A Harvest Tale - Finale
Our final stop in Italy, co-Covid, and 11 days of madness in October
It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. —Donald Trump
The straw that broke the camel’s back… and then some
Wednesday, September 13 - Last we left off, we were hopping aboard our train from Florence to Rome—our final destination in Italy—and I was sending off emails to everyone involved in harvesting and processing a ton of Zinfandel grapes into Rosé from ancient vines that were about to be torn out of an old, storied Sonoma vineyard.
As you’ll recall from my last post, the grapes all got picked and processed successfully, even with me micro-managing from afar. Now we were speeding towards Rome at 300 km/h on the high-speed train, and Deb was describing our next adventure—a four-hour food tour through Trastevere, an area of Rome favored by foodies and famous for its bohemian atmosphere, restaurants and wine bars.
“That sounds awesome,” I replied, perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as I might have if I wasn’t still trying to digest the carafe of white wine and the mountain of shaved truffles over pasta that I’d had earlier for lunch. “When is that scheduled for?”
“From 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm… this afternoon.”
“Uh-oh.”
Upon arriving in Rome we had just enough time to get from the train station to our Airb&b, a large, wonderful old apartment also in Trastevere (best find yet Deb, bravo!), before we were due to meet our Twilight Trastevere Rome Food Tour on Tiber Island, just a few blocks away. Booked through Eating Europe, this tour was quite popular and featured seven amazing stops. I only have one word of warning—you better be hungry!
Here’s how it went down that night. But, “Just the facts, ma'am.” If I don’t skip the superlatives this will sound like one big PR rant. Suffice it to say that the food was simply fantastic everywhere we went, and even better than that at one or two of the places.
Our first stop was the tiny and truly famous Trattoria da Enzo al 29, where our friendly hosts met us with glasses of Prosecco and plates of sliced tomatoes and fresh basil with creamy burrata, Italian bread and thick olive oil, and Arancini di Riso (risotto balls). If you go to Rome you should spend at least an evening in Trastevere, and you must eat at da Enzo. Simple as that. Make reservations far in advance.
Stop number two was Ristorante Spirito di Vino, a proverbial hole-in-the-wall find, where we were allowed down steep stone steps to visit their wine cellar, purportedly a hundred years older than even the Colosseum. Then we were ushered upstairs into the main part of the ristorante for glasses of a local red wine and bowls of pork stew, its ancient recipe of braised pork, apple purée, and roasted vegetables hailing back to the time of Julius Caesar’s Roman rule. From there we went to Biscottificio Artigiano Innocenti, a small bakery adorned with signed photographs of famous Italian celebrities, where you can buy cookies by the pound. Then Supplì Roma, where we stood among the throngs of passerby sampling suppli, a popular street food in Rome that is basically a fried rice ball with meat and cheese.
Stop number five was Norcineria Iacozzilli for samples of everything pork, including porchetta (roasted pork belly) sandwiches, which are very popular with the Roman lunch crowd. Then it was revealed that we were going to stop for dinner outside under the fairy lights at Rione 13. Dinner?! We had already consumed the equivalent of three dinners! But this place was known for it’s Roman pizza and traditional pastas, so, while in Rome… And finally Fatamorgana Gelato, a gelateria chain claiming to be the creators of gourmet gelato. They have multiple locations in Rome, and even two in Los Angeles - Beverly Hills and Studio City.
The evening was way more involved than I’ve made it sound but, again, I’d never stop writing if I described it in any fashion other than the cursory treatment above (believe me, I truly could go on and on).
But for me it was also—finally—too much of a good thing. After nearly two weeks of seemingly endless wine drinking and excessive eating, interrupted only by aesthetic over-stimulation, I hit the wall. As we sat down for “dinner” at Rione 13, stop number six, and a big pan of All’Amatriciana pasta followed a bottle of Sangiovese around the table, I suddenly couldn’t eat another bite or drink any more of anything. My head was spinning and my stomach rumbled. Uh, oh, this couldn’t be good.
I silently conveyed my distress to Deb, who can always be relied on to leave a gathering before the party stops being one, and we make our goodbyes. We tipped our guide and thanked him profusely, but begged out of that last stop for gelato, much to his disbelief.
Somehow I stumbled home without losing it, but I knew for certain that it was going to be a rough and tumble ride on the porcelain pony that night.
And it was.
