October 7, 2001

Many things were happening on October 7, 2001. As usual, summer had become fall in the Willamette Valley. The grape harvest was on, and St. Innocent winery was apparently finishing two days of harvesting Anden vineyard, what was then the upper part of what had been and is again the great Seven Springs vineyard, split briefly due to family issues. My beloved San Francisco Giants were finishing up a disappointing season. The war in Afghanistan began. And I took my first and only drive to Mollala, OR, to pick grapes to make my first wine.

When I'm out pouring my wine for the public, one of the most common questions I get is, "how long have you been making wine?" The answer is not necessarily so simple, though it's not as complicated as the other main question I get, "how did you get into wine?" With that one, I can cite any number of epiphanies, a sequence with which readers may be familiar. Being maybe five years old and going on a day trip to Napa during a big family reunion in San Francisco back in the 1970s, the scent of wine soaked wood from the cellar at Inglenook a memory that's never left me and never will. Or studying in Europe during college and traveling to the remarkably picturesque village of St. Emilion in the Bordeaux region. Or later that year living with in Austria and getting schooled in the dry white wines of the Wachau and Weinviertel by my Austrian hosts. Or the bottle of '86 Steltzner Cabernet that my brother poured for me on my first night of a cross-country road trip after leaving college. Or, or...there simply wasn't one epiphany. It's complicated I suppose.

But how long have I been making wine? I usually answer "since 1999," when I first volunteered in the cellar of a California zinfandel and syrah producer then just transitioning from home wine making to the professional ranks. As I've written, that experience provided the model for my own garage wine making before I joined the professional ranks in 2009.

Really, the first day I truly made wine, my own wine, was October 7, 2001, a dry and mild but cloudy Sunday that was otherwise unremarkable at the time, at least that morning, but became one of the most significant days of my life. And keeps on returning in ways I never expect.

I was a new homeowner then, with an unexpectedly large garage that seemed perfect for making wine. I had found a listing for pinot noir grapes outside of Mollala at a local wine making supply store and drove down the valley to pick some hundreds of pounds of grapes myself, the Giants game on the radio in the car on the drive and, later, on my boom box in the vineyard rows as I picked. Slowly. Very inexperienced.

I knew very little about making wine at that point. I was smart enough to ask the grower on the phone when the last sulfur spray had been but innocent enough to take the answer at face value, especially when I arrived to find the vines covered in sulfur dust. I knew that wasn't good but didn't know why, so I went for it anyway and found out the hard way why that was a huge mistake. Sure, the terroir of Mollala may be less than ideal for pinot noir, but the wine sucked because that sulfur reacted with yeast during fementation to create powerful (and powerfully bad) aromas called mercaptans. You know, what they put into natural gas so you can smell it. So you'll know something's wrong and call the gas company before an explosion. Unfortunately, wine is a nice proving ground for mercaptans. This wine succeeded on that level only.

I shouldn't be too hard on myself. The fermentation was otherwise fine. All the sugar converted to alcohol, the wine had good color and enough body to, in theory anyway, make a decent drink. It just smelled and tasted like boiled cabbage under a sewer grate on a summer day. Dank. Nasty.

Happily, I didn't give up. If wine making is about one's quest for new mistakes, for all the things that could possibly go wrong in the process with occasional genius along the way, I was off to a wonderful start. Still waiting for the genius of course, but it was a good start.

I kept bottles of that wine for years, occasionally getting the courage to open one to see if anything positive had happened to that horrible stench. No, it never did and the final bottle went down the drain maybe two years ago in a fit to rid the cellar of this and other failed experiments that had finally outlived any seeming usefulness.

I sort of wish I still had a bottle of that first wine, not because it would be any good. Rather just to see it, to know it was real, which of course it was but now is just memory. Instead, I have other things to remind me.

Take the 2001 St. Innocent Pinot Noir Anden Vineyard, a stray bottle I've held for many years waiting for the "right time" to open. As I've written, I'm clearing through many of these random bottles and the other night it was time for this wine to receive its due. And oh my god, if my first wine was that bad, this is incredibly good. A bit tannic but otherwise remarkable, astonishing even. Wine that tastes like nothing else but Oregon, with the masculinity of Seven Springs vineyard and a savor that only the best Oregon wines ever show. This bottle was too good for Friday pizza night at home.

