Almost feels like summer

After last weekend's beautiful weather the vines put on a burst of growth, as did the weeds around my house.  Sebastian our vineyard manager said he measured several shoots on Friday and again Monday and they grew an average of 3".  The vines that is, not the weeds, though I think my weeds might have grown that much too!  The clusters are also starting to grow so you can see where the future grapes will be after bloom.  They look so tiny right now it's hard to believe how much growing they have to do.

On the winery side I was put in touch with the perfect person to discuss lab work with on the sparkling wine.  I called ETS Labs, a California based company that does a lot of lab work for the wine industry and it turns out they have someone who used to work for Moet, the champagne house, and even better she is actually located in Oregon!  So after spending some time of the phone with her we decided what tests needed to be run so that I can be more comfortable that I won't have problems in the bottle during secondary fermentation.  One of the concerns is because of the shift in alcohol that occurs in bottle, wines that were previously stable, especially cold stable, can become unstable and in the case of cold stability crystals can form in the bottle making the yeast beads less effective as well as giving me the added problem of trying to get the crystals out of the bottle.  It also turns out that wines fermented with the yeast beads are at risk of becoming calcium unstable, a problem I have never encountered so I'm not sure what happens other than I am assuming that the calcium forms crystals in the wine similar to the tartaric acid precipitant formed during cold stabilization.

I am still waiting on those results but as I am off on a short road trip next week I went ahead and filtered the wine yesterday so that we can turn off the chilling system.  I don't like having it running while both Mary and I are gone and she is off next week to sell wine in Denver.  For this small volume of wine I decided to use the plate and frame filter that I use for bottling because I think there is a little less oxygen pickup and it might be easier on the wine than the DE filter I usually use for this step.  I used a coarser filter pad than I do for bottling as I was trying to minimize stripping the wine while still making sure I got out all of the cream of tartar I used to seed for cold stability as well as any crystals forming on their own.  Filtering went very smoothly and I could have used fewer pads than I did.  I'll know for next time.  This was the first time the wine has been moved since it went into the this tank for fermentation and the lees were very well settled.  The tan parts are mostly dead yeast bodies mixed with whatever particulates were left from the grapes after the first settling.  The pink layer on top is some of the color falling out on its own and then the lightest pink is the cream of tartar, it started white, which pulled out color along with the tartrates on its way down.   Keeping this wine pink may be difficult, we'll see.

I also attended a Pinot gris conference at Oak Knoll Winery this week.  Everyone who attended brought a bottle of Pinot gris and after spending the morning discussing everything from growing and making the wine to selling and marketing it we tasted through all the wines.  It was great to taste so many next to each other and to be able to compare and contrast different styles of winemaking.  I, of course, would have liked to spend more time on the making part but I think people had some good ideas about how to move Oregon Pinot gris forward as a group making it both more available and understandable to the consumer.  The next step will be trying to implement some of those ideas.

Rocky wants to know "where are you?"

Not much else to report.  As I mentioned above I am gone next week.  My younger brother is graduating from University of Washington in Seattle and is then off to Connecticut to teach at the Coast Guard academy. I offered to help him drive his car, that 1972 BMW I showed a few weeks ago, minus the canoe.  We are leaving Monday and planning on driving across the northern part of the country spending a day at Glacier Park in Montana.  It should be a great trip.  I haven't taken a road trip like this in quite a while and am looking forward to it.  All this boils down to the fact that I probably won't write next week, I'm not taking my computer but I will have my camera and am sure I will have pictures to share when I get back.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