[Even now, over three months later, just writing about that evening elicits a small wave of sympathetic nausea. Sheesh!]
Thursday, September 14 - I awoke the next morning totally spent. The t-shirt I’d slept in and the bedsheets were wadded and damp with sweat, and I was cold for the first time in Italy. But, I no longer had an angry stomach. How could I? For the first time in two weeks there was nothing in it!
Deb had us scheduled that day for touring the Vatican—from the Sistine Chapel to St Peter’s Basilica—but I had to cancel. As much as I wanted to be with her there was no way I was going anywhere. I bid her arrivederci and crawled back under the covers, slightly embarrassed at my lack of resilience and fortitude. But, if there was one day better than another to call in sick on this trip, this was probably it for me.
Allow me to explain… for I thought about all of this—in a nostalgic, almost hallucinogenic way—as I lay there depleted that day, in this holiest city of Italy, a country much holier than many others.
I had been to the Vatican before on a family roadtrip almost 55 years ago when all eight of us were, for the most part, still practicing Catholics. I was only a few years past being an altar boy at that time so there was still a heady amount of gravitas associated with such a visit. Pope Paul VI was in residence and he blessed the crowd. I remember my parents’ solemn excitement.
That my father was privately suffering a serious conflict of faith that year as a devout Catholic but also a visiting microbiologist on a National Science Foundation Senior Fellowship in Cambridge, England to expand the research and help lay the groundwork for the eventual test-tube baby achievement—I didn’t know. His monumental yet antithetical act of creating human life scientifically in lieu of a divine act of God challenged his very belief system, and would eventually supplant our familial adherence to Catholicism. But it was all lost on me at the time.
It was 1969. I was a 15-year-old kid from Colorado suddenly wearing the required jacket and tie of an British all-boys high school, learning to play rugby, and trying to fit in with my long-haired, bell-bottomed peers who spoke funny and were obsessed with soccer, the Beatles, and the Royal Family. The world was being rocked by many of the cultural apogees that would define my generation—from Woodstock to the moon landing, the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam to Northern Ireland, the recent assassinations of Bobbie Kennedy and Martin Luther King to Richard Nixon, the Rolling Stones to the Black Panthers, Monty Python to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was a confusing, exciting, sometimes frightening time to be coming of age.
So while I still tolerated hanging out with my younger siblings and driving around Europe on the weekends and holidays, I wasn’t thinking too much anymore about religion. Still, to actually get to see the Pope in real life, the holy father on earth, avatar of God himself, well, for any kid who had grown up within the strictures of the Catholic church, victim of the rigid discipline administered by the nuns, this was not to be missed.
And so, on one of my father’s frequent forays “onto the continent” that year we ended up driving all the way to Rome to receive a Papal blessing. And as we gathered in St Peter’s Square amongst the thousands of faithful who had crowded together for the benediction, I remember being disappointed that all I could see was a tiny guy dressed in white, waving his tiny arm from a tiny window far away from where we stood.
Then all eight of us piled back into our rented station wagon and began our long drive home, back up half the length of Italy, across France to the English Channel, and across that to Cambridge. I sat in the back-back of the car the whole time snacking on Italian, then French, baguettes and sneaking sips of Chianti from one of those bottles with the woven straw baskets, which I had purchased surreptitiously from a local market in Rome. It tasted great.
I tell this story, not only to reveal what might have been a harbinger of things to come as far as wine was concerned, but also to rationalize my current indifference at not exploring the Vatican again. I’d been there, done that, and now that I am older—and I like to think a little more worldly—I am no longer enraptured by this religion (or its cultural headquarters, relics and art) that I consider to have done more harm than good. While this does, admittedly, still feel a little sacrilegious, it’s just my personal stance and I mean no disrespect to anyone reading who may feel differently.
Deb made a day out of it, walking all the way to the Vatican City, exploring the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican museums, St Peter’s Square and the Basilica, and then walking all the way back to where we were staying in Trastevere. Her tour was expansive (like all the ones we’d previously had in Venice and Florence) and she took beautiful photos of almost everything, with the very notable exclusion of the Sistine Chapel.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing when she explained why photos were not allowed in that most exquisite of religious enclaves, and haven’t been for over 30 years. Remember now, we’re talking about home to the greatest frescoes in the world, most particularly the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment, both by Michelangelo.
