--Wherein Wes and Chanda continue their ‘on tour' status, traveling to Disneyland and Woodland Hills to teach Southern Californians all about pinot noir and Clos Pepe.  Also included: info about canopy management.

 

It feels like I haven't been home in weeks, even though I've had a day or two to sleep in my own bed over the past 15 days. I think about winemakers who live on the road selling wine, and it must weigh on them. Perhaps that is their proper penance for not having a vineyard to manage (most sane winemakers just buy fruit instead of growing their own like we do). In the past two weeks we've been to Pomona to judge wine for a week, took a whirlwind trip to San Francisco to be on Gene Burns radio show on KGO Radio, and then off to Anaheim to spend this week doing four days of wine education and promotion at Disney's Food and Wine Festival. It's been a fantastic run, but I'm ready to get back into the rhythm of the vineyard. Enough of the madness of the general public, I'm ready to go to sleep tonight to the sound of crickets under foggy skies-not 12 year old girls screaming as the roller coaster dumps them over a steep drop.

The week:

Pomona>>Santa Rita Hills>>San Francisco, all within 8 hours: I returned from the LA County Fair's Los Angeles International Wine and Spirits Competition on Friday around 2 pm, and within 15 minutes (just as long as it took for me to find a sick deal online for a hotel room that night on the Embarcadero) I was back in the car hurtling towards San Francisco-one of my favorite cities in the world. I had promised the producers of Pinot Days (a fantastic yearly festival that travels from SF to Chicago to New York) that I would do a half hour interview with Gene Burns' ‘Dining Around' program. There was part of me that assumed I would be able to call in my part of the interview-but Gene is an Old School perfectionist and insisted I be in studio. So I did my best not to think about how many hours on the road would be necessary per minute of interview and decided the experience would provide a great excuse to just fire up to the City for a few hours of fun. I checked into the hotel around 7:30, and found out that a highly rated Japanese restaurant and sushi bar was part of the hotel and provided room service. I only felt slightly lazy not going out on the town, but after a full day on the road the chance to order great sushi as room service and watch the Lakers spank Denver was as good of a conclusion as I could have asked for. The next morning I woke and, fulfilling a dream of a guy who lives 12 miles from the nearest coffee shop or bakery, walked across the street to the Ferry Plaza and got myself a good cup of Blue Bottle coffee (some of the best in the US), an Acme Bakery baguette, and sat on a bench and watched the world jog by. The interview started at 1:30, and I was back on the road leaving San Francisco by 2 pm. A few of my ‘City' friends called and heckled me for not staying at least long enough to get dinner, get drunk and pass out on their couch. Next time, there's always next time. And to San Francisco, that gem of a City on the Bay, I have to apologize for our one night stand. I'll call you, really I will.

Monday's Vineyard Checkup: After getting back to the vineyard Saturday night, I slept well and then woke early to prepare for a group of Japanese tasters expected at 10:30 am. The tour went great and they even brought me a bottle of extremely rare Japanese sparkling wine which will come into play later in the blog. I was able to also take a quick cruise around the vineyard to make sure the vines were all doing well and to assess the work list for the crew. Later on Sunday I put together the work sheet, including the following practices:

5 gallons of water per vine. As we're finishing flowering in the vineyard, the vines are fairly finicky right now about their water and nutrient status. Why it matters: They are deciding how much crop load they can bring to ripeness with the available moisture and ‘food' in the ground, and I want them to feel happy and secure enough to keep the small amount of crop (a few pounds of potential pinot noir per vine) on the vine. An unhappy vine may send signals to the flowering clusters that there isn't enough love to go around, and the cluster may abandon many of the berries, which will shrivel and fall off the cluster in a process called ‘shatter'. Shatter can also be caused by heavy winds, rain, hail, or other conditions that compromise the delicate flowers that arise from the berries.

Petiole samples. Petiole samples are a vineyard practice that allows us to gauge the real-time nutrient status of the vines, vineyard block by vineyard block. A petiole is the ‘stem' of a leaf-the thin tubular structure that attached the leaf blade to the growing shoot. Why it matters: Using the petioles that are growing right next to the clusters, we can have them analyzed for nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous (the main, or macro, nutrients) as well as calcium, boron, zinc and other micro-nutrients. The lab requires a small baggie filled with petioles that they heat dry, pulverize, and then test. The results will be back in a few weeks, and you know I'll share them with you. This year's petiole samples will guide our fertilization program next year.

