Math Boom at BBCC

Good article in the Seattle Times this week about burgeoning interest in math & tech classes at Big Bend Community College, thanks in part to a federal grant. Skilled workforce = economic vitality.

"The Moses Lake school (BBCC) has boosted the number of classes it offers in pre-calculus I from 3 to 11. Pre-calculus II has gone from one class to five. And statistics classes increased from four to 12. ...

"The number of Hispanic students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and math courses has grown from 24 in 2008-09 to 473 in 2014-15."

Click here for the full article.

Mudhole

This is Ken "Mudhole" Merrill. During WWII Ken was one of Carlson's Raiders, an elite commando unit forerunner to today's Navy Seals. He was on the famous "Long Patrol" on Guadalcanal, and is one of the last living members of the submarine-borne raid of Makin Island in August '42. I won't get into details but take my word for it: he was a bad bad man.

Now he's a sweet and engaging 91-year old living in a memorabilia-filled home in Clarkston, WA. We drove over last weekend and spent an amazing hour and a half visiting with Mudhole and his stepdaughter, listening to stories including the one about how Jimmy Roosevelt gave him his famous nickname.

A day we'll always remember. Semper fi and gung ho, Mudhole.

The Boss

Mom came out and ran the household for 10 days during harvest. She's a dynamo at 87. Among many other things she picked grapes and made dozens of quarts of juice and jam for her teetotalling friends.

This steamer is pretty slick; Just throw the fruit in the top vessel, boil water in the bottom, and after 30 minutes the juice is collected in the middle chamber.

Hard Labor

It was an intense four days as always. I was in the vineyard until midnight and then back out before dawn. Picking grapes, pulling up netting, listening to the coyotes yippin and howling at the bottom of the slope.

The hardest part of harvest is assembling your crew. You're watching the sugars/acids and trying to predict when you'll pick, and hoping your crew will be able to make it on only about three days actual notice.

Thanks to my man Lionel we got a good crew and they really saved the day as always. Left to right: Lionel (sitting on my new platform scale), his dad Esteban (who helped me put in the vineyard back in '09), Panchito, Alex and Magdalena.

Panchito had picked grapes as a young man in California, and he put us all to shame. Lionel called him Matrix. I tried to study his technique but his hands were a blur and the buckets filled up faster than I could keep up.

Harvest 2015

We harvested the weekend of Sept 25-27.

Sold all of our Cab Franc - 2.5 tons - to Beaumont Cellars and Camas Cove Cellars. Picked at just under 25 brix with .55 TA and 3.7 pH. Thanks all for your support.

Due to some last-minute shuffling by winemakers we only ended up selling 1.5 ton of Chardonnay, with another 2.5 tons left on the vine. Kind of a shame because it is gorgeous gorgeous fruit. My bad, I'll do a better job nailing that down next year.

Another good year for growing conditions, I think. Hot and dry of course most of the year, then cooled off a bit after veraison and the grapes got to hang a little longer than they would have. Still, we picked the Cab Franc a week earlier than last year, which was also a very hot season.

Daytrippin: Waterville and Moses Coulee

Drove up through Wenatchee yesterday, then took Highway 2 east up dramatic Corbaley Canyon to the high-plateau wheat town of Waterville.

Regrettably did not bring the camera; the colors of wheat stubble and plowed fields in late afternoon were phenomenal. An early dinner at Harvest House Restaurant (worth the drive by itself) and then south through Moses Coulee as the moon came up, the road to ourselves.

In the 1800s the Chief Moses tribe wintered in Moses Coulee, sheltering their ponies in the lee of the cliffs.

Really memorable day. I can't imagine a better motorcycle day trip, for those so inclined.

Say Hello to My Leetle Friend!

It's veraison, when the grapes turn color and begin their ripening phase. The robins are already in the vineyard and the starlings have a squadron of advance scouts sitting on the irrigation pivot monitoring progress.

Tube Man will buy us about a week to get the nets up before the little peckers get used to him and start moving in.

We have every pound of grapes already spoken for this year so can't afford to lose any to the pests. I mean the birds. Rats with wings.

Checking In On The Wine

A couple weeks ago we decided to go check in on our "children;" i.e., the grapes we sold last year to Beaumont Cellars in Quincy + Woodinville and to Camas Cove Cellars here in Moses Lake. They grow up so fast.

It's pretty thrilling to taste the fruits of your labor. It's only been wine for nine months now, but at this stage one can tell whether it's going to be successful or not.