One last rabbit hole, I promise…
This might be old news to some, but it was the first I’d heard of it. As reflected on by journalist Jason Ward at medium.com, and Stephen Carlisle a copyright lawyer at NSU (condensed and combined for space, but in their wording) it seems that…
In 1980, the Vatican decided it was time to undertake a comprehensive restoration of the Sistine chapel and Michelangelo’s art in particular. It was a huge undertaking that would take 14 years. It also came with a hefty price tag that forced them to seek outside financial assistance. So they let corporations bid for access.
The winning offer came from the Nippon Television Network Corporation of Japan (NTV), which offered $3 million (which eventually increased to $4.2 million) and no one was able to match them. In return for funding the project, Nippon TV got exclusive rights to all photography and video relating to the work. This meant the process of restoration itself and all the final restored art. A photographer named Takashi Okamura was commissioned and he set about recording it all. No other photographers were allowed.
The restoration work and resulting photography was considered exemplary.
Since making the deal, Nippon TV has made over a dozen documentaries, including a few in English, and coffee-table books of the art, translated into several languages. Although NTV has never announced if they made any profit, it seemed like they had made a good deal.
As reported in the New York Times, the deal only lasted for the restoration period for each section and the three years that followed completion. The final phase, The Last Judgement, finished in 1994. The exclusive NTV rights ended in 1997.
But the photo ban still stood.
There is nothing underhanded going on from Nippon’s side. In fact, they originally stated that the photo and video ban didn’t apply to ‘ordinary tourists’. However, at the time, authorities understandably instigated a broad policy of ‘No photos or videos’. They worried a cunning professional photographer could sneak in and get off some snaps. Once the exclusivity period ended, Vatican officials decided to keep the ban in place.
Why?
The main reason people think there is a ban on photography in the Sistine Chapel is due to the damage flash photography can do to art over time, even though with today’s high-quality phone cameras, a flash is no longer needed. And using a phone camera flash wouldn’t make any difference anyway in a room that size.
Other folks note that the Vatican cannot levy taxes, so museum admission fees, stamp and souvenir sales, and contributions generate the Vatican’s revenue. So, of course, [since you aren’t allowed to take your own photograph] the Vatican City gift shop will be more than happy to sell you a high-quality photograph of the entire ceiling.
The cynic in me naturally leans toward that reasoning, although there is actually a much more sincere argument to be made.
In 2012, an Italian literary critic called Pietro Citati caused a storm when he wrote an open letter to a major newspaper denouncing the crowds. He argued that the chapel and its art was supposed to be a place of quiet contemplation. The hordes of tourists (around 30,000 people every day) disrupt that. If they were armed with cameras, it would be worse.
Ben detto.
Despite my day of basically doing nothing I still felt sapped and I could sense fatigue and overload on Deb’s part as well. It happens on every trip, at least it does for me, when the experiences you’ve travelled to have and the sights you’ve come to see exceed your capacity to fully process everything. It’s when you start talking about wanting to come back and spend an entire trip at only one of the places you’ve just visited.
We had one last day to go in Rome before we left Italy and made our way back home to California. On the docket was the Colosseum and the Forum, which I had never seen and was definitely down with exploring. If the ancient gladiators could survive the crowds of bloodthirsty Romans, I could rally to pay witness to their field of battle.
What I couldn’t do yet is eat much. So, intrepid Deb stepped out into the bustling nightlife of Trastevere and found a tiny pizzeria serving square slices of delicious rustic pie for her dinner, and on the way back scored me a container of cut up fruit—the only thing that seemed to come without a warning for my stomach.
Friday, September 15 - Still shaky, I was up early, and actually a bit hungry. We stopped at “our local coffee shop,” a corner bar frequented by salt-of-the-earth types. Two lesbian couples still dressed in their finest Goth from the night before, a young professional in a suit carrying the briefcase of a lawyer or legal lobbyist perhaps, a young mother with a toddler and a baby sharing the same stroller, and an older guy who seemed to know them all. A tatted-out barista made coffee for which you followed a certain street protocol to keep your place in line, while his pretty assistant dished up the ubiquitous croissant, or cornetto as they’re called in these parts. It felt good to be back amongst the people, and have dough in my belly and caffeine once again coursing through my veins.
We decided to walk to the Colosseum, which in the end proved to be quite a hike, but we passed an international horse-jumping competition on the way, laid out with the placards and pomp of a Formula 1 race. That was cool. Something very contemporary in the midst of everything so old.
