Tag: Millie

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First Pick of 2014

I know everyone is waiting for part four of the news but we did have some actual winemaking to do this week.  I’ll have Part 4 up soon I promise.

Harvest 2014 started like it does every year for us with getting the picking bins out of storage and cleaned up after a year of sitting outside.  We do cover them but dirt creeps in.  Millie is driving the tractor in the picture below with two of our bins on the back.  I had the pressure washer set up and clean them as they got to the crush pad.  Stefania helped out with a disinfecting scrub and I blasted away all the dirt.

 

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While we were on site Stefania also set up the testing lab for the season.  We’ll test pH, TA and Brix on all our vineyards over the next couple of months.  Those are Chardonnay samples being tested.  The testing is pretty redundant for us 10 years in.  I walked through the vineyard before the samples were picked and said: “2 maybe three full weeks until these are ready.”  Stefania walked down one row and picked about a dozen berries and said: “These are at 19.5 Brix”.  The testing results were Brix 19.6 and pH 3.1 which means we are 2-3 weeks out.
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With all that done we loaded up the FJ Cruiser with 3 bins to take down to the vineyard for picking the next morning.  It’s a pain to have to deal with the u-haul office on the first weekend of the month but it had to be done.  When we get into our new place I’ll have room to store a trailer and our rental days should be behind us.
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The first grapes of the year came in on Labor Day.  We got 3000 pounds of Viognier from Leal Vineyards in San Benito County.  The grapes looked great and we were able to confirm with the assistant winemaker at Leal that we should be able to get Viognier from them every year.
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It was a pretty easy drive to our new facility, although we did hit some holiday traffic.  Here’s a little bit of a sneak preview of Part 4.  It’s the Viognier being loaded into the press at our new facility.  The crew there was fantastic and even with hanging around and chatting for a little we were in and out in less than an hour.  Stefania was SOOOOOOOO happy to not have to clean a press or a tank and have the crew there to do those tasks.  The wine is doing well.  We’ll raise it half in neutral French oak and half in stainless steel.  It will be bottled early and should be available to our mailing list next Spring.

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The Day Job

The number one question we used to get was; “Who takes care of your vineyards”.  We still do get that question from time to time from people just meeting us.  Now though the number one question is, “Are you doing this full time?”

The answer is yes and no.  Since we get that questions so much I thought it was time for a crew review.

Millie has been with us the longest, since 2004.  She works for us about 2 days per week on average.  She does vineyard work and any construction tasks we have.  When we do vineyard installations she’s the lead person on those.

Herrardo has been with us since 2007.  We usually refer to him as Jerry since people have a hard time pronouncing Herrardo.  He’s working about one day per week on average.  He does our heavy labor including construction work, netting and major repairs.  He also puts together our crews for us when we need larger groups.  Mostly the crews are his family.

Ron has been with us since 2010.  He works a few days a month on local sales for us.  Getting our wine into local restaurants in Santa Cruz and San Jose.

Jaye is our newest person.  She’s in the picture above working in the winery.  She joined us last September.  She’s done everything for us, vineyard work, winery work, shipping and she’s starting to do a little bit of sales work.  Our plan is when we open a tasting room she’ll run that.  She’s working about 30 hours a week for us.

Stefania is full time and gets a paycheck now, which she cashes about once every 7 weeks 🙂  She’s really become the General Manager.  She runs everything day to day and handles all the winery and vineyard management including the finance side of the business and dealing with vendors.

So my usual response to the questions is; “I still have a day job, someone has to have health insurance.”  I run a group of about 50 support engineers, managers and account managers in the software part at a very big high tech company.  I’ve been there 8 years and have enough vacation time that I can take off the 15-20 days a year when my presence in the winery is really critical.  These days most of my tasks are planning vineyard maintenance and doing the winemaking.

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bottling Day Recap

Another bottling day down!  I wish I could say it was drama free, but bottling days never are.  Mostly though it went smoothly and a lot of the issues we had were early in the day and I chalked them up to learning a new bottling truck and system.  We arrived at the winery at 6am and the truck was there at the gate.

No issues getting it into place (the last truck we used could take up to 5 hours to get through the gates and down the hill).  The truck was ready to go by 8:15 am.  This is early in the set up process with the forklift in the foreground.  The equipment needs to get set up, hooked inot the tanks in the winery and cleaned before we start.

