pinot noir – Stefania Wine

January 18, 2014

Soil

In blogs and release letters I’ve often talked about the red volcanic soil that we have in a few of our vineyards. It really does not happen in the Santa Cruz Mountains very often. On the west side of the mountains the soils are mainly sandy and sandstone based, that’s part of why I think the wines there can be light in color. On the east side of the mountains the soils are clay and fractured limestone. Every now and then though there’s a rare streak of red volcanic soil.

This is actually much more common in the band of foothills to the east of the Santa Cruz Mountains proper. In the southern part of the range those foothills are called the Santa Teresa Foothills and our Crimson Clover vineyard is in that chain. There’s some of that red volcanic soil at Crimson Clover and I’ve always thought that was a key to the high quality of the site.

Our Pinot Noir vineyard is on a knoll of red volcanic soil in the northern part of the foothill chain. So far the wine from that site have been unusually dark and tannic for Pinot Noir. I think that’s the soil in play. I love this soil and wish we could find more sites with it.

Just before Christmas Stefania and I went on a seven mile hike in Santa Teresa Park, which surrounds the highest peek in the foothills. That peak is called Coyote peak and is just over 1100 feet. Our hike took us from the base of the hills at 90 feet to the peak. Along the way there’s an old horse ranch and I took this photo of an old barn.

On the way back down we took the trail below and I thought this was a great shot of just how rare and elusive the red soil of the Santa Teresa Hills is. In the foreground the trail is dark brown. This is a heavy clay soil we have in the valley floor below. It turns black when it’s wet and holds a lot of water. Our Mourvedre in the yard at home loves this soil but Syrah has never really done well in it.

Half way down the trail though you see the color of the trail change. That’s not the lighting, that’s a band of red volcanic soil. You can even see the little raise in the hill where the lava once flowed. The band lasted for about 70 yards on the trail and then was back to black clay. The photo will enlarge if you want a bigger view of it. Next time we’re in the park I’ll take a close up of the transition. It’s pretty dramatic.

September 25, 2013

Field Testing

Right now we’re doing a lot of testing and sampling. Sometimes we have Millie go out and bring samples back to us at home. When we’re at the winery we gather samples from that vineyard and test there. Most of the time though we go out and get samples and test them right in the field. The back of the FJ Cruiser is a completely odd assortment of gear right now. Both Stef and I have a change of shoes and socks in the car, there’s some dirty shirts, some mostly clean sweatshirts, tie downs, peanuts, apples, bottled water, a trailer hitch, plastic bags (for samples), clippers, and an assortment of test equipment and gear.

When we arrive on site we take out the plastic bags and start walking rows. Usually we walk every row picking berries from both sides. We then meet back up and combine the grapes. Stef smashes them and strains the juice. The first test actually happens as we pick. We’re tasting as we go. We’re also checking for the toughness of the skins. If they are tough, the tannins in the wine will be tough. Once strained we want to see most of the seeds brown and the juice should be reddish. Really unripe grapes will have brown juice. The picture below I would call brick red.

Next we have this handy field temperature and pH meter. The temperature is important because it will effect the other readings. The pH meter is usually + or – .10 degrees from our experience. If in doubt we’ll run a full test in the lab, but usually it gives us a good feel for the acidity.

We like to run a hydrometer and refractometer test. They hydrometer tends to be more accurate. The picture below is actually from the day after we were in the field. We always bring the samples home and let them soak overnight then retest. With not ripe grapes there’s not much of a difference, but grapes over 24 Brix can soak up 2-3 degrees pretty easy. THis reading is right at 20.

Somehow Stef got a picture of the inside of a refractometer. This is from the same sample and shows a slightly lower Brix of 19.1 That’s why we like to do both tests.
$refractometer$

And this is what you do after you’ve driven 112 miles round trip in stop and go traffic to get samples you knew probably were not close to ready but had to anyway because the vineyard owner was ready to pick in two days of you didn’t test.

September 19, 2013

Pictures from the Chardonnay Harvest

Last Saturday we picked Chardonnay at Chaine d’Or. I posted most of these pictures real time on Facebook on Saturday in real time. I’ll try to do the same again this Saturday as we pick at Crimson Clover but I know getting a signal there is even harder than Chaine d’Or. The day started at a decent hour for picking. I was up at 5:45 and we were in the car at 6:33 and 60 degrees. We did make a stop for coffee and arrived at the winery at 7:15.

Jerry and the crew had arrived at 7 and were already at work getting the nets off. Stef and I had prepped and cleaned the winery and equipment the day before so there was no additional work that morning other than getting started picking.

The fog hung low around the vineyard well into the early afternoon. I was able to help with a little of the picking before switching to my regular job of driving the tractor and picking up the full bins for processing.

The grapes looked really nice coming in. Some were very golden. The upper section of the vineyard gets more sun and those grapes usually are riper than the grapes from the lower section.

