Harvest 2021 - Friendship
And more miscellanea from this year's harvest
A real friend reaches for your hand and puts a wine glass in it. ~ Anonymous
As in the case of wines that improve with age, the oldest friendships ought to be the most delightful. ~ Cicero
The red man cometh
Bruce Flynn and I have a friendship that goes back nearly fifty years, and yet it still feels as fertile and promising as it did when we first met each other on the University of Colorado campus at the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, where we had both just been hired as hashers.
Flynn [flin]: Irish: reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Floinn ‘descendant of Flann’, a byname meaning ‘red(dish)’, ‘ruddy’.
Hasher [hash-er]: slang: waiter: usually a poor, starving college student who prepares food and serves it to the female members of a sorority houses in return for free meals—and futile fantasies of other benefits.
Those were halcyon days, and we took full advantage of our independence and hunger for adventure—hiking, skiing, fishing, rafting in the Colorado mountains and criss-crossing the country and beyond on impromptu road trips for matters (usually of the heart) deemed critical at the time. We both were photographers and from that passion sprung projects and even a small business or two. In between it all we went to college, Bruce as a graduate student in architecture and me as an undergrad in journalism.
Then real life took over. Bruce followed a fast track to architectural excellence and I chose (risked?) the freelancer’s life. We both eventually got married (after exhausting our twenties in the chase!), built homes and had children. We still socialized and took the occasional hike or river trip, but there was now a subdued air of adulthood and responsibility, which outwardly we took pride in, yet I’m guessing both secretly resented, just a little.
The next few decades flew past and delivered many of the hoped-for high notes that were celebrated richly between our two families. But there were also crises—business failures, employee matters, life-threatening illnesses, serious accidents, and sometimes overwhelming familial challenges. Bruce and I seemed to drift apart during those dark times, which was sad, but I recognize now was due simply to the limits of personal bandwidth in dealing with the immediate issue at hand.
We reconnected in Colorado recently, in what for me was a powerful affirmation of the human experience. We’re both a bit ragged from the ride but still deeply curious about life. It is sorrowful that both of our marriages have ended, but our children have grown and are in good spaces. Our professional passions have remained intact and continue to flourish, and there is a new curiosity in both of us for other ventures. I guess it was only meant to be… that there was some synergy there… with wine, of course!
Upon learning the depth of his interest—over several bottles of the stuff!—and how it was anchored in a lifelong desire to be a farmer of sorts and work the land, and how this was fueled by a "vendemmia” stint (as he likes to call it) that he did in Italy, I invited him out to Sonoma for a few days to help with our harvest. And he came.
I’m not quite sure Bruce knew what he was getting himself into, as I pretty much ran him into the ground over the next few days. From the moment I picked him up from the Airport Express bus stop at the Petaluma Fairgrounds parking lot, where we grabbed outrageous carnitas burritos from the El Roy’s Express Mex food truck, it was a virtual whirlwind of vendemmia!
It went like this: We headed back over the summit of Bennett Valley Road, where we stopped to collect grape samples from the Malbec vineyard I planned to have picked that weekend. Then we continued on to Sonoma and collected grape samples from the Syrah vineyard also slated to be harvested on the weekend. Then we headed over to my little winery at Bobbie’s to offload the eight buckets of Sangiovese I had picked that morning just before fetching Bruce. They had been sharing the back of my car with his luggage and really needed to be processed. But we stuck them in the winery to remain cool just a little longer and went and grabbed a quick frozen acai berry bowl at Picazo’s for a little cool-down pick-me-up, before heading back to Bobbie’s to crush the Sangiovese. Then it was out to the rental place to pick up a trailer and two half-ton macro bins, which we took over to the Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard we planned to pick in the morning. Then off to the Tuesday-night farmer’s market and band on the town square, where Bruce met the gang and reveled in a little more Sonoma culture. Finally, I dropped him off at Peter and Gayle Stanford’s, who graciously put him up in their Airbnb.
