| ghm2112 |
Hello all:
The latest hot spell here in the NorCal wine country has pushed up sugar levels and lead to complete verasion (color change) on all but the coolest and most sturborn vineyards. It's been a relatively cool and uneventful growing season (with the exception of some thunderstorms last week), but harvest is just around the corner. If the weather is as predicted I anticipate we will be harvesting our Mountain Greens Merlot the last week of September.:2:
Dunno is marne is still around, but is anyone else growing grapes/making wine?
How about an update from our firends in the Gold Country and elsewhere (Central CA Coast; Northwest; East Coast)?
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| DaleB |
quote:
Originally posted by ghm2112
Hello all:
The latest hot spell here in the NorCal wine country has pushed up sugar levels and lead to complete verasion (color change) on all but the coolest and most sturborn vineyards. It's been a relatively cool and uneventful growing season (with the exception of some thunderstorms last week), but harvest is just around the corner. If the weather is as predicted I anticipate we will be harvesting our Mountain Greens Merlot the last week of September.:2:
Dunno is marne is still around, but is anyone else growing grapes/making wine?
How about an update from our firends in the Gold Country and elsewhere (Central CA Coast; Northwest; East Coast)?
Salute'
-Traveller
Don't forget us out here in the central valley with some award winning selections courtesy of Fresno State..etc. I will post as I find out more specific info. |
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| ghm2112 |
Dale: Sorry about the CV exclusion, but if I tried to list all the places wine grapes are grown these days...
If I remember correctly, weren't you from Livermore, one of the orginal birthplaces of the Bay Area wine industry???
BTW, the word is that the latest trends associated with the 'grape glut' and foreign (AUS, Chile etc) competition will contnue for at least another couple of years: lower prices and better quality at almost all price points.
If you have a few $M laying around it will be a good time to pick up that boutique winery you've always wanted!
-Traveller:1: |
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| DaleB |
quote:
Originally posted by ghm2112
Dale: Sorry about the CV exclusion, but if I tried to list all the places wine grapes are grown these days...
If I remember correctly, weren't you from Livermore, one of the orginal birthplaces of the Bay Area wine industry???
BTW, the word is that the latest trends associated with the 'grape glut' and foreign (AUS, Chile etc) competition will contnue for at least another couple of years: lower prices and better quality at almost all price points.
If you have a few $M laying around it will be a good time to pick up that boutique winery you've always wanted!
-Traveller:1:
No, from San Jose. And on a good day could walk to Mirrasou...getting back was the problem...:p |
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| MikeLastort |
I just saw something on the Today Show that said that 2003 vintage European wines are going to be incredible due to the hot weather all summer.
Italy, France, Spain, and even England can look forward to great wines from this year. |
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| ghm2112 |
I've heard similar things, including an anticpated dramatic improvement in the complexity of a number of wines from Germany. Evidently, this has been the best growing season on record for much of the German wine industry. Nice silver lining...
Latest readings from The Squire's Vineyard:
20.2 deg Brix; green, firm internal fruit
Probably 2-3 weeks before harvest unless things really heat up (i.e., >100 deg F for a number of days)
Dale: Last I heard I think the Mirasou family sold their holdings (vineyards and winery) to some group called La Rochelle, and sold the NAME Mirasou to Gallo. Have you heard same?
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| MikeLastort |
My wife's sister and her partner live in San Francisco, but they have a ranch they own outside of Kelseyville. They grow grapes on the ranch and sell them to Berringer.
They also own a coffee shop in downtown Kelseyville. |
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| MikeLastort |
And yeah, I love German wines, which are often considered too sweet for the American palette. I used to live in a small town on the Mosel (Moselle) River, called Traben-Trarbach, which is in the middle of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine region.
Bernkastel-Kues is about 10 km away (about 20-25 if you go by the river) which is where the famous Doktor vineyards are located. |
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| ghm2112 |
Mike:
We are somewhat familiar with wines from Bernkastel-Kues as my wife is Indian and we drink a fair amount of Riesling (including some dynamite ones from B-K) with the food she makes.
Do you have any favorites to suggest??? :2:
For anyone interested here's a link to a site that gives a very general overview of the region's wines.
Salute'
-Traveller
:1: |
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| MikeLastort |
quote:
Originally posted by ghm2112
Mike:
We are somewhat familiar with wines from Bernkastel-Kues as my wife is Indian and we drink a fair amount of Riesling (including some dynamite ones from B-K) with the food she makes.
Do you have any favorites to suggest??? :2:
For anyone interested here's a link to a site that gives a very general overview of the region's wines.
Salute'
-Traveller
:1:
First of all, keep in mind that I haven't lived in Traben-Trarbach since 1987, so my knowledge is a bit out of date.
