The snow flying puts this white haze over a sleepy vineyard and it's about this time in the winter when I really start daydreaming. It's a combination of hiding from the cold and trying to find inventive ways to get my tasks done that has my mind really wandering.
On my list of things to do is count all the replacement vines so we can put an order in. This means walking the entire vineyard, actually all three vineyards, row by row and counting how many poor little vines didn't make it. So I'm daydreaming of doing this task on horseback because really, if you have a horse, how often is it that you can use it to do something useful like walk around the vineyards to count vines. And I don't really have to get down on the ground to see that a vine didn't survive, so I'd save myself many steps and my feet would be at least a bit warmer than walking in the snow. Do you think that horses get cold feet in winter? I guess maybe I should daydream about a 4 wheeler, but those are loud and smell like gas and are not nearly as romantic of a scenario as a snow covered vineyard as seen from horseback.
And yes, I am making up ridiculous scenarios. It's winter. This is what I do.
It's about this time that I realistically start putting together my game plan for the vines. I'm calculating man hours and how long it will take me and x amount of people to go through each pruning step in order for everything to be done on time. I'm looking at last years spray schedule and thinking - how can I make this better, more perfectly timed and effective. How can I make each pass over the vineyard with my pruners yield the best grapes possible with the most effective and efficient cuts.
So of course naturally, I daydream about all the possibilities of vineyard helpers and pruning techniques and a little voice in the back of my head, Karl's voice, says that maybe pruning in a gorilla costume really would be nice and warm and make you work faster.
Ah winter. How much longer?
Anyway, I wish I had a time frame to tell you all that the tasting room would be open. I wish I could put my finger on a date and say "yes, certainly it will be --/--/2011," but I can't. It's contingent on so many pieces and parts and the stars being just in line for everything to work out perfectly. And as much as I'd love to plow forward and get open so I can talk about wine and growing grapes, everything is going at it's own pace and that's ok for now.
But, in the meantime, I'm working on a killer menu of local foods. I found the perfect bread baker and I'm so excited to pair her delicious olive and onion loaf with a nice rich Frontenac red wine or a glass of our cherry cider. Jason is perfecting his pepperoni roll recipe, herb crusted and to be filled with our home grown tomatoes. I tracked down the best smoked sausage and some delicious local cheeses too.
For me, I think that a nice winter soup would lend well to a crusty roll and a bottle of red wine. Now I'm daydreaming about a wild rice and mushroom creamy soup or a delicious winter squash and sausage soup.
Menu suggestions, by all means let me know. I still have a couple of months to perfect them before we open our doors for wine tasting. Until then, I'll daydream and wait.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
oh winter
It's that dead part of winter - post football, or at least post Browns season, where time just hovers and stands still like the cold swirls of breath in the freezing air. I walked around the vineyard today after the encouragement of a few days of unseasonably warm weather and started thinking about getting back to my vines. Soon, but not today.
This is an incredibly exciting time. It feels like it's all pent up in my throat, where we're about ready to open and I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes of engraved wine glasses and paint samples and wine racks. I'm like a kid before Christmas just waiting for the tasting room floor to be finished, the walls to be up and painted the perfect hue that just embraces you in the warm fuzzy feeling that's so conducive to drinking wine in.
I'm plotting and planning for this next year, building on the beauty of the vineyard and the deliciousness of our finished wine. I'm thinking about growing a couple rows of basil so that we'd have fresh, organic herbs for our home baked bread we'll serve in the tasting room. I'm thinking about getting a couple of pigs so that we could sell our own smoked sausage that we raised ourselves with locally made cheese plates. I'm planning the warm soups and the simple menu, imagining chatting over a beautiful wooden bar with open bottles and smiling people on the other side, just tasting the fruit of Ohio vines in the peak of their glory for the first time.
Ah yes, I'm probably getting ahead of myself. One step at a time, Janeé. It's a couple of months before we're open still.
Anyway, we're going through the filtering process for our 2010 sweet wines and some of our dry reds now. They're getting chilled to perfection to make the sediment drop to the bottom of the tanks. Then they go through our new plate frame filter, many, many times. Then they go back into tanks to sit and think about it for a bit, then they get filtered by a different filter. Then they're bottled.
It looks like another couple of months before we are going to do another round of bottling. We've got plenty to do to get ready in the mean time and our 2009 wines are all in bottles and getting labeled with great care right now.
I'm happily standing in a relatively warm building, staring out the window at the vines, just waiting for a break in the weather to start tying them up again. But man, when the snow starts flying, it sure is nice to hibernate in the production room, surrounded by cases of wine and looking forward to opening day...
This is an incredibly exciting time. It feels like it's all pent up in my throat, where we're about ready to open and I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes of engraved wine glasses and paint samples and wine racks. I'm like a kid before Christmas just waiting for the tasting room floor to be finished, the walls to be up and painted the perfect hue that just embraces you in the warm fuzzy feeling that's so conducive to drinking wine in.
I'm plotting and planning for this next year, building on the beauty of the vineyard and the deliciousness of our finished wine. I'm thinking about growing a couple rows of basil so that we'd have fresh, organic herbs for our home baked bread we'll serve in the tasting room. I'm thinking about getting a couple of pigs so that we could sell our own smoked sausage that we raised ourselves with locally made cheese plates. I'm planning the warm soups and the simple menu, imagining chatting over a beautiful wooden bar with open bottles and smiling people on the other side, just tasting the fruit of Ohio vines in the peak of their glory for the first time.
Ah yes, I'm probably getting ahead of myself. One step at a time, Janeé. It's a couple of months before we're open still.
Anyway, we're going through the filtering process for our 2010 sweet wines and some of our dry reds now. They're getting chilled to perfection to make the sediment drop to the bottom of the tanks. Then they go through our new plate frame filter, many, many times. Then they go back into tanks to sit and think about it for a bit, then they get filtered by a different filter. Then they're bottled.
It looks like another couple of months before we are going to do another round of bottling. We've got plenty to do to get ready in the mean time and our 2009 wines are all in bottles and getting labeled with great care right now.
I'm happily standing in a relatively warm building, staring out the window at the vines, just waiting for a break in the weather to start tying them up again. But man, when the snow starts flying, it sure is nice to hibernate in the production room, surrounded by cases of wine and looking forward to opening day...
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