On day two we did a big one-ton Cabernet Sauvignon pick at Sam’s vineyard with a great group of friends (story in next week’s newsletter). Then we drove all the grapes out to Magnolia Wine Services to be crushed. That afternoon, after returning the trailer and macro bins to the rental place, we drove over to Napa and on up to St. Helena to the famous Spottswoode Winery and bought a once-used French oak barrel, which I suddenly needed after deciding to crush a fourth ton of grapes this year. James Revie, the assistant winemaker there, gave us a great tour through their storied cellar and barrel room, which was like swimming in a pool of Cabernet Sauvignon, the aroma was so strong. We drove back to Sonoma, grabbed another 60-gallon barrel I had at Bobbie’s, and delivered both to Magnolia. Then we headed back to Deb’s and my place for dinner—and since we were definitely in a Cabernet state of mind, a killer bottle of Sebastiani Cherryblock.
On day three Bruce and I drove up to Dry Creek and met vineyard manager Andrew Roberts at his family’s old-vine Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard way up high off the main road. It turned out we were several hundred pounds light on our Cab pick from Sam’s vineyard the day before, so I had contracted with Andrew to buy 500 pounds of his grapes to supplement the original pick. I had also made an earlier deal with him for 300 pounds to make a 15-gallon test barrel of the Cab just to see what it was like in the—now suddenly realized—event we might run short.
When we got to the vineyard he and one of his picking partners already had the 500 pounds ready to go in the back of his pickup, and Andrew had a good start on the other 300 pounds. I asked him to head on down to Magnolia with the 500 pounds and Bruce and I would finish picking the 300 pounds. It was beautiful fruit and a spectacular morning and we didn’t want it to end as we popped sweet berries in our mouths from almost every cluster that went into our picking buckets. Finally, after filling twelve buckets with grapes, we reluctantly headed back to Bobbies to crush our blueberry-like treasure.
After crushing the Dry Creek Cab, we headed out to Magnolia to crush the 500 pounds Andrew had dropped off earlier. I dumped that must into the same fermenter that held the Cabernet must from the Sam’s vineyard pick the day before, and we were back in business!
Bruce and I then headed back to Bobbie’s to press the Merlot that Deb and Jerry and I had picked nearly two weeks before. It had gone through a beautiful and very solid fermentation despite my mismanagement (see below), and was now sitting dry at -1 degree Brix. When we pressed it, using a classic old-style slatted wood basket press, the juice ran a dark red garnet color already rich in typicity with a Merlot nose and soft mouthfeel (see video directly below).
We easily filled two 15.5-gallon beer kegs and set them aside to settle for a day before racking to a 30-gallon French oak barrel. As is the custom on your first press—which for Bruce this was—you have to take a big bite of the “cake,” which is the pomace that’s left over after you’ve pressed all the juice (wine) out of the fermented grapes. Fancying himself a wine aficionado, Bruce wasn’t quite as keen on this Merlot cake as he will likely be on the finished wine (see video below).
After pressing the Merlot I took Bruce to meet my Sonoma buddy and winemaking guru Ken Wornick at his Hydeout ranch on the east side of Sonoma. Ken has been wrestling with myriad issues in his quest to build a small commercial winery for his Dysfunctional Family label and Bruce, who is familiar with just about every unreasonable roadblock thrown up by city and county planning departments, was quick to empathize. The two connected immediately so I took a rare moment to relax, closing my eyes and hiding what Ken calls “the stare,” which most exhausted winemakers exhibit about this point in the harvest.
Once the two of them had solved all the problems, or at least devised questionably conforming workarounds, Ken gave Bruce a tour of the ranch—winery buildings, estate vineyard, chickens, vegetable garden and olive orchard—and explained his and his wife Cynthia’s goal to turn Hydeout into an experiential tourism destination. This dovetailed directly into an ongoing conversation Bruce and I had been having over the past three days about somehow merging my California Tiny Vineyards concept with another wine-related venture in Palisade, which is part of Grand Valley, an up-and-coming American Viticultural Area on the western slope of Colorado. Bruce was suggesting developing a similar property there to promote Tiny Vineyards through a Colorado counterpart, and connecting with the millions of tourists that travel along the I70 corridor. But that’s another story yet to be told.
