Pruning has begun!

The timeline has been set and the pruning schedule for 2011 has been put into motion. It's me and my lightweight Japanese pruners against the thousands of cuts to be made to the thousands of vines. My callouses are growing back, my hand is starting to automatically mold into the shape of my pruners, and I see grapevines on high cordon wire systems every time I close my eyes now.

It's a race against the clock. It's a gamble with the weather and a whistle and a prayer that what I've learned over the past few years of pruning pays off this year. The vines are tied up just right, which is a good start to the pruning season. Now all I have to do is start at one end of the 10 or so acres in productive, hardy vines and prune until I get to the other side and then race back over and do it all again.

Step one - prune fruiting wood back into what buds I'd like to produce.
Step two - as the little blossoms emerge, prune back clusters to make sure each plant can support a good crop
Step three - arrange the fruiting crop for maximum sunlight, airflow, and productivity to get the finest quality grapes and avoid diseases and pests with healthy plants.

And that's just the spring training system. Summer is a whole different set of steps.

I'm about halfway through step one. It's probably the most taxing to do as wrestling old grapevines out that have knotted themselves together means making many cuts and pulling and then cutting again and pulling until the vine looks manageable again and ready for a productive season. Move to next grapevine and repeat.
I'm quite addicted to listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros while tackling this task for it's upbeat nature and there's nothing like a good singalong and a slight dance in your step to keep things rolling.

These few beautiful March days have really catapulted my mood into a soaring hopefulness. It's just warm enough to enjoy the sun and the smell of the mud. The grass is just starting to blush a bit of green, very cautiously as it slowly emerges, not too quick as the threat of a few more winter storms still lingers in the air.

Still not open yet. Still working on the renovation. The wine is shaping up very beautifully. The cider is doing something amazing. I hope we're open in the next few months. Until then, I'll be outside happily pruning.

vineyard horses, gorilla suits, and menu plans

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.

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...

When I was in high school, I loved science. So I took chemistry. I lasted 2 days. I didn't see the point of memorizing the periodic table and I zoned out for the first 4 minutes of class and the rest of the class totally didn't make sense then, kinda like a Seinfield episode. I dropped it and promptly picked up earth science. Rocks seemed a bit less confusing to me and more tangible than elements.

I think application of knowledge is very important. I used to be one of those kids that would say 'why do I need to learn -blank- I'm never going to use that.' Now I know why.
I use all those facts I glossed over in geometry for area and volume and everything I learned science classes I halfway slept through.
I use the difference between acids and bases and how to neutralize them when I grow things. The most basic things in life, planting seeds and growing food still relies on soil chemistry and at the very least, elemental math. I calculate the ratio of organic matter if I add how many pounds of compost and the amount of sulