I am a big fan of early blending, for reasons of wine stability and flavor integration, but my 2010 vintage red wines had other ideas about how I should conduct the élevage (the raising, upbringing, or education of a wine). For starters, they have taken a solid six months to find their way through malolactic fermentation, a situation some winemakers would consider horrific and others can only dream of. Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon fame (and of the latter school of thought) has even argued for blending pre-ML, but I am not brave enough to try to imagine a finished wine when tasting it in its most raw form.
To make a long story short, here are the wines now, back in their barrels after a nice racking, a little oxygen, some SO2, and…absolutely no blending.
The Malbec wanted no part of the Cabernet Franc, and the Cabernet Franc felt no need to play along with the Malbec.
Is this because I have lost my touch with blending? (Perfectly conceivable)
Is it because each wine is flawless by itself? (this can hardly be true)
Is it because each wine expresses regional and varietal character? (I sure hope so)
We’ll bottle these wines this winter as part of my general plan of élevage which moves towards less barrel time and more of a focus on bottle time, and then we’ll see.
Author Archives: Gus
2010 Vintage Blending (or not)
First Racking – Not So Gentle Winemaking
I know, I know, all of us winemaking folks are supposed to adhere to the philosophy of “gentle winemaking” at every step of the way. Gentle winemaking has become one of those catch-phrases whose meaning is almost, well, meaningless. I am sorry to have to report that sometimes a wine needs to be roughed up a bit.
In this case the 2010 Malbec has had a long, long secondary fermentation, not completing its conversion of its high levels of malic acid (due to the cool vintage) until mid-May. Towards the end of the process, it was clear the wine was getting tired of being cooped up in barrels with a bunch of ML bacteria, no matter how beneficial they were.
The wine needed to breathe! So out of the barrel it came – gently, at this stage. A few days later, though, we took the unsuspecting wine and aggressively splashed it out the racking valve into a Brute, then pumped it back over into the top of the tank, agitating and aerating for about 7-8 minutes. I tasted every minute or two and enjoyed the evolution from a tight, brooding, closed-in style to a wine expressive of blackcurrants and black tea, reviving the freshness and intensity I remember enjoying in the vineyard.
Velo rides the San Francisco hills
Besides being the coldest, wettest spring in a decade or more, this has been the spring of the traveling winemaker. I’ve made an effort to get up to Portland, down to the Bay Area, and will next week be off to Seattle to meet face-to-face with the people who out there are buying Velocity wines and introducing them, bottle by bottle and glass by glass, to brave wine drinkers, willing to venture from the beaten path and try such brazen undertakings as Malbec and Viognier from the Rogue Valley.
These trips can be fun, educational and humbling for me, but this past trip to San Francisco was particularly enjoyable because I brought along my bicycle. The weather and traffic were cooperative, and I squeezed in two short rides between my duties in the marketplace. Thanks to a Charlie Morgan, a local friend, I was invited to join the Headlands Raiders for their Thursday morning jaunt throughout he city, out across the Golden Gate Bridge, up into the Marin headlands, and back again for coffee with ample time to head to work.
This is what they look like at summit:
Yes, that is the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, visible now that the sun is up.
Despite my advancing years and inadequate training, these kind folks allowed me to tag along and feel alive for a couple of hours. Charlie bought me coffee at Velo Rouge Cafe which used to carry my Velo red wine but no longer seems to. I forgave them because their coffee was so good, all french-pressed just like in Portland. The roaster is Blue Bottle Coffee and is memorable because it kept me awake and inspired, perhaps foolishly, to tack on a little solo ride afterwards up Twin Peaks and around the Noe Valley in search of some of those famously steep streets to test my mettle.
Oh, and wine sales went quite well, too, thanks to my hardworking friends at Real Wines Company.
William Augustus Viognier-Marsanne
Have I mentioned that I am making a white wine? It does often take me a while to get around to these things. The fact that my middle name is White (really) finally forced me to give in to the inevitable. Here it is, at least to look at:
The wine is a blend of Viognier (72%) and Marsanne (28%) and is named after my great, great grandfather, William Augustus White. That’s his silhouette on the bottle, from a 1923 photograph depicting him atop New York State’s highest peak, Mt. Marcy, on his 80th birthday. He was both a great book-lover and an enthusiastic outdoorsman, and I suspect that at even half his age I would have had some difficulty keeping pace with him on his birthday ascent.
