crimson clover – Page 2

August 22, 2013

Red Soil

It’s the time of year to start checking on all our vineyards for sugar readings and ripeness. We think everything will be on the early side. Maybe a week eariler than last year, which would be four weeks ahead of 2011 and 3 weeks ahead of 2010. Right now this year reminds me of 2009 or maybe 2007. Our first vineyard we’ll pick is the Under a Lucky Star vineyard in Los Altos Hills.

Like most of our vineyards it’s on a steep hill. The steps below are on the right of the vineyard and go from the bottom to the top. It’s the best way to enter the rows. I took the picture though to show the red volcanic soil. This soil type is pretty rare in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Teresa Foothills. Most of the soil is lift thrust from earthquake activity. There is a small band though of volcanic soils, usually to the west of the San Andres fault. The Crimson Clover vineyard has a band of this soul that covers about 30% of the vineyard. The Lucky Star vineyard though is 100% red volcanic soil.

I love this soil and wish we had more grapes planted on it. The best grapes from Crimson Clover come off this soil. It brings out lots of bright and intense fruit and super dark color. So far the Pinots we’ve made from Lucky Star would fool most lovers of Santa Cruz Mountains wines. They have the flavor profiles of the Santa Cruz Mountains but the fruit is more intense and the wines much darker. Pinots from the southern and eastern side of the mountains, where the soil is sandy, can almost look like a Rose. On this soil though the wines get very dark.

The vineyard is just about ready and I think we’ll be picking on August 31st or September 1st. About 5 days ahead of last year. This site is always our first and always 1-3 weeks ahead of Pinot from the eastern sides of the mountains. Because the vineyard is so steep we’ll use our regular ‘A’ team of pickers with Millie, Stefania and I helping out. This vineyard is just to dangerous for inexperienced helpers. Usually for people who want to come out and help we invite them to the Crimson Clover vineyard which is mostly flat and has lots of shade around the vineyard.

Brix was at 21.1 on Saturday and we’ll pick at between 23 and 24. The flavors are not ready yet. Stef said the grapes taste ‘plain’ still. It will take the additional few weeks to get more fruit flavors to develop. Yields look about the same as last year. This is a vineyard we’re still doing some recovery work on so we think yields will stay low for another year or maybe two as we strengthen and retrain the plants. When that work is complete the vineyard will yield 1500-2000 pounds a year or about two barrels. Right now it’s getting about 800-1000 pounds or one barrel.

August 17, 2013

Tucking at Crimson CLover

These are actually pictures from about a month ago. We generally let the vineyard get a little crazy in the late spring and early summer. We’re trying to not touch them while flowering and fruit set is going on so we don’t disturb that process. I also like that at this stage the young fruit is protected from the direct sun if we have a heat wave. In the picture below you can see Stefania at the back of the row. Millie, Stefania and I went out to do the tucking

It has been a good year for vine growth so things at Crimson Clover where the thickest we’ve seen then since 2009. The objective here is to remove any extra shoots and then get the vines tucked up into the wires. We also cut off any really long tops on shoots.

We accomplish a lot with this effort. The plant can then focus on getting fruit ripe and not on growing extra shoots. The maturing fruit will also get more sunlight now. This also let’s us see if there was any mildew present and treat it. There was not as we’ve had a pretty easy/good spraying schedule this year. The final thing this does is get the vineyard ready to put on bird nets

At Crimson Clover the process goes pretty easy as we have movable wires. You move down the row and pull both sets of wires off the trellis stakes. One person then lifts the lower wire and places it just above the fruit zone. Once this is complete you go back and take the second wire and raise it to the height of the growth. In this case we were raising it to the very top. The other two people then follow behind and tuck and cut anything loose. The hardest part is removing the wire since the vine wants to attach to wire.

When it’s all done you have nice clean rows. Millie came back a few days later and cleaned up the last of the weeds under the rows with a weedwhacker and we were already for netting.

August 15, 2013

A Couple of Pics

My schedule has been terribly busy but I made a pledge to set aside two hours a week to blog and keep the website updated. We’ll see how well I do at that but it’s a start. It looks like WordPress has finally made some improvement to how photos are uploaded so that should make it a little easier. Part of being able to keep up on the blog was really derailed by the need to spend 4-5 minutes editing each photo before it went up. 6 photos was 30 minutes before a word was even written and then try to get them set right on the page was another 15 minutes.

Anyway we’ve been pretty busy, me with the day job and Stefania keeping the winery and vineyards humming along. We did just recently complete a bottling of our first 2012 wines. We bottled our 2012 Pinot Noir and 2012 Chardonnay.

Below the Chardonnay barrels are drying before being sterilized. We had already put the wine in tank for cold stabilization.

After cold stabilization the wine is filtered. We rarely filter red wines but do filter the Chardonnay. That makes it a big challenge to remember how to set up and run the filter since we only do it once a year for an hour or so. Last time we did it though Stefania took pictures of the set up which she taped on the walls for us to view as we set it up this time. The filtering went very easy.

This is the kind of stuff most wineries don’t want to show but being honest about production is not something we ever shy from. This is the ‘gunk’ at the bottom of the tank after filtering. Mostly it’s dead yeast. For a red wine this isn’t such a big deal. We rack a few times to get as much of this gone as we can but some will end up as sediment in the bottom of the bottle. In a white wine though it looks a little sludgy to leave this stuff behind.

One final unrelated picture. This Saturday at 5 PM we will be at the Silicon Valley Roller Girls bout http://svrollergirls.com/ We are the official wine sponsor and they will have our 2009 Chardonnay and 2010 Crimson Clover Cabernet by the glass. Hope to see you there.

July 9, 2012

July Vineyard Checks

Saturday morning Stefania and I set out to check on all the vineyards. We like to do this about every six weeks or so. We’ll visit each one more often than that but it is a good idea to see what is going on everywhere at once to really get an accurate gage of how to schedule upcoming work.

This helps me come up with a vineyard plan for each vineyard for the next six weeks and the priorities not just for each vineyard but for all the vineyards as a whole. We set off about 9 AM to start the inspection tour.

One thing you’ll notice as I go through the pictures is they all look the same! This is actually great. They should look the same. Each vineyard is unique but we apply the same level of care to each one. They should have a certain sameness to them. It’s also good if they are all about on the same maturity schedule and we don’t have anything too far behind or ahead.

Crimson Clover was the first stop. Below is a close up of the fruit clusters. The clusters are loose and we expect a lighter than usual yield here because of some pruning decisions in the winter. There’s a bit more fruit though than we thought we might get and it looks healthy.

The rows are in good shape with almost no weeds. The vineyard needs a little water and a little nitrogen which we will put in the work plan.

Next up was the Peacock Vineyard, which I think we will change soon to calling the ‘Sheredy Yard’. The peacocks have been captured and removed by the county and most of the crew never even saw them. The Sheredy’s own the vineyard and it’s in their backyard. I could call it the Sheredy Clos, but Clos is on the list of banned terms for American wines, even though it is exactly a Clos.

The fruit load here is high, we’re expecting about 50% more fruit from this site than we got last year. Not too surprising as we were in a bit of a recovery mode last year after taking on the vineyard from another company. Here the clusters are larger, fuller and tighter than at Crimson Clover.

The Sheredy’s actually do most of the work themselves. Anytime a major task needs to be done we stop by and spend 30-60 minutes giving them instructions and then they complete the work. We’re doing the routine things and the crew comes in to check on things and correct mistakes, but you can see they followed our instructions on raising the wires very well.

Next was the long part of the drive up to Woodside and Chaine d’Or. We decided to hit the other vineyards on the route on the way back from Chaine d’Or, that way we would end up at home.

Here’s a good example of why it’s good to visit everywhere in one day. Jaye has been working on tucking the vineyard up for the last week. She’s about half done and you can see that below. Walking through though I decided I want to spray this Friday and we’ll need to finish tucking by then. We made this the priority for the week and Millie will go help Jaye get it done by Tuesday.

We have the best looking Chardonnay fruit we’ve had in three years. The clusters are larger than normal and everything looked mildew free. This is our coolest site and has the highest risk of mildew. I found a hornets nest in our walk through, but only a single gopher hole. Jaye has been gopher killer supreme this year.