The most famous vineyard in Bernkastel is of course Bernkasteler Doktor. It's also the most expensive, and while the wines are good, I think they're typically overpriced. Two other less expensive wines I know are Bernkasteler Badstube and Bernkasteler Kürfustlay. As far as I know, only those three wines are allowed to call themselves "Berkasteler." You can also look for wines labeled as "Bereich Bernkastel," which implies that they are from the area around Bernkastel, but are not necessarily in Berkastel itself.
Other vineyards I really like that are in the "Mittelmosel" (middle Moselle) region are Piesporter Goldtropfchen (literally golden drops), Wehlener Sonnenuhr (sundial, named for the medieval sundial in the middle of the vineyard), and Graacher Himmelreich (kindgom of heaven).
There are lots of other vineyards that have decent Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wines, most of which are in the Mittlemosel area. I'm not a big fan of anything north of Zell, and I avoid Zeller Schwartzer Katz (black cat) at all costs. I think the only reason it's popular in the US is because of the cat on the label. It's not for the quality of the wine. :)
I'll post more later. |
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| ghm2112 |
Thanks, Mike, this is great information. Next time I'm heading out to one of my favorite wine shops I'll be sure to bring the list along.
I have to say that some of the winery/vineyard names are pretty cool. I particularly like sayiing "Piesporter Goldtropfchen."
Anyway, more weird weather here in the NV this week: heavy thunderstorms yesterday morning and continued cool today. Don't think it will be a problem for our grapes, although rain closer to harvest (2-3 weks?) may be problematic.
Some of the sparkling wine and lighter whites producers have begun harvesting so yesterday's rains were probably not a welcome occurrance.
The St. Helena Star should start running their harvest reports soon. I'll post a link when I get a chance.
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| marne |
Sorry folks, I've been away for a loooong while.
Crush has been going on furiously for several weeks now. Yes, the hot weather has spiked sugar levels, but some of that is dehydration rather than true fruit maturation. Therefore, acids may be higher and flavor development may be less complete than ideal this year. We'll have to wait and see how the 2003 vintage really plays out once the winemaking is farther along.
Also, the rain storm a couple of weeks ago followed by the extreme heat has caused Aspergillus niger problems in some vineyards, notably those in cooler areas with west facing slopes. (Some of you may have visited one such vineyard just about this time last year.) Among other effects, Aspergillus accelerates dehydration, especially of the tiny berries which are legion this year. Net net, my yield now looks to be significantly lower than it did just two weeks ago.
We'll be picking on Monday 9/30. I'll have more news then.
--Marne |
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| ghm2112 |
Hi Marne:
Good to see you're still lurking around the .org world.
We harvested our merlot and some friends' Howell Mtn Cab Franc last weekend. I was really sweating the numbers as we, like you, were seeing raisining w/o real maturing. Fortunately the really high sugar of the Cab Franc (27.4deg Brix) has balanced out the lower sugar in the merlot (~23 deg Brix). Perhaps surprisingly, the acids were OK in both and the whole lot is cold soaking now at 23.8 deg Brix and pH 3.5.
Anyhow, we'll be pulling in some Cab Sauv this week and plan to get the fermentation cranking along some time next week.
Salute'
-Traveller:cool: |
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| marne |
Sounds real good!!! Let me know how things progress with the Cab Franc - Merlot blend, and with the CS harvest.
--Marne |
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| ghm2112 |
Marne:
Last evening I got a call from a friend saying she had more Howell Mtn Cab Franc for me. When I picked it up, I asked her about the Brix and pH and she said that her measurements were pH 3.5 and 30deg Brix!!!!
What the...?
Tested it myself and sure enough thems the numbers.
Have you ever seen something like that? I've seen sugar almost that high but with a pH~4. Good tasting fruit, though, with more CF and some Stags Leap Cab Sauv to be added this weekend.:2:
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| marne |
I ain't never seen those numbers, or anything like 'em. Was the fruit really dessicated?
I'm glad the flavors are good, though...
--Marne |
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| ghm2112 |
We actually spent Saturday morning manually picking through 3.5 tons of destemmed CF, the bulk of which was in the 30 deg Brix range. The winemaker is a big-time stickler for quality, so we set up a sorting conveyor and 6 of us picked out 'all' of the jacks, shot, leaves, stems, lizards, wasps, etc.
While we got a very high percentage of those, there were probably hundreds of earwigs that we didn't bother grabbing (just too many of them). Oh well, c'est terroir, non?
Marne: Did you still harvest tiday? how are things shaping up with your Pinot? Are you still servicing the same contracts? Testarossa?
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| mdxxxx |
quote:
Originally posted by marne
I ain't never seen those numbers, or anything like 'em. Was the fruit really dessicated?
I'm glad the flavors are good, though...
