Harvest 2011 is coming!

As I sit here watching the setting sun duck under the clouds and set our elm tree alight and contemplating what to write this week I realize that while I sometimes consider sitting down to write a chore, okay writing is always a chore for me, I do enjoy the perspective that this blog has given me on what I do and how much I love it.  I hope that you have enjoyed reading it and maybe even have a little better feel as to what goes into making that bottle of wine you are having tonight.  Of course, if it isn't my wine then you may have to guess a little but the basic premise is the same and many of the same choices will have been discussed even if the decision is different in the end.  I find too that sitting down to write sometimes I'm not sure I want to discuss all the nitty gritty details.  Maybe I'm taking too much away from the romance of wine or at least making you realize that it's not the 'natural' product you thought it was, whatever 'natural' means.  In the end though what I really hope for is that you learned a little about something I love, enjoyed some good pictures and will cherish that next glass of wine a little bit more knowing the love, thought and care that someone put in to creating it.
Enough philosophy and back to blogging.  I did take my cluster pictures last week but feeling as though I had nothing to write about but complaining about the weather and the birds I decided not to post.  So you get two weeks worth of pictures again and you can see the effect of some of what I would have complained about when you compare the two.  If you look at the Foch grapes there is a darker area in the middle of the cluster in this week's picture.  That is were the waxy protective layer I think has started to break down.  If you look closer and between the grapes you can see the very beginning of botrytis rot setting in.  Looking again at both pictures I realize the dark patch was already there in the previous week but the mold hadn't started growing yet.  I think the fact that the cluster was already weak in that spot allowed the botrytis to start growing more easily when the rain came.   I'm a little on the fence about keeping this cluster because if it weren't our picture cluster I would cut it off to avoid contaminating the surrounding grapes.  Sebastian did apply a botrytis spray yesterday to the whole vineyard and hopefully that will be able to kill the spores and I will feel better about keeping the cluster until picking, which is maybe 1.5 - 2 weeks away. 

On the chardonnay cluster if you near the top there is a missing grape in this week's picture. Ackk! Make that two grapes!  You can thank some bird for that!  Usually they eat a quite a few grapes from a cluster so either this one wasn't ripe enough so it flew off or it was disturbed before it could really tuck in.  Either way I was bummed to see it missing today.   So those would be our two biggest pests now. 

  The disease pressure came about because of the weather. A little rain, a little humidity and a little warmth and you have some happy spores.  If you look at the last grape picture you can see another problem the rain brings.  When there is a lot of rain the grapes swell as they soak up the water and if the grapes are ripe or close to ripe the excess water can split the skin of the berry providing a food source for mold like you can see here.  The problem with the mold growing on the outside like this is that it can penetrate the grape, enter the stem and then spread throughout a previously healthy cluster.  Fortunately we have very little botrytis at this time and the dry weather on the way combined with the spray applied yesterday will help keep it under control.  So while I am not overly concerned we will certainly be vigilant in the coming weeks.

Back in the winery, two of our favorite volunteers Jake and Lynn arrived just in time to help me get the 2010 ans 2009 pinot noir out of barrel as well as the 2010 Marechal Foch.  They did an excellent job too and the wines are in tank and ready for bottling next week.  I got to go along behind  and clean barrels this year and it was a fun change, less concentration and more muscles.  We have also started sampling the grapes to get a base line for ripeness.  I love all the colors the juice ends up.  Tomorrow we are headed out to a few other vineyards to see how they are progressing.  We may have fruit before we know it!

What's a winemaker to do?

What a view!

So the grapes have been sampled and need at least another week or more, the harvest crew has arrived and the sun is shinning so what are a winery owner and her winemaker to do?  Why go frustrate ourselves, I mean go have a great time playing golf of course.  After a brief discussion in which we decided that stressing ourselves out over something we have no control, i.e. the unripe grapes, was not a good solution to the problem Mary announced that is was time for our annual Harvest Crew Golf Scramble.  I must admit that I was uncertain that this was great idea, albeit it wasn't the thought of walking around a beautiful course spending time with people I like but rather the thought that I haven't picked up a club since Mary broke her wrist last year.  And since I don't practice lets face it I'm lousy and the fact that my personality hates being lousy at anything means that as the game progresses I usually manage to get frustrated and thus lousier.  Does this sound familiar to any of you?  Well today I tried to not get frustrated and to keep reminding myself that this is supposed to be fun well at least the part about a great walk with friends.   The beautiful weather, great company and that we played best ball all contributed to a good day.  I might even have a little sunburn!