Bruce treated Deb and me to dinner that night at Yeti in Glen Ellen. We drank a good local Malbec— as it was the theme wine for our Colorado concept—and, with frequent laughter, recounted every minute of Bruce’s busy Sonoma indoctrination. I have to say that having him here was tremendously helpful; just the extra set of hands was invaluable. And, as in any endeavor, the opportunity to think past your own reflection in the mirror adds so much to success in your decision making. Just ask Ken or Deb how often I bug them for input!
I sense there is more to come with us and all of this.
One more word on cap management
In my last post I talked a lot about "cap management” so I won’t belabor the point any further, except to say: It isn’t something that’s important only for large-volume winemaking. The same principles apply if you’re only making a 5-gallon carboy of wine. You’ve got to ferment the wine in the right-size vessel to allow room for the cap and a protective layer of CO2 to form. Then you need to manage it carefully, monitoring temperature and Brix, and punching down daily to ensure proper extraction.
Yeah? Well, somebody ought to heed their own advice, cuz here’s what happens when you try and ferment 500 pounds of crushed grapes in a 55-gallon bin. Classic home winemaker faux pas, or in my case, simple laziness.
We were all hot and tired after the steep hillside rigor of picking at Wei Zhou’s ranch, and I thought, just maybe, I could get away with one large bin, instead of preparing two appropriate-sized ones. Not a chance. The cap that formed on the Merlot must was 18 inches thick and I could hardly punch it down using all my strength. It would have risen more and spilled out onto the floor if I hadn’t had a top on the bin. I love how the caps develop. I think they sometimes look like a column of deflated coffee beans. And when you finally push through with a punch down tool a big whoosh of CO2 escapes and beautiful foamy wine bubbles up from below.
I sheepishly divided up the must into two 45-gallon bins, but not before Bobbie and I took all kinds of pictures, shrieking “It’s alive!” and basically acting multiple decades younger than our ages.
Sample, eat, sample, eat, sample… should I pick?
Did you know there’s a right way and a wrong way to “sample” grapes, which I always thought of as a pleasant amble through the vineyard tasting one’s way up and down the rows and collecting grapes to check changes in Brix and pH—all to help gauge when ripeness might occur?
Well, according to the oenophilic think tank (yeah, I just coined that term) behind my U.C. Davis Wine Production class, that’s the wrong approach. It seems, as grape-loving creatures, we’re actually programmed to pick the ripest grapes on each cluster, whichever ones are the largest, plumpest and prettiest. This is no bull, and it’s no accident. The vine works hard to attract its animal vectors to the ripest grapes, i.e. most fertile seeds. Those invited to the feast will eat these perfect grapes and either spit or poop out the seeds along the way, ensuring future propagation and ultimate survival.
For anyone interested in the technical aspects, my professorial team offers a more defined, less subjective protocol, focused on acquiring a truly random sampling of the vineyard as a whole. Among the many things, they suggest are the following:
1) Divide large vineyards into homogeneous blocks; smaller vineyards can be approached in their entirety.
2) Create a random picking pattern to apply to the block or whole vineyard, such as random berries from random clusters from different parts of the fruit zone on every third vine on every third row.
3) Avoid naturally picking the ripest grapes by not looking at the cluster you are sampling
4) Pick a random grape sample from the top, middle and bottom of each random cluster you sample. Select the middle grape from deep inside the cluster near the rachis.
5) Avoid sampling along the edges of the vineyard, at the ends of the rows, and from any vine that is non-representative.
6) Consistently sample at the same time of day you will be picking, preferably in the morning.
7) Have the same person sample the same section of vineyard throughout the season.
Okay, so now it’s all sounding more like work instead of the idyllic autumn-afternoon stroll through the vineyard.
