vineyards – Page 2 – Stefania Wine

September 26, 2013

Crimson Clover Harvest Pictures

By now this is a really familiar picture. Start of the morning in the FJ Cruiser. I was up at 5:45. Crimson is not far from our home compared to some other sites so leaving at 6:37 we were actually the first ones on site at just after 7AM. Millie had come the day before and removed all the chopsticks from the netting so the first task would be to remove the nets. Normally we’d have Jerry and Gil remove the nets and everyone else would start picking. The weather was drippy and wet though with mist coming down and clouds all around the vineyard. I kept checking the hourly weather update (which showed clear from 8 Am until Noon) and watching the clouds. Everyone pitched in to take the nets off.

There was a little moister on the leafs but the clusters where staying dry. They really looked fantastic. We don’t generally leaf pull. I prefer to get dappled sunlight on to the grapes rather than direct sun.

About 8:45 we got the clearing that we needed in the clouds and I sent the crew out to start picking as fast as they could. Clouds hung around the vineyard all morning but as volunteers arrived on site they all said it was clear to the north of us, the direction any rain would come in from.

The first bin of grapes. I picked about six bins total. Once the bins started to fill up though my job changes to picking up the bins and carrying them to the macro bins for sorting. Stefania calculated that I walked 12 miles in the vineyard, half of that carrying 30 pounds on my shoulder. In all I carried out over 100 bins on Saturday and over 60 on Sunday.

This is Stef’s usual job on picking days. She’s keeping a tally of the bins as they come in and sorting through the grapes removing any bees, spiders, lady bugs, earwigs, leafs, shoots, grass, water bottles or finger tips that come in. We had a good pick this time with no injuries or bee stings.

I thought we might pick heavy this year. Last year we brought in just under three full bins or about 2700 pounds. That’s 1 1/2 tons per acre and pretty normal for this site. I thought we would get 4 bins this year. That’s a little bit of a logistical challenge because the biggest trailer I can rent only hold three bins, and I wouldn’t want to tow much more than the 4000 pounds a fully loaded rig weighs up and down the mountain roads we have to travel. I figured we’d just come back Sunday though and finish up. The third bin though filled up on row 12 of 23. Rows 18-23 are shorter than the rest so we actually came back for 2+ bins on Sunday or just over 5000 pounds.

There was some drama driving back to the winery. The forecast held and at Noon it started raining again. We had covered the bins though and were already on the road when the rain started. When we arrived at the winery we had to weight about 30 minutes for the misting to stop. We then got everything processed and inside in just about 25 minutes, which was perfect because 5 minutes after we finished processing it rained as hard as I’ve ever seen at the winery.

We ended up with three full fermentation bins of must. That’s a thermometer sticking in the must getting a temperature. Brix was 14 and pH 3.80. Reallly perfect for this vineyard.

We were out of the winery in time to get home and take a shower and visit our friend Ingrid’s house for authentic Chinese food. The ‘pearl’ sausage balls were fantastic and there was a pot of ‘blood and guts’ that I really enjoy. We probably drank too much and ate too much and stayed to late given we had to get up Sunday at 5:45 again but it was fun.

Sunday we returned and picked the rest of the vineyard as well as the Cabernet from the Roxy vineyard a block down the road from Crimson Clover. For the first time there looks like enough grapes from Roxy (about 800 pounds so far) to do a barrel on its own. Usually it goes into the Haut Tubee blend. Sunday was one of those really tough days. At 1 PM I had to stop picking and hauling grapes and just sit in the car for about 30 minutes to recover. When we made it to the winery at 4PM with the grapes Millie was not there yet. We’d sent her to pick up some sandwiches so knew we had about 30 minutes before we had to process the grapes. I took my boots off and put them under my head on the cellar floor and fell asleep.

We ended up staying until just about 8PM. The Chardonnay was ready to go into barrel so while Millie and crew cleaned up outside, Stef and I got the barrels ready and all the wine transferred inside. Sunday’s dinner was traditional harvest food – beer and pizza.

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.

January 22, 2013

Changing Pruning at Chaine d’ Or

It’s been cold for California this January. It is a time we have to be outside a great deal. We probably spend more time in the vineyards in January than any other month of the year including harvest time. As long as it is dry though it’s not bad to work in the cold. We just bring lots of layers and we actually stay pretty warm as we work.

