Not Entirely Unscathed.

Unfortunately we didn't make it through last week's frost entirely unscathed and while walking the vineyard I can certainly see where the fans and burn pile didn't quite reach.  It's interesting to note how more often than not it's the buds on the top of the cane which got burned while the underside ones are okay.

Ah well, though it puts me in mind of that well known quote "This was supposed to be 'The summer of George'! The summer of George."  Fingers crossed that the rest of our growing season is perfect and I'll still be happy come fall.  Though they are predicting low temperatures again tonight and Friday night.  Hopefully it will stay well above freezing.

On a more upbeat note I am off to Rose City Label tomorrow to be on the press run for our new labels.  Get your smart phones ready!

Look at this great shot from this morning.  The Foch is on the right, shoots are already 4-8" long and the empty trellises on the left are the new pinot blanc grafts and a few of them are starting to push buds.  We are going to have pinot blanc (imagine me wiggling in my seat).

Frost in May!

Hard to believe but Mary got up at 2am this morning the fire up the fans and light the burn piles to protect our vines.  It got down to 32F last night and is predicted to be similar tonight.  The joys of being the owner and living on the property!   After driving around this morning she seems to have protected everything, no crispy leaves.  Now to do it again tonight!  So if you come out tomorrow, be gentle, she is going to be very short on sleep!

As for me I just had to drive to Bend yesterday, a beautiful drive and pour wine for a few hours before driving home again.  The tasting was at the Broken Top Country Club and though you can't tell from the picture we had a gorgeous view of the lake and the mountains beyond.  Snow capped mountains in fact hard to believe it was almost 70F in the valley and I was still supposed to be carrying chains going through the pass.

Otherwise things are quiet in the winery.  Checking SO2's on the pinot today and still trying to encourage the Chardonnay to go through ML.  I decided to reinoculate but so far have not seen an effect.  The parameters of pH and temperature are within limits so I'm not sure what the problem is.  If it doesn't start going soon with the barrel room warming up I'll have to send a sample to lab and see if there is a competitor inhibiting my ML bacteria.

On the home front the bathroom is done!  Yeah!  I just have to nail up a little bit of trim that I was repainting.  I'm very happy with how it came out and it is so nice to have it done.  Now to gear ourselves up for the master bath.  Ugh!

Summer has finally arrived.

Sorry for not posting last week.  I was up in Seattle learning how to make better wine and grow better grapes.  There were two two-day conferences back to back and I am definitely in information overload.  On a side note I got to stay with my younger brother and his wife and do a little catching up.  I also took the train instead of driving and used the bus to get around Seattle.  It was very easy and much less stressful than driving if a touch slower though taking the bus into the convention center every morning was a snap! 
One of the two conferences was the International Cool Climate Symposium.  It meets every two or three years and this was the first one I have attended.  It was fascinating and in some ways much better than the other conference for hearing about ideas and new developments that are directly applicable to what I do day to day.  The other conference was the annual meeting of the American Society of Enologists and Viticulturists (ASEV).  This meeting is an opportunity for researchers to present their experiments and studies and subsequently is much more directed at other researchers and students versus grape growers and winemakers.  Thus I find that some information is far too theoretical or it takes a lot more effort on my part to extract usable information.  I have to admit that the presentation on the use of resveratrol, found in grapes, to combat colon cancer was way over my head.  While I could grasp the ideas I certainly couldn't follow the science.  However the one on crop load versus leaf area was much more applicable and I think a similar trial might be worth running in our vineyard.  I also talked to several people about setting up very small experiments to try and learn things about our vineyard and so I think Mary and I will be implementing some of those experiments this summer.

So, after cramming my head for four days I got home on Thursday night in time to finish getting ready for new counter-tops to be installed on Friday!  Yeah, the end of cardboard counter-tops and better yet no more white tile with dark red grout lines.  They didn't get the counter-tops done on Friday and had to come back on Monday to finish but at least we spent to the weekend with solid surfaces to put stuff down on without checking first as to whether or not the cardboard could support it.
Monday morning rolled around and I had to get my head back in the winemaking game.  I was expecting to lose two days this week to judging the amateur winemaking competition at the Oregon State Fair however I got a phone call Monday morning saying there was a law in the OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission) books saying that amateur wines can not be tasted outside the home.  Who knew!  This competetion has been going on for years and I have no idea when the law was written or changed, but if you are at all inspired and are an Oregon resident write your local representative and ask that it be changed to allow competitions.  I'll have more information next week and will pass it along.  The way this competition is organized is that there are 5 judges and we taste through about 130 amateur wines, evaluate them, write up our evaluations and award ribbons.  The winemakers get the pleasure of receiving a ribbon but more importantly to most of them they get to read our feedback and hopefully learn how to make better wine.

As I stated in my title summer has finally arrived, both on the calendar, last week, and in the air.  We are having warm sunny days at last.  I am loving it and hopefully plants will start bursting into bloom.  I took a short walk in the vineyard and the foch is at about 50% bloom.  Count out one hundred days and that tentatively is the start of harvest.  The blooms are not very interesting looking are they, but they smell great.  And no, I am not starting a new ad campaign for chapstick I just wanted you to get a feel for how small the cluster starts.  Our demonstration Chardonnay plant pictured at the top is still growing but hasn't started blooming yet, I'll post a picture of it as soon as it does.