Of course, I had none of this on my mind when I opened the bottle. It was just another wine I'd waited on too long, or thought I had anyway, that seemed to need opening. Now. I poured it and immediately the scent made me laugh. This is why I make Oregon wine. This smelled unlike anything else in the world, unlike any other place in the world. The words I use may not be so distinct, but the wine utterly is. Cherries, black tea, a sense of green moss on a forest floor otherwise covered in brown leaves and needles, dry and earthy the way hummus smells, ashy in a way that convinces me it's most or all Pommard clone, like Burgundy but nothing like the Cote de Nuits or Cote de Beaune, if that makes sense. This is simply Oregon, and lovely.

Then I turned the bottle to read the back label and found the pity stats winemaker Mark Vlossak likes to print. When it was picked, how long it was aged, when it was bottled, etc. And the pick dates here were October 5 and 7, 2001, bringing back that latter day in a flood of memory that I've been thinking about all weekend.

That crazy day when I heard on the radio about the start of war on my drive home, wondering for more than a moment if I wasn't a presumptuous fool for making wine in the face of such catastrophe. But it's what I do. And that's the day it really all began.

Dinner at Southpark

 

I had the opportunity a few nights ago to dine at Southpark restaurant in Portland. It's not the newest or flashiest restaurant in town but I love it just the same. I suppose I'm biased because they put my 2009 Vincent Eola-Amity Hills Pinot Noir on their list last year and did well with it. In truth this was a special place for me long before that, and not just for the crab cakes I seem to order on almost every visit.

This particular evening saw a collision between two of my worlds - my winery and my day job at a certain urban university in the heart of downtown Portland. This occasion was a visit from a new leader at the national organization that's affiliated with our faculty union, of which I'm treasurer. I thought it would be fiscally prudent to bring a bottle of one of my latest releases to share with dinner. Ok, I wanted everyone to try my wine, fine, I admit it. Happily, they loved it and, in all modesty, so did I. My 2010s are really rounding out and I couldn't be happier with them.

Of course, one bottle wasn't enough for the group, and I was asked to select another. Why not keep it in the family? So I ordered a bottle of the 2008 Grochau Cellars Pinot Noir Willamette Valley. Astute readers will remember that this wine, the 2004 vintage, struck me at a dinner at Higgins several years back. I'd heard of this John Grochau character. We had mutual friends but I'd never met him. That wine led me to contact him, taste a number of his 2005s then in barrel and write about them on this site. I thought John was doing really interesting work with grapes from the Willamette Valley and beyond, and before I knew it I was helping with harvest. Then he moved into Portland to make wine in the city and I kept helping him, then launched my own label on his bond, then became partners with two other friends in Guild Winemakers. And through it all we became friends.

That's a long way of saying...now you know why I don't write about his wines here anymore. Until now. The server pulled the cork and decanted the '08 GC and it was rocking good from the start. Good enough to tell you why I shouldn't write about it but am anyway. John's been barrel aging his wines longer in recent years, not to give any woodiness to the wine (that happens quickly in barrel aging anyway), but to allow for more evolution in the wine before bottling, more curing to use my own words.

The results are really nice. I love the deep fruitiness of the '08s in general, with good structure and savory qualities perhaps because alcohols were more moderate in this year. This wine has all that, with a scent of Douglas fir like you might find morel hunting in the coastal hills (oh my god, it's almost morel season). Plus there's a lovely mix of fresh fruit, cured meats and other interesting qualities from a bit more barrel aging. Overall, there's lovely balance and depth, richness and restraint, and as I'd hoped, everyone at the table loved it.

There you have it. A lovely evening at Southpark that I had to write about. I hope you'll understand.

Demanding wine

I'm pretty easy going and I appreciate how easy some wines are to understand, to satisfy in a way.

Still, the most compelling wines are demanding. They need something from you and, in the right case, I find myself happy to go where the wine leads. I'm not looking for wine to "perform," a word I hear too much. Wine isn't a show dog. I want the wine to compel me to act, to respond.

This 2004 Domaine Confuron-Cotetidot Vosne-Romanee is a good example of demanding wine. Powerfully complex aromatically, hard-edged texturally, there is no sign of any greenness that makes 2004 notorious in Burgundy.

Instead, this wine has an alluring perfume, wild to be sure and perhaps to the chagrin of the brett police. This isn't clean wine but it doesn't seem dirty to me either. Rather, it is full of iron and oaky spice to complement the red fruit flavors, floral like a syrah from the northern Rhone that you'd suggest was Burgundian.

