Category Archives: Wine Growing

Nets

OK….so we finished the harvest and made wine….done yet. Nope, we had 3 miles of bird net that is 17 feet across to take in from the vineyard. Don’t know the official procedure, but we put the bags in a recycle bin, took off the nets from the vines, pulled them tight on the ground and then rolled the bin around and stuffed them in the bag. Each bag is about 100 pounds. Took us 24 hours! We had to finish by Sunday as it was supposed to rain Monday-Wednesday and they were on the ground and would have been full of mud. We finished, but you can see Joey was dead tired when it was over. Next year, I’m hoping to take them up the day before harvest so we can enjoy the fall colors on the leaves.

PS This next week I’m going to start pruning for next year.

Fermentation

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This will detail the fermentation of our first harvest of Pinot noir and Sauvignon blanc

SAUVIGNON BLANC
Harvest – 9/23/12
Amount – ~20 lbs
Brix – 22.6
Yeast – VL1 (a Viogner type)
Manually crushed and de-stemmed into a small press. Press resulted in about 2 gallons of liquid. 10g of VL1 yeast was added to a 5 gallon carboy with a plastic cup on top at 1pm. 5ml of a 10% potassium meta-bisulfite solution was added as a preservative, approximately 35ppm.

9/24 – Lovely smell
10/4 – added mlf
PINOT NOIR
Harvest – 9/23/12
Amount – 34 picking tubs with ~35 lbs in each, or 1190 lbs, Brix – ~23.2 Crushed and de-stemmed at EMTU vineyards into a 1/2 ton bin. 32g of meta-bi-sulfite added as a preservative. Also added 40 lbs of dry ice. Temperature of must solution reduced from 62 F to 40 F.
9/24 – 48 F at noon
9/25 62 F at 9:30am Brix = 22.8 or 23.0 , Added 10 g Lallzyme Enzyme, 30# dry ice
9/27 55 F, added 40# dry ice, liquid very viscous due to enzymes
9/29 58 F, Added 1.5 g/l of tartaric acid and 0g assmanshausen yeast
9/30 62 F, brix 22, punch down
10/1 82 F, brix 19.8, punch down
10/2 88 F, brix 12.7 and 9.8, pH 3.84, punch down and added 0.5 g/l tartaric acid
10/3 90 F, brix 4.5, pH 3.82, great color much less viscous
10/4 81 F, brix -1.4
10/8 pH 3.76, very dark purple and cap has fallen….ready for pressing this morning.

Harvest

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Harvest Happens at Turtle Vines….after only 4 short years of planning! We started on 9/23 at 8 am with nine friends and ended up picking 20 lbs of Sauvignon blanc (Brix 22.4) and around 1190 lbs of Pinot noir (Brix ~23). We finished picking at 11:00 and then went to EMTU Vineyards for crushing/destemming (another 1.5 hours) and adding sulfur/dry ice for a cold soak on the Pinot noir and sulfur/yeast for the Sauvignon blanc. I’ve added lots of pictures below….

Another reason to hate raccoons, but they have good taste!

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As many of you know I have been waging a small battle with the raccoons due to the fact that they have been messing up my weed cloth/mulch so they can find food. However, now they have gone to far. They are now eating my almost ripe grapes! I can understand since they taste so good, but it will certainly cut down on the bottles of wine this year since we don’t have a lot to start with. How do they do it you ask….they push the nets against the clusters and then eat them.

Well, this weekend I relocated two more raccoons. One little one and one full sized. They are now going 11 miles away in hopes they don’t return.

Green Fruit?

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Amazing how that saying “Don’t sweat the small stuff” does not seem to apply to wine growing. So, you can see in the picture above that the grapes on the top right are not deep purple. In this case they are “wings” of a bigger cluster. You have to remove these or they will suck away the ripening power to the rest of the clusters…..so I did this last week. I pulled up the net where I had to cut and removed them.

In other cases, the entire vine or an entire section of the vineyard may not ripen. In this case you have to do a second pick or remove leaves in the cluster zone to hasten the ripening along. Of course, this could backfire and you might sunburn them if you have a hot spell.

Now I know why my Grandfather in Nebraska always worried about the weather when we came to visit.

Nothin’ but net !

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Time to net….can’t believe it has been 4 years in the making, but our first harvest is almost here and we want to protect it, so we purchased 12500’ of netting (not enough) and netted 70 of the rows so the birds won’t get the fruit. We hired a friend/management company, Carmine Indindoli, who has a motorized tool to net. It took them almost 5 hours with 4 men to get it 90% done. The hardest part is we have 84 rows, with many of them small. The turns are the worst part of netting as you have to tie the nets so you don’t trip over them.

