Almost a repeat of last week!

I was reading what I wrote last week and this week was so similar I almost could have re-posted!  The weather wasn't quite as perfect for growing but it was nice and is supposed to warm up again this weekend.  The nights have started cooling off more and that combined with the lowering sun has started to put me in the mind of fall instead of summer.  Our clusters are just finishing going through lag phase and the seeds have hardened nicely.  Now I just want to start seeing some color change and a little berry softening!  There is a little color in the Foch block, though none on our cluster yet.

As for our pinot trials we did taste through them last week and while all the differing opinions made making a decision a little more difficult then I might have hoped.  I always wish for the day when everyone at the table has the same opinion, but then again what fun would that be?!  So taking the results from the Friday tasting I narrowed done the choices and tried creating the blends again at lower levels of additions.  Mary, Barry and I tasted the wines yesterday and decided I might be a little closer but needed to go lower still.  I brought the wines home and my husband confirmed so back to it again next week!  I made up a new set of blends to sit over the weekend and we will taste the wines on Tuesday.  Fingers crossed I'll be there or almost there.  I would like to go on vacation knowing this part of the process has been resolved.   Sorry no engaging pictures, I forgot to take my camera in with me to both tastings!

If you are looking for something to do this weekend keep the Bounty of Benton County in mind.  It is a great opportunity to support local rural families and to enjoy much that Benton County has to offer.  Plus a little of Polk County too!  We are on the tour and will be offering Fairview Farm's cheeses alongside our wines.  So stop by, buy a passport and go on a little road trip.  For more information, click here.

Yesterday while taking our cluster pictures I did snap this of the crocosmia blooming in front of the tasting room. The colors really are wonderful right now.

Tasting pinots and enjoying the weather!

This week has been a spectacular ripening week.  Just about as hot as it can be without being so hot it shuts the vines down.  Perfect!  It will help us continue to catch up to a more 'normal' year, whatever that is!  Our grapes are coming along nicely and the little bit of spotting you can see is a touch of sunburn.   Here are our clusters:

I did taste through the treated pinots last week and was really interested to see what effect the various compounds had.  They all had an effect but not all had a positive effect, which in some ways was a good thing because it helped narrow down my choices to experiment with further.  So after choosing my top five treatments I made up the treatments up again in larger bottles so that I could measure the additions more accurately, let them sit a few days and then made up blends of all the barrels of pinot substituting the treated wines for the barrel that I am experimenting with.  So I have 6 wines to taste: one that is all the barrels blended with no treatments, my control, and then five blends each with one of the treatments substituting for the experimental barrel.  At this point I have not treated the experimental barrel but after this tasting I hope to be able to treat that barrel.  In these blends I am only effecting 7% of the blend so I am curious to see how obvious the treatments are in the final blends.  A few friends/customers are coming up this evening to taste with us and I am looking to see what they think not only of the treatments but of the wines in general.
 

In other news, I went to an Oregon Wine Research Institute conference yesterday in Corvallis at OSU.  It was educational as always as well as a chance to catch up with some friends and students.  I really enjoyed that we had an entomologist and a financier both speak and they brought some new thoughts to the conference including some highly controversial ones!  Usually we only get viticulturalists, food science or fermentation science students and professors, which should be more applicable but not always.  I think sometimes the presenters forget they are talking to farmers and winemakers who are not necessarily scientists or chemists.

On a personal note, my first nephew (on my side of the family) was born this morning!  

Congrats to my brother and his wife, I wish them all the best.

Puttering around the winery.

In the vineyard the crew has returned from leaf pulling at Emerson and BeckenRidge and is now tucking the vines and opening up the fruiting zone a little more.  We were unable to tuck before because the vines were to fragile and moving them around that much could easily break them.  The vines have started to harden now and so shifting them is easier.  We tuck the vines behind a catch wire so that they can't grow across the rows and grab onto their neighbor, creating a mess for humans and tractor alike.  Our clusters are continuing to grow and I am curious to see when they will enter lag phase.  Lag phase is when the grapes temporarily stop growing in size and instead continue to develop on the inside, another name for this time is seed hardening.  Normally this occurs 40 - 50 days after bloom but we don't have much time left in the summer so I hoping to see it occur earlier.  Here are this weeks pictures.

