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2022 Harvest

Another fun week making wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The yield was down about 1/3 compared to last year due to heavy spring rain that damaged the flowering (we call it “shatter” when a grapevine’s delicate flowers don’t pollinate and develop into grapes). The Chardonnay grapes suffered from excessive powdery mildew also due to the early rain, so we got a limited crop this year. However, the fruit we did harvest was outstanding and of high quality.

This year, we decided to focus on making sparkling wine, rosé, and Port-style wines. We have so much Pinot Noir red wine in the cellar, and it’s always fun to focus on other wine styles. We pressed the Pinot Noir grapes whole-bunch (no destemming) in our new horizontal press, and the juice was rich in sugar, acidity, and flavors (yummy). We let the juice settle overnight and then made a 100% Pinot Noir sparkling base wine (Blanc de Noirs) and a 100% Pinot Noir rosé. The acidity was higher than last year, so we expect both wines to have a fresh fruit profile with a crisp and zappy edge.

We dried about ½ ton of Pinot Noir grapes on our drying racks in a cold space to further concentrate the sugar, flavors, and acidity. This is a similar technique to how you make Amarone wines (known as Appassimento), and I learned to use it for Port-style wines when I failed to make an Amarone-style red wine five years ago, as the grapes got so concentrated I couldn’t ferment the juice. The fermentation is still going and will probably take another 30 days before it reaches the right alcohol/sugar level. More to come!

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BeauZini – Zinfandel

This is a family favorite. The fruit came from an old vineyard in the Lodi AVA in California, where the average age of the vines is 90 years. We fermented the grapes in three different ways: hot fermentation (28-29C), cold fermentation (19-20C), and Carbonic Maceration (similar to Beaujolais wines), and blended the wines at the end. The wine was aged for 18 months in new American oak barrels hence oaky notes. The name “BeauZini” came from the Beaujolais method and Zinfandel, the grape variety.

Here are the tasting notes:
Intense and attractively oaky. Delicious ripe dark plush plum and damson concentrated fruit muddled with a lovely touch of characterful spice. Well-integrated spicy oak and lovely fine-grained tannins with a pure, balanced long finish. It is intense with a smooth taste, and a long finish. 

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Cellar 777 – Sparkling Wine

We are making our Sparkling wines with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes from the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA. The Thurston vineyard is located at around 1,000 feet elevation.  The elevation is critical as in the Summer, the Monterey Bay brings fog to the lower elevations. This cools the evenings down, a trait that Pinot loves. The typical morning starts out cool and slowly warms as the movement of the morning air flow caused by the fog pulls back. These are ideal conditions for Pinot Noir and retain the acidity, which is great for sparkling wines.

We pick the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes early and cold ferment them around 20C for 5-7 days. This creates a fresh and fruity wine that is used as our base wine  Using the time-honored way, similar to Champagne (Methode Champenoise), we add yeast and sugar to the base wine and bottle it, for the secondary fermentation to happen in the bottle. We leave the wine for two years before we remove the dead yeast and get the wine ready.

Our 2018 Sparkling Wine won Bronze at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

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Cellar 777 – Syrah

This is our ‘household’ wine grown on our own property in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. The vines are around 20 years old and well taken care of. It is known as a ‘John Alban Syrah’ and it produces an elegant, floral and compelling Syrah. In the Rhone wine district in France, it is called “Serine” and it originated in Côte Rôtie. It is now highly sought after by vignerons and is the basis of many new plantings. Syrah originated in the Rhone Valley over 2000 years ago.

We pick our Syrah grapes around end of August and beginning of September and aim for an alcohol of around 14.5% abv. We ‘cold ferment’ our Syrah wines around 20C for 10-14 days and leave the wine on the skins (cold maceration) for another 10-12 days to full extract the colors and tannins. We then move the wine into new American oak barrels to be matured for 24-30 months. This is longer than average, but we feel the wine develops really well and softens the tannin over time in oak barrels.

Our 2016 Syrah won Silver at the California State Fair, and our 2017 Syrah won Gold at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

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This is such an exciting time in the vineyard. The weather in California is great, and our vines love it. We are well past flowering and into the berry setting stage where young berries are forming, and the bunches are at a right angle to the stem. The bunches will drop down and hang in the next couple of weeks, and the berries will continue to grow. We can already now see what kind of crop we will get, and the focus is on nurturing the vines.
The vines are growing rapidly, and vegetative growth is high. So we have to “train” the vines to make them grow up instead of out, down, and to the side. I have included a before and after photo of a row where I have trained the vines. Hopefully, you can see the difference!
We use a Vertical Shoot Position system or VSP, and it is a standard and widely used trellis system around the world. In the VSP system, the vine shoots are trained upward in a vertical, narrow curtain with the fruiting zone below. We use three “catch wires” to keep the shoots in place and train the growth in an upward direction. We can then trim the top, should the shoots get too long.
Next week, I will write about myth-busters in viticulture. It should be fun as there are so many misperceptions about wine and winegrowing.
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Vintage 2020

I just finished our 2020 vintage and prepared the vineyard for the next season. All our wines have been pressed off the skins and are now resting in oak barrels. We will leave our Pinot Noir for about 18 months and our Syrah for 33 months. Time will tell whether it was worth all the effort but both wines show early promise so we are hopeful.
Once the wines went into the barrels, we inoculated with Malo-Lactic bacteria to start the Malo-Lactic conversion (also called Malo-Lactic fermentation or MLF) where the bacteria consume the harsh and bitter Malic acid and produce Lactic acid instead. Lactic acid is softer and sometimes has a buttery taste (especially in white wines). Most red wines go through MLF to soften the wine and create more mouthfeel. After 4-6 weeks we checked the progress of the MLF. We used a chemical analysis that showed whether there was any Malic acid left in the wine. You can see the analysis in the photo where we still have one wine with some Malic acid left.
In the vineyard, the leaves are turning and we have cleaned up and packed the bird nets away, ready for next year. I collected 2 tons of horse manure from the local horse stables to use as fertilizer next year. We try to grow our vines organically, and horse manure is a good source of nitrogen. Our dogs, Cookie and Cruz, also thought the horse manure was quite nice so had to get a bath.
With the winter coming, we get a chance to drink some of our wines. I just bottled our 2015 Pinot Port which is absolutely delicious and will be perfect for the Holidays.
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