Pruning is the major task in January. We will also do maintenance on the trellis systems though as well. It’s a good time to replace any broken posts and repair any damaged wire. One big task for this January has been changing the pruning at Chaine d’Or. Over the last few years the yields on the Chardonnay plants has gone way down. The plants are 25 years old now and that is the point when yields do drop. The drop though has been dramatic. Some plants had only 4-5 clusters per plant instead of the 20-25 we’d expect.

Last year I spent some time researching the issue and after a lot of reading wondered if we should use the Guyot training method instead of the Cordon and Spur method we were using. In Burgundy on old plants they use Guyot and I thought there must be some reason, although I could not find anything specific about yields.

I selected about a half dozen plants last year and pruned and trained them in the Guyot method as an experiment. The results by the end of the year were dramatic. At best on the Cordon and Spur training we saw 8-10 clusters per plant and the average was about 6. Some plants had less than 4 and many only had 1-2 clusters. All the clusters were very small as well. With Guyot training cluster sizes were 50% larger and we had at least 12 clusters on every plant.

We decided to change over the entire vineyard starting this year. We did about 40% of the lower section. We chose plants there based on the position of the canes and overall health of the vine. If we could make the conversion we did. If we couldn’t we left the plant for next year.

In the upper section though we did a 100% conversion. In the first step Stefania and Millie went through the vineyard and removed all of the canes from the plant except for 2 or 3 closest to the center of the plant. The goal was to end up with two left, but they often left me 3 so I had options on where to cut. Below is an example of what the plant looked like after they went through.

I spent a lot of time with the chain saw. The cordons are too thick to remove with pruners and have to be sawed off. It’s a delicate thing to do. I have to make sure not to cut the canes we want to leave, or too much of the plant off. I also have to avoid hitting the wire with the saw, which is hard because the cordons rest on the wire. I ended up cutting the wire once and bucking the chain of the saw about 5 times.

Once the Cordons are off the plant looks like this. Herrardo followed me around as I cut and removed the wood from the vineyard. He’d also replace the chain when it came off. With the amount to be cut I’d switch chain saws every 30 minutes or so to let one cool while I worked with the other one.

The final step is to pull down the canes and tie them to the wire as you see below. In this case I was able to leave one renewal spur for next year. In the Guyot method you have 4 canes total on the plant. Two are pulled down and two are cut to two nodes to provide canes for the next year. In our situation though we had no plants yet with 4 canes in the right position so we’ll do the step of having renewal spurs next season.

Normally such a dramatic change, and the missing renewal spurs would mean a huge drop in yields. Since yields were already so low though we thing we might actually have more Chardonnay this year than last.

August 2, 2012

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.

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 14, 2012

Urgent Care

I think I’ll start this post as a rant. I’ve been to Urgent Care twice now in the past 6-7 years. Once for stitches to close a puncture wound in my hand – oyster incident. The other time was last week. I didn’t go there, my doctor sent me there. I had made a regular appointment and she did not have enough of the drug in her office I needed to inject me with. In fact they tried every office in the building and no one had enough, so she sent me to Urgent Care.

I’m just gonna say if you are in urgent care you should have one of the following on your person – bandage, barf bucket, visible rash, something swollen so much you look like the kid from Mask. A runny nose or a cough is not Urgent. I had two of the four by the way. Otherwise make an appointment for goodness sake. Don’t make the guy with his eyes swollen shut wait behind you and your runny nose.

So now the back story. Last Sunday we got an urgent email from Jerry at Chaine d Or. Deer were in the vineyard and had eaten about 50 plants. We went up Sunday night to find the problem in the fence. Jerry had already gotten the parts to repair the fence, but we were coming from the movies and were not really dressed right for fence repair.

The fence was down over about a 30 foot stretch. A combination of a wood rat den and a down limb had brought it down. The wood rat was the danger. They build their dens with poison oak. I had to cut out a bunch with snipers and a chain saw to make enough room to repair the fence.

It’s an urgent operation. You have to stop the deer right away or they will come back every night until the vineyard is stripped of leafs. Stefania got to work putting up dryer sheets around the fence and vineyard. Deer hate the smell and will avoid the sheets.

