Category Archives: Wine Growing

2016 Pinot Harvest – Turtle Vines

It’s 3am and the call comes in…whom do you want to answer the phone? Oh, this is harvest time and not the election!!!

I was up at 3am September 14th, and we started our pick at 4am with a 7 man crew. We finished up a little after 10am. Between what we sell to Hanzell and what we keep for ourselves we harvested 7,003 pounds!

And by the way, I lifted almost all of the grapes twice to get the trailer loaded….once to my truck and once from the truck to the trailer. Didn’t have to work out for a week.

empty-bins-2016

Joey and Bernadino loading the trailer!

joey-bernadino-2016-harvest

Almost full trailer…

full-bins-2016

I’m finishing up the Pommard and then heading to Sonoma to deliver the grapes!

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Joey and Bernadino loading the trailer!

Grafting – Part 2

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vineyard with grafts and replant

So, for any of you that have followed my blog you know that when we originally planted our Pinot Noir in 2010 the nursery accidentally included a little over 50 Merlot and 5 Chardonnay bench grafts. We didn’t realize what the Merlot were until our second harvest in 2013. The last 2 years we have made Merlot wine…but it is very difficult to handle them in the vineyard as they are spread out over many rows. (The got mixed up in our planting process). So…we decided to graft them over to the Pommard clone. In Part 1 I showed how we cut off last years canes during pruning and put them in our extra refrigerator…so what is next?

1 -Take them out of cold storage (~36F) for a day and soak one end in water.

canes in bag

In the picture below you can see the buds on the canes. These will be used for bud grafting.

Buds

2 – Hire a grafter…seriously, for many other varieties the success rate is >98% but for Pinot Noir you are lucky to get 90% and for those who don’t know what they are doing much less.

3 – The grafter will cut off the trunk of the vine about 2′ above the ground.

4 – Then they notch the trunk on two sides and notch out two buds from last years canes.

5 – They then place the buds into the notches and hold them in place with tape.

6 – You then cover with a grow tube to keep direct sunlight off them.

7 – Lastly, you wait about three weeks when the canes should appear and you can take the grow tube off. You may or may not get any grapes, but the important part is for it to grow strong this year so it can be pruned into shape next spring.

Vine Graft

Why in my first picture I have grow tubes with and without red tape? The red tape denotes the bud grafts and the normal grow tubes are replants that gophers/mowers/trimmers killed the previous few years.

Bud Break and Grape Harvest Prediction

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Budbreak 2016

Bud break this year was 3/14, almost 3 weeks later than last year which is a very good thing! Based on my predictions the last 4 years we have averaged 183 days from bud break to harvest. This year we will delay a week for riper fruit…so my prediction is 9/20/16.

How much you ask? Well, this last year we had a disastrous fruit set which resulted in a 60+% loss in fruit. After all is said and done with new bench graft plantings and grafting over the Merlot we will have 3000 vines. I’m estimating a 90% efficiency at 3.5 pounds/vine. I’m hoping for a better fruit set than that, but still being cautious I’m guessing 4.7 tons of Pinot Noir and 350 pounds of Sauvignon Blanc.

I’ll offer a free bottle of wine to the person who comes closest to the pounds of Pinot grapes we harvest this year. Post here on my Turtle Vines Facebook page in the next week or email me and I’ll publish the names and guesses…and we will see who wins 5 1/2 months from now.

Stay tuned for the results!

2015 Grape Harvest Sales Plunge

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2 dollar bill

Why the $2 bill?

Well, not often do you see the North Coast grape harvest drop like it did in 2015 (sort of like a $2 bill)…unless it was from the recent Great Recession.

Due to the 23% drop in tonnage harvested (we were off by 60%!)…the amount of money to the vineyard’s in the North Bay reduced to $1.12B from $1.46B. However, due to the shortage of grapes the price went up 5% in Sonoma County…and the Pinot Noir average price was $3,500/ton. For those not in the business, this translates to just about $5/bottle (~55-60 cases/ton) just for average grapes before any processing starts which is more expensive! Grapes that make excellent wines are much more expensive and could be twice as much! Now you know why Pinot Noir in the Russian River Valley is expensive.

Solar Sebastopol and Our Panels…Good and Bad News!

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Roof leak 2-1-16

Sebastopol, our agri-artsy Sonoma County outpost, (Jerry Garcia went to High School at Analy 1/2 mile from our house) was the first city in the US in 2013 to implement a building ordinance that required all new homes/buildings to include solar systems that provide 2 watts of photovoltaic-derived power per square foot of insulated building area. The system must offset at least 75 percent of the home/building’s total annual electric load.

We are in the county but on the Sebastopol border, so it is not applicable to us…but being good neighbors, stewards of the environment and cost efficient people…and we were about to rent on VRBO, we decided to add to our solar in 2012.

When we purchased our home there was already 7 kW of solar. We added 2 kW February 2012 that would take advantage of the morning/mid-afternoon sun. In addition we have converted most of our lights from incandescent/CFL to LED and upgraded our pool pump to variable speed…but I had to add a wine room for the Turtle Vines Inventory!

How are we doing?
– Our average electric bill 2009-2011 was $1,085
– Our average electric bill 2012-2015 was $ 638
– The last 4 years have also included 125 couple who stayed at our Vacation Rental, which is all electric.
– Our solar generation accounted for 70% of our energy usage! In addition, we purchase the remainder of our electricity from Sonoma Clean Power that is 100% renewable.
– We use half of the electricity of the average American family.
– Our goal is to be near $0 for 2016.

So…why the picture above? Installing solar panels after the roof is installed has risks…namely leaks. We are now figuring out the best way to fix the roof, but we are committed to solar!

Grafting – Part 1

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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

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