It has been a while since my last post.  It didn't seem necessary to post pictures and comments about early spring in the vineyard.  I have done it many times before, so why be redundant?  I was waiting for something interesting and new to say before posting.

So, I'll bring you quickly up to speed on 2013.

During the dormant phase this winter, I did my usual annual pruning (I use a spur prune system on a high wire cordon trellis).  I burn the cuttings and spread the ash on the vineyard to bring the nutrients back to the soil, as I observed in Burgundy in 2011.  This was a wet spring, yet somehow, the fruit set wasn't bad.  Not great, but better than last year.  I have 6 vines in their 5th leaf, quite a few in their 3rd and 4th leaf, and 9 vines in their second leaf.  I could be close to full scale production next year, but this year it will be an interesting and solid harvest if I can finally get some grapes all the way to ripe without some calamity, natural disaster, pests, or some combination of them all!

I'm impressed by the incredible vigor of mature Marquette vines--they can quickly take over a vineyard.  I went to Maine for 6 days with my family and when I returned, shoots had gone all the way across rows into the next row of vines.  Good grief I have no idea how anyone can manage a full vineyard, or even an acre of vines.  It takes an incredible amount of my time just to handle 30 vines!

This spring I started using yellow jacket traps to catch the queens early.  As a result I have seen precious few yellow jackets, thank goodness.  They were my main enemy last year.  I hate those little buggers.  First of all they sting like hell.  And they eat fruit like crazy!  I have also purchased some good insect-exclusion netting that will be put up soon.  Forget bird netting, this keeps out everything. I'm just worried how much sun will get through and if this will be a problem for mildew with reduced air circulation.  I'll have a whole blog post on this netting process, so I won't cover it now.

Once the vines got to the point that the canes were strong enough to be "man handled" a bit, it was time to undertake a little shoot positioning and leaf thinning.  Basically, the vines send the shoots off in any direction that helps them get more sun.  A vine might send a shoot across the row, down the row, and end up 2 vines over.  What a mess you have by mid-July.  Left to their own devices, by fall you wouldn't be able to get through the vineyard without a machete.  So at this phase, I walk down each row and re-position shoots that are going the wrong way.  In general I pull them off the top of other vines and send them down towards the ground.  In a VSP (Vertical shoot positioning) trellis (the kind I wish I had built in hindsight) you would snake them up through the wires towards the sky.  But in a top wire cordon, it's downward they go, then trim them off at ground level.  I had shoots that were over 10 feet long, so that once they were positioned correctly, five feet of cane has to be pruned.  There is no point in letting them snake along the ground--they will spring roots and try to start a new vine.  I kid you not...grape vines are seriously invasive.  Anyone who has wild vines around their house can tell you.  I have some wild vines in my back yard that try to take over the whole place every summer.  No matter how brutal I am yanking them up, chopping them off at the ground, they come right back!

Once the shoots are positioned, it's time for some leaf thinning.  This is hard to get used to, and this is the first year I have done it because it seems so weird.  The idea is to increase light and ventilation in the fruiting zone.  The fruit will mature better and with more flavor if it is exposed to some sun.  So removing the leaves blocking light to the fruit achieves this goal.  In addition, this allows air to move around the fruit better, helping to reduce issues with mildew and hopefully reducing the amount of fungicide that needs to be used.  What's weird is spending years coaxing the vines to become big and healthy, trying to keep bugs from eating the leaves...and then intentionally plucking off leaves.  But by the time the vines are mature and making fruit, they are also making more leaves than they need and spending too much energy on trying to take over the yard.  You need to keep them in check and force them to ripen the fruit, not grow more shoots.

I included a picture of my fake owl standing guard.  Not sure if it helps, but I need all the help I can get from those birds!

I have included a few pictures of the process.  Stand by for netting in a few weeks....

-Jacques

Farming is hard!

I don't know exactly what I expected when I decided it was a good idea to plant a vineyard.  But one thing is for certain, I had no idea it would be so hard to get fruit all the way through the process to ripe. Yes, trellising, pruning, watering etc. were learning curves.  Then I had to learn about spray fungicides because our humid New England summers are a black rot paradise.  Then of course I had to learn about pesticides because every bug in the world loves grape leaves and grapes.  Let's not forget the deer which have stripped all the leaves off many a shoot overnight.  Last year I only managed to get literally a bowl-full of fruit to ripeness.  I only had 3 vines mature enough to make grapes last summer.  I assumed I had all my procedures down:  fungicide schedule, insecticide schedule, and bird netting.  This year, with 11 vines making grapes, even with that depressing loss of fruit to hail, I figured I would at least get 50 pounds of grapes so I could make a small batch of wine.

Nope.  I got absolutely zero fruit.  Nada.  Nothing.

