since just the outside of the vineyard gets netted. One thing we’ve learned about netting is, once you do it, you don’t need to do it. After a couple of seasons of netting, the birds seem to lose interest in the site and don’t hang around anymore, or they take the route of their migration, since the food is gone. So despite netting only about 10% of Chaine d’ Or we loose almost no fruit to the birds.

Later this coming week, we’ll prep the Crimson Clover vineyard. Some fruit needs to get dropped. Here we’ll take anything that is behind in turning colors and any fruit on plants that look overloaded. I don’t personally like going to a one cluster per shoot approach. I know it’s much easier to instruct a crew to do that, but I find that if you remove too much fruit from a strong plant, you send the plant back into a growth cycle. Then the plant is putting its energy into growing, instead of getting its fruit ripe. That can also lead to late mildew problems since the new growth is not sprayed.

It’s more time consuming, and requires a more skilled crew, but I prefer to remove fruit on a plant by plant assessment. Stefania will be out with Jerry and the crew on Tuesday to teach them exactly how to do this. When they are done, we’ll hedge any tall plants, spray any hot spots for mildew, and then net the vineyard. That will be our last one for summer to net.

On each release I’ve set aside a pretty good chunk of the available cases for local events. I thought it was important to help us build a following here in the South Bay that we have wine to do things like trade shows, restaurant, and charity events.

On our first few releases I set aside 10 cases of each wine. On the spring release I set aside 25 cases of wine. It seemed like a lot, but we went through the 10 cases pretty fast last year. I enjoyed many of the events we did, especially a private dinner we cooked and paired wine at for a group called Friends of the Winemakers.

Lately though I’ve been swamped with requests for wine. The pitch is almost always the same: “This is a great opportunity for you to promote your wine.” The thing is though, I’m finding out it’s not. The guests at these events are never really there for the wine, and we get far better response when someone on our mailing list brings a bottle to a neighbor than we have from all these events. It’s a great event for the restaurant or event to promote itself, and that’s about it.

People ask us for a lot of wine. Usually they want us to pour or donate 4-10 bottles. That’s $350 out of our pockets. That might not seem huge, but put dozens of those together and it is huge. Combine that with the trade off, $350 is a new bin, or 4 barrel racks, and those things we need right now. We’re trying to make this a profitable business, and giving away wine isn’t helping. We actually had one group ask us for four cases! $1600 and their offer to us was ‘a mention in the event letter ‘. They were insulted when I told them we couldn’t do that.

I guess part of it is people just assume wineries are swimming in money, and winery owners must have money to burn. We sure don’t. Every dollar goes back into the winery and vineyards and this is not a profitable business yet. We still are putting our own savings in to cover costs.

Bottom line. I’m more worried about the bottom line now. I’m canceling some events we have scheduled and being much more picky about the ones we attend. I’m going to keep some Syrah for the Friends of the Winemakers event, and we’ll keep some to pour at dinners we do with people on our mailing list. We enjoy those events. The other 10 cases we have left I’m going to offer out again on the Fall Release Letter. It makes so much more sense to get the wine to people who enjoy it than saving it for events where people don’t care what they are drinking.