The palate is tannic, there's no getting around it. But I find the tannin toothsome, not drying, the wine cleansing where overly soft, fruit-sweet wines finish syrupy and not refreshing.

With food, the tannin immediately seems a non-factor, though the pleasing edge to the wine remains. And I find myself holding the glass, smelling the perfume and setting the glass down without sipping. Exhaling, thinking of that fragrance, classic Burgundy like a Burberry scarf. Unmistakable.

Overthinking

The cellar clean out continues, with some hits and several misses. Some disappointments we should have seen coming. Others have been surprises. "Good" wines that simply weren't good, or didn't age well, or were overly brett infected or otherwise bitter. Sure, there have been good bottles but too many haven't turned out well. I find myself overthinking about why this is.

Then after a busy day for everyone today, we had a ziti and salad from the grocery store. Easy, pretty good, but better with a glass of red wine. Something simply fresh and delicious, perhaps more if one were lucky. So down to the cellar and I find the last bottle of 2005 Neudorf Pinot Noir "Tom's Block" Nelson, from the northern part of the southern island of New Zealand. No thinking was necessary. This was the wine.

The match was almost perfect. Baked pasta and red wine is about as good as it gets on a February night, no? And this wine delivered. Spicy black cherry flavors, a gravelly earth undertone coming out over time in the glass, good freshness at seven years old, this wine made me stop in the middle of dinner to remark to myself how good it was, how good it made the meal. Really, what more could you ask for in a wine?

A different kind of letting go

This bottle, the 2006 Domaine Meo Camuzet Bourgogne Hautes-Cotes de Nuits Clos Saint-Philibert, should have been wonderful. Again, wine from a top producer but not a top bottling. In this case, a simple Hautes-Cotes from a single vineyard, Clos Saint-Philibert, perched above the fanciest vineyard land in the world - Vosne Romanee. Meaning, this should be good. It is. I tried it a few years ago on release and bought a couple with the intent of aging them for a few years. So here we were, and here was a beautiful pair of Dungeness crab, ready for eating with a friend while watching the 49ers playoff game. A little bit of decadence on a Saturday afternoon.

Alas, the wine was corked. And so down the drain. Who cares. The crab was incredibly good and the game even better. So there.

Letting go

We are constantly letting go.

I'm reminded of this lately by my sister, who is writing a lovely blog called One Item a Day about her plan this year to get rid of one thing per day. It's a brilliant idea. The blog is sweet and poignant, extremely personal. It's all about letting go.

It's funny because in November I went through my wine cellar to do something similar. For one reason or another, I have many wines, mostly older ones, that need to be let go. Some are sure to be great, but they apparently need special occasions that never seem to come. Others are past their best, probably anyway, and that uncertainty is part of what makes letting go so much harder. Will it be a let down? I write that and I think, so what? It's just a bottle of wine. And yet here we are. Surely it's about more than just wine.

I bought the bottle to the right, the 2000 Henschke Keyneton Estate, almost four years ago. A single bottle from the best Australian producer (the one I would choose anyway), but not their top cuvee by a long shot and not something I should have held this long. Why did I? Maybe because I bid on it on my 39th birthday, in Manzanita, OR, from the kitchen table of a beachfront rental house shared with my parents. Readers may remember that birthday was particularly poignant for me. This bottle, only connected to that moment by chance, became part of that day, a foggy, misty memory now, Edenic.

Imagine a book that dissolves as you read it. That's how wine is. A memory. So this bottle sat, unopened, until November when I lined it up with many others and resolved to treat it differently than I had. To confront things, in a way. Then the other night I pulled the cork, a little nervous. Would I be disappointed? The wine tasted decent but was a little herbal and soft, the negatives compounded by enough age that the flavors simply lacked life. The wine wasn't dead at all, just gone. We often speak of a wine that sings. This wine was silent. I wanted it to be so good, better than it had any reason to be. It wasn't, and I should have known better.

A post from last weekend on my sister's blog brought all of this together for me. She wrote about finding long lost x-rays of her son's troubled esophagaus, from one point among others in his young life when she and her husband weren't sure he would survive the complications of Down's syndrome. About her tears finding something she forgot she even had, the old x-rays, and the feeling of how can something you forgot you had trigger such emotion and be so difficult to let go? Of course, we know the answer. We can all relate, no? It doesn't make it easier though.

That post in turn reminded me of a Lorrie Moore's devastating "People Like That Are The Only People Here." That story captures unlike any other how parenting must be about letting go. No matter what. The same with children I suppose. We are constantly letting go.

