“I have never seen anything like this…” I heard this sentiment expressed by more growers and winemakers during the 2011 harvest than ever before in my 25 years of doing this. I said it myself any number of times. It’s not that any one thing about this vintage stood out on its own as unusual [...]
Archive for the ‘Vineyard’ Category
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 [...]
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. [...]
Wine Grapes & Pesticides in Sonoma
The other day I was reading “Lack of Sex Among Grapes Tangles a Family Vine” in the New York Times and came across the line “…a host of pests have caught up with the grape, obliging growers to protect their vines with a deluge of insecticides, fungicides and other powerful chemicals.” The line was a [...]
Harvest 2010 — Initial Debrief
I’ve gone on and on here about how this was such a tough vintage. I saw some really awful vineyard problems (luckily, few in our vineyard), heard some unprecedented horror stories from growers and winemakers, and tasted some pretty sketchy wines (thankfully, none of them in our winery). When the 2010 Grape Crush Report comes [...]
Harvest 2010 — Finally Over!
We picked our Grenache and Counoise on Wednesday. The crew did a great job of field-sorting and we saw almost no rot in the bins. Yields on these varieties were way down: 2.60 t/ac for the Counoise (most of the loss to rot over the last couple of weeks) and an unprecedentedly low 1.80 t/ac [...]
Harvest 2010: Not Done Yet
It is November 3rd and I still have Mourvedre, Grenache and Counoise on the vine at our Annadel Estate Vineyard. This is now officially the latest harvest I have done in 24 years. The Mourvedre is as ready as it is going to get — the seeds are ripe enough and flavors are good with [...]
Harvest 2010: Calamitous
Calamitous. There’s just no better word to describe this growing season. A cold spring and summer gave us budbreak, flowering and veraison later than I can ever recall. Some growers struggled with nearly the worst mildew pressure they have had to deal with — fortunately we were spared this at our Annadel Estate. We have [...]