The idea for this wine took hold two years ago, after I had made various whites in the Rogue Valley for eight years under several labels, from a range of varietals such as Pinot gris, Pinot blanc, Chardonnay, Roussanne, Grenache blanc, Marsanne and Viognier. As I brought the grapes in and made the wines in a variety of styles for clients or employers, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how consistently Viognier performed. Bursting with flavor, with a mouthfilling richness and an ability to stand up to barrel fermentation and lengthy lees contact, it promises to be one of the wines with which our little fledgling valley can really make a name for itself.
There are, however, some challenges to making Viognier here: it has a tendency to have higher alcohol and lower acidity than I think are appropriate for a good white wine. My approach was the same as with my other winemaking projects: select a site that yields balanced fruit. As it happens, Gold Vineyard came through again for me. With its higher elevation, easterly aspect, and Randy’s meticulous farming, we have so far been able to harvest two successive vintages (the ’09, bottled last month, and the ’10, just harvested last week) with moderate sugars, balanced acidity, and rich, mature flavors. No de-alcoholization, no acidification, just the straight deal from vineyard to glass.
And the Marsanne? To be honest, I was hedging my bets. I liked what I had seen of Marsanne so far, and was planning on using its lower sugars (below 22 Brix both years) and higher acidity to further correct Viognier’s potential problems of alcohol and balance. From a chemistry standpoint, my choice was unnecessary, since the Gold Vineyard fruit came in so nicely. However, the Marsanne brought a beautiful melon character to the wine, and further fleshed out the midpalate while slightly toning down the overtly floral nature of the Viognier. The grapes are grown on a west-facing slope out at Crater View Vineyard, near Jacksonville, Oregon.
We’ve been enjoying the wine at home, certainly, and I have released it in the Bay area through my excellent broker down there, Real Wines Company, so now I need to release it in Oregon and get it up on my website. The website thing may take a month, so be patient, but the wine is only improving since September’s bottling. Can I just say that I am very, very happy with it?
Vintage 2010 Showing Early Signs of Promise
I’ve been reluctant so far to hope for anything better than an average vintage from this challenging year, 2010, but this morning’s walk through the vineyard may have given me cause to feel a bit more confident. Randy Gold has done a stellar job managing nutrient and water availability throughout the season, to the point where, despite the likelihood, still, of a later-than-usual harvest, the vines and fruit are in position to achieve full maturity.
Here’s the Cabernet Franc in Block B:
And the Viognier…
And the Malbec (Clone 9).
But the most hopeful sign of all, perhaps, is that the old International has its rear forklift mounted in preparation for hoisting picking bins around the vineyard.
All that’s left to do is watch the weather and try not to worry.
Flowering and Fruit Set
Despite the cold, wet spring the vines have valiantly produced flowers, and have optimistically set a plentiful-looking crop. This is certainly a relief to growers and winemakers alike, who have been concerned about the difficult spring weather and the effect it may have on the 2010 vintage.
The only lasting impact from the wet spring has been to delay fruit development by about two weeks, which has most of us hoping for a warm, dry September and October.
That other pesky weather event of 2010, the May frost, has had the unfortunate, albeit not unexpected, effect of peppering certain areas of the vineyard with secondary shoots, whose clusters are forming yet another two weeks behind the already-delayed primary clusters.
The photo above (from July 7th) shows a still unopened, recently formed flower-cluster, from a secondary shoot, while the cluster on the lower right has already finished flowering and has set fruit – yes, those little green balls will become ripe, golden berries on this Viognier vine (or so we hope).
Few people want to harvest a vineyard block twice, picking the primary clusters on the first pass and the secondaries on the next (not to be confused with the small secondary clusters that emerge later in the season from lateral growth up higher in the vine’s canopy). For that reason, and to avoid the possibility this fall of mistakenly picking undeveloped clusters into a bin of otherwise ripe fruit, these secondary clusters will be removed at the time of leaf thinning, within the next week or two.
And quality? Of course we all want to be able to predict what sort of promise the vintage holds, but the truth is that at this point there are far too many variables at play. So far the summer is dealing us a very good hand, providing plenty of sunshine without excess heat, so the vines are able to photosynthesize as much as they’d like. The next point of reckoning will be at seed-hardening, when we’ll glance at the calendar again and see whether we’ve made up any of the lost time.
Bottling the 2009 Velo Malbec Rosé
The 2009 Velo Malbec Rosé was bottled on May 4th with a mobile bottling truck at RoxyAnn Winery in Medford. Working at better than a bottle per second, the line and crew made short work of my tiny (156 case) production.
