Winter in the Back Yard Vineyard

The grapes have all gone dormant for the winter, and just in time too. First frost has been hitting northern California and the vineyard has completely shut down. I expect to do a first round of pruning in a couple weeks, just to make walking though it and weeding easier.

Around the first of they year I will put the new trellis in for the new vines and a high wire for vertical shoot positioning.

On the equipment side, I just got may new bladder press.

Lots of fun ahead

Tim

My Evil Plan

My evil plan to take over the back yard is working!
BwaaaaHaaaaaaHaaaaaHaaa!

Well not really an evil plan, and not the whole yard, but it is a plan and it is working.

Here was the basic idea:

Infiltration: You plant a few grapes, not too many, but enough that you can actually make something out of it, but not so much that it imposes itself as a major project. You know, it reflects a little bit of an obsessive behavior, but not anything that requires therapy or lithium.
I settled on 20 vines.

Acclimation: Not of the wines, No, the family. It has to become a non-issue. Nothing out of the ordinary. "Vines in the back yard? Oh yea. Hey, how was your day? Wow, this dinner is very good; what is that great flavor. You look great this evening. Oh, hey, I need to run." The new, young vineyard needs to be sheltered from any chance of negative discussion until they have woven themselves into our daily lives like the air we breath.

This is key. The 20 vines must be protected from ill thoughts. It would be so easy to have a discussion pop up as some dinner with family or friends that could undermine the whole plan. It would be a shame to have the whole plan die at this point just because someone wants to use the space for a lawn or something silly like that. I mean really, a lawn, in a back yard.
Let's be real!

The Foothold: The vines have survived the gophers, the rabbits (don't get me started again about the rabbits), the family discussions. Their roots are now extending down deep into the soil and weaving themselves into our daily lives.

The Expansion Groundwork: This is a risky time. I have to do it right. A conversation like this follows: "You know dear? Those vines really look good. They are doing real well too and I think they compliment the back yard well. I may put a few more in. You look real nice this evening!" (then exit quickly).

The Expansion: 22 new vines arrive. About doubling the number of existing vines. Two more rows, two more vines per row. The unusually wet spring let up finally. One reasonably dry day of digging and planting and now I am twice the grape grower that I was a the week before.

This doubling works well. Obviously, doubling can't go on for ever. The math geek in me knows that that is not possible.
But, lets see what happens in another 2 years.

Winter Pruning and Clean Up

Winter time seems to be the grapes equivalent of my Saturday morning. After a full summer and fall "workweek", they just want to sleep in, lounge around the vineyard in their PJs and not really do much. But that is pretty much where the metaphor ends.

We have just come out of a particularly bad set of weather. Lots of rain, high winds and all in all, some bummer dreary climates. I took advantage of a sliver of a warmer afternoons this weekend and spent some quality time with my vines.

The wind had wrestled some of the first year cordons free from their ties and the young wood was dangling. No damage, they are all still fairly immature and supple, so the wood where the cordon meets the trunk of the vine is pliable enough that there was no damage. I just gently lifted them back to the trellis and tied them up with fresh green twists.

I am not quite ready to dive into spur pruning yet, for two reasons.
One, the vines seem reluctant to slip completely into their winter dormancy (more on that later) and I am afraid that an aggressive pruning may encourage a burst of growth, which would be in danger of frost damage and then disease.
And two, I have never practiced the pruning techniques learned in my viticulture class on my own grapes yet.

Scary! So, I just gave a light pruning to remove the long growth that was being whipped around in the winds. I left an ample number of buds on each spur so that when I come back in a couple months. I have lots to work on my technique with. I'm sure I will do fine eventually. My vines and I will make it through this together.

Weather around here can be a bit schizophrenic; cold, then hot, then cold again. It's probably hard for a vine to figure out if it should be gowning or going dormant. One of the vines was a bit confused by the few sporadic days of warmth that we had since the colds days had come and thought it should start making fruit. I actually found a small cluster of new berries on one. Looked like they had been there a few weeks. With the rainy weather, I never went down and looked closely at the vines so I must have missed the blossoms. Silly vine. My vines are young, I am sure that we both will get through this early stage and figure out what we are doing.