Christmas 2011 at home

Merry Christmas, dear reader. I'm home this year after several holidays at my childhood home in Los Angeles. Everything is focused on home, how good home feels, especially at Christmas.

For me, wine is always secondary at the holidays. Essential for the great holiday meals. Enjoyable for visiting with neighbors, family and friends. Just not the focus, and not necessarily the best match for my favorite holiday foods. One thing I'm missing this year in Portland are some good tamales, something I'd like to make fresh for Christmas one of these years, once I learn how to make them.

On Christmas night, it's just the family at home at the 1998 Laurel Glen Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma Mountain and flat iron steak, a onion and gruyere tart, Brussels sprouts (yes, named for the city) and the most essential of holiday foods, the mashed potato. Dinner will surely be delicious.

But the wine? It is mature, lovely and ready now but I'm sure has the staying power this producer is known for. This is aromatic cabernet, more in the Loire style than Bordeaux, more about tobacco and herbs and the caramelization of age than heavier, richer cabernet of the Medoc. If you're into that, and I am, this is a wine you will love, treasure even. Something you'll keep when others might not, sure you'll be rewarded. I'm sure you will.

This is how Christmas should be. Home. And for those who can't be home yet, a taste of what will be.

Harvest 2011 part 7: celebration

Harvest 2011 in Oregon's Willamette Valley is complete. The grapes picked, the new wines safely through fermentation and in barrel (unless you're Barnaby at Teutonic Wine Company, who told me last week that he was picking his last riesling on Saturday - December 3!).

All that remains is the harvest celebration. This year the Guild Winemakers bunch celebrated together, a low key gathering of partners to talk about the harvest and anything else that came to mind. Such get togethers never last long enough. Why can't meals with friends last for days instead of hours?

I thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with an older wine I recently found. So the 1987 Nozzole Chianti Classico Riserva, pale in candlelight, brilliantly translucent, more than alive, growing with airtime to show its Tuscan sangiovese roots and all the layers of time. Not a great wine, but certainly pleasurable, much more than just a novelty of the past, so beautiful.

This harvest, this whole year was incredible. Unusual. Something I don't want to go through again. But the results are incredibly exciting. The wines we have in barrel taste electric. Ripe with a burst of flavor and yet so full of energy, so lively. They need to settle down and complete the secondary malolactic fermentation, which softens the young wine. Then time in barrel and bottle. Time will be everything for these wines.

We won't really see what we have for ten years, though of course we will check in frequently along the way, in cask and bottle. Already barrels need topping up only a few weeks after being filled. Otherwise, there is little to do now that harvest is done. This time is the elevage, the education of the wine, requiring patience.

So we eat and drink and finish the year, glad to be through with harvest and ready now for everything else a year brings. Harvest will be back again soon enough. But let's drink a little more old Chianti before thinking about that.

Harvest 2011 part 6: barreling

At this point, the new wine from each fermenter settles for a few days in a separate container. Press wine is kept separate as well. Everything settles for a few days before the wine goes into barrel. All that's left to do now is fill barrels.

Filling barrels means washing barrels first, then smelling them to see if they're fit for wine. These two look beautiful and smell sweet and fresh despite a few years of prior use. Good French oak - all we use - is a wonderful thing for wine.

Each barrel gets filled and tagged with a note on what's inside. Barrels are paired side by side on racks, the racks then stacked three high and put away into the barrel storage area.

To wait. And wait.

Through the winter and spring, when the malolactic fermentation will happen, softening what are now young, raw wines. Then into the summer, before the wines will be drawn off the fine sediment that settles out in barrel and blended for bottling before the next harvest.

Once the last barrel is filled and the final tanks and hoses cleaned out, harvest is done. Now it's time for a harvest dinner to celebrate the vintage. Tomorrow night in fact, I can't wait.

Harvest 2011 part 5: draining

Draining and pressing is what you do once the red wine is done fermenting. 

We begin by tipping a small fermenter and putting a siphon into the grapes and new wine.

As the wine is gently pumped out, the grape skins floating on the surface of the liquid gradually drop to the bottom of the bin. I like how they cling to the top of the "torpedo" that sucks out the wine.

The new wine goes into a tank to settle before going into barrel. The grape skins go into the press to squeeze out every last bit of juice. Here you see how we use the fork lift to dump the grapes into the press.