After driving the bins up in the tractor I dump them into the press. I started doing whole cluster pressing last year.

I did take a short break from the bin dumping to run down into the lower section of the vineyard and pick the ‘rouge’ Pinot Noir I wrote about last week.

After pressing the wine is pumped into this large chilled tank to settle for 24 hours. That helps the juice separate from any solids.

The dogs watch the entire process. Sofie on the right was a puppy in 2005 when I first worked at Chaine d’Or so this is her 8th Chardonnay harvest.

On Sunday we went back up to the winery and transferred the settled wine into an inside tank to start fermentation. We’ll let it burble in here until it reaches about 12 Brix. The tank is chilled to keep fermentation between 60 and 70 degrees. Once we reach the 1/2 way point on fermentation and the temperature is not likely to spike up we’ll transfer the wine to barrel to finish fermentation.

Final numbers on the wine looked great. Brix was 23 exactly and pH was 3.36. We expect a smooth fermentation and the wine should turn out like the 2008 version based on the numbers and handling so far.

September 12, 2013

Samples and Rouge Pinot Noir

Saturday Stefania and I logged 112 miles on the FJ Cruiser checking on vineyards and getting samples to do lab testing on. We started at Chaine d Or testing Chardonnay. We tasted the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the vineyard as we went but it’s really too early to do lab tests on those grapes yet.

We walk each row of the vineyard and pull berries from each plant, going back and forth to get each side of the row and each exposure. We also try and mix up the berries from the middle, bottom, and top of the cluster as well as pull from clusters in full sun and those on the interior of the plant. The idea is to get a sample that shows the entire vineyard not just those berries that are in sight. Stef is holding a white bucket that we use to gather the berries as we go.

At Chaine d Or it takes one person about an hour to get samples. Two people takes 30 minutes so we split up. It’s also important to taste as you go. That’s a good way to train your taste to recognize what the grapes are at in terms of lab readings. You sample 20-30 grapes in the vineyard, then go back and test and it’s instant feedback and learning. In this case the Brix was under 21 and the pH was 3.25 so now we both have an excellent idea of what the maturity level tastes like.

We’re also checking on secondary indicators of ripeness like brown seeds and brown stems on the clusters. Since each plant is getting a quick look we can also check for any issues. On Labor day weekend when I went out I noticed small amounts of Botrytis or Grey Mold in the vineyard. Under the wrong conditions this can be a disaster unless you spray right away. With the weather we’ve had though I though we would be ok. It’s been very hot and I know temperatures over 90 degrees will keep the mold from spreading and just shrivel the berries that have been effected making them very sweet and introducing the unique Botrytis flavor profile.

The walk through the vineyard confirmed that the mold was all dead and we’ll have about 60 clusters of Botrytis Chardonnay grapes in the wine, which is normal for the vineyard.

One final oddity that Stefania wanted me to take a picture of is a rouge Pinot Noir plant we have in the Chardonnay. It was probably a mix up at the nursery when then vineyard was originally planted. It was actually 4 years before we noticed the plant. The leafs are very similar between Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and the cluster shapes and sizes are also very close.

We kept missing this plant because the Pinot turns red earlier than the Cabernet Sauvignon. We usually don’t net the vineyard until the Cabernet turns color, so the birds were cleaning out this plant every year before we netted and could see the grapes were red and not white. I remember seeing the plant and thinking it odd that the birds would completely clean out one plant and not touch the others around it. That’s not super unusual, it’s how birds attack a plant. They eat one cluster completely before moving to the next and tend to clean out the plants one at a time. Stills it would be odd that they had not eaten any clusters off the neighboring plants.

When we discovered this plant last year it was mostly eaten but there were a few clusters left that helped us identify it. We made an effort this year to get it netted early and will use the grapes in our Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot. Chaine d’Or also has a rouge Zinfandel plant in the Chardonnay and a group of plants we are pretty sure are Pinot Gris in the Merlot section. The birds love Pinot Gris and most of those get eaten early every year.

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.

July 17, 2012

Veraison

Many years ago on this blog I said I’d try to not use French words in the blog or when talking about wine. Veraison though is a word that only exists in French. The English translation is: When the grapes turn from green to red. So, everyone uses the word veraison through out the world because it’s easier than saying; “when the grapes turn from green to red”, every time.

It’s a big event for us in the vineyards. It means the grapes are going to start adding color and flavor. It also means it’s almost time for us to stop spraying. The tasks change from maintenance to harvest preparations. We’ll now start topping the vines, that means cutting the long tops off, to get ready for netting. When netting goes on the vineyard work is really done. We usually start that in August but we’ll be a little early this year it looks like.

We had our first veraison last Friday. Millie sent me a picture of it starting in our Pinot Noir vineyard at Noon. When I got home that night the Mourvedre in the home vineyard was also changing color. The picture is from our front yard. We still have a few weeks before all the vineyards change but we seem to be early this year. Last year we had green grapes into September in some spots.

