Vineyard & Winery Blog 2007

[Casey Hartlip]

"At this point (and I hate saying this) everything is right where we want them to be."

Way to jinx us Russell, you dope!

Central Mendocino County is running about 10 days to two weeks ahead of our historical normal. I saw my first bloom in Sangiovese two days ago. I was pretty shocked. I can't remember bloom in mature vines on May 16th without loking at my records.

We're doing well on weed control and falling behind on suckering and shoot thinning. Tomorrow morning will be the final go-round of my 2nd Thiolux application. We've had some early morning winds this week which doesn't make vine spraying all that fun. Good thing I like the smell of sulfur.

Crop potential is big. No other way to put it. We're suckering hard, but if all of this $hit sets, we'll be dropping 30-50 tons (a hard number to guess) of fruit over the summer.

Two weeks ago we bottled our '05 Syrah, '05 Petite and the '06 Grenache. Never a dull moment here!

[Rebel Rose]

Greetings all . . .

Russell Bevan is in the house! Greetings, Russ, and thanks for joining us!

I am ashamed to admit that I'm not that familiar with your source vineyards . . . where are the Alban and Estrella clones planted? And what is the importance of each?

[Rebel Rose]

It looks like an extraordinarily early harvest this year. Vineyards throughout the central coast have started picking whites and some pinot noir almost two weeks early!

Our syrah and zinfandel are still not quite there. While most of California is reporting a lighter than usual crop load (25%), ours is significantly heavier, and we chose not to drop fruit as our little vineyard usually sets only 1.5 to 2 tons per acre. (So what might be a 'significant' increase for us would be a berry-in-a-bucket for someone else.) Still, we estimate our crop load to be 25% to 30% heavier than usual.

After a cooler than usual summer, with few days over 90 degrees, we were slammed with hot temps this week. To top it all off, we just had an 18 hour thunderstorm, with lightning bolts smacking down into the hills immediately around us and spiffs of heavy rain. We are worried about mildew in the fruit, of course, but fortunately the rain spells were brief and the extremely hot temperatures burned off the moisture quickly. It has been uncharacteristically muggy though, so we will continue to monitor the clusters and watch for signs of mildew, but in our windy location I think we'll be okay. On a positive note, the fields, vineyards and orchards are a clean, vibrant green . . . a nice way to start the Labor Day weekend.

[Casey Hartlip]

I thought I'd catch everyone up on where we are at the moment.

Sugars from this morning:

Old Syr (Mother block)-22.6

Gate Syr-24.0

'01 Syr (877)-23.0

'94 Syr-21.4

Far Upper PS-19.4

I've had some conversations with some other growers and winery reps (folks that are visiting numerous vineyards per day) and the talk is the same: nothing has moved in the past week. The Petite sugar kind of bugs me, but it could be a sampling error. I took my 30 year old refractometer to Parducci this morning to test it with 20 brix solution and its dead on.

BTW the ph on the gate Syr is 3.3 which tells me its not all that close.

The weather is the next issue. Looks for sure that we're gonna see some amount of precip, its just a matter of how much. Right now I'm saying less than .20 at our location, which won't really bother me that much. I have no botrytis active in anything and with my moderate canopy things will dry out pretty quickly. I little storm will just give the wussies something to freak out about, and the rookie growers to have heated conversations with their wineries about how badly they need to pick.

I have friends who have been seeing deer acting a bit friskey (the start of the rut) and a little rain will turn them on. After I tarp the open beam ceiling portion of my house project, I'm gonna go out and shoot me a big one!

[Rebel Rose]

Sounds like you're getting a bit frisky yourself, Casey!

Our headtrained, dryfarmed zin vineyard is actually up about 30% this year, but as it's still young and many wee vines which were gopher decimation replants are just coming on, it's not all that remarkable. Just exciting for us as this is only our third zin harvest. We haven't even bothered with refrac yet, just tasted the berries and they still have a ways to go. The syrah will come in first.

Yes, weather reports indicated T-storms in Paso on Friday. But the last time we had T-storms we only had squiffs of rain, just enough to wash the greenery.

The cooler day and nighttime temperatures are holding the Brix at other vineyards which is a darn good thing as we have a bottling to get through, too!