I didn’t take pictures at our last three stops, Harrison (Syrah), Brauns (Pinot) or Red Hen (Merlot). All looked good with only a minor emergency at Red Hen. The way the chicken pen had been laid around the vineyard this year made one spot hard to spray. That spot had some mildew. I quickly topped off all the excess growth to open up the canopy for spraying and returned the next morning to spray Stylet on the offending spot. The owners also reconfigured the chicken pen so that I can get to that spot going forward.

In all we covered 129 miles and we have a full set of plans to get done before netting starts in mid-August.

May 7, 2012

Thinning at Crimson Clover

Friday I took the day off from the day job. We had traveled up to Sonoma the day before and I thought there might be more touring around on Friday but there wasn’t. We thought about going hiking but decided to help Jaye out at Crimson Clover instead. We had sent her out to thin the vineyard and it was going much slower than we counted on.

Stefania and I arrived about 9 am. We started by raising the wires on the first nine rows. We stopped on the 10th though and started helping Jaye thin. The growthwas much shorter starting in row 7 or so and we figured out that the crew had made a pruning error this winter.

Many of the spurs were removed and this was what was slowing Jaye down. Instead of removing one or two extra shoots from each spur she was having to pick one shoot out of dozens to reestablish the spur.

It is a set back for the vineyard. We’ll lose somewhere between 1000-2000 pounds of potential fruit this year. That would mean a ‘good’ yield will be about 3000 pounds. We counted on about 5000 this year. It’s bad but not tragic, the vineyard will recover.

I took the picture below of Jaye and Stefania working while I took a water break. We were able to finish thinning by 3 PM or so. We’ll go back in a couple of week and raise the rest of the wires as the shoots get longer. We’ll be busy thinning in all the vineyards over the next few weeks. It’s something we like to finish before flowering starts. We don’t want to do any work on the vines while they flower to avoid shatter.

It is also much harder to thin after flowering because the base of the shoot becomes hard. After flowering you need to use clippers to remove extra shoots. Right now we can just snap the shoots off with out hands.

April 2, 2012

Racking Day(s)

Saturday was a cold and rainy day. We headed up to the winery for a long day of work inside so at least we’d be mostly dry. We still had 15 barrels to get through the first racking and sulfuring of the year. Malolactic fermentation has been slow this year and 5 different lots were just finishing up.

We can’t add sulfur to the wines before Malo has completed or the sulfur will kill the Malo bacteria along with the bad bacteria. The longer we go though the greater the risk of those bad bacteria showing up so it’s been a tense few months.

Stefania started by setting up her lab and I got the pump, tanks and barrel cleaner ready. We had lab results back from the lab we have to do our government testing with so we didn’t need to do much in the way of actual measurements, but we would have to prepare SO2 for every wine and Tartaric Acid for a few.

One routine we always have is that a second person must verify that the pump is hooked up right and all the seals on the tanks are closed. This helps prevent oversight and shooting wine all over the place.

We had five different lots to work with; Crimson Clover Cab ,Harvest Moon Cab, Coastview Syrah, Mourvedre and Haut Tubee. Everything would get an SO2 treatment of 40-50 ppm depending on the pH of the wine. The Mourvedre, Harvest Moon and Haut Tubee would also have Tartaric added to lower pH.

We combined some of the Crimson Clover Cabernet, with some Peacock Cab Franc and a little Harvest Moon Cab to start a Santa Clara Valley Cabernet blend. The rest of the Harvest Moon and the Haut t was kept on its own for now. We finished up the day about 5PM by filing the tanks with Coastview Syrah in tank #1 and Mourvedre in tank #2 and left them to settle for the night.

We returned the next day to get those wines back in barrel and spent just 3 hours compared to the 8 the day before. We started our GSM blend by putting some of the Syrah in with some of the Mourvedre, but kept two barrels of each on their own. In the end we had 14 barrels and topping wine.

Each barrel is rinsed and cleaned as part of the process on the barrel holder below. The holder allows the barrel to spin and Stefania usually does this job.