In fact the Colosseum seems that way as well, only the opposite, as you suddenly catch glimpses of its iconic shape rising out of the busy traffic and hubbub of modern Rome.
It was here that the onslaught of tourists, the sheer number of folks with the same idea of experiencing Italy, caught up with us. It was a zoo, and actually required some attention to not get dropped by our tour guide and group as we navigated through thousands of people.
Unlike much of the restored and renovated history of Italy that we had been immersed in for the previous two weeks, my first impression of the nearly 2,000-year-old Colosseum was that it was truly a ruin—a condition which began shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire due to neglect, earthquakes, vandalism, theft and systemic deterioration, and continued unabated into modern times. By the 20th century, nearly two-thirds of the original building had been destroyed.
Our native Roman guide, a somewhat creepy self-professed aficionado of violence, warfare, ancient weapons and bloodshed—perfect credentials for being a docent of the Colosseum—regaled us with stories of his childhood and how he and his friends used to come to the Colosseum and stage mock sword fights running unsupervised throughout the ruins. He told us how the site had suffered greatly from vandalism, especially people carving their names into the stone walls. Then he proceeded to show us where he had carved his own name as a boy.
It wasn’t until 1996 that Roman officials even charged an entrance fee to visit the Colosseum, and 2008 when they started charging a separate fee to tour the Forum. Finally, a massive restoration project was begun in 2013 and finished in 2021 with the official “reopening” of the Colosseum. Today, under much stricter antiquity preservation laws—carve your name in the Colosseum wall now and you’re going to jail—nearly 6-million people a year visit the Colosseum. That’s around 16,000 every day.
I think we bumped into close to that many people that day we as we pushed our way around the Colosseum and then wandered up through the Roman Forum, considered by many to be the largest and most important archaeological site in the world. It was all amazing, even in spite of the crowds, but it was only just remnants—a few free-standing columns here, a crumbling facade there—of what had been the epicenter of an advanced civilization, oh so long ago. I left there thinking, and worrying, about parallels in today’s society, and more convinced than ever before of the need to live fully in the moment.
Italy, in its unabashed celebration of the past and the present does that to you.
By that evening I was once again running on fumes, but I still wanted to eat the one dish that could be found almost anywhere in Italy and was the true measure of epicurean expertise. A deceptively simple dish of spaghetti, eggs, hard cheese (pecorino Romano), guanciale (dry-cured pork jowl), and black pepper—it nonetheless defies perfection. But serve a good plate of spaghetti carbonara and your ristorante will thrive!
And so we stopped off at Ristorante Carlo Menta, on the street just below the apartment where we were staying. We had gone to sleep smelling its aromas since we’d been in Rome. It was a very relaxed, very crowded sidewalk scene that only had a single $ sign attached to its Google Maps location. But it had 16,928 reviews averaging four stars. This was the kind of place that could definitely be made or broken based on its spaghetti carbonara.
I ordered a simple serving—which I shared with Deb—and a glass of red wine. What kind, I couldn’t tell you. Neither could our waiter. I was constantly surprised by how often that happened during our trip. If you wanted a local variety, the wine choice at many of the places we ate was simply red or white. No one seemed to keep track of what vintage or varietal it was. Because it was whatever the local enoteca dropped off that day, usually in a 30-liter demijohn bottle supported in a basket. It then showed up on the menu as simply “vino della casa.”
The carbonara was great, and so was the wine, and I’d like to report that this most authentic of Italian meals was the eventual cure to my still lingering malaise of over-indulgence. But in reality, I could only eat a few bites and I was actually feeling worse. And now, Deb wasn’t doing so well either. Thank goodness we were only a few steps from our lodging so we supported each other back there, re-packed our bags for our flight home the next day, set double alarm clocks, and fell into bed exhausted. As I lay there waiting for sleep to come, I had the first inkling that something else might be wrong. I was usually a stomach-of-steel, hair-of-the-dog kind of guy. I should be feeling better by now.
Saturday, September 16 - The next morning we were lucky to hail a cab to the train station, and board trains to the airport, which is how you get there. I say “trains” in the plural because the arrival and departure signs kept updating, the train platforms kept changing, then suddenly all the trains to the airport were cancelled, and Deb and I found ourselves separated.