 

Canopy management: shoot positioning and leaf plucking. The lion's share of vineyard management consists of manipulating the vine to make the ‘fruiting zone' a perfect environment for ripening and flavor development. What we want to encourage is sun flecking and air movement.
Why it matters:
• Sun exposure activates the grapes to protect themselves against sunburn. They produce color compounds and thicker skins-both of which will produce richer and more expressive pinot noir. We have to be careful not to expose the fruit so much that the fruit can burn on warmer days, so our level of leaf plucking is carefully managed by over a decade of fine tuning, and a crew that has mostly been here throughout the vineyard's life.
• Mildew and rot do not like direct sun exposure, and air movement that is encouraged by removing leaves also reduces the incidence of powdery mildew and bunch rot.
• All winegrapes have a compound within the skins called ‘pyrazines'. The strongest and most noxious of these is meth-oxypyrazine, which smells and tastes just like green bell pepper. The compound can be removed from winegrapes by sun exposure. And as I don't appreciate pyrazine character in my wines (perhaps a little white pepper in Syrah is ok...), we do everything we can to get sun on the fruit, remove the pyrazines, and to promote the high-toned berry character that emerges in wines that have been grown with proper sun exposure in an open canopy.

So we want to open the fruiting zone up (as shown in the pictures) to a level that balances sun and wind exposure with the vine's attempts to protect the clusters against harsh sunlight on hot days. The way we've found to strike that balance is to remove almost all leaves from the east, or morning, side, and only a few leaves from the afternoon side. This way the gentler morning sunlight penetrates the canopy, and the grape bunches have a ‘sombrero' for the long summer and fall afternoons (during the short and rare periods where temperatures go over 80 degrees). It's also important that the entire leaf AND petiole is removed together. Lazy leaf pulling retains torn leaves and petioles which are more prone to mildew and can increase mildew incidence in the vineyard. I insist that the leaf pulling is done with great care, and we may move a little slower through this process than some vineyards. The timing of leaf pulling should coincide with the conclusion of flowering and fruit set. The earlier the clusters are exposed to light after ‘set', the more time they will have to be bathed in sunlight and flavor and expression will be improved.

Disneyland: Chanda, Oliver and I had a fantastic time at Disneyland teaching wine. There was just enough time to walk around each of the two parks and nibble junk food and people watch. We hope to do this each year, and it seems that folks really enjoyed my hour-long wine classes. In between the classes we saw enough crazy kids and flustered adults that we began calling the visit ‘the ultimate in birth control'. Sure there are also super cute and well-behaved kids that give me a paternal urge-but it's quickly evident at Disneyland that there are probably enough children in the world at this point in history, and we'll stick with animals and the vineyard for now.

Monday night we stayed in and had room service.

Tuesday night we had dinner at Napa Rose with a bunch of our Orange County wine geek friends. We broke the bank on dinner and went all out on Chef Andrew's spur of the moment tasting menu-5 hours and over ten courses of deft deliciousness. Keeping me at table for 5 hours without checking my watch is a feat-but the wines brought by the assembled geek-squad were impressive: some highlights were the 3 Japanese wines I brought to stump the experts (which they did, and showed very impressively), a 1970 Beau Sejour Bordeaux, a 1966 Lafite Rothschild that drank like silk (did I love it because the 43 years made it taste more pinot like?), a 1988 Duhart Millon, a 1998 Clos Vougeot and a (gasp) 1960 Barsac that was great with the strawberry dessert. The meal really was one of the best food and wine matching orgies I've ever experienced, and our waiter John totally kicked ass moving between a dozen wines, hundreds of polished crystal stems, 10 courses and a lot of questions. They even had a Japanese-speaking Sommelier come out and translate the Japanese wine bottles for us. Awesome! A few of the courses are pictured below.

Wednesday night we drove to Woodland Hills Country Club to do a very fancy and special tasting of Santa Rita Hills wines set up by a gem of SoCal wine stores: Woodland Hills Wine Company. The place was full of pinot heads, and I shared the stage with Ken Brown (formerly of Byron and now Ken Brown Wines), Justin Willett (Tyler Wines), Chad Melville (Melville and Samsara). The wines showed beautifully as a group and individually, and I thought everyone in attendance had a good time. Little did I know (until the end when I got to meet him) that PGA Golfer Duffy Waldorf was in the house, and I ironically was chatting about golf with a group after the tasting when I found out that he was standing next to me. I begged him to come up and let me take him around La Purisima with a few bottles of Rose of Pinot Noir. We'll see what happens.

Thursday we did another afternoon class at Disneyland and drove home, hurrying to miss the traffic that made our Wednesday trip from Anaheim to Woodland Hills take 3.5 hours. My GPS said our average speed was 7 mph on the way there and 72 on the way back. At 10:30 pm the trip took 37 minutes.
I'm currently back at the trying to get up the energy to go for a ride through the vineyard and check the status, but it may have to wait until tomorrow morning, when I plan to take some more pictures, get my pictures modified and placed in the blog, and go back to my regular daily duties on the ranch. Then a busy weekend of tastings and wine dinners. Love this job! (The big question is how long I can maintain my lean waistline.)