I am thinking of calling around this week up to some of the wine country nurseries. I would like to get a few more vines. Some Petite Verdot. Probably too late to order them, but I think it would be fun to give my existing vines some young siblings. Especially now that I think I'm getting the hang of this.

Tim Beauchamp
timb@googol.com

White in the bottle and Red racked one last time

I finally bottled the white. It was a little anti-climactic bottling this wine.

It is harder to get excited about a kit wine. You don't put all of the attention into it in the beginning like you do when you start off with fruit on the stem. It just takes on a bit of a "Paint by the Numbers" feel when you start off with a perfectly balanced juice from a supplier. There isn't that added bond you get from checking the weather every day in order to convince yourself that the grapes can hang just a couple more days or a week without problems. All of that has been automated and extracted from the process. When you get the juice, it may have come from the perfect grapes for the year, or it might have been created from a bit of this and a bit of that. Some from here, some from there. Kind of a "Franken-juice"

But, before I completely talk myself out of the wine, I should say that it turned out very good. The wine is well balanced, sugar, alcohol, acid, oak and body are all very good. I am very pleased with it and next year, I think my white will be coming from actual, local fruit.

Bottling went quick and easy. 6 gallons into 24 regular 750ml bottles and 12 splits which made very nice Christmas presents.

The Red.

Once the white was in the bottles, that freed up the 6 gallon carboy so I did a final racking of the Cabernet. It had been in a collection of different sized glass vessels with oak chips. I racked them all into a primary fermenter and then into the 6 gallon and 2 x 3 gallon carboys. That is now where they will stay for another 6 months.

That should give it plenty of time to age and mellow. It has dropped a lot of sediment but there is still some in suspension that will drop out over some time. No need to rush it.

Now that the wines are put to bed for a while, maybe in a few weeks I will fire up a batch of Pale ale.

Tim

Autumn weather and colors.

My vines have finally noticed that summer is over. The weather is cooling down and dormancy is soon to come. The leaves are turning from green to yellow. They are using the last bit of sun to squirrel away just a little more sugar into the roots. This is energy for next year's head start.

Grapes are funny that way. Their roots have two growth spurts, one at the beginning of the season, and one at the end. In between theses two flairs of growth, they put all of their energy into making sweet little grapes. Only after they are done focusing on their perfect fruit, do they allow themselves to take the last few weeks of sun to prepare for winter. Then they start shutting down, leaves thin out, chlorophyll, which was keeping the leaves green starts to break down with the decrease in sun, leaving compounds that give those autumnal colors. Compounds with funny names like porphyrins, carotenoids, and flavonoids create shades of yellow, blue, burgundy, maroon, brown and red.

Soon, the vines will be completely shut down and dormant. They will be safely sleeping and protected for the winter frosts. Getting a good, long winter sleep before they need to start all over again next year. What a life.

Tim

My one grape cluster.

My young grape plants are just finishing up their second year.

They are all up to the trellis wires and the cordons are all set for next years growth and fruit.

I pinched off or pruned all the grape clusters from my vines this year before they ever had a chance of reaching maturity. Except for one plant. It was the most vigorous and so I rewarded it by letting it have a single cluster.

It was not quite sure what to do. But, it did manage to create a small cluster of 20 berries.

They reached veraison very late and only darkened up after the Autumnal Equinox.

By October 15th, I could not restrain myself anymore and I plucked one of the ripest berries and sampled it. Still a bit sour, probably only 15% sugar and still pretty acidic and the seeds were still quite light green.

In any case, it was exciting. We should have had a party.
Next year.

timb

A kit.

I have the opportunity to try out a wine kit. A box of grape juice concentrate, a handful of little packages filled with this chemical and that. 6 easy steps and in 6-8 months, I will have 6 gallons of chardonnay/semillon

It seems so easy. Sanitize the fermenter, add the juice, water, oak sawdust (sounds odd, no?) and yeast. Close it up, set it aside, let it go.