The big pan under the press captures the milky press wine, which we pump into a separate tank to settle before it goes also into barrel.

 The pump, with hoses not in proper order.

 Wise advice on the press, full of moving parts.

The harvest lunch table. Ok, this is exceptional, but nearing the end of harvest means more time to celebrate things. All that's left to do is put the new wine into barrel.

Harvest 2011 part 4: plunging

or

Pumping over Vincent Pinot Noir, once early on to give oxygen to the yeast.

Waiting this year for the fermenters to start their fermenting was especially nerve wracking for me. Last year one fermenter went a little sideways on me. The resulting wine was good, just not what it might have been. This year, a few days into crush I was sure something was terribly wrong with everything. I felt an inexplicable doubt about the whole process, the doing nothing, waiting for luck to happen. Still we did nothing, waiting for some good carbon dioxide to emerge before plunging the first time. Finally it happened.

Plunging Bjornson vineyard, never shy on color. Very interesting, muscular Pin

Before harvest, a thread on Wine Berserkers offered a nice debate on how many or few punchdowns make sense for Pinot noir. One camp says just a few are necessary. Another camp, predominant in the U.S., says no, no, no, frequent punchdowns are required to extract color and flavor, not to mention keeping the fermentation healthy and happy. I felt some bravado and wrote about how we don't punchdown much, how at a winemaking conference we heard from a famous producer in Burgundy about the "one" punchdown they do for the top end Musigny. Turns out we did between eight and 10 punchdowns in each fermenter over 18 days, more than I would have guessed but still not a lot compared to usual regimes locally. The wines don't lack for color and the fermentations were extremely healthy, so it just didn't make sense to do anything more. Same with yeast foods or anything else. The grapes were terrific this year. And plunging fewer times helps let the natural core of heat in the fermenter build up, rather than constantly mixing things up and wondering why the temperature isn't going up.

I'm not about color in Pinot noir, but this is remarkable nonetheless.

The result? Beautiful, young, raw wine that needs time in wood. Time it now gets, harvest completely done, all new wines in barrel. The vibrant color of new wine is unmatched. You may not love the green apple acidity of this unfinished drink, but that color is remarkable. Astonishing even.

Harvest 2011 part 3: waiting

Last time I wrote about bringing in several tons of Pinot noir from Armstrong Vineyard on this past October 20. Turns out that same day, we also brought in Vincent Wine Company's one ton of Pinot from Zenith Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills. With the three fermenters full of Armstrong fruit, we ended the day with four full fermenters of destemmed grapes ready to become wine.


So how does that happen? Every which way you can imagine. You can add yeast or let ambient yeast spontaneously ferment the grapes. You can chill the grapes before they start to ferment to let them "cold soak," so that color, texture, flavor and aroma elements in the grapes can gently steep into the grape juice before alcohol has been created. You can heat the grapes to encourage fermentation, much as you might put dough in a warm place to rise. You can add nutrients to feed the yeast and keep them healthy. Sugar to boost alcohol levels in the finished wine in cold years like this one. Acidity to boost acid levels if the grapes are too ripe (not much of an issue this year). Tannin to fix color and, yes, soften the texture of the finished wine. Enzymes to help the grape matter break down more readily, for enhanced extraction. Sulfur dioxide as a preservative. You name it.



No matter what you choose to do or not do in your winemaking, fermentation is all about sugar in the grapes and grape juice changing into alcohol, producing carbon dioxide and heat in the process. The winemaker simply wants to guide the process. Our process is to do that extremely minimally. This year the approach was this:

• Pick and process the grapes
• Let them soak at ambient temperature until they begin to ferment on their own
• Do one "pump over" - using a pump to suck out the juice at the bottom of the fermenter and spraying it over the top, to mix the juice and give air to the yeast
• Do nothing for days until fermentation is active enough so you get a little hit from the carbon dioxide of fermentation
• That means nothing - no punch downs or pump overs - just a little spritz of sulfur if necessary to keep things fresh
• Once fermentation is nice and active - after about 10 days - the first punch down is highly aerative to feed the yeast more
• Then punchdowns once a day for the six to eight days as the yeast convert sugar to alcohol and temperatures in the fermenter get into the 80sF if not 90F.
• Drain the new wine and press the grape skins to get everything out
• Let the new wine settle for a couple days, then put into barrel for the winter

With the late harvest and cold temperatures when it came time to make wine, we played with some aquarium heaters to help encourage the spontaneous fermentation in some bins. With the last fermenter, we didn't even use heat. We just waited, with patience knowing everything would work out. And it did.



