Anticipation

“Anticipation, anticipation
Is making me late
Is keeping me waiting…”

Harvest 2009 is close. Oh so close.

The Cabernet was at 23.8 over the weekend. Merlot – 23.5.  pHs are in the 3.4s.

So begins the harvest dance, that maddening balance between fruit health, flavor intensity, acidity, pH and brix.

We decided to take our Pinot Gris as juice this year, rather than berries, so we have two 275-gallon totes heading for Palisade this weekend from Washington State.

We also have 5-6 tons of Riesling that should be ready this week as well.

Thursday is the critical day this week. It’s supposed to get down to 36 degrees overnight. We had a hard freeze last year, and had to take what mother nature gave us.

C’mon weather – give us one more week…..

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night…”

Quiscalus quiscula – the common grackle. Also known to anyone who owns a vineyard as “the enemy”.

We netted the vineyard two weeks ago. As we have irregular row lengths, we use the 600 x 100 foot nets, and cover six rows at a time.

You can see how it’s done in the photo above. We put a macrobin on the back on the tractor (forks), put a net bag in the macrobin, and then feed the net up and over a custom-built guide and out over the rows. Workers pull the net out to the sides and anchor it on hooks at the bottom of the trellis posts.

We had good weather this year – mostly sunny and in the low 80s.

The hundreds of grackles that live in the cottonwoods on our farm will now have to forage elsewhere for ripe, juicy treats.

Better late than never…

Finally – veraison.

Took this shot yesterday of the cab up close to the barn. Veraison looks to be about 9-10 days later this year than last year.

For you cube dwellers, Wikipedia defines veraison as “change of color of the grape berries.” It typically signals the change from “berry growth to berry ripening.” In layman’s terms, it’s when the grapes start looking, well, like grapes.

We took some quick brix readings this weekend, just for practice. Most of the vineyard was between 17 and 20, so we still have plenty of time before harvest.

We now need a warm, sunny September, or we’re going to run out of Fall before the vineyard can fully ripen. The sugar/acid dance begins.

It just gives us something else to worry about. Next up – getting the vineyard netted. The birds are eyeing our grapes as we speak….

“Happy Trials To You…”

This is one of the cooler parts of owning a winery. We just started our 2005 vintage blending trials.

In 2004 (our first official harvest), we didn’t have enough cab and merlot to bottle straight varietals (besides, no one is buying Merlot these days anyway, thanks to Paul Giamatti). So we acted like we knew what we were doing and blended the Cab and Merlot together, along with a smidge of our neighbor’s Cab Franc.

We decided to call it Altitude, if for no other reason than all the good names were already taken.

The 2004 release was more of a “right-bank” Bordeaux – 75% Merlot, 20% Cab Sauv and 5% Cab Franc.

And it’s become our best selling wine.

So, not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, it looks like we’ll be bottling a Bordeaux blend for the rest of our lives – which is actually a lot of fun.

This past weekend, we swept the lab equipment off the island in the farmhouse kitchen and set up rows of glasses. We have been doing fining trials as well, so we had a lot to choose from with both our 2005 Cab and Merlot (in an effort to keep costs in line we also used French and American oak, so it’s going to get interesting!).

The early results look more like a 50-50 blend this year, but 50-50 is like kissing your sister, so we’ll have to tweak things a little (besides – you can’t say you have a “middle bank” Bordeaux – it just doesn’t sound right…).