Right about the middle of September is when all the fretting begins. I had been sampling grapes every few days, but then it ramped up to whenever my angst got the better of me—like almost every morning. I still had five picks to go, some really big ones for my commercial wine, and a couple of small test lots to try out some new varietals and vineyards. Everything was hovering between 22.5 and 24.5 Brix and the pH was going up. I started worrying that they were all gonna come ripe at the same time. Yikes! Then again, it had cooled down a bit, and we even had a freak rain forecast in the offing…
Knowing when to pick is the single most important decision you face in winemaking. Depending on the style of wine you’re after, that goal frames the set of parameters that guide you in deciding exactly when to pull the trigger. For me, it’s big, bold reds with a lot of structure and tannin and a healthy balance of alcohol and acidity. In other words, I want my grapes truly ripe, but not overripe, but ripe enough that I can see a little pucker in the skin, but not so ripe that they’ve become dehydrated and are on their way to raisins, but I want them ripe enough that the berry has softened and the seeds have turned dark and crunchy and the stem heading into the cluster is turning brown, but not overripe to where that stem has also turned woody and the grapes might be starting to spoil. I want my pH low and my acid high. Is any of this too much to ask for?
Of course it is, and of course it’s not. It’s truly rare when the indicators of ripeness line up perfectly, but it’s your job is to line them up as perfectly as possible. A crises of compromises for sure, but learning how to triage those is the art behind the craft.
Peter pick
When the Promethean Peter Stanford was contacted by PG&E and told to cut down the three magnificent palm trees along the front of his property because they were too close to the power lines overhead, he did what he always does in difficult situations. He turned lemons into lemonade. Although in this case it was an elixir far more interesting. He hired chainsaw artist Devyon Harrison out of Petaluma to transform the tree trunks into a 10-foot-high wine bottle and two wine glasses to scale. But it was not just any wine bottle.
One of Peter’s many projects of art and soul is the tiny vineyard of Ribolla Gialla in his back yard and the incredible white wine he makes each year. Devyon captured that wine bottle in amazing detail, right down to the label—which I had the honor of designing a few years back.
His isn’t one of the small picks I scheduled for this season, but it’s a harvest I wouldn’t miss for the world. I just have to let Peter go through his fretting on when to pick, and once a date is finally selected the inevitable text and email invites go out to family and friends. If you’re lucky enough to get one, you’d be wise to reschedule whatever you had planned for that day—and the next, as this always turns into a two-day affair, picking on one day, pressing on the next.
But it’s not the work that requires your attendance. The vineyard is small and can be picked and crushed by a few people in less than two hours, and not much longer for the pressing. It’s the culinary largesse of Peter and his wife Gayle that they’ve become known for in Sonoma, and their idea of a harvest party starts with an outrageous morning spread of pastries, Dirty Girl donuts, giant breakfast sandwiches, delicious coffee, and/or Bloody Marys if you prefer, and ends the next afternoon with build-your-own gourmet pizzas from Peter’s brick oven, dozens of side dishes, more dozens of desserts and, of course, an endless fountain of wine. And it always attracts a wonderful hodgepodge of people that Peter has met, finds interesting and has been able to Tom Sawyer into picking his grapes.
Which is good, because this year his vines were literally dripping with grapes. Despite the drought and the average low yields around the county, we harvested a bumper crop that Peter likes to equate as being “equal to 10.5 tons per acre!” Ribolla Gialla is a spectacular grape and wine originating in Italy. During the 14th century, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio listed indulgence in Ribolla wines as one of the sins of gluttony. So apropos for Peter, a man whose appetite for life is bigger than just about anyone’s I know!
Restoration vineyard
A bird in the hand is worth two…er…in the vine. Well, maybe. It’s a race with the birds as to who gets the clusters this year on the little Sangiovese vineyard I’m trying to restore from fire damage. I was approached last year by a friend of the new owner to see what could be done with his 275-vine vineyard that had suffered serious heat and flame exposure when wildfire swept through Glen Ellen. The new owner had just purchased the property right before the fire, which was a year or so after the previous owner, a passionate home winemaker and viticulturist, had passed away.
So, the vineyard had received little care in four years, and hadn’t even been pruned in the last two years. It was a tangle of blackened vines with overgrown canes and the skeletons of grape clusters growing haphazardly throughout the trellising, which, along with the irrigation system, was hanging loose and broken in several places. It was a real mess, and I was about to beg off, but then I heard through the grapevine (sorry!) that the vineyard used to produce fantastic fruit and the wine that the old owner had made was excellent. It deserved some attention.