In the end, we saw some nicely flavored and colored wines from Armstrong and Zenith. Good raw material you might say, fully ripe tasting but with alcohols in the 12.5% and bright acidity, wine that will change dramatically in barrel but already you know it's going to be good. 2011 is that kind of year.

Harvest 2011 part 2: grapes!

8am, October 20 at Armstrong vineyard on Ribbon Ridge. Picking bins scattered around the vineyard and a fast crew of pickers working through the rows. The Vincent Wine Company harvest begins.

In most years, October 20 would see the last grapes coming in to local wineries. Ok, some late, late pickers and people who make Riesling would still be holding on. The point remains, this was a very late beginning to harvest and yet look at the sky. Beautifully blue, the ground dry, even a bit dusty after more than a week of dry weather (that would continue almost through the month).

A little while later, four tons of gorgeous Pinot noir clusters rest in a series of bins, waiting to be loaded on a flat bed truck that will take them to the winery. As the bins get filled with buckets of freshly picked grapes, a few of us pick out any rotten clusters, leaves and anything that doesn't look good.

I always like to taste berries and occasionally chomp into a cluster to see how things taste, careful to avoid seeds. This year, the flavors are ripe but the acidity seems strong, giving a fresh quality to the flavors, an energy that I'm looking for. The grape skins seem relatively thick, perhaps because of the cool year, and I think that I want to make sure the wines don't end up too tannic. File that thought away.

Later at the winery, our trusty grower Doug Ackerman (right) and several other kind volunteers help do another sort of the grapes. Again, we pull out any rotten cluster we find, any leaves, anything we don't want in the fermenters. It's tedious work but vital for producing great wine. The volunteers' reward? Fun talking wine and everything else you can imagine on the sorting line. Then some dinner and wine for taking home. Thank you volunteers!

From here, the clusters go through the destemmer to separate the grapes from their stems, dropping the berries into a fermenter waiting below. We end up filling three small fermenters with the fruit from three different blocks at Armstrong, each to be fermented and barrel aged separately before we blend in about year before bottling. Now comes the waiting period, where the grapes sit undisturbed until they ferment on their own. This year, as usual, it takes several days to begin. More on that next time.

Harvest 2011, part 1 - it's a miracle

Yes, always.

Seriously, that has to be the answer if anyone ever again asks if the harvest is going to turn out. After this year, how could you say any different?

In the brief history of wine grape growing in Oregon's Willamette Valley, this year was historically cold and late. How late? Bud break in Pinot noir vines that should be in full swing in mid-April was still happening after Mother's Day because spring was so wet and cold. Flowering should happen by mid-June. This year it finally occurred on and after the fourth of July for the same reason. But the weather was great for flowering, meaning that lots of flowers that might have been knocked off by June wind and rain actually set as fruit, making for a potentially huge crop that might never get ripe. So growers immediately went into major triage mode, cutting off lots of new grape clusters to reduce the size of the crop in the hope of making sure what remained on the vines would actually ripen. Crop thinning happens every year, but this year it was more important than ever.

A nice benchmark for grape growing locally is that you might harvest grapes 100 days after flowering. So when flowering peaked in early July, I wrote here that we might begin picking around October 12. Ideally you would get more than those 100 days to further develop grape flavors and tannin, but this year that would put harvest into late October and early November for the coolest sites. If you don't know Willamette Valley weather, understand that we have warm and dry summers that often last into October. This is a great place for grape growing. But ask any kid around here - come Halloween it's usually cold, wet and windy. You really don't want to be sitting there in July thinking about harvesting grapes around Halloween, so you can imagine how hard it was to stay optimistic this year.

July proceeded to be relatively cool though dry, with August continuing the dry streak and summer temperatures finally coming on strong. I believe we didn't hit 90F locally until mid-August, ridiculously late for such a benchmark. Then the season began to turn in our favor. September was warmer overall than July and we entered October still facing a mid-month start to harvest, but on the cusp of something special if the weather held out.

It didn't, at least at first. Early October saw a quick change to autumn with cold temps and rain. Immediately we saw media reports of a ruined harvest, before any grapes had been picked. I'll admit, it was hard to remain optimistic, but what choice did we have? Then the skies cleared and the rest of October was amazingly mild and notably dry, perfect for ripening grapes. Finally, on October 20 it was time for our first pick of the season, at Armstrong vineyard on Ribbon Ridge.