I did plan on writing while I was on the road and my only excuse is that I had evening events every night but two and I was flying both of those nights.  Ergo, no sitting down and writing.  I did get home on Tuesday but catching up at work and at home meant that I put off writing.  So here it is a brief overview of my two week trip, I had to take a picture of the snow at MSP and the great light fixture.  I spent almost a full week in Ohio traveling to Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati to sell wine to various shops and restaurants.  A normal day involves being picked up by my sales rep and then spending the day visiting various places and tasting the wine buyer on my wines while telling him or her a little bit about myself and Airlie.  The idea is that if they know what the wines taste like and have a little story they are more likely to sell the wines in turn.  An abnormal day is being snowed on in Columbus!
The evenings were spent either at consumer tastings or in the case of Ohio I spent two nights pouring at the Cincinnati Wine Festival where I got a bronze for the Seven.  The festival was fun if a little long.  It is broken into 4 sessions and definitely the last session on Saturday night feels like a party.  Mostly people are there to drink wine and talk with their friends.  I was pouring Seven, Muller Thurgau and Willamette Valley Pinot noir.  Hopefully I turned a few people on to Muller and I did get a call yesterday from a wine shop in Ohio wanting to know how to order our wine because a customer was requesting it.  I consider that a good sign.

The Ohio River looking south to Kentucky

Bistro Blanc's Website

My next stop was Baltimore where I didn't manage to get my camera out of my bag.  I had just two days there and we were able to do a winemaker's dinner on one of them at Bistro Blanc in Glenelg, west of Baltimore.  The wine food pairings were excellent and I must admit that my favorite was Maple Lime Glazed Duck Breast with thyme infused pain perdu and a sour cherry scallion portabella salad paired with the three pinot noirs.  The three pinots we poured with that dish were the 2008 Willamette Valley, 2006 Vintner's Blend and 2006 Dunn Forest Single Vineyard.  It was really interesting to see how the wines changed with the dish and that different characters were brought out in each wine.  There was cinnamon mixed with the sour cherries that was perfect for the wines.

Sotto Sopra's Website

The other piece of good news I just got today is that Sotto Sopra on Charles Street has decided to add the Muller Thurgau to the glass pour list.  I am very excited about that and I think it will be a great summer wine for the restaurant.

Then off to North Carolina.  I spent one day in Hickory, north of Charlotte and had a lovely winemaker's dinner at Table 220.  Again more excellent food pairings and this time my favorite was unexpectedly the Veal Tenderloin poached in Toasted Almond milk and served with Crisp Artichoke Spelt Risotto paired with the 2009 Chardonnay.  I wasn't sure what to expect but the flavors balanced very nicely bringing out unexpected nuances in both the food and the wine, artichoke can be tricky as it tends to make white wines taste green but this pairing was great.  After Hickory it was two days in Raleigh and the surrounding Chapel Hill/Cary areas.  The weather was beautiful and warm, perfect for pouring my array of whites and the wines were well received.
I had a very nice consumer tasting at Great Grapes in Cary for my last event and then it was off to visit my aunt and uncle on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Great Grapes' Website

I must admit that after nearly two full weeks of selling wine I was ready to go home but being so close to them and not having seen them in about five years I put off going home a little longer and drove over to see them.  I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel but I managed to cross it in the dark both times I had my camera.  The whole thing is about 20 miles long and connects Norfolk with the southern tip of the Eastern Shore.  The bridge isn't very high off the water and when the timing is perfect it looks as though you are about to drive onto a container ship just before you dive into the tunnel.  My aunt and uncle's place is right on the water and I got the opportunity to help my uncle refloat his oyster cages for the summer.  There are also clam beds off his beach and in the summer they go out into the creek for crab.  Sounds like heaven, no?  Unfortunately I was there at just the beginning of the crab season so no fresh picked crab for me but my aunt did make me some stellar crab cakes.  Blue Point crab has such a different flavor from Dungeness and I have to admit that I really enjoy both.

  So now I am home again and back to doing my own cooking, a good thing in my opinion, and taking care of my wines.  Everything is tasting good and I am checking the ML on the pinot tomorrow, maybe the barrels will have finished while I was gone.  Though I am not holding my breath.  The buds are starting to swell on the vines but hopefully won't pop until we get through the next full moon in April as that usually brings a little bit of frost to the area.  As for the winery it is back to the grind stone and now trying to sort out glass supply issues.  Apparently several glass companies have closed some foundries to save money and don't have a reopen date so my supplier is out of one of my normal bottles.   I don't know yet what we will do, you may see this year's Riesling in brown instead of green glass.  We'll see.