Dennis & Nancy at Camas Cove had both our Cab Franc and our Chardonnay. The Chard had been aging sur lie (sediment unremoved). Neither had yet been exposed to new oak.

We sampled the Cab Franc first. What a moment. The color was unexpected, more plum than red, almost like a malbec. Expectations were relatively low, given the youth of the wine. But my goodness! Lots of fruit, lovely strains of blackberry/cassis all the way through, with that classic tobacco & leather Cab Franc finish. It was young, yes, but already better than most year-old releases I've had.

I kept my opinions to myself and watched the host. "Damn! That's really good," says Dennis, swirling and quaffing and shaking his head. "That's really good!" Triumph.

Next the Chard. For some reason I had expected it to be minerally & flinty, reflective of our lean rocky soil. Instead it was decidedly tropical, all pineapple & melon. A full-bodied mouthfeel. Which makes sense, because it was picked at around 25.5 brix. It's going to be magnificent as well, though Dennis is going to use most of it to blend with his Rousanne to make the famous Thelma & Louise. He's going to put the rest on a little light oak to enhance the flavors.

The next weekend we dropped in on Pete at Beaumont Cellars at the end of a tasting day and relaxed with him for an hour sampling wine and talking farming. He brought out some of our Cab Franc and dropped a tiny oak chip in it. By now my expectations were too high, or my palate more realistic. It was plenty good, but now I noticed the newness of the wine much more than I had at Camas Cove. (Both lots of Cab Franc were picked the same day, at the same numbers - 25 brix, .49% TA, 3.4 pH.)

Again I kept my mouth shut and asked Pete what he thought. He mentioned how important the tobacco finish was to a Cab Franc, and that this had it. "I can definitely work with this," he said, which for the taciturn Pete Beaumont I'll take as high praise indeed.

Pete's wines have been getting a lot of recognition at competitions around the Northwest. "Take care of those grapes!" he called to me as we were leaving.

"Win me a gold medal," I hollered back.

$21 Million Allocated to Port of Moses Lake Rail Project

The Washington State Legislature included a $21 million allocation to the Port of Moses Lake in the just-adopted 2015-2017 state transportation package. The money will go to design and construct rail access connecting Grant County International Airport and the Wheeler Industrial Corridor to existing interstate railroads north and south of Moses Lake.

This was a much-needed and long-awaited development. Rail access makes Moses Lake a triple threat in intermodal transportation - rail, truck and air - and makes the expanding industrial hub even more attractive to businesses looking at possible relocation.

Here is the link to the Legislature's page detailing the project.

Fourth of July

I decided to really focus this year on getting the nutrition perfected in the vineyard. I did another soils test over the winter and found that a couple of micro nutrients, boron & zinc, were nearly absent. And this soil is always wanting more nitrogen, which is not necessarily a bad thing for grapes.

I gave the vineyard two foliar applications of boron & zinc prior to fluorescence (flowering), as well as a ground application of ordinary time-release lawn nitrogen. The response has been noticeable. Very vigorous shoot growth. Keeps me busy pruning all the suckers that want to come up from the base of the trunk.

The boron in particular should help with fruit set. The last couple seasons there've been a fair number of  "shot berries," tiny grapes that never mature with the rest of the fruit in the bunch. These nutrients should help with that, as well as the premature yellowing of the leaves we've been seeing around harvest time.

I'll give it a final application just after harvest. The vines will store the nutrients and use them first thing next spring.

Our good friends came out for a couple days last week and we took the kids on a history hike along Rocky Ford Creek. Bryce found a number of Indian rock chippings and Madyson found this amazing arrowhead!

Pruned Spurs

I pruned the vineyard in February this year, at least a month earlier than normal. Pruning takes me about 40 hours. Nice to have that out of the way with plenty of time to focus on the other tasks.

Every time I prune I catch myself asking "Who was the moron who pruned these things last year?!"

I pruned the Cabernet Franc to the traditional 2-bud spurs, but this time I left 6 buds on the Chardonnay spurs. The Chardonnay are more prone to winterkill/die back. I'm even thinking of going to an entirely different method of vine training on the Chard for the future, to keep the canes closer to the main trunk.

Another very mild winter, and the buds are already pushing hard. We'll have budbreak within the week. Too bad, because we're bound to get a few stiff frosts still. Will probably need those remarkable redundancies that are built into grape buds, with secondary and even tertiary nodes in case the primaries are irreparably damaged.