How did it go? The picture at the top shows the sunrise October 20 from Bell Road as I made my way out to the vineyard. No fog, no rain, just a beautiful, perfect morning that told me we indeed had something special about to happen. Stay tuned for part 2, which won't take another month to write up. Harvest is finally about done and I couldn't be more excited for the results. Plus, now I have a little free time again.

Harvest 2011 begins, finally

Harvest 2011 begins Thursday for Vincent Wine Company. We’re picking everything from our blocks at Armstrong Vineyard on Ribbon Ridge and Zenith Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills. I am so excited. After this crazy growing season, where historic cold weather delayed budbreak until May and flowering until July, we’re near the end of October and finally we pick grapes.

How is the quality? We won’t really know until we have the fruit in the fermenters, but sugar levels are in the low 20s brix and pHs are in the 3.2 to 3.3 range. Just where I want them, for making wines with ripe flavors but energy, life, acid balance. Flavors are mixed, meaning some pretty explosive tasting berries and others with some bracing qualities that I prize. Let’s remember, we’re making wine, not fruit juice or eating grapes. I think grape flavors are overrated. Wine is a curing process. We’re taking raw meat and making bacon. There’s a big difference in the two. I’m looking for something in the final product that you can’t necessarily see in the raw material. What I want now are healthy, ripe grapes from a successful growing season. We have that.

And what a crazy growing season it was. A good indicator of a growing season here is at least 100 days from flowering until harvest, maybe 110 or longer depending on the season. Our early July flowering meant 100 days would be around October 12. In many years, we’d finish picking at that time. This year we knew we probably wouldn’t even begin until then. Crazy. Harvest is an outdoor activity. Does anyone think that outdoor events in the Willamette Valley in mid-October or later is a good idea?

Now, on the eve of October 20, we will finally pick. The grapes have had a long season after all. Turns out we’ve gotten the weather we need and things are turning out. I wouldn’t advise more seasons like this. Don’t plan an outdoor wedding this time of year. But for now, it looks like we might get lucky.

Stay tuned for more on harvest. Now I need some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long, and I hope great, day.

Harvest approaches in the Willamette Valley

It's weird to say in mid-October that harvest hasn't really started in the Willamette Valley. Yes, some white grapes are in. The Pinot, however, waits. Along with pretty much everything else.

This year is indeed historic. Cold. Late. Essentially unprecedented. In response, growers have mostly cut back to one cluster of grapes per vine shoot. The idea is to limit the grape crop to make sure what you still have on the vines will get ripe, even in an historically cold year.

The funny thing is, flowering took place during perfect weather around July 4. Late, but perfect. As a result, grape clusters on average are well above normal. We still haven't picked, but I'm seeing 150g to 200g clusters of Pinot Noir. Usually that might be 80g to 120g or so, depending on the clones or types of Pinot Noir sub-varieties.

I'm thinking the story this year isn't the cold weather or late harvest. September was like July should have been. We've had a nice growing season. The clouds are due to break and we should have nice gusty, warm drying winds next week. Things look good on the grape front.

Once the grapes are picked, the story will be big yields even when people tried to cut back. Those big clusters, even just a handful or two per vine, add up to more tonnage per acre. If clusters are at least 50% bigger than normal, that's going to be a lot more wine to put into barrel than we might have been expecting.

As I say too much, but it's true - stay tuned.

End of the growing season

The winegrape harvest in the northern Willamette Valley is so close. In a normal year, I would be picking pinot noir from lower elevation warmer sites. This year we are still weeks away, with doom on the horizon.

Portland, where I am, saw delightful autumn weather today. A cool morning, then sunny skies with temperatures in the low 80s for a while in the afternoon. September has been warmer than July, just when we needed it after such a cold season. Vineyards have really been progressing this month. If things could hang on, you're thinking this could be classic.

Until you see the forecast. Cold, windy and rainy. Perhaps epic amounts of precipitation. Or maybe it's just the usual soaking here and there, with dry times in between, bad but now awful. Either way, tough.

Which makes me think of harvest 2005. The calendar is the same this year as 2005, and Thursday the 29th, 2005, was the last in a string of lovely days. The next three days saw two inches of rain in Portland, ushering in a month of on and off again rain and maybe two days at 70F or higher in October.