We had traveled in synch remarkably well for the past two weeks and had never lost touch with each other’s whereabouts, even though at times we wandered freely. So, I had thought Deb was right behind me as I boarded, but for whatever reason—we each have our own, but I’m going with the Italian train system, or perhaps descending brain fog—I was suddenly speeding along towards… somewhere, while Deb was still back on the platform trying to sort out what train to board.
We each had a moment of panic, me wondering where I was headed, and Deb wondering where I had gone. But it soon sorted itself out when my fellow passengers assured me I was on the correct express train to the airport, and another airport-bound train—the one on which we were originally ticketed!—magically appeared on the correct track back at the station where Deb was waiting. Then it was just a matter of confirming with each other via text that we were both actually headed in the right direction, albeit on different trains, and we would reconnect at the airport with plenty of time to still make our flight.
This was all good, because as I sat in the arrivals lounge at the airport waiting to meet Deb’s train, I realized I was feeling that helpless way you get when you’re really sick and even the slightest inconvenience seems insurmountable. Add a couple levels of difficulty due to being in a foreign country with a language barrier, and it could have been a much worse day.
It was all somewhat of a haze from there on—a two-and-a-half-hour flight to London, a two-hour layover with a plane change, then an eleven-hour flight to San Francisco. Fourteen hours of flying over the same endless 12-hour day stretched to 21 hours due to nine time zones.
By that point I knew—without really knowing—what was wrong with us. Somewhere along our travels, perhaps as early as our wine tour in Tuscany or as late as our food tour in Rome I had contracted Covid, and then had likely infected Deb.
It really was the only thing it could be. I had never felt this way before, and the symptoms fit, starting with the upset stomach. Conscious of my fellow passengers I put on a mask, pulled the airline blanket over my head and huddled under it back across the Atlantic, then the whole of America, then on the airport bus to the Petaluma Fairgrounds where we had parked our car two weeks earlier. It wasn’t lost on me how viruses can travel around the globe in a matter of days.
I was truly in bad shape when we got to Petaluma and Deb had to drive us home to Sonoma. “I’ll bet you anything we’ve got Covid,” was all I could say slumped in the front passenger seat starting to shake from a fever. How Deb was keeping it together I don’t know, but I thank the gods she did. Otherwise, I’d still be curled up in a ball on the outdoor bus stop bench at the Fairgrounds.
The first thing we did upon arriving at home was take a Covid test. Even before the prescribed wait time had elapsed the results were conclusive. Positive for both of us.
I have to say, that after more than three years of careful adherence to Covid safety protocol, sheltering at home, wearing masks, washing the groceries and disinfecting every surface, maintaining proper social distance, and getting every damn vaccination and booster recommended, I was pretty disappointed to have finally caught it.
But I guess I wasn’t surprised, given the sea of people we had waded through for the past two weeks in Italy, with nary a person in sight wearing a mask. And, I wasn’t really concerned, like I might have been in the early days of Covid. I could tell that it was going to kick my butt in the same way a bad case of the flu might, but I never felt like it was life-threatening. I just felt really crappy for a week or so. Both Deb and I took Paxlovid right away, given our age, and that seemed to tamp down the symptoms some, and it definitely shortened the time we might have been sick, which was good, as I fully expected harvest to begin any day.
Funny thing, that. As it turned out we could have stayed in Italy for almost another month. Every one of the additional vineyards I would be picking wouldn’t be ready to harvest until almost the middle of October. Which was also good, because just a few days after Deb and I started feeling better and subsequently tested negative, we started feeling bad again. On September 25th we took another Covid test and were both suddenly positive again! Was this bounce back Covid or maybe another strain we’d picked up in that viral soup in Italy?
Hard to say, impossible to prove, so we isolated again and spent a bunch more money having groceries and take-out delivered. I snuck out a lot—but only when I knew I wasn’t going to run in to anyone—to test grapes for sugar content and ripeness and attempt to establish a harvest plan for when the vines would finally tire of all this unfamiliar hang time and decide they were ready to turn water into wine.
Harvesting my 2023 Vintage
When you speak of “harvest” in wine country, for most people that means the actual act of picking grapes. But to a winemaker “harvest” is thought of as a time of year, meaning everything leading up to actually picking your grapes—like final testing for sugar and acid, scheduling picking crews, crush pad and tank time at the winery—and then everything you have to do with those grapes to turn them into wine and prepare them for aging. This usually takes at least two months, but the core segment of that seasonal activity, picking the grapes and getting them through primary fermentation, is only about two to three weeks long.