I was really happy with the Mourvedre. Our original plan was to blend all of it into the GSM blend or the Haut Tubee, but we may keep some on its own. The other wines were all good as well, and I’m excited about the final wines. After a rough weather year last year it looks like we still ended up with good wine.

March 22, 2012

Shipping Update

We have been shipping out orders from the Spring release for about a week now. We are holding the southeastern U.S. due to the heat wave there but everything else looks open. The release included 2009 Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon, 2009 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon and 2006 Uvas Creek Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon.

As usual we have to ship in small batches. We are not big enough to get a regular pick up from UPS so we have to be able to fit everything in the back of our car to run to UPS. Since we stage shipping out of the garage, which is also small, we can handle about 30 cases a day maximum. We do expect to have everything out that is not on a weather hold though in 2-3 weeks.

We’re shipping east coast orders on Thursday and Friday now. That holds it over weekend west of the Rockies which is cooler than holding it east of the Rockies. Those shipments have to over weekend somewhere and we feel better about having it in the west which is cool right now. There still is enough wine to fill orders. We’re very low on the Uvas and Crimson but can still take orders on both.

March 21, 2012

Pick Up Day Saturday March 24th

Pick up day for the Spring Release is this Saturday from 11-3. Here’s the ‘official’ invite:

We would like to invite you this weekend to the winery to taste wines from our current release We will also feature complimentary brick oven pizza from our friends at Mario’s Mobile Pizza.

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=welcome#!/pages/Marios-Mobile-Pizza-llc/352590774772822

When: Saturday, March 24th
Time: 11a.m. – 3p.m.
Where: Chaine d’Or Winery, Woodside
Directions: http://www.chainedor.com/directions.html

We will be pouring wines from our Spring Release:

2009 Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon, $44
2009 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon, $40
2006 Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Library Release, $40

This is a residential location, parking is limited to the street area. This will likely be the only time we will be open this year. If you have an order from the Spring Release it will be available for pick up. We hope you can join us and we look forward to visiting with you again!

For more information about our wines, you can also visit our website, www.stefaniawine.com

Paul & Stefania

March 13, 2012

Vineyard Visits

Saturday morning we went out to inspect several vineyards and put together the work orders for the next few weeks. Jaye was with us mostly so I could show her the way to Peacock Vineyard. I didn’t take any pictures at Peacock but things looked great there. The homeowner does the pruning themselves and we just have a little correction and clean up to do.

Next we were on to Crimson Clover. This also looked really good and the vines are really healthy and starting to get thick at the trunk.

The third stop of the day (after a bathroom stop at home) was at the little Red Hen Vineyard. This was the first place we saw bud break. We put in some flags there to mark spots where we want Millie to install additional posts. The vineyard was pretty vigorous last year and the vines need more posts to hold up the wires that hold up the growth. Stef had already bought the posts so we were just marking out the install points.

Our final stop was at the Brauns vineyard to check on the Pinot Noir Vines there. Bud break was also starting and I took the picture below. We have a few grow tubes to install on smaller plants. We took this vineyard over last year and I think it has suffered from over watering. The vines are scrawny for their age which is a sign to me the roots have not gone deep. That happens when the plants are getting all their water from a drip system at the surface. We’ll work this year to correct that.

Here’s one of the plants that’s furthest along. We’ll also try and limit fruit production here this year so that the plant can work on its strength.

Overall we were really happy with how everything looked and the work that’s been done so far this year. The crew will be busy over the next few weeks on the tasks we’ve put together.

December 4, 2011

Harvest is Finally Done

We’ve had a couple of years where the last task of the year was on Thanksgiving weekend. Usually we had one small lot to get into barrel. This year our last task was yesterday. We had two lots to go into barrel which ended up being 40% of our 2011 production.

I’m actually really happy with the wine we’ve made so far. No problem lots like last years Pinot Noir and the Harvest Moon Cab, Peacock Cab Franc, Crimson Clover and Mourvedre lots I’m really liking so far.

Stefania and I have a lot of blogging and picture to catch up on. Now that we finally have some down time we’ll try and get those up over the next few weeks. Today we have a pig in the Caja China for Millie’s birthday and lots of great wine planned for tonight. It feels like an end of harvest party and I’m enjoying it!