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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Vineyard’ Category
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 [...]
Harvest 2010: A Quick Update
Just time for a quick update before I run off to the winery to clean up the press and crush the fruit we picked yesterday. This is a radar snapshot of the storm that is on top of us. We have had over 3″ of rain in the last 24 hours and more is expected. [...]
2010 Harvest: Pinot In The Barn
As I stepped out of the shower yesterday morning I heard rain on the skylight. Pretty heavy rain — nearly the last thing a winemaker wants to hear on the first day of harvest. Fortunately it was brief. By the time I got to the vineyard to see how the crews were doing on picking [...]
2010 Harvest: Finally, Pinot
Sunday, we’re bringing in all the Pinot from our Annadel Estate Vineyard. The past four days we have seen temperatures at the vineyard in excess of 95°F, with near 105°F for two of them. In some ways this was as hard on the vines as the blast furnace of 115+°F we saw back at the [...]
The Newest Greatest Wine Marketing Thingie
Here it is — the hottest ticket to making better wine in the last couple of years. The concrete “egg” fermenter. This year, no fashionable winemaker should be without one! (No, this one is not mine – I’m SO unfashionable.) Seriously though: the temperature is barely getting out of the 70s today, but is supposed [...]
Sunburn Disaster
We had a heat spike last week. Monday it was over 90°F, Tuesday it nearly reached 110° and Wednesday it got to almost 105°. We haven’t cracked 80° since then, but the damage was done. I was hanging out with some winegrowing friends on Friday when I got a call from Jean-Marie: he was seeing [...]