As the guys were leaving, they gave me some tips in the vineyard……I missed to many “doubles”, on the weak plants I should have left only 2 or 3 buds instead of 4, the far side of the vineyard was not getting enough water….but all in all looked OK for one person doing it who is “learning”.

Wasps – OUCH!!!

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On Saturday the 7th we had our annual family gathering. The kids were all in the area and all got stung. Matisse (above) who is 6 got stung 4 times. So, I get to my question…..do wasps have memories?

The spot they were stung is the same location I got stung 10 times 4 years ago when I was excavating a tree trunk. The wasps moved 15 feet to a hive in the vineyard and I boiled them last year. So…they like that location. After the kids all got stung, my friend and I flamed them…..scary, funny video…..wasps and wine don’t mix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwCbXEpI_3M&feature=channel&list=UL

Yesterday I was near the spot where everyone got stung a few weeks ago and got stung 2 or 3 times on my calf, but I wasn’t messing with the hive. My calf and foot are now swollen to about double. Hope it goes down soon. I just wonder if they remembered me burning them and then hitting them with boiling water and excavating them? I guess I would be upset if someone did that to me.

July/Aug Work

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Will it be enough? The above picture is perhaps the best looking vine I have in the vineyard. It is going through veraison and I think it is well balanced. I think this vine has 8 clusters. In order to get a ton of wine (enough for a barrel) I have to have 5000 good size clusters.

Unfortunately, many of the vines are small and they don’t have enough leaves for photosynthesis I fear. I hope they ripen with the rest of the vines, or I’ll have to either cut them off or pick them at another time

Turtle Vines has 3130 total vines. I had to start over 380 vines…..so I only have 2750. Of those, another 300 or so have very few cluster on them. So…..I have to average about 2 clusters per vine to get my barrel….and I have to have a little extra since wine in the barrel evaporates. Going to be close.

July 30 – 2 hours mowing, 1.5 hours pruning/walking for mildew, 2.5 hours chipping
July 31 – 2 hours spraying, 1 hour collecting grow tubes
Aug 2 – 2 hours spraying front and putting in anchors for living fence
Aug 6 – 3 hours picking out vineyard netting
Aug 7 – 1 hours tucking, 2.5 hours putting on highway stake protectors
Aug 8 – 1.5 hours leafing/laterals, 2 hours spraying Serenade and 5# kaligreen in 50 gallons, 2 hours mowing
Aug 9 – 1 hour killing wasps
Aug 10 – 1 hour killing wasps
Aug 11 – 1 hour with net folks

Mildew

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In Russian River Valley, the weather is perfect for growing Pinot noir, Chardonnay and in some areas Sauvignon blanc. Cool evenings, fog and then warm days. This is also ideal for mildew. Being an organic farmer, you are limited to what you can spray. Suffice it to say, but being organic means I have to spray twice as frequent with material that is more expensive. The key is to spray every week and put on the right chemical at the right time. Last year I didn’t spray enough and had mildew in the middle of the year. This year was much better and I only had about 8 vines with bad mildew. What did I do and learn?

At bud break I sprayed with Serenade and copper 4 times for 4 weeks – I’ll keep this for next year.

Next I sprayed with serenade only until the end of June – Serenade will contol midew but won’t kill it. Next year I’m going to spray with Stylet Oil until veraison.

From veraison until netting, I’m spraying with Serenade and will keep this next year. Near the end of the year I’ll spray with Kaligreen for mildew control in Aug/September.

In addition, throughout the vine/leaf growing season I’m going to spray with Metalosate Multimineral Foliar Spray to help with mineral uptake to the vines.

Why is it so important? First, if the grapes get mildew they will die and infect other grapes. If the vines get midew, it will affect next years clusters and ultimately the harvest. So….a never ending fight but one that has to be won every year.

Veraison

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Veraison is the term used when red grape varietals actually turn red during growing season. In addition, it is the time when you have to start thinking about netting the vineyard so the birds don’t eat all of your crop.

As you can see from the picture above, we have a few grapes turning red!!!

In about 2-3 weeks I’ll be netting and the sugar content of the grapes will be above 12% so I won’t have to spray anymore. That will be a relief.

We have had a lot more sunshine this year, so I’m anticipating that we will have our first harvest of around 1000 pounds mid-September.