Here comes the first rain of the season. The radar loop shows a slow eastward progression; most of the motion is southwest to northeast. Forecast total rain accumulations have increased from yesterday’s projections. Dislike.
Archive for the ‘Journal’ Category
2011 Vintage – Quick Harvest Update
Sunday afternoon; outside the overcast is increasing and westerly wind rising as the first of a series of cold fronts approaches the area. Rain on tap for tomorrow and then for Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Forecast has advanced the timing and decreased the amount of rain expected from the system. We really don’t have [...]
Biochar & Yeast Nutrition
I love Twitter. For example, biochar would not be on my radar today if I was not following @RandallGrahm on the platform. I remember reading an article on terra preta some time ago (might have been this article in National Geographic) but it is Randall’s sustained expression of enthusiasm for biochar as a vineyard amendment [...]
2011 Vintage & The Rain
Sampled the vineyard yesterday, confirming that Syrah (approaching 23° Brix) is two full weeks ahead of Pinot (not quite 21° Brix) this year. Awesomely weird; feels like down is suddenly up. Jennifer Thomson tweeted this morning that “Diageo reports they are bringing Chard & Pinot in around the clock for next 72 hrs. Anything 23.5° [...]
No Harvest Yet :-(
It is the day before the autumnal equinox and I haven’t picked grape one. A week ago I was sweating bullets over this, in spite of it being cold outside–in fact because it was cold outside. I have been mostly tweeting it up from the vineyard this year, but it is time to make a [...]
No One On The Corner Has Swagger Like Us
Close friends know I have been a M.I.A. fan since 2004. Closer friends know that weekend nights I sometimes turn DJ. A+B= this is how the Labor Day weekend has felt so far:
Is The Customer Always Right?
In a word–no. End of discussion. I refer the reader to the wise thoughts on this question expressed by Herb Kelleher, Gordon Bethune and ServiceGruppen (click here for a nice synopsis). Since we opened in May, 2005 we have relied on our semi-hidden location to weed out the people who might not “get” our unusual [...]
Judging A Wine On Its Own Merits
I recently came across this exchange between Wine Wonkette (Amy Corron-Power) and 1 Wine Dude (Joe Roberts) on Amy’s “Another Wine Blog” (which is up for a 2011 Wine Blogger Award–and BTW so is Joe’s blog). Joe: “Do critics give decent ratings to wines that they don’t personally like but otherwise are made well, just [...]
2011 Vintage–Interesting
There is an old Chinese curse which goes “May you live in interesting times.” It seems we are under this curse for this vintage in Sonoma, as much or more as we were in 2010. This is the Estate vineyard yesterday, viewed from the NW corner looking SE. It rained on Monday; about 0.90 inches. [...]
The Heavy Lifting
A few posts back I took Leah Hennessy to task for (what I read as her) lumping all wineries’ range of marketing efforts together with the stale lamestream approach of some players in the industry. Yesterday, The Millennier penned another tough love letter to the industry, and got it right (in my opinion). The message? [...]