Di, Grape Squisher Extraordinaire

So back to the nitty gritty of winemaking.  I promised last week that I would better explain the sampling process which helps us to decide when to pick.  So here goes.  Yesterday Di, one of our harvest volunteers, yes, you too can volunteer, and I went out and walked the vineyard picking berries off the clusters.  We tried to pick a representative sample which means, for our vineyard, we pick 3 berries off a cluster from the top, middle and bottom, ideally without looking as your eye automatically tends to choose the ripest grape, walk down 5 plants cross the row and pick three more from that plant.  Then we do this every three rows except the small blocks which get every other row.  So in this way we slowly walk the vineyard, getting our exercise, checking on the quality of the fruit and at least in my case, enjoying the quiet before the mayhem of harvest.  The next step is to take our zip-lock bags of grapes up to the winery lab and squish them.   The juice is then drained into a jar and the testing begins.  I mainly test for three things: sugar, pH and titratable acidity.  Then I look at how many of the seeds have turned brown in the juice and finally taste the juice.  This step while it tends to be the last is key in the actual picking decision.  The flavors, both good and bad, showing themselves in the juice will also express themselves in the wine.  While we like the numbers to be right it is also important that the flavors are there.  A long ripening season like the grapes are getting this year definitely helps flavor development but if they never get ripe then we won't get to see that great wine.  I;m keeping my fingers crossed for the longest Indian summer ever!

Juice and a refractometer

Are you suffering from WIBS?

pic courtesy of Van Duzer Winery

Chances are you aren't unless you are a winemaker on the west coast this fall and more specifically one in the Willamette Valley at which point I am almost 100% sure you are among the suffering.  I myself was an unknowing sufferer of the disease until I was recently diagnosed by my good friend and fellow winemaker Jerry Murray at Van Duzer Winery, about 45 minutes north of here.  Jerry says that Weather Induced Bi-polar Syndrome (WIBS) can be aggravated by repeated checking of the weather forecast and then looking at fruit in the vineyard.  The symptoms are feelings of elation when the sun is out and the thermometer reads 80 followed by extreme lows and the conviction that no grapes will be harvested this year when the clouds roll in, rain threatens and the temperature isn't above 62.  The fact that these highs and lows can occur on the same day only increases the severity of the swing as well as raise stress levels and here at Airlie has caused Mary to run to the coast and go crabbing.  I am very appreciative that Jerry formally diagnosed the disease and gave it a name.  I am hoping that he is working on a drug to alleviate the condition as I type.  I was thinking something alcoholic (smile . . . feel high) but then remembered that none of us have any fruit to be making alcohol (sigh . . . another low).  If you are interested in reading more about Jerry and his philosophies click here, you'll be taken to Jerry's latest comments on the vintage, beautifully expressed I think. 

As far as what else I have been up to, last week we bottled the 2009 Willamette Valley pinot noir, it went very well, and the little bit of 2008 Dunn Forest Pinot noir that had an extra year in barrel.  We were scheduled to bottle the infamous port on Saturday but the bottler was giving us problems so that didn't get bottled till Monday of this week.  Mary had some friends in town who took on fixing the problem piece on the bottler.  Thank you Orv and Alan it worked great on Monday.  I must admit that I feel at loose ends with almost no wine to look after and that I'm not scrambling to get get ready for fruit to be picked.  Just the 7 barrels of 09 pinot I held over for another year of aging in barrel.  They look so lonely.

Muller Thurgau,      Pinot noir,      Marechal Foch

Yesterday Sebastian pulled our first samples of grapes for me to test.  And apparently my blogging brain was turned off because I didn't take any pictures.  I still had the juice sitting on the counter this morning so you can see the three grapes we sampled and the color difference though amongst the three.  The Muller and Pinot noir have oxidized in the jar over night so aren't as green or pink, respectively, as they were yesterday.  Isn't the colour on the Foch amazing!  I'll explain the process next week when we sample again but suffice to say the grapes are not ripe.  The Marechal Foch has at least 10-14 days and that will be the first fruit to come in.  I went looking at past numbers to see if I could give you and me both an estimate for how far behind we are and it turns out I have never sampled the Foch at as low a number as it is right now.  The closest year was 2007 and the fruit then was a degree of brix higher, about a weeks worth of ripening, on September 13th, versus October 6th.  And we didn't pick for another 19 days.  Deep Sigh!  I never should have gone and looked.  I should add checking past vintage numbers to the list of don'ts while suffering from WIBS.  I think I'll go join Phineas on the couch and hide my head under the blanket.  Let me know if the sun comes out.