I got the area cleared and with help from Millie and Stef got 5 new posts pounded in and 30 feet of new fence up in about 2 hours.

It didn’t set in until Tuesday about noon. First on my left arm, then most troubling on my neck. By Thursday morning both arms were covered from elbow to wrist. I had it on my right leg, waist and back. It also was in my left ear, forehead, neck and around both eyes. My right eye was swollen shut. Stef had it on her right arm, waist and back. Mine was worse though, probably from the chainsaw throwing poison around. I had about 5 times more coverage on my body and eyes and ear were the biggest risk.

The doctor put me on a steroid to ease the swelling and that first shot helped right away. We’re both still red and itchy but recovering. Hot water helps the most so Stef’s been in the hot tub a fair amount and I shower or wash down every 6 hours or so. If you wonder why we say we hate deer so much, here’s another reason. 50 lost plants and 3+ weeks of recovery.

April 23, 2012

Aesthetic Follow Up

I took a few better pictures of the front yard Haut Tubee vineyard to illustrate the comments I made about aesthetics in my update on our Pinot Noir Vineyard. Most of the things we do are simple and you probably would have a hard time noticing the differences. It’s not really an attempt to make it ‘pretty’ as much as one to make it look clean and pleasing.

Below see how the vines don’t have a stake holding up the trunk? Once the vine reaches the cordon wire we remove that stake and let the vine attach to the wire. This removes a lot of metal from the vineyard and lets the plant be seen on its own with no visual distractions.

In this close up you can see there are no ties or clips in the vineyard. There’s nothing to attach the vine to the wire, or the wires to anything else. This vine hasn’t attached on its own so we will use one twisty to tie it off this year. Each vine does have a small vine protector on it to keep it safe from weed whacking. Stef selected guards though that blend in and aren’t too tall. We will use grow tubes, but once the vine is up to the wire we remove it with the stake.

The cover crop between the rows is slow to get started this year, it is a natural mix of crimson clover and California wild flowers. The idea is that the vineyard should look like a natural hillside would and the only thing you should see is the vines and the absolute minimum hardware needed to keep the vines upright.

March 30, 2012

Rain, Drought, and Water Worries

This has been one of the driest years I can remember. Right now in San Jose rainfall is at about 40% of a normal year. We’ve only had a couple of good storms go through. Mostly when we have had rain though it has been a light drizzle more than real rain. The winter months of December, January and February had almost no rain at all.

The natural question to ask is how will this effect the vines and potentially the grape harvest in 2012. The answer is – not very much. The vines are dormant in the winter so not using any water. Rain during that time is important to build up reserves for the dry summer months in the soil, but not important for the plants at that time.

I took the picture below on Wednesday of the Mourvedre vines in the front yard. They are just starting to wake up and grow. Now is when they need rain and water and right now we are getting regular little storms. It’s been more than enough for the vines right now. It has also been cool with highs in the low 60’s. That means the plants will be growing slowly and don’t need a bunch of water just yet. It also means there is no risk of mildew since mildew needs temps to be over 70 degrees.

Another good side effect we will see this year is that the lack of rain has kept growth down between the rows. You can see that in the picture below. At this time last year the cover crop was a foot tall. Those cover crops, and weeds compete with the vines for water, and this year those plants are small and won’t offer much competition. Last year we had to mow three times in most vineyards and some weeds grew to 5 feet high. This year we’ll likely mow just once or twice and it doesn’t look like anything will be over 18 inches tall.

We can’t count on the perfect timing of the rain though through the rest of the year and the amount of water in the soil is going to be an issue if we don’t get a lot of rain in April and May. That’s why we have drip systems though and we can turn them on if we need them. We usually don’t have them on so there will be some additional work we’ll have to do to get them ready before we can use them. This means turning them on and walking every row to see where they have gotten leaks since we lasted used them and fixing the leaks.

So we’re not really worried about the rain shortage or drought at all. Drought years like 2007 and 2009 have turned out to be some of the easiest farming years we’ve had, and produced great wines. If we have to turn on the drip systems we’ll have additional costs in water and maintenance. Those should be more than offset though in the savings from mowing and weed control. Look for an update on the rain situation in May. That’s when we will decide about turning on the drip systems or not.

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.