Two days later Vernon Rollins at New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro in Talent, a few stones’ throws from where the grapes are grown, paid me a high compliment by taking a case of the new wine as his house rosé pour.
Now, more than a month after bottling, the wine is really showing its stuff, with fabulous aromas of grapefruit and strawberry-rhubarb, and a now signature racy acidity against a bone-dry finish with vibrant flavors of wild strawberries and cream.
Velocity Moves to Pallet Wine Company
May 27th, 2010 was moving day for Velocity Cellars. After eight fine vintages under the roof of RoxyAnn Winery in Medford, including six for which I worked as RoxyAnn’s winemaker, the day finally came for me to move on.
How does a winery just pick up and move? In my case, the advantage of being a winemaker with neither buildings nor equipment comes through in just this sort of situation. I hired a big truck and we moved eighty barrels across town in one morning with the help of Les (the driver), Peter (loading at Roxyann) and Linda and Josh (unloading at the other end).
Pallet Wine Company, my new home, is located just across town from my old digs at Roxyann, in an historic industrial building which has found a new life as a winery under the direction of Dan and Olivia Sullivan and their talented winemaker/partner Linda Donovan. Besides the lovely new paint job, they have transformed the interior into a full-scale production facility, complete with underground barrel storage, state-of-the-art crush equipment, and even a ROPP head on their bottling line (that’s industry-talk for a screwcap applicator, of which I am a big fan).
Why move? It is never an easy decision to make a big change, and in this case I was certainly in the enviable position of having a choice between two excellent facilities. In the end, the driving force had to be wine style. Pallet will permit me to undertake three significant shifts in my production: native yeast fermentation, micro-lot fermentation, and on-demand bottling under a screwcap, all of which will, I hope, allow me to better pursue my goal of truly regionally distinctive wines.
Thanks, Roxyann, for eight great years. Thanks, Pallet, for the opportunity to share your great facility in the coming years. And thanks, Linda, for a flawless job unloading barrels!
The Glamorous Art of Pruning, Part 2
Nearly two months have passed since I wrote about pruning. Here in the Rogue Valley we’ve spent much of that time waiting and worrying. It has been cold, and very wet, and our vines are off to a slow start. On May 6th we had a frosty night, with temperatures dipping several degrees below freezing and causing some damage to the tender, young shoots.
From an academic perspective, these are interesting times to evaluate the pros and cons of the two main pruning techniques, spur and cane. From a vineyard management perspective, however, it is downright annoying. The results of the frost will be felt throughout the growing season, requiring additional hand-work and a sharp eye to spot the shoots and clusters which, having formed from secondary buds when the primary one got frozen, will be ripening fruit (if at all) at a pace behind that of the majority of the vineyard. We will have to be vigilant early on about removing any fruit which threatens to be unripe at harvest time.
Upon inspection at Gold vineyard, the spur-pruned plants appeared to have done a little better in the cold, if only because at each spur position there were five or six green shoots, so there was some insurance against loss of the uppermost (albeit the most fruitful) ones. The vines with canes that were frosted, however, will likely have areas devoid of healthy shoots and will yield a reduced crop as a result.
Still, there are plenty of very healthy-looking shoots out there. These are Viognier from Gold vineyard:
This cane-pruned example shows how nicely this pruning method provides a well-spaced, uncluttered line of shoots, making the process of shoot thinning (removing excess shoots to prevent crowding) relatively fast and easy. This is, in my mind, one of the big advantages of cane pruning, compared to the relative clutter of growth at each spur.
Which would I rather shoot-thin? One can see that there is fairly little to do to the cane, while the thinning of just two spurs on a cordon required some careful work on this Sauvignon Blanc at Upper Five Vineyard.
Before shoot thinning:
…and after:
Terry Sullivan has chosen cordon pruning, with its orderly rows of short spurs, for his vineyard for the simple reason that he doesn’t like to cane prune. Regardless of his motivations, it seems a wise choice considering the vigor of his Sauvignon Blanc, and the wider spaces between vines to accommodate its growth habit. Cane pruning can be troublesome at spacing greater than six feet between vines, so the permanent cordon makes sense here.
Still, just like the pruning process itself, the resulting shoot-thinning process is more repetitive and simple with the spur, and more nuanced and subjective with the cane. When evenness and consistency are the goal, the spur is difficult to get wrong, and so is currently the preferred choice of most winegrowers in this region.