So I went to the new owner and made a deal. I would put my best effort forward in restoring the vineyard as long as he paid me the same hourly wage that a vineyard worker in Sonoma would make. I had no idea what that was so I consulted a couple of vineyard-management folks I know and asked them what it cost them for a fully-loaded employee (pay, insurance, benefits) per hour—it was more than you might think but still not that much for the work that gets done—and that’s what I charged the vineyard owner. He was fine with the deal.
I started with a thorough cleanup of the entire vineyard followed by a serious pruning, back to just one bud in a lot of places. When bud break happened I soaked the whole vineyard in elemental sulfur to try and counteract a systemic mold and mildew issue within the older wood of the vines. I then suckered very aggressively and kept up with the spraying. We actually had a pretty good flowering but only on about half of the vines, and not all at the same time. Cluster buds take two years to develop as opposed to leaf buds, which take one year. They also require a lot of sunlight, something that was definitely missing in the previous bramble of canes.
The fruit came in sporadically and with varying vigor. A couple of places looked like how I’d heard the old vineyard described, and then there were whole rows without any clusters at all. Verasion took weeks to complete and the real problem was that the nicer clusters in one section of the vineyard ripened before other ones somewhere else. And the birds figured it out, systematically following the ripening curve throughout the vineyard. We discussed bird netting, but the expenses seemed excessive for what was ultimately going to be a very small yield.
In the end we were hoping for at least 300 pounds of grapes. We only got 200. And it was pretty rough fruit that showed its flaws early, developing hydrogen sulfide—a volatile sulfur compound that smells like rotten eggs—shortly after fermentation. H2S can be caused by many things—a lack of nitrogen (an important grape nutrient), compacted vegetative material, excessive elemental sulfur from mildew mitigation, and pest damage that results in mold or rot. It was a big disappointment, but not really a surprise. I sorta knew in the back of my mind that it would be a multi-year project bringing this special vineyard back to its better days.
Still feeling woody
If you’ve read this newsletter far enough in the past you know that I’ve been obsessed with oak barrels right from the start. In fact I probably have a very unhealthy attachment to these wine vessels. I think they are genuine works of art and what they can do to wine borders on alchemy.
Today finds me sorting through all my barrels in my mind—a mental inventory if you will—subscribing each to its next task. I have my original 60-gallon Saint Martin French oak barrel that I just moved over to Magnolia Wine Services along with another used-one-time Saint Martin that I just bought from Spottswoode Winery, to join six other used-one-time French oak barrels, and one totally neutral one, that I also bought this year—all for aging the juice from the four tons of grapes I hope to turn into revenue-producing wine. They have romantic-sounding names, the cooperages or tonnelleries of these barrels, like Fleur de Quintessence, Sylvain and Artisanle de Beaune. I am smitten.
In my little winery I’ve got a 2018 30-gallon Saint Martin French oak barrel that had been aging a beautiful GSM blend but now holds a 2020 Malbec that I don’t know what to do with—it tastes fine but lacks typicity. I’ve got another 30-gallon Saint Martin French oak barrel, 2019, now holding my recent Merlot pick from Al King’s old vineyard. I’ve got a brand-new 15-gallon Balazs Hungarian oak barrel that I just filled with a Windsor Zinfandel/Petite Syrah/Carignan field blend, which I’ll alternate this year with a Glen Ellen Sangiovese, a Dry Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, and a special Lovall Valley Road private-vineyard Cab blended with my big-harvest Cab—all small-lot tests of new vineyards that have caught my eye.
There’s this math thing that states the smaller you go in size with a barrel the more of the surface area of the total volume of wine inside comes in direct contact with the oak. Suddenly you go from a gentle influence to a full-on ingredient with dire consequences if you over-season. Too much oak is like too much chile—it’s not gonna taste good. But use oak respectfully, tasting your way up to the desired flavor, and you will discover the “making” part of winemaking.
To that end, I’ve also got an awesome old 5-gallon Balcones Whiskey barrel that I filled with the new Zinfandel Port I made from our Windsor pick. And finally I’ve got a cool little 5-liter barrel holding the last remnants of a Smokey Port I made using a Mescal distillate to fortify.
I do love them all. Kinky, huh?