Also my husband thought that I didn't explain what suckering is very well in an earlier post so here are before and after shots.  Suckers are the small extraneous vines that grow on the trunk.  Generally they pull nutrients from the top of the vine so unless we need to train one up as a replacement head then they are all stripped off.  This is done by hand, if they are young enough, or cut off with pruners to avoid damaging the trunk if they are mature enough to be stiff.  I also found a foch plant, pictured below, that looks as though it caught a touch of frost back in May when I was talking about that and now you can really see the difference and the damage caused and why we were so concerned.  There are about 25 vines scattered around that look like this.  I am not sure it is frost damage but it sure looks like it.

Tasting Barrels

This is my week for tasting through all the barrels and I have to say that they are starting to come around.  The chardonnay in particular is showing improvement this week.  Some of the harsher bitter edges are softening into a rounder wine with nice aicidty.  The wine still needs time but is starting to show its potential. 

I made some acid additions to a few barrels of pinot 2 weeks ago because I thought that the pH was too high and that it was making the wine seem flabby and uninteresting.  I am happy to say that I think the acid has improved the wine.  It still pokes out a little on the palate but with more time it will smooth out, 2 weeks is short for the wine to have both incorporated the acid and recovered from being disturbed.  I don't like to make additions to wine on principle but at the same time I think that part of a winemaker's job is to determine when making a change, i.e. filtering, fining, additions, will make a better wine than leaving it alone and to do the necessary work.

Last weekend was our annual barrel tasting and as I always I got lots of good feedback.  I try to set up something different every year so that our customers learn something as well as getting an opportunity to taste what is coming down the pipe.  This year we tasted barrel fermented chardonnay vs stainless steel fermented, pinot noir from two vineyards that was handled the same and fermented with the same yeast so that hopefully the vineyard differenced show more than the winemaking practices.  Finally marechal foch from two blocks in our vineyard one of which gets less sun than the other to see if there are noticeable differences.  Generally people seemed to find a difference but it was clearly divided on which wine people preferred.  I always find that interesting.  Sometimes there is an obvious preference but by no means usually.

We are still on frost alert and Mary's sleep has definitely been interrupted.  She had to turn the fans on last week again and for a while she thought last night too but at about 2 am she said the temperature leveled off and she got to go to bed.  What a luxury that I get to sleep soundly through the whole process in my own warm bed.  She is on watch again tonight so keep your fingers crossed for either warmer weather or at least rain and cloud cover.  Our little vines are still growing!

Spring Fever?

I think I have a case of spring fever.  I have not been at all motivated to sit in front of my computer and type or for that matter even read.  I am behind in all my blogs that I like to follow.  Though checking today I think there is a general dearth of entries so I may not be the only one with spring fever.

The weather has been typical spring, gloriously sunny and then bone chillingly cold.  Saturday Mary spent the night getting up every hour to check the temperature and finally around 3 am went out into the vineyard and fired up the fans and lit the burn piles to save the little vines from freezing.  The joys of being a farmer.  Then Sunday it was short weather and finally Monday night it rained so hard I couldn't sleep!  We got about 1.25 inches in the course of a few hours.  Guess watering is taken care of for a little while longer.  The vines are starting to show their leaves so it was particularly important that they didn't get frost damage.

Last week I did something interesting.  There was a tasting sponsored by a barrel manufacturer where about 40 winemakers had the opportunity to taste the same wine aged in different toast barrels so that we could start to get a feel for what toast we might like.  It was interesting to see the divided opinions on who liked which wines as well as to hear what different people tasted in the wines.  I think depending on the sensitivities of your palate the barrel helped or hindered various components in the wine.  There was a chardonnay and two pinot noirs, one from France and one from Oregon.  The Oregon wine showed the differences better though so of that might be attributed to the fact that is did not need to get shipped part way around the world.

Last week was also the annual LIVE meeting.  LIVE stands for Low Input Viticulture and Enology and started out as a group of like minded individuals who were interested in trying to create a sustainable way of maintaining a vineyard.  The program is now about 15 years old and has grown to include over 200 vineyards as well as certifying 24 wineries and the wines that they produce.  If you are interested in more information here is the link to LIVE.

Finally, yesterday Mary, Barry and I sat down and tasted 8 Pinot gris wines blind.  This means I put them all in bags, taped the neck, pulled the cork and then Mary and Barry poured them so no one had an idea of which wine was where.  It is a good way to evaluate wines without being biased by price or producer and is another way of looking at our own wines without having preconceptions.  Well that wouldn't be quite honest but hopefully I don't know which preconception to link with which wine.  I have to admit that I wasn't sure which two wines were mine but on a positive note I liked both of them even if they both weren't my stand out choices.  As I said, always educational.  One of the things I got from the tasting is that there are two winemakers I will be calling to talk to them about their pinot gris style and how they make it.  While I may not change what I am doing if I can learn a better way I might adopt a new practice.   Interestingly as a group we were pretty much in agreement on what we liked and why which doesn't normally happen with us.  The surprise wine of the tasting was the 2008 Eola Hills.  The wine had a more distinctive fruit driven nose than the other which led me to believe it might be sweet but rather it was crisp and dry with nice complexity of flavors and good fruit core.  I'll be calling Steve to ask him which yeast he is using and maybe I'll run an experiment next year to see if I like the yeast, provided that is the distinguishing factor, and to see how it works with our fruit.