What was is this time?  Yellow Jackets!  They are of course those tremendously painful stinging bugs that many people think of as bees.  Not bees.  Bees are good.  Bees pollinate.  Yellow jackets are wasps that eat fruit--and as far as I can tell serve no useful purpose on planet Earth.  Once once they found my grapevines, they built a nest high in a tree out of reach and destroyed my whole crop like a horde of locusts within only a day or so, before I even realized what was happening.  Even though the fruit was sprayed with Sevin (a pesticide) the yellow jackets ignore that stuff.  They are immune to most of the relatively benign pesticides that are not too toxic to people.  So, the entire crop is gone...teaching me a valuable lesson in yet another critter I have to keep from attacking my grapes.

Next year I need a two-pronged approach.  The first is to kill the queens in the spring with Onslaught poison traps before they go and create a zillion workers to eat my grapes.   Next, I am going to experiment with insect netting instead of bird netting to physically exclude the yellow jackets from the fruit.  Also, I will build some T shaped brackets to hold the netting further from the vines as the birds still managed to stand on the netting this year and peck through to any fruit that was within a few inches of the net.

One thing is for sure...grapes have a lot of sugar in them.  (That's why they make good wine).  Animals crave the carbs--it's like candy.  Deer, rabbits, birds and yellow jackets, (God only knows what else) once they find your grapes, are voracious!  It probably doesn't help that I live in the middle of the woods, surrounded by a zillion hungry animals.  But one thing is for sure:  farming is hard.

There is some good news to report however.  My 2011 "Bordeaux Blend" made with Merlot and Cab from Washington state (plus that bowl of estate-grown Marquette) was just bottled.  As the second batch through my new 8 gallon Vadai Hungarian barrel, it has a fair amount of oak that is going to need some time to mellow.  However, it's the first wine of mine that I really think is pretty darned good.  It was awesome before going in the barrel.  Now there is enough oak in there that I'm not sure it's as good, but hopefully the oak will integrate in a couple years and the micro-ox of the barrel treatment will shine through.  We'll see.




-Jacques

Damn hail!!!

Many times I have read about hailstorms causing havoc in Bordeaux.  Now I truly feel their pain.  A week ago we got a freak hail storm and it did a number on the garden and vineyard.  It literally shredded leaves on the vines, knocked entire clusters of grapes off the vines, and punctured dozens of grapes on other clusters.  In all, it looks like a loss of at least 10% of my already meagre crop.  :-(  Farming sucks!

Over the weekend we netted the vines since the grapes have started changing color.  Veraison is the term for this metamorphosis, and the result is that it attracts the attention of the birds.  We don't want that!  So time to net and protect the crop I have left!

-Jacques

What happens when it rains....

You often hear winemakers lamenting the weather during flowering and complaining about a poor fruit set.  What does that mean?

The tiny flowers of grape vines must be pollinated to create grapes, just like any other fruit.  In the case of grapes, bees certainly assist, but if all goes well, they can pollinate with the wind as long as the flowers stay dry so the pollen can blow freely from one flower to the next.  When the weather gets rainy and the flowers are wet, the pollen won't blow around because it's all soggy.  The bees are not out there working the flowers much in the rain either.  So basically, nothing gets pollinated.

The picture below shows some clusters of Marquette all photographed on the same day.  (Click the pic for a larger view).  On the left, a nice healthy cluster of small grapes that had sunshine during flowering.  In the middle a cluster created by a vine that flowered a couple days later, when it was rainy.  You can see how very few flowers in the cluster got pollinated so the cluster has only a small number of grapes, plus a few tiny grapes that probably will not mature.  On the far right, an extreme example of a cluster that really didn't pollinate well at all.  Fortunately, I only have a few vines that flowered late and ended up with clusters like this.  Who knows why they flowered late, but I'm grateful for the ones that flowered when the sun was out.  This was a rough spring for grapes...very rainy in spite of early warm weather and a mild winter.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we pray for sun during flowering!

-Jacques

Finally....Grapes!

Here it is the middle of June and my Marquette vines are seriously kicking butt this year.  We had some rain during flowering, which is never good, but I would say that only 1/3 of the vines show clusters significantly affected by the rain.  The result are clusters with vastly different sized grapes on them.  The unaffected clusters all have similarly-sized (and generally larger) grapes.  But the big news is lots of clusters on lots of vines!

There might be more clusters than the vines can ripen.  We'll have to see about that as the summer goes on.  I'm mostly pretty pleased with the growth so far and I am hoping I can get 100 pounds to make a decent batch of wine.

In other news, I drove down to M&M wine today and picked up my Chilean pinot noir, which is a month late compared with last year.  They had a very late harvest and mine was on the last ship.  It actually looked darned good.  I'll get some measurements in the morning on the must once it has had a chance to warm this evening.  I destemmed and crushed it this afternoon, and threw in some Lallzyme to aid with extraction.  I'm going to experiment this time with fewer punchdowns and a cooler ferment to attempt to preserve aromatics and fruit.  Previously, I have been using the Burgundian technique of a single extreme temperature spike to aid in extraction and I really think I'm losing aromatics when I do that.  I'm hoping to replace that action with enzymatically-assisted extraction instead.

My 2011 fall "Bordeaux" (which I'm calling Meritage to be politically correct) is in my barrel and tasting pretty good.  It has a Syrah-like spice/pepper twang to it that is really cool.  I will likely bottle it in the fall when this Chilean pinot noir is ready to be barreled.  If you are really nice, you might get a bottle for Christmas.

-Jacques

2012 is THE YEAR for Chateau Oiseau!

As anyone in the northeast USA knows, spring came early this year.  We had weather in the 80° F range in March!  All the vines went nuts, trying to push out buds.  After a week of unseasonably warm and dry weather, temperatures went back down to normal (in the 40s and 50s) and the vines went into a kind of suspended animation where nothing happened for a few weeks.  Then another couple weeks of unseasonably warm weather happened again in early April.  We actually hit 91° F for a day!  With very little rain, our local pond's water level was at least a foot low and I decided to put some light irrigation on the vines.  As I sit writing this, we have had a solid day of rain from a passing "Nor'easter" that promises a very wet week ahead.  We need the rain, but the timing isn't good, as the vines are leafed out and starting to produce flower clusters.  Hopefully the flowers won't actually bloom for another week.

I have posted a picture of the buds on one of my Marquette vines popping out in only 4 days.  It's really amazing to watch.  If you compare the dates between this year and last, everything is a full 2 weeks early.  Spring is a busy time in the vineyard.  I have spent the last few weeks removing buds and shoots from the trunks of the vines, spraying fungicide (very important to hit the vines in the spring with fungicide to control black rot), adding composted manure to the vineyard, and hoeing the weeds between the vines.  I'm trying to reduce my use of chemicals like Round-up in the vineyard.  Of course, going "organic" is largely impossible in the northeast as our humid weather simply breeds too much mold and mildew that needs controlling, and the insects will eat everything without some chemical interference.  So hoeing the weeds is one small thing I can do rather than depend on Round-up.

The good news is that I have 6 vines going into their 4th summer, and another 10 or so going into their 3rd summer.  These vines all have tiny flower clusters forming and most are going to make grapes this summer!  So with a little cooperation from Mother Nature and some gentle nurturing from me, I might actually make a batch of Marquette wine this year!  This is exciting!  Four years of hard work and expense and I can finally make wine from my own estate grown grapes!

In the cellar, not much is happening.  I bought an 8 gallon Vadai Hungarian Oak (same wood species as "French oak" but not made in France, hence cheaper) barrel in February and my 2011 spring Chilean Merlot is in there now.  Small new barrels are famous for over-oaking the wine as they have a lot of surface area as a function of volume.  Even though I put water in the barrel for a couple weeks to seal it up and extract some of the oakiness, I'm pretty sure the first batch of wine in there is over-oaked pretty significantly.  On the flip side, this Merlot wasn't that great and maybe a little too much oak is just what it needs to cover its flaws!  ;-)  Once I bottle it (next month) I'll wash out the barrel and put my 2011 fall "Bordeaux Blend" in there.  I don't want to brag, but this wine is actually good.  Very good.  With a little time in a barrel I think it might be awesome and the first wine I have made that I'm proud of.  And just in time, because I have that Marquette to turn into wine this fall I hope!

-Jacques

The Fall 2011 Winemaking begins!

Well, the summer seemed to fly by and I haven't posted an update here since the end of June. So what has happened?

Well, around the beginning of August we had veraison in the Marquette, the time when the grapes start changing color. Grapes do this to signal the birds that they are ready to eat. That way the birds will spread their seeds around. Of course we don't want the birds to eat the crop, so we have to put bird netting on the vines. What a pain that is (but nothing compared to getting them back off again!)

Due to my travel schedule, I had to harvest the Marquette a little earlier than anticipated at around 22 brix because I had a trip to the Maldives and I was afraid they would hang too long otherwise. In addition to the rain during flowering which made for some bad fruit set and small, loose clusters, we also had a solid week of rain in late August that caused a lot of grapes to split. Overall, 2011 was a terrible year for growing grapes in Massachusetts. At least for me. Fortunately, I only had a few vines making fruit and there was no way I was going to get enough for a batch of wine anyway. So this is just an experiment year.

My Reliance (seedless) vines made a ton of grapes, and then right before they were ready to harvest, they all fell off the vine. Some had bee damage, but most just literally fell on the ground and got eaten. The vines were well netted. I have no idea what happened, but it has shaken my belief in Reliance. I have decided to remove the whole row of them in the spring and replace with Marquette. Reliance is not for making wine and I have no idea what to do with 40 pounds of Reliance if we ever get a harvest.

By the time Marquette harvest came (Sept 15th) I was down to about 2 pounds of actual harvestable grapes. But it was still a thrill to make my very first (tiny!) harvest. I froze the grapes to be added to my next wine batch. (More on this...keep reading)

Because I was going to be in the Maldives during the time when the California grapes would arrive for us east coast winemakers, I made the decision to order Washington state grapes for my fall winemaking. They wouldn't come until October, and I would be back from the Maldives. Since Washington Pinot Noir is not an option from my local retailer, I ordered Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon to make a "Bordeaux blend." I find it odd that we can get Cab from Washington but not Pinot noir. It seems to me that it must be hard to ripen Cab that far north, but that is a great climate for Pinot Noir.

The grapes arrived yesterday so I had to drop everything and go into wine making mode (something I enjoy!) As usual, I manually de-stemmed all the grapes. My daughter helped for about 10 minutes then got bored and left. My fingers were sore (and purple) all night afterwards. I really need a destemmer. For the most part the Cab looked as Cab should--tight clusters that are hard to de-stem, with dark blue berries. But when I crushed them, the seeds were still green--a sure sign that they are not ripe. My refractometer (see pic here) indicated between 22 and 23 brix on all the berries I tested, which is to say definitely not ripe. I can only imagine the pH. Fortunately, I'm doing a co-ferment blend with the Merlot and those berries had nice brown seeds and tested out at 26-27 brix (nice and ripe) so with any luck, they will cancel each other out and end up good. I also tossed my 2 pounds of frozen Marquette in there. So my wine will be 1.3% Estate Grown! LOL!

After destemming and crushing, the pH was 3.25. Egads, that's low! A small treatment with Potassium bicarbonate brought the pH up to 3.4 which is a lot better. In addition to a tiny dose of meta to kill bacteria, I added Lallzyme EX, my first attempt with an enzyme. The point is to try getting more color and tannin out of the skins. My previous attempts with really dark grapes (Merlot, Malbec) ended up looking more like pinot noir. On this batch I'm using several different techniques to get some extraction: an enzyme, a peak ferment temp into the 90s for a day and some tannin added before ferment to bind color and hopefully deal with the expected "vegetal" character of the unripe Cab.

This morning after the must had sat at 60 degrees all night, I couldn't believe the extraction of color I already had just from the enzyme! This is encouraging! Next I added the tannin and some Opti-red (again, to help with color) and started my yeast hydration. I have been using Go-Ferm for yeast hydration and Fermaid-K for nutrients along the ferment and that seems to work great. Now I have inoculated the must and I'm waiting for the ferment to start (at low temp) before bringing in the heat. This helps the yeast to get going before any bacteria can because the yeast will get going (slowly of course) at low temp much better than bacteria. Applying heat to the must before the yeast is in there is an invitation to bacterial growth.

Once the must had been inoculated, it was time to bottle my Fall 2010 California Pinot noir in order to clear out a carboy. This is the third wine I have bottled. Tasting notes? Well, it's flawed but not as badly as the previous two. I consider it drinkable, which is more than I can say for the spring 2010 wines. However, I still detect that "home winemaking aroma" that I detect in a lot of home-made wines, not just mine. I think it's the slight leftover taint from hydrogen sulfide. As well, the wine is pretty thin and lacks character. You can drink it, it tastes like wine, and a person who hasn't got much palate for wine (you know who you are Tim) would think it's fine. But it's flawed. I certainly won't be entering it in any wine competitions.

So anyway, I disinfected a bunch of bottles, put them on the bottle tree to dry, and started filling and corking. I ended up with 34 bottles. I'll label them and put on the heat-shrink capsules tomorrow. More wine in the cellar that I seriously doubt will improve with age!

Next I racked the spring 2011 Merlot. This is 6 months old and was ready for a racking plus the addition of some oak spirals. Christine and I tasted it and here's what I can say. It has no noticeable flaws! Which is a first for me. And it tastes okay. But for Merlot, it's pale and lacking tannin and body. If I handed a glass to a wine lover and asked that person to identify it, any sane person would conclude that it is pinot noir. It's not dark and "thick" like Merlot should be. For some reason, no matter what grape I start with, I keep making "pinot!" Hence you can see that I have a problem with getting good extraction. Keeping my fingers crossed on the extracting of this new Bordeaux blend! I'll keep you posted, and thanks for reading!

-Jacques