This was just as we got started.  Millie, Kaleb from the bottling company and Stefania in the truck.  This seemed to be a really good fit for the speed we like to go and care we like to put in.  We had some early drama figuring out the right screen to put in line with the bottle filler.  The first one we used jammed up after 5-6 cases.  We finally went with a wide ‘bug catcher’ screen that lets everything through but big chunks.

Once we got over that problem we ran out of Nitrogen.  The Nitrogen is used to sparge the glass and clean in before filling.  Millie is doing that step below.  I had a back up tank but it was also almost empty.  I must have left it open at some point it as it should have been new.  So we sent Millie down into Redwood City to get another tank.  They would only let her load one at a time into the car so she had to make two trips.

Once past that we were back on our way.  You can see Kaleb, Stefania and Ingrid’s back in the picture below.  Somehow I missed getting Jaye in any pictures but she was there also working on the line.

My job was to tape up the filled cases, put on tags and load them on to pallets.  It’s a good job for me because I can lift the cases and they come off slow enough that if I need to be gone for 5 minutes I can and only a few cases will back up.  That time lets me use the forklift to move pallets around or run into the winery to make adjustments inside.

We wrapped up bottling about 1:30 and clean up by 3:00.  A pretty good day in all and we were really happy with the new truck.  Our 2010,  Haut Tubee and a new blend are safely in storage now!

When we got home we had one last bit of drama.  A bee swarm trying to move into our house.  I called Art the Bee Guy and he arrived after 9:00 pm and safetly got the queen and her hive off to a new home.

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Another Bottling Day Upon Us

Bottling is always one of the hardest most stressful things we do.  There are over a dozen different vendors to coordinate with and everything has to be timed just right.  It’s also hard because we do it just twice per year so getting experience for us and the crew has been a process that takes years.

This time we’ve also been fighting the weather and have had to reschedule twice around rain.  We just don’t have enough room inside to stage everything indoors and that means rain is a deal breaker.

Stefania and I came up yesterday to prep the wine and get it ready.  We’re doing a small lot of two wines.  Our 2010 Haut Tubee and a new wine we will release this fall.  There was a small amount of blending to do and Stefania had to check final SO2 on the wines so I could make the right additions.  Other than the drain backing up on us it went smoothly.

The forklift showed up at 8:30 and I got that positioned and ready.  The truck showed up at 12:30 with the empty glass and this is when I knew we’re finally at the point of being veteran bottlers.  The driver had forgotten to load a pallet jack and had no idea how to get the 1000 pounds of glass from the front of the truck to the back where the forklift could pick it up.

“No problem”, I said.  “I’ve had this happen before, I’ll show you what to do.”  So I went in the winery and pulled out my strongest rope that we keep for just this emergancy.  I showed him how to tie up a pallet and pull it out of a truck with the forklift.

Everything was wrapped up by 2:30 and we were able to get a late lunch and some hot tub time in last night.  This morning came really early:

53 degrees and 5:30 am when we hit the road.  We’re waiting now in the winery for the bottling truck to finish setting up.  If all goes well we will start about 8:30.  We’re using a small crew today.  Stefania, Millie, Ingrid, Jaye and I.  Another veteran thing we’ve learned.  It’s actually better to have a small experienced crew than a large one that needs lots of hand holding.

I’ll be busy most of the day so probably won’t have too many pictures, but I’ll try and get some as we bottle and get them up before Friday.

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Vineyard Worker to be Named Later

Over the last few years we’ve made an effort to take Sunday off from work. Even during fall harvest time we try and keep one day when we can rest and recover. I’ve always been a football fan and Dad would take us to 49er practices and games well before Joe Montana and Jerry Rice made the Niners a great team.

Stefania has gotten to be an even bigger fan though and she insisted that last year we get the NFL package on Directv. That way we could watch the Saints, Broncos, Bears and Seahawks also. She like to follow the teams of cities we visit often or have been to games at.

Well the news this week had been buzzing about Payton Manning coming to the 49ers. He decided on the Broncos though and Denver quickly announced they would try and trade Tim Tebow. That’s when the staff around here got worried. Stef likes Tebow, and the odds of any NFL team trading anything for him seem pretty low. I bet we could get John Elway to trade him for a vineyard worker to be named later. Millie and Jaye were both worried we might offer one of them to the Broncos for Tebow. After all there is no need to throw anything when working in the vineyards or winery so he has the right skills.

That’s my way of reminding everyone Millie is back working with us and Jaye decided she likes this new job and stayed with us after trying the job out last fall. We’re a crew of six now.

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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!