This year, my harvest season began around the 12th of September and ended around the 12th of November. But that was because I had two outlier harvests on either end of that time period—a Zinfandel Rosé I was making (described in my last newsletter) that I purposely picked early to maintain acidity and keep the alcohol low, and a Grenache/Syrah blend that also became a Rosé by default because I never could get it to ripen even though I left it on the vine as long as possible.
In between those two harvests, from only October 8 to October 19 (by which time I was fully recovered from both of my bouts of Covid), I had 10 other harvests for both private clients and my Tiny Vineyards Wine Company commercial wines. They ranged in size from only a few hundred pounds (because the birds beat us to the grapes!) to 4.2 tons.
I’m going to go into detail in a future post about a very progressive fermentation and oak extraction protocol I applied this year, but for now here’s a quick look at how the usually simple act of getting the grapes picked was anything but, as I struggled to meet a 10-ton goal from 10 harvests in 7 days of picking. I’ve included notes on wine yields after the grapes were fermented to give you a sense of what harvest weights really mean.
October 8 - My first harvest of the season since returning from Italy. A fun private client group pick—with his family and friends—of Syrah from a tiny vineyard in Sonoma. We thought we’d get enough grapes (we needed at least three-quarters of a ton) to process at Magnolia so I brought a trailer and two half-ton bins. Unfortunately the vineyard only yielded about 900 pounds and I ended up having to process them at my little winery after reloading all of the grapes into buckets in order to carry them there. The grapes were small but very flavorful, and though we barely got one barrel of wine I think it’s going to be sensational.
I had another private client Zinfandel harvest going on that same morning, handled by the client’s vineyard manager. They got a bit more than expected —1,200 pounds—and decided they wanted to process at Magnolia, so Tom and I picked an additional 500 pounds of Zin that afternoon from our new Moondancers vineyard to blend with the client’s harvest and meet Magnolia’s weight minimum. In both cases we did the opposite of this morning and had to transfer grapes in buckets into half-ton bins. The grapes were of excellent quality and we ended up with two 60-gallon barrels and a 15-gallon keg of wine.
October 9 - Deb, Tom and I picked Bobbie’s Malbec from our tiny 64-vine estate vineyard and got our best yield yet, enough to produce a 30-gallon barrel of wine. I planted this vineyard in 2019 and this was its third harvest.
October 14 - This was our only group harvest this year with a bunch of friends who make it a very fun annual event. As always it was Sangiovese from the vineyard in Glen Ellen that I have been restoring from fire damage over the past few years. The work seems to be paying off as the vineyard finally ripened in balance and produced 50% more grapes resulting in a 60-gallon barrel, a 15-gallon keg and two 5-gallon carboys of wine—all of which already taste great! But it was still just under what we needed to process at Magnolia so it ended up at my small winery.
October 16 - Over the next three days our three big commercial harvests will be picked. Today, the remainder of the Moondancers Zinfandel Vineyard, which we already poached for a ton of grapes in mid-September to make Rosé, and then again, a week ago for 500 pounds to supplement our private client’s harvest. Still, the remainder of the vineyard yielded another two tons, which resulted in six barrels of wine. My original plan was to process five tons of grapes at Magnolia this year, so this was a substantial contribution to this total.
We also had a new private client this year with a small Zinfandel vineyard in Santa Rosa that historically produced about a ton of grapes. We planned to process them at Magnolia and add them to our total. However, when my picking crew arrived this morning, they were shocked to discover that the birds and ground squirrels had beat them to the bounty, scheduling their “pick” for the previous few days. We ended up with less than 400 pounds of grapes, which I was forced to process on top of the Moondancers Zin.
October 17 - The first time we picked this new Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard of about 1,000 vines two years we only got about 700 pounds of grapes. Last year we got a ton-and-a-half. This year the vineyard manager did a night pick and when I called Magnolia this morning to find out what the pickers had delivered, they had just finished weighing the nine half-ton bins left outside of the winery. The answer was mind boggling 4.2 tons!
When a young vineyard reaches maturity, the yields can suddenly be dramatic. This is great news as it means the quality of the grapes will also likely be much higher than ever before. But you’ve got to have someplace to put all the wine coming from that bounty. I suddenly found myself a dozen barrels shy of what I had estimated I needed for this vintage.
