Author Archives: Doug Williams

Grafting – Part 1

canes in frig

Why am I posting grafting? We just planted our vineyard in 2010 with 3130 Pinot Noir vines…or so we thought. Nurseries, like anyone else, make mistakes. Of the 3200 vines we ordered, we ended up with 50 Merlot’s, 7 Chardonnay and about 23 vines that the graft didn’t take. You can’t tell any of that until you have fruit on them 2 or 3 years later!

In 2012, our 1st fruit year, we ended up putting the Merlot into the Pinot Noir since we could not tell the vines apart. For 2013 made the Merlot into Jelly. In 2014 we made a little Merlot and the picking crew cut the rest off before I could stop them. Lastly, in 2015 we left the Merlot to ripen for an extra 3 weeks and it is now getting ready to bottle in a few months…and it tastes great!

So why are we grafting them over the Pinot Noir? Since they ripen at different times than the Pinot Noir and the 50 Merlot are scattered in the vineyard with 3000 other vines, they are a pain to keep separate. You have to mark them, leaf differently, and keep them netted longer.

So, we will lose a year of production on those vines…but they would not have been used anyway.

How do you do graft?

First you have to mark the vines you want to graft over
Next you have to obtain budwood…in our case, when we pruned the vines we collected the canes and cut them into 4 bud lengths. We then bundled them up, put them in a plastic bag and will refrigerate them until we graft in March. (see picture above) Keep them around 34-36 F but don’t freeze them!

For the rest of the Grafting process…tune back in mid-March

canes ground

Invisible Tannins

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wine-tannins2

What are “invisible Tannins”?

I recently received a review for our 2014 Turtle Vines Pinot Noir …yes, we are announcing the release of that wine in the next few days!!! In the review was the term “Invisible Tannins”. A few years ago I taught my nephew “Young but Approachable”. This one is not as funny, but I think is a great term, and in my mind another way to say “balanced with great structure”. Below is the explanation I got below from the Prince of Pinot.

First…a quick explanation of a wine tannin. Tannin is a naturally occurring polyphenol found in plants, seeds, bark, wood, leaves and fruit skins. (see above picture) As a characteristic of wine, tannin adds both bitterness and astringency as well as complexity. Wine tannins are most commonly found in red wine, although white wines have tannin from being aged in wooden barrels or with oak adjuncts.

Prince of Pinot – “You want some tannic backbone in wine not only for balance but for age ability. That said, you want to sense that a wine has structure, but you don’t want the structure (tannins) to stand out. Tannins should blend harmoniously with the fruit extraction, alcohol, acidity and oak – essentially invisible in the context of the wine as a whole or better said, balanced. Tannins will change over time in the bottle, so they may stand out a bit in a young wine and that is ok if they are not big tannins. I am sure you have experienced opening a wine and finding it a bit tannic, but when re-tasted 2-3 days later from the same bottle, the tannins have softened and seemingly integrated. That is a sign that the tannins will meld over time in the bottle in the cellar.”

Lastly, in order to make a balanced wine you need to take into account the acidity and alcohol content to determine how much tannin is needed. In general, the higher the alcohol and lower the acid the more tannins you will need. That is why Cabernet and Merlot will have more tannins than Pinot Noir.

Duh…Don’t Buy Extra Spools of Tie designed to Erode!

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tie spool

Just a quick post on vine tying and buying the correct wire. Two years ago a friend of mine and fellow winemaker, John Mason, invested in a Pellanc Tie Tool. Has made tying vines to the wires much easier.

When you tie vines you need to pick out the correct wire. Tie wire for the Pellanc comes in 4 grades based on how long it will last in the field. For cane pruned vines you only want the ties to last 1 year and then be able to pull the canes from the wires easily. I used the second softest grade of wire, the first softest tends to jam in the tool.

I learned an obvious but good lesson this year. Since the wire is designed to fall apart after 1 year, get new spools every year. What you see above and in detail below is the tie wire that I left in the tool since last spring. Notice how the cover has come off the wire. I didn’t change the spool and it jammed and didn’t work. Took me about 15 minutes to realize why….duh, you need a new spool, the old one is doing what it was designed to do, fall apart after a year! Good thing I only had one spool leftover from 2015. FYI…I will use 9 of these spools in my boutique vineyard and take me about 12 hours to tie.

Tie wire

Dry Periods During a Strong El Nino?

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Special-Weather-Statement

For those of you in other parts of the country having an arctic blast caused by El Nino this year and you wondered…must be a lot of rain in Wine Country. Well…not so much. We are a little under our normal rainfall total so far in 2016 and it has now been dry for 12 days (and counting) and it doesn’t look much rain until the 23rd of February. Good news is they are predicting a wetter than normal March. Hopefully we get a lot of rain to fill the reservoirs and end the drought, but doesn’t look like it. At least for us in wine country, rain in March is great as it fills the soil with moisture that will last until July for the grapevines.

Good news – mid 70’s here in February!

Bad news – soil will warm up and cause an early bud break!

Pruning – Part 2 Final Pruning

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So…I had pre-pruned the vineyard earlier to make it easier to see where to prune…and to delay my final pruning. Above you can see for cane pruning you leave 2 healthy canes from the previous year and cut off all the rest. Below you will see that the canes are shortened such that the canes when tied to the wires don’t touch. It is hard to estimate, so normally I tie them to the wires and then trim one of the canes if I left them to long.

For me this year looks like my “wire will be full” (all of the vines have 2 canes to tie to the wire. Hopefully we will have a good fruit set and a large quality harvest in 2016.

BTW…what is nice to see in 2016, six years after initial planting, is that the trunks are getting larger and we did a good job last year of keeping the correct canes during thinning in 2015 for use in 2015! Hope that makes sense to all reading. Basically, anything you do as far as pruning/thinning/spraying the previous year you get to see the results the next year.

pruned row

This picture shows the rows now pruned and ready to be tied. I will remove the piles of canes in the next week and mow the grass so I can begin to catch gophers earlier this year before they get out of control!

Pruning – Part 1…Pre-pruning

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which one?

Wow, don’t know about you but the time between fall and spring seems to be getting shorter every year. Seems like just yesterday we were harvesting our grapes and making wine!

Every year the vines have to be pruned back to provide room for new growth, and if done correctly, provide balance between the amount of fruit and the vegetative growth. Pruning is done early spring. If it is done to early then your trunks can become infected with fungi, or Eutypa Dieback. Basically…your vines get infected and dieback over a number of years. Given all the time and money you have invested in them, you want to prevent this from happening so that your vines will last a few lifetimes. There are a few easy things to try and prevent this.

– Delay your pruning as long as possible in the spring. If the phloem and xylem (blood of the vines) are flowing when you prune the vines, the diseases will not adhere to the wood.
– Double prune – prune the vines in the winter to an intermediate length and then prune late when the phloem and xylem is active. You can see from the picture above that we have done this. Basically we cut the vines to about 6″ close to where they will eventually be pruned. One of the more difficult items in pruning is removing the old wood that is tied to the wires. If you do this first it makes the final pruning much easier to do and easier to see where the final pruning cuts should be located.
– Protectants can be used after you prune to inhibit the growth of fungi. In the case of an organic vineyard the only item I have found is Serenade at 3% which will out compete the bad fungi. We have used this in previous years.
– Lastly, make sure as you prune you sanitize your pruning shear initially and during your pruning session so as not to spread any diseases.

So, for Turtle Vines…pre-pruning is complete and now we are waiting for the correct time to prune! Can’t be to late as we had bud break the last week of February last year.

Below is a picture of a row that has been pre-pruned and the old canes removed. Notice that all of the vine ties are gone from last year. (the ones connecting the vines to the wires)

pre-pruned

We now have 5 big piles of canes from 2015 around the vineyard. Soon they will be chipped and used around the property.

cane pile

He’s Back! Red Tails in Love!

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Red Tails

The last two winters we have had a Red Tail Hawk come visit Turtle Vines. It sits on our vine row endpoints, jumps to the ground and hunts gophers and observes me from the trees weeding and pruning! Unfortunately the last two years I have only seen one…no mate.

This year, I saw my Hawk again in the vineyard about a week ago…again alone. But not for long…if you can see from the picture above we now have two Hawks!!! I’m hoping they are mating and we will have little ones flying around in the spring. Stay tuned for more Red Tail love stories!!!

on post

2016 Drought Update at Turtle Vines, Russian River Valley

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Special-Weather-Statement (1)

I’m sure all the news east of California has massive rainfall with flooding in California…and the drought it over. But that is not the case here in Northern California.

GOOD NEWS – We are getting moderate amounts of rainfall here in Russian River Valley spread over a long period of time which is soaking the soil without flooding. The rainfall/storm window continues to remain open with the prospect of more rain for the foreseeable future. We have not had any big storms and El Nino storms historically have come in February. In addition, the snowpack is growing in the mountains and in much better shape than last year (see picture above)

BAD NEWS – We are below last years rainfall total and below our long term average. Sebastopol is currently at 19″ for the rain year and we need to get 45″ just to get to our average. Hate to say it but we need about 5″ of rain for the next 6 weeks! Just hope it is constant and not all at once.

As much as would like to be outside pruning and getting ready for the year…let it rain!!!

Big Red needs a little help !

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After returning from Minneapolis for Christmas 2 weeks ago, I was going to get some work done around the vineyard between rain storms. However, my 2000 F250 decided it wanted a little pampering and maintenance. After several ideas on what was wrong on my part, I had AAA tow it to a local service center. Ends up the fuel pump failed. I have read that they should last at least 10 years or 100,000 miles. Since Big Red is 16 years old but only has a little over 80K miles, seems about right. Just the $750 bill was not the way I wanted to start out the new year.

Now…you have to ask, when is it time for a replacement truck. Given the truck is for the vineyard/winery only, has 4WD, running boards, a $3K lift gate on the back, tows 5 tons and is only driven 2,000 miles/yr…and a new one just like it is $36K without the lift…we should have it a long time (at least we hope)!

2016 Goals

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Happy New Year…And a special shout out to Anna and Brian for this wonderful picture of our 2014 Turtle Vines Pinot Noir at Lake Tahoe!!!

Wow, if you read my “2015 Recap” you realize 2015 was a fantastic year. How to improve upon that? Here are my goals for 2016

Grow great grapes that turn into great wine!!!

Vineyard

Keep Hanzell Vineyards as a grape purchaser
Drip Epson Salt through the irrigation system between set and harvest to lower the potassium level in the grapes that will lower the pH of the wine
Institue an improved spray program for powdery mildew
Replant 85 weak or missing vines
Graft over 80 Merlot/Chardonnay/Original no-clone vines
Prune trees that shade the vineyard
Outsource more of the vineyard work

Winery

Add another restaurant that sells Turtle Vines to go with Millennium and Muir’s Tea Room
Reviews for the 2013 (Pinot Report), 2014 (Prince of Pinot)
Make a small batch of Pinot that can age based on 2015 information