We would be wise to remember, however, that the first buds on every new shoot in 2010, whether it grows from a cane or a spur, are forming in unfavorably cool conditions, which will tend to restrict their fruitfulness in the following year. Spur-pruned vines in particular may shower fewer, smaller clusters in 2011 because of this cold spring. The good news is that this can sometimes mean less work thinning the crop down, and may even bode well for a low-yielding, high-quality vintage.
But first we’ll get through this one.
The Glamorous Art of Pruning, Part 1
So much goes into making a good bottle of wine. Besides the requisite rows of polished stainless tanks and candle-lit chestnut-hooped barrels, there is the furrowed brow of the philosophical winemaker and the vast, imposing backdrop of the arched and pillared winery itself. Surely there is little significance, and certainly less glamor, out in the muddy, dormant vineyard in winter?
Winemakers joke about the most important tool of their trade. For some it is their nose, for some a mop, and now, perhaps, it is even the ubiquitous Blackberry, iPhone, or the like. For me, just ahead of my bicycle, it is a pair of pruning shears. Mine are standard-issue Felco no. 2. I don’t use them as frequently or as vigorously as I used to, but they accompany me on critical trips to the vineyard.
Pruning is not glamorous. It is done in unpleasant weather, all day long, quite monotonously. It is not highly-paid work, and rarely garners public attention like a pressing or a bottling might. Yet the well-executed art of the pruner lays the foundation for the production of all high-quality wines.
Left to its own devices, a grapevine will produce a tangle of shoots, in the hope that one or two will find their way to the top of a tree and produce some fruit there which may prove attractive to a passing bird, thereby assuring the continuity of the species. In brief, the goal of pruning (and subsequent vine management) is to fool the vine into thinking that every one of its grape clusters is so ideally positioned, and therefore to pack every berry with maximum flavor for the fortunate bird. Pruning is also the first, and most important, step in controlling yield, helping assure that the vine’s limited resources are allocated to only as much fruit as can confidently achieve ripeness.
All pruning methods are some adaptation of either cane or spur pruning – two words which capture the somewhat punitive nature of the task. Whether one is employing one of the many common variations on the theme, including guyot, bi-lateral cordon, lyre, Scott Henry, or simple head-pruning, one is still making use of either a cane, shown here,
or a spur, shown here,
to achieve the above goals of fruit-positioning and crop limitation. The obvious difference is that the spur pruning method makes use of several short sections of last-year’s growth to provide this year’s fruiting wood, while the cane pruning method employs one or two longer canes per vine. Thus, while both vines may have been pruned to, say, twenty buds per vine, the cane-pruned vine achieves this with two ten-bud canes, while the spur pruned vine achieves it with ten two-bud spurs. Sharp eyes will notice that the above cane-pruned vine also has one spur on each side, to provide next year’s cane and spur.
Why should this matter? Pruning style is usually determined by varietal, region, and the preferences of the vineyard manager. Certain varietals may bear fruit more consistently when cane pruned, especially those varietals which do not have very fruitful basal buds – the first bud on the shoot, which is always one of the two or three buds left on a spur. Other varietals perform better when spur pruned, and would yield inconsistently on a cane. Vineyards in cooler regions tend to lean more towards cane pruning, since it is a type of pruning that provides a degree of insurance against wild swings in crop load by not relying solely on the fruitfulness of the first two or three buds on a shoot. Those first few buds are the first to form, and therefore are the most likely to have developed during cold weather, a challenge which can restrict their tendency to bear fruit.
The cane vs. spur decision is also frequently a matter of logistics. Spur pruning of any sort is generally easier to teach and practice, and requires less subjective decision-making on the part of the person wielding the shears. This can be a relief to the vineyard manager looking for absolute consistency in the vineyard, where the varying pruning styles of individual workers does not have any real impact on the shape of the vines from row to row.
Cane pruning is often considered more of an art. The pruner must look at the vine as a whole, select a new fruiting cane of adequate girth, length, and position, make a cut to improve or maintain the desired shape of the vine, then take the added step of planning for the following year by leaving a renewal spur in a location that won’t interfere with the shoots growing from the fruiting cane, and that will maintain a low vine head. A skilled pruner enjoys the challenges of cane pruning, but when it is done badly it can create a lot of extra work in the vineyard.
The look of a cane pruned vineyard in early spring is unmistakable: light, airy, orderly and elegant.
In part two I will explore how two neighboring vineyards employ different pruning tactics, and why.