The moral of story. Oh my god. No, seriously, October can be cold and wet. We just need to deal with it, especially in what has been exceptionally cold and wet growing season. We just need to pick low brix, high acid pinot noir and make great wine, like people do elsewhere in the world with the same situations. I'm kind of excited about it. [what I don't want is rot and mold from rain and generally damp conditions. We'll see about that.]

So, it's going to be a long two weeks before I think we might start picking at one of our sites. The other two will be another week at least. What a late and, now, possibly wet harvest. All you can do now is watch the skies.

2010 Vincent Wine Company Pinot Tasting

Readers may recall that I make wine. When I pour my wines, it's always fun meeting people who read this site. I'm holding another event this weekend and readers, please, come and taste my latest wines.

I'm releasing all my 2010 Pinot Noirs this Sunday, October 2, 1-5pm at the Slate, a mixed use space at 2001 NW 19th Avenue in Portland. I'll be pouring with friend and Guild Winemakers partner Anne Hubatch, who will be sampling her latest release of Helioterra wines.

It's a drop in thing, very casual, open to the public. There is no charge to taste. We will be selling all our new releases, so please buy wines that you like. The holidays are coming.

I will have small amounts of both of my 2010 single vineyard bottlings available. 2010 is the third year I've made Zenith Vineyard wine, all Pommard clone on a shallow soiled knoll in the vineyard. Red fruited, delicate and subtle, aged completely in older oak. The prettiest wine I've made.

This is the first year of Armstrong Vineyard from Ribbon Ridge, on Lewis Rogers Lane just down from Ayres and Brickhouse. Darker, more black-fruited wine as you would expect here. 25% new oak, good density, a more substantial wine.

A few local shops and restaurants will have these wines, but not many. And not for long. Hope you can join us this Sunday to taste.

Late summer

It's summer and everything and nothing is going on. The tomatoes are coming on. The sunflowers tall and lanky.

And the nocino sits in the garden, baking in the daylight and heat. Brown now, the color of coffee but thicker. Chartreuse even, when sloshed around. The nocino will stay out here until November and still be a touch raw then.

Meanwhile I just got back from a short visit to the southern Okanagan Valley of central British Columbia. More on that later. But it's amazing how driving up US 97 through Washington, you go from nowhere Washington to the vibrant Okanagan valley on the Canadian side.

Immediately across the border it's orchards and vineyards tucked in remarkable places above the lake and below the glacier-carved granite walls. Truly wonderful landscape, and amid lots of good wine, I found what might be great wine. Certainly the best dry wine I've tried from BC. More later

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Reading KCole

I'm on vacation in California - non-wine vacation, with family - so maybe that explains my absence. There just isn't too much to write about, what with hiking in the Sierra and playing some golf, drinking cold beer and eating too much, now in the SF area for a few days to see in-laws before a weekend return to Portland.

However, I have been reading. For pure pleasure, I'm reading Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. And for "work" I'm reading Katherine Cole's Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers. I'll review it slightly more formally when I finish it, soon.

For now, Cole is simply a pleasure to read, making Fitzgerald wait or at least share the bedside table. I wasn't sure what she would write about biodynamics, but as I tweeted last week when starting the book, she brings a nice mix of intrigue and healthy skepticism to the topic. The result is a lovely profile of the Oregon wine scene, which in reflection is centered more on biodynamics than I realized. I highly recommend it to any wine geek interested in Oregon, biodynamics, and ideally both.

"Everybody's playing in the heart of gold band..."

I've long wondered if that Robert Hunter lyric above was a reference to Neil Young's song Heart of Gold. I do know Edmunds St. John's white wine bottling of that name is a Neil Young reference. It's also absolutely delicious in the 2008 edition I picked up locally not too long ago.

The 2008 Edmunds St. John Heart of Gold is a blend of Grenache Blanc, a classic white Rhone variety, and Vermentino, known as Rolle in France. It is gorgeous. Inspirational even. I'd love to explore white grapes like these in my wine production here in the the Pacific Northwest. Note to self - research who's growing stuff like this within a few hours of Portland.

The wine fittingly has a lovely light gold color. The aroma is similarly golden and something I think wine lovers everywhere could love even if they've never heard of these lower profile grapes. There are aromas of lemons, minerals, pastry dough and the exotic scent of stone fruit flesh and pits. Not quite peach or apricot, maybe something between.

The flavors are zippy and bright, with lemons and a waxy roundness. There's perhaps a touch of heat from alcohol, but it just adds to the body and intrigue of the wine. The finish lingers. I love this wine, and for $15 or so locally, you can't go wrong.