A Cayuse Spring Sunrise

The fields are lush in the summer, but the colors are also beautiful this time of year. Here they look like chocolate after being freshly tilled and planted.

The growing season has begun.

Pruning 2016

Started pruning this week, earliest ever. We had driven to Yakima and seen many of the vineyards there already pruned or in the process, so figured I better get my rear end out there.

Best job in the vineyard, though. Very little bending over, and it always feels good to get a vine looking spruced up; kinda like spring cleaning.

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.