Of course, this was going on all over the valley due to the long and almost perfect growing conditions this season. Quality used barrels were in high demand, and as I searched the online classifieds on winebusiness.com it was slim picking. Then as I was literally staring at the screen a new listing popped up with exactly what I wanted for a good price from a respected winery. I responded immediately with the required email, and a few minutes later someone from the winery calls me on my mobile.
“Damn dude, you responded to my ad like a minute after I posted it. Then another guy responded right after you saying he’d take every barrel I had. But you were first, so what do you need?”
Damn dude, indeed!
So now I was the proud owner of about twice as much wine as I thought I’d have at this point and I adjusted my harvest totals upwards to take advantage of financial incentives Magnolia was offering winemakers who processed 10 tons or more of grapes. I hoped that with my big Syrah harvest the next day I’d be able to reach that goal.
October 18 - A friend of mine had farmed and picked a beautiful Syrah vineyard way up on Bennett Valley Road last year but it proved too large for him. With his blessing I met with the owner and discovered she wanted to restore and maintain the vineyard which had been her deceased husband’s pet project. She wasn’t interested in grapes or wine; it was more of a landscaping element for her and she wanted it to look good. So, I took it on and we subjected the vineyard to an aggressive soil break-up, thinning and pruning, and we planted about 50 new vines.
That level of restoration usually has a bit of an adverse effect on yields the first year, which often changes to a positive gain by year two as the plants rebound. Hence, I had no way of knowing for sure what we’d get this first harvest, although the vineyard had historically yielded two to three tons. Still, it was hard to hide my disappointment when the harvest yielded less than one ton.
October 19 - So, I was still a little short of the 10 tons I needed, but I had a wonderful Zinfandel/Petite Sirah field blend harvest scheduled for today, which should produce at least a ton-and-a-half of grapes and get me to my final goal. Only something evil had been lurking in the vineyard over the past couple of weeks and the Zinfandel grapes there were falling victim to a systemic outbreak of Botrytis, literally collapsing into mold covered mush when you handled them. I had no choice but to reject the Zinfandel this morning, much to the owner’s frustration, but I picked the half ton or so of Petite Sirah which hadn’t fully ripened yet and was seemingly Botrytis free.
As consolation, or to make up for the ruined Zinfandel, or for whatever reason, the owner told me about a Cabernet Franc vineyard nearby that had lost its harvest contract and could be picked for free to avoid the grapes rotting on the vine.
By that point it was already afternoon and I was out of time, out of money, out of energy, and out of enthusiasm, but I was still out of about a ton of grapes to make my-10-ton quota, so Tom and I, and our four-man picking crew we had assembled for the harvest today, drove over to the Cab Franc vineyard and checked it out. The grapes were very ripe, but in excellent shape, and I reasoned I could combine them with the unripe Petite Sirah grapes from the morning, and a little excess Cabernet Sauvignon and come out ahead. I’d end up with two barrels of Petite Syrah blend that I could add to my Requisite Red for this vintage, and two barrels of Cabernet Franc, a delicious varietal I hadn’t even expected to make.
And thus ended my 2023 harvest—a complete success actually, if you’re comfortable with change, being flexible, going with the flow, and turning on a dime at a moment’s notice. In other words, the normal chaos that is winemaking!
Wishing you a very happy and prosperous New Year!
Thank you everyone for continuing to read this whacky, upstart newsletter of mine, and for all the amazing support you’ve shown as I endeavored to launch the Tiny Vineyards Wine Company. Today, on the cusp of a very promising new year, I reflect in amazement at what has happened and what might be coming down the pike!
Six years ago I made my very first vintage in a 5-gallon carboy in Deb’s laundry room. Right now I have over 50 barrels of wine, two vintages worth, in various stages of aging in an exclusive commercial barrel room. Who’d have thought?!
So let me repeat, with great excitement and infinite gratitude, the original invitation I issued back on January 24, 2021 when I began this newsletter:
If you are at all fascinated by wine—the growing of wine, the making of wine, or simply the drinking and appreciation of wine—PLEASE join me in this very exciting, sure to be humorous and sometimes embarrassing, frequently confusing yet hugely rewarding, highly addictive yet maddeningly slow, delicious experience!
I have just launched a monthly newsletter to chronicle my own unexpected “wine awakening” over a six-year period of my life, three years of which have already passed, and three that are yet to come!
Well, obviously, those three years “yet to come” have come and gone.
Wanna do another three?
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!