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.