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.

Foggy Sunrise in McConihe Flats