It has been a quiet week here at the winery.  I tasted through all the barrels and am happy with where the wines are heading.  Based on what I tasted and some of the comments from the Steamboat conference I am going to set up a few trials so see if I can tweak some of the barrels to make the whole blend better.  One of the disadvantages to such a small harvest is that each barrel is a significant contributor to the overall blend.   This also means that subtly changing one barrel can impact the blend so I have to make sure that if I decide my tweaking of a barrel makes the barrel better I also have to check to see if it makes the final blend better.  I'll start the process by looking at a few products, both fining agents such as egg whites, casein (milk product) and isinglass as well as some additive products such as grape seed or skin tannins or even oak tannins.  All of these products will effect mouth feel and some will effect flavor and aroma.  My goal is to make a better wine while still remaining true to the vintage and what nature gave me.  I have found some products that make a lovely, round and pretty wine that tastes just like the next lovely, round and pretty wine which was treated with the same product.  In a recent tasting I was surprised by one such product that when added to 5 wines from 5 winemakers it made all the wines taste about the same.  There were still subtle differences but much of what had made the wines unique was gone.  This to me is not an improvement and something I tend to avoid.  Okay, I'll get off my soap box now, or maybe I should say wine box.

I've also been working on updating our listing on Yelp and getting us a listing on TripAdvisor.  If you use Yelp  feel free to head over and give us a boost in our social network standing!  We don't have a listing yet on TripAdvisor but I have my fingers crossed.  All part of learning how to navigate a small business in this new world of social media.  Which is why you can now read this on our facebook page as well as my blog page.  Though I've noticed the formatting isn't as nice on FB.  So if you want to see the pictures in their proper places you actually have to come over to blogger.

The lights are hung, the dance floor is swept and the campers are arriving!  Starry Starry Nite here we come.  Don't know what I am talking about?  Visit our website and check it out!

Rain, rain go away.

When I started thinking about what I would write about this week there were visions of purple grapes and sun filled skies dancing in my head.  Watching the rain drizzle down I'm not feeling quite to joyful.  But first things first.

Rosario surrounded by Foch vines

Victoria was beautiful and I forgot my camera so no pictures, sorry.  We love visiting Vancouver Island and had another great trip.  Mostly we walk all day so that we can sit down to a great meal in the evening.  This year we stayed at Abigail's, a bed and breakfast just outside of the main downtown area and slept in a four poster king bed that was so high it had little steps so you can climb in.  It was great fun and we laughed the first few times we climbed on the bed, sliding out was good too (hint, hint M&D).  I only mention the sliding out because my parents sleep about 8 inches off the floor and standing up every morning has become a family joke.  The guest bed is a whole 14"!  But I digress.  As for dining we hit our normal haunts: Cafe Brio, Il Terrazzo, and Bon Rouge and for the first time made it to Camille's.  Chad thinks that may be the best meal he has ever eaten.  Certainly the whole experience was amazing from the greeting, the service and the knowledge of the staff to the wine and by no means the least the food.  We had a lovely bottle of 2007 Orofino Pinot noir from BC.  Sadly another wonderful BC wine which is not exported.  British Columbians do too good a job drinking local wine so there is no need for wineries to go through the hassle and expense of exporting to the US.  If you ever make it up to there I highly recommend checking out the wines.  There are some beauties.

Marechal Foch

Pinot noir

Now back to work.  The weather was good while we were gone and the grapes have been progressing.  The Foch is over 50% through veraison and the pinot noir and pinot gris are turning.  There is softening of the berries in the Muller and the Chardonnay, also a good sign.  Of course we are still weeks behind and now it is raining and they are predicting a few more days.  Normally I wouldn't complain as we need a good drink of water this time of year but it does lower the air temperature and we need more warmth.  Of course, all of this is out of my control so there is no use in stressing.  What will be will be.  The crew is out in the vineyard, yes, in the rain, dropping the fruit that is still green.  See Rosario above.  They are looking at every plant, starting with the Foch, and cutting off any clusters of grapes that have not started changing color.  This is the best time to tell which clusters are lagging behind and will lower the overall ripeness of the fruit at harvest.  After color change has completed there is no way to tell visually which clusters are less ripe.  The crew also spent a few days repairing our picking bins, see we haven't given up on harvest yet!

Sebastian and Rosario

 In the winery my yeast fining to remove the copper was exceedingly successful so I finished putting the blend together and the Willamette Valley pinot is ready to bottle.  We are going to start bottling next week.  We have about 5 days and will break them up over two weeks I think.  Bottling days are long but satisfying as I finally feel that the wine is safe once it is in bottle and I can stop worrying about what might happen.

Happy Dance and mournful dirge!

All the pinot noir is out of barrel and in tank! Yeah, happy dance!

Just starting!

3800 gallons to the top.

Let me be slightly more accurate:  the 2009 Willamette Valley is blended and in tank and the 2009 reserve pinot noir has been racked into neutral oak barrels to age another year and be bottled in September 2011.  I was able to rack 80 barrels in 2 days which was a lot of staring at the racking wand and waiting on the pump.  I like to use a pump to get the wine out of barrel because I think that it does a cleaner job and is easier on the barrels.  I have used a piece of equipment called a bulldog's pup which allows me to pressurize the barrel with nitrogen gas and force the wine out with no moving parts.  While I think that is the gentlest way to move the wine I don't think it as good at separating the settled wine from the lees and it is much harder on the barrels.  The pressurization of the barrels and then sudden release, especially if the seal fails on the bulldog, tends to warp the heads and make the barrels more likely to leak in the future.  That combined with the lack of control made me switch back to using a pump a few years ago.

I must admit that I ended up fining some of the pinot barrels with copper in order to remove some reductive aromas.  I consider reduction a flaw and one that can usually be addressed by the winemaker, so while I don't like having to make additions to my wines I will when necessary.  I consider fixing flaws when possible an essential part of good wine making.  I am trying to put the best wine I can on the market not the wine that has been handled the least.  If the two happen to agree that is wonderful but as I have mentioned before they don't always.  So after fining the barrels with copper to clean them up I then wanted to remove some of the copper, I would love to remove all if the copper but I'm not sure that is even possible and doing would be hard on the wine.  Removing the copper will not cause the reductive aromas to come back and I prefer to bottle a wine with minimal residual copper.  This means that after using the copper to treat the reduction I added yeast to the treated barrels to remove the copper.  This leads to yet another step, the yeast needed to be filtered out of the wine before mixing those barrels into the main blend.  The advantage of doing it this way is that only about 10% of the wine is filtered rather than 100% which goes back to my point that I like to be hands off when I can.  I spent Thursday morning filtering the treated barrels through a pad filter.  I'm sorry I forgot to take a picture when it was loaded but I will when we are bottling so you can see the filter in action.  The pads are 40cm square and go between the black plastic plates on the machines.  It is just like it sounds, the wine is pumped through the paper pads which trap the sediment and comes out clean on the other side.  The pads are available with different pore sizes so I can filter out only what is necessary and not any more.  I then sent a sample of the filtered wine off to a lab to be tested for residual copper and if I am happy with the number I'll mix the treated wine back into the main lot. 

Sebastian cleaned the barrels for me this time, the only reason I could do the job in 2 days instead of 4 and why the barrel room looks so nice and tidy.  He also reset the barrels for me so I was able to burn the sulfur wicks today like I did for the foch and chardonnay barrels protecting the barrels until we start cleaning them for the 2010 vintage.  Speaking of which . . . you all need to start sending us your sunny and warm weather!  We are still very behind and while today is warm, pushing 90F, earlier in the week it was definitely not warm.  We did get about 1/2" of rain on Monday which was a nice drink of water but what we really need is warmth.  The foch is starting to change color, a process called veraison, but is not nearly far enough along and there is no color any where else in our vineyard.  We are still about 2 weeks behind and I'm getting a little nervous!  Okay so maybe the mournful dirge is a slight exaggeration but still more ripening weather would be good.

On a happier note I am off on vacation next week to Victoria BC with my husband to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary so Mary has kindly agreed to write next week's blog.  I can't wait to see what she decides to share with you.