Well, we will see. Check back in 6-weeks to find out.

Tim

Picked, crushed and fermenting

A wonderful trip down to Hollister at lunch time. I arrived at 11:00am and met the grower. He is living my dream, well, not quite. I would have more vines and less trees. But, to each his own.

I got there and inspected the fruit. Very clean, no mold or mildew. Not a lot of bird damage. I split open a few berries. The sees were a bit green still, even though it was late in the season. I found out that these fine are very young. 3 yrs. So they probably are not quite used to being the foundation for great wines yet, but still very tasty. Brix came in at 24.2 from the refractometer. 25 from the hydrometer. I did a pH strip. 3.5. Right on the edge.


5 minutes on the crusher/stemmer and I was on my way home with 200 lbs of must.

When I titrated at home, I was a little disappointed at the TA. 5.2 g/l of acid. I will assume that
the young grapes gave everything they could to get the sugar up to 25. Dropping the acid
to almost .5 percent.

I corrected the acid with some tartaric. Not too much. I would have like to get the TA back up to 6 but I did not want to drop the pH too low. So, I hit a compromise. We will see. Also, I want to give the grapes, even though they are young, a chance to show what they can do. Faith. Yes, I do have faith.

White juice. It never ceases to amaze me. Red grapes make white juice. I took a sample at crush, and then another at 12 hours and a final at 24 hours. Each sample was deeper in color. I will post the pictures.

I started the yeast in a sucrose starter 12 hours after crush. Pitched it at 22 hours after crush.
By 36 hours, "mission control, we have fermentation".

Here we go. The magic begins.

I will keep you informed.

Cheers.

TimB

Grapes are almost here

Harvest time is here. I heard from the grower this weekend. Harvest of the grapes I contracted is set for Thursday. By Friday, we will crush. Saturday will be pitched and then the magic starts.

I have been a bit worried about the weather. Cool and even some rain. I am hoping they are in good shape and I can keep the SO2 to a minimum.

I think about my choice of grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon. It is the grape for either the winemaker who likes to worry, because it comes in late. W Cab, you can only be sure that the grapes will be ready when they are ready, and no earlier. It is like playing chicken with fall. What will happen first. Do you wait for the grape to reach it's full ripeness, and risk getting caught at the end with
cool weather and rain that dooms you to mold? Or do you harvest a little early, happy that you got good clean berries, just a bit lower brix and higher TA, but no worries.

Or, do you stick it out. Don't turn off the road. Stare the autumnal season in the face and hold your ground. Because, you know, if you can wait those last few days or week, the grapes will reach that perfect balance of sugar, total acid and pH. And you will win.

Keeps the blood pumping anyway.

Cheers;

Tim

The search for grapes

I need grapes. Last year I bought 100 lbs of grapes through a local wine making shop.
He was able to arrange the purchase from a local wine maker.
It worked out real well. A couple days before the harvest, I got a phone call
with the date, time and location of where I could pick up the grapes.

I showed up with my 20 gal plastic fermenter at the winery. About 10 other small
wine makers were there and the truck with lugs of grapes. The grapes had been picked
the day before and one by one, we got our grapes. Some people took the grapes
whole. Taking them back to crush them at home or their winery. Others like myself
climbed up onto a wooden platform and got to run each lug of grapes through
the stemmer/crusher into a container.

I was the newbie in the crowd. First time making wine, first time buying grapes.
I was only buying 100 lbs, so there was a bit of grape envy of the guy buying 1000 lbs.

Other than the person buying 1000 lbs (who appeared agitated that he actually
had to listen to other people chat while his precious time was being wasted), everyone
was in a very good mood, crunching grapes and hauling stuff around.

I realize then that doubling to 200 lbs of grapes, or even tripling would probably not
be that much more work overall. So, this time I am going to try to get more grapes.

But, there has been a change in the winery that we got the grapes from. The owner
has sold the winery so it has thrown into question my ability get grapes this year.
So, we will see what we can do. I would hate to have buy juice this year.
We will see.

timb