--Marne
Welcome back Marne! |
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| marne |
Here's the update on our vineyard. There's more detail here than you need (or want, probably). So if you want, skip to the bottom for the end results.
To fully develop wine flavors and to ensure complete ripening of the fruit before the weather collapsed in the fall, we had been following a regime of regulated deficit irrigation, or RDI. With unlimited irrigation, vines happily make leaves. Vines only ripen fruit when soil moisture becomes limited and they have to work harder to extract water through their roots. So weekly throughout the growing season, I was using a pressure chamber instrument to measure the actual water demand in the vines, and we'd irrigate only when the vines exhibited a moderate amount of water stress. Until about three weeks ago, our RDI program was working swimmingly.
Indeed, we were progressing toward harvest with a wonderful crop of terrific Pinot Noir grapes. Our odd spring weather produced clusters with lots of small berries. This is ideal. Small berries have a large skin-to-juice ratio, and since most of the flavors and all of the color come from the skins, wine made from small berries is deep, rich, intense and complex. While small berries produce terrific wine (which makes the wineries very happy), there is a downside -- the overall yield is smaller. So although we were looking at lesser tonnage that we would have liked to see in our second harvest, we knew that the grapes were going to be stellar.
All of this came to a near tragic ending (or more precisely, a tragic near-ending) about three weeks ago when we had some unseasonably early rain followed by several days of intense heat. This produced an outbreak of a mold / fungus called Aspergillus Niger. Aspergillus, known colloquially in the viticulture world as 'smut', produces an unsightly greenish-brown, slightly fuzzy growth on the skins of the grapes, and induces a moderate rate of berry dehydration. In the winery, Aspergillus is quickly destroyed by the normal addition of sulfur dioxide, a standard practice to deactivate native yeasts so that fermentation doesn't begin in an uncontrolled manner. This means that the flavor effects of Aspergillus are negligible. But berry dehydration artificially elevates sugar concentrations, creating fruit with harvestable levels of sugar while not having reached full harvest maturity. Worse, the dehydration effect is most intense where there is less berry to begin with, so small berries rapidly turn into raisins, then drop off the clusters entirely.
We arrested the Aspergillus attack and we've increased our irrigations to reduce any water deficit. But the reality of vine physiology is that no additional water goes into the fruit at this stage of development. The net result is that the yield in our vineyard has been reduced dramatically in the last two weeks.
So our sugars now high, and there appeared to be a likelihood of more rain in the near future. In consultation with both of our wineries, we have decided to harvest Siduri's eight acres on Monday, September 29, and Testarossa's fruit on Friday 10/3. (Testarossa was a bit squeezed on tank space, and they prefered that we wait to harvest their three acres until then.)
On harvest day, picking always begins early. The idea is to get the grapes off the vines while they're still cold from our now very chilly nights. The cool fruit travels without self-initiated fermentation activity, and will arrive at the wineries sound and fresh.
Monday's crew of 28 started at 7am and was finished at 1:30pm. On Friday, the crew of 14 again started at 7am and finished at 11:30am.
Both crews were very selective about the fruit that they picked; they only took clusters which were substantially untouched and unharmed by the Aspergillus attack. This meant that lots of fruit was dropped on the ground instead of being packed into the winery bins. At the end of the day (er, week), the total harvest from our vineyard this year was just 7.5 tons. We had been expecting to get about 17.5 tons. I guess one could say that we were off by just one digit. Oh well -- that's farming!
But while the yield was low, the stats on the harvested fruit were just fine. For the enologists among you, Siduri's grapes averaged 24.4 Brix, with a pH of 3.65 and titratable acidity of 0.674 g/100ml. Testarossa's numbers were 25.1, 3.59 and 0.590.
So when will you see some wine from Sonatera? The bottles containing wine from our 2002 harvest should be released next spring. Until then, drink anything you like. (Wine would be nice!)
--Marne |
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| ghm2112 |
Hi Marne:
Sorry to hear of all the Aspergillus problems. If it's any consolation a friend of mine growing pinot in Carneros has had the same (but perhaps less dramatic) problem.
It seems that Apsergillus hits Pinot Noir the hardest. Do you find that to be the case, or is it more just a function of the timing of maturation in relation to the problematic weather events?
As for our our still evolving NV Bordeaux, we have added some Pritchard Hill Cab Sauv and Petit Verdot to the blend and the primary fermentation is proceeding well (@ ~5deg brix). Really nice color and flavors so far, so we're keeping our fingers crossed.
BTW, do you make any wine yourself, Marne?
Also, can anyone chime in with updates on how things are going elsewhere in the winegrowing world??
Salute'
-Traveller |
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| ByeByeChrysler |
Definitely did my share of wine drinking over Christmas.
:2: |
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