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.

April 13, 2012

Visiting our Pinot Noir Vineyard

Tuesday we drove up to the Los Altos Hills after work to drop off some grow tubes and check on our Pinot Noir Vineyard. This small vineyard has just about 800 plants and should produce about a ton of fruit from us once at full production. This was our first vineyard to have bud break this year and the plants were pretty far along in growth.

Stefania, Millie and I did all the pruning this year. There were some spacing issues I wanted corrected and I though many of the plants needed new cordons as they’d been pushed too far too fast before we took over the site last year. We went through each vine very carefully to get it pruned with the focus on strong plant this year. So far the growth looks really good.

The vines need some suckering and thinning. Stef and I will do that ourselves also so that we know the plants are trained exactly how we want them. We both felt there was too much green growth and too many shoots left last year so thinning will be a key. The vineyard layout is good but it is ‘busy’ compared to what we normally do. Stef likes a clean simple aesthetic in the vineyard and this one had a lot of extra clips, stakes, holders and tape. We try and avoid using those items.

It might be hard to spot below but if you look closely you’ll see lots of green tie tape on the plants. Each plant is also staked and tied down to the stake. I put up a picture of our front yard vineyard as a comparison. Notice that there is no tie anywhere and no extra metal or plastic in sight. It’s something small and subtle but it gives the vineyard more of a natural feeling versus looking like a ‘metal and wire garden’ as Stef calls them.

February 3, 2012

The Best Car Ever

Our little Toyota FJ Cruiser is a regular item in our blog postings. Pictures, especially of the time and temperature are featured in all kinds of posts.

We bought the car in February of 2007. It’s very first road trip was that May. We drove up to Oregon to visit a few Pinot Noir producers we liked. 2007 was our first year making Pinot Noir and we wanted to pick the brains of people who made it the way we liked it.

We’ve used the car to move barrels, one fits in the back perfectly. We also use it to move cases of wine. We can get in about 20 cases from the warehouse, or about 15 packages to go to UPS. It also hauls us to vineyard sites and can get up any road we throw at it no matter how rough.

It passed 91000 miles this month and the title showed up. It’s paid for. No major problems. The front end suspension needs a tune up that will run about $400 and we put new tires on it at 50,000 miles. Other than that it’s been regular maintenance. It still gets just about 19-20 miles to the gallon on gas.

The topper is I went to check Blue Book value on the car after a friend mentioned how much he saw used cars FJ’s selling for. I was blown away. With our miles and condition the retail is $19,200. I paid $23,500 for it new. We’re not planning on selling it anytime soon though. It’s been a great car and a key part of making Stefania Wine go.

October 3, 2011

First Harvest of the Year.

Saturday morning we were out for our fist harvest of the year. I took the traditional photo of the time and temperature from the FJ Cruiser.

This next photo is also a traditional stop for us now. Sam’s Donuts around the corner from our house. We get a dozen donuts or so for the crew and volunteers.

The vineyard we harvested is new for us this year. It’s the Brauns or Under a Lucky Star Vineyard. There are 400 Pinot Noir plants above Los Altos in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

We arrived on site just as the sun was coming up and the crew had already started working. In 2005 we tried harvesting earlier in a couple vineyards using lights. This sounds really cool and is trendy, but I figured quickly it’s a complete waste of time. The crew moves at about 50% of normal speed and you end up having to go back through anyway and get what you missed when the sun comes out. All we really accomplished was sleep deprivation and a higher risk of injury so we don’t do that anymore.

We used the ‘A Team’ for this pick since it was out first time in the vineyard to harvest. Jerry, Gil, Estella and Ysidro made up the professional crew and we had Wes, Ingrid, Joan and Ron come as volunteers. Everyone picking was an experienced picker.

Picking went very quickly and we were done well before 9AM. Total harvest was just about 900 pounds which is the most ever for this site we were told. There had been animal and bird issues in the past. We used a double netting system and sealed the net bottoms with chop sticks as we normally do. This is different from most vineyards but we’ve learned this method is key for our suburban vineyards.

The fruit looked excellent and I took the picture below of the soil in the vineyard. Stefania and I love this red volcanic dirt. There’s a small band through out the Santa Cruz Mountains and grapes do very well on it. The same band also cuts through Crimson Clover.

It took just about 25 minutes to get to the winery and then only about 10 minutes to process the fruit. There was a little drama with the pump that I had to tend to and then the winemaking so I didn’t take any pictures of the actual crush. Stefania took readings and the numbers were Brix 23.9, pH 3.7 and TA .61. Really great for a first time in this vineyard.

The juice went into a single bin and will ferment on native yeast. We used 1/3 whole clusters and I’ll only do two punch downs a day to avoid getting to much tannin extracted. We’re really excited about this vineyard and wine.