Heading into harvest season
Hi Folks, it’s that time of year again. Crush ’11 is coming up in just a couple months. This year Sunfire will be making 2 kinds of wine: Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo. We grow most of our own fruit but since we are growing faster than I had planned for (which is why my wife says I need to write a business plan) we need to source some addition fruit from other vineyards around the state. I have been looking seriously at a couple of Paso Robles cabernet vineyards that look very promising. Tempranillo will be much more challenging since there is so little acreage planted to it. Odds are I am going to have to have more of it planted next year. There is however a tiny site (about 2-3 acres) with Tempranillo from some Rioja cuttings grown by a gentleman farmer just way up in the hills at an elevation of about 2200 feet. He even has one of the rows planted to Mensia, the grandfather of modern Cabernet Franc!
Since this is a brand new vineyard (3’rd year vines) I’ll be spending a significant amount of time discussing and observing viticultural techniques with the owner. The soil is sand and granite with excellent drainage. With close attention to quality and low yields, this may very well end up being one of the top sites for high elevation Spanish varietals in the state.
As many of you know, my vineyard site’s well ran dry a few years ago. We didn’t know at the time how that would affect the vineyard or if there would still even be a vineyard. There has been a learning curve in ways to handle the water issue. We built cistern to collect runoff and rain water. We upgraded to fanjet drip emitters to reduce water waste and where once we got 3-4 total yield per acre which we now grow in the 2 ton range. Ultimately we may change over to sub-surface drip irrigation to conserve even more water. I can say now that the vineyard is, if not actually thriving, it is at least healthy.
This year, in part due to the uncharacteristically cool weather, the yield will be cut back (a process called cluster thinning) by roughly half– partly to accelerate ripening and to assure that I’ll still get the quality that I’m hoping to attain. We are looking at it from the point of view of long term vineyard sustainability.
Right now the clusters are still uniformly green. That means that veraison has not yet begun. The term refers to two processes in the final stages of grape development. First, at least in red wines, the green berries get their color (turning red) and second, the berries (both red and white) soften. After veraison the grapes rapidly increase in sweetness. Generally one can figure that harvest will occur about 6-7 weeks after the color change. One of the cool things this year is that we can now electronically monitor soil water density right at root depth (called the rootzone) at approximately 30-36 inches. This is exciting because it allows us to precisely quantify the amount of irrigation necessary to stress the vine to improve flavor development and concentration in the berries while making sure that the vine has enough water to remain healthy. Until these were installed we could only make educated guesses. Sometimes with less than desirable results…
Stew “That vine looks kinda spindly”
Dave “Maybe we should’ve put more water on it”
Stew “Oops”
Anyway, not that bad really but you get the point.
A bit of a rant…
For the better part of a month I have been trying to work out what to do about my port program. If you’re not aware, port consumption in the us has decrease to the point of obscurity. There are maybe a dozen producers who specialize in it left in California. I make an uttuerly traditional one and I’m starting to think that may be the problem.
Traditional ports are massive sweet wines with loads of structure that are far from soft or smooth– but smooth is what consumer studies and competitions such as Lodi’s Consumer Wine Awards last year show year after year. While most of us in the trade are conditioned to think that everybody wants bone dry wines or complex ports that is simply not the case and we are likely discouraging folks from being able to enjoy what they drink . If I were new to wine I’d be either intimidated or insulted or both!
The folks who are drinking a Desaronno on the rocks could just as easily be a wine drinker if they were’nt embarrassed to ask for a sweet red wine over ice. But even if they wanted it they can’t order it… At least not in the US. They can get sweet Shiraz in Australia. A common and wildly popular bar drink. But not here because obviously they only “think” that they want a sweet wine…
And that leads me back to my original question. What shall I do with my port program. Well maybe I’ll pitch some fining agent into my port barrels to knock out the tannins. It’s totally against conventional wisdom but really, where has that gotten us?
Something new for summer
For those of you who know me or frequent the winery and our summer impromptu lunch parties this will come as no surprise… I love Rose as a summer sipper and realy think there’s nothing better than hangin round outside by the pool (which I don’t have- tho we do have a hose) with a chilled glass full of light raspberry and strawberry flavors. Yum!
But I have a new love called Verdelho that’s makin’ its way to a store shelf near you. Now I can already hear y’all ask “What the *#$@ is Verdelho? Well its a white wine from- you guessed it- Spain and its sorta like an exotic Sauvignon Blanc without the grass. Think mangos and melons and tart acidity. Molydooker of The Boxer fame makes one called the Violinist and Scholium Project’s Naucratis is quite possibly one of the most intriguing wines to cross my lips this year.
Great find in NYC
This evening I went out with a couple friends to try a new Sri Lankan restaurant in the East Village and stumbled upon an amazing find just two doors down- a wine shop solely dedicated to Spanish wines!
Rioja, Ribera, Bierzo, Priorat… this place has ‘em all. And the lady who owns it is friendly and knowledgable too. Check them out. Tinto Fino at the corner of 5th Street and 1st Avenue.
Tempranillo Tuesdays (or maybe Thursdays)
Thanksgiving is over and it’s back to the grind for most folks, yours truly included, to the daily ritual which for this particular blogger is to amble out to the winery, toy with Cabernet and Tempranillo blends (which I should do more of) and this week at least get my act in gear re: Tempranillo Tuesdays or Thursdays. I need to choose two Spanish tapas dishes to pair with the first night’s wine, come up with some sort of scoring system that’s not utterly confusing (I mean really, what is the difference between a 91 and a 92 point wine… tell me please!) so I’m thinking about a star system (i.e. 1 star sucks and 5 stars means get the hell out of my way while I run to the store to wipe out my hard earned cash). I want this little experiment to include folks from within and without the industry so in any given week there will be winemakers, restaurateurs, sommeliers, serious and not so serious wine tasters and whoever else happens to show up. When I met my fiancé, I stupidly assumed that she knew what I was talking about when we were drinking wine. Now ya gotta understand, she’s a foodie, but she was completely perplexed when I started going on and on about white pepper and boysenberry fusion in wine and it finally clicked that most folks, probably some of my readers too, are equally intimidated or perplexed by wine-speak and inaccessible scoring systems and would just like someone whose not a pompous snob to tell them what they think of a wine in somewhat clearer terms. That’s why I feel its so important to include in these weekly tastings inexperienced wine tasters– inexperienced incidentally does not mean disinterested, a common misconception in my trade. Most wine professionals were just as confused by wine-speak at one time. Twenty years ago, I knew there were two types of wine (well, three types since my parents drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape) red and white. When I read wine notes like ” it has aromas of warm wet gravel” my reaction was something akin to: “as opposed to what? cold pond gravel….” So here we are twenty or so years later and I still don’t know what warm wet gravel tastes like, do you? I think not … I can just see it now, telling my friends:
Me: ”Hey guys, this wine has aromas of lychee nut and warm wet
gravel”
Them: “Sure Stew, whatyever you say.”
Me: “I swear I’m serious and Ill prove it to you– just give me a
moment to heat up some water and get some gravel out of
the goldfish bowl…”
All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to getting this weekly tasting program under way. I hope you are too.
Please, not another boring Thanksgiving wine…
Lately I’ve been hearing alot of talk about what wines go best with Thanksgiving dinner and I gotta say that for most folks Tempranillo is not the first wine that comes to mind, but it should be. I mean, yeah, you could go out and get a Pinot which works most of the time especially if its a fruity style or even a Syrah in some cases. Heck, lots of people think Chardonnay goes great with turkey (though I think they’re insane- lets get real, Chardonnay with stuffing and cranberries… YUK!). Tempranillo on the other hand is a match made in heaven. Roast turkey and Tempranillo were made for each other. Think about it, cranberries were paired with turkies for a reason- they bring out the richness of the meat. Tempranillo has berries, mostly red berries and lots of them. It also has good acidity which is very important to cut through the rich oily textures of roasted meats and gravy. Remember, the wine is supposed to elevate the flavors of each bite and a good pairing also brings out the juiciness of the wine. If all a wine does is wash down the food, well… that’s what water is for, which is cheaper and you should have it at the table anyway.
Where is TryTempranillo going…
Now that Crush 2009 is finally over and I can finally move my arm again, albeit very slowly due to shoulder surgery (and thus can type), I can get back to posting on this site. Over the last couple of weeks whilst stuck in the house recuperating, I’ve had the chance to figure out a little bit on where I want to go with this blog. Most folks at wine tastings that I attend both as a pouring winemaker and those in which I am a casual participant are unfamiliar with Spanish varietal wines…
Taster: “What kind of wine is that?”
Me: “It’s a Tempranillo.”
Taster: “Is that a grape?”
Anyway you get the picture. So I’ve decide that TryTempranillo needs to start off with a tasting and food pairing focus. Beginning this December I will be conducting a weekly Tempranillo wine tasting at my home and pairing the wines to a couple Tapas dishes (Spanish small plates to share among diners) that I’ll be making. There will be a panel of tasters each week- generally about 6-8 of us- and we’ll blog about the experience. You see, different people have different tastes so I want this blog to reflect that. If everybody at the tasting agrees that the wine of the night is awesome, then great; but if it sucks we’ll say so too.
For the record. I’ll be buying the wines and the food. I won’t be pouring Sunfire’s wines. Since Tempranillo is relatively new to wine lovers in this country, my intent is to offer you, my readers, the chance to become more familiar with this amazing grape and to get some sense of where you can fit this wine into your lifestyle. This is meant to be a conversation so I also hope that you will try some of these wines yourself and post your own tasting notes and comments on this blog. I’ll probably twitter about the tastings too- if I can figure out how to. I’m a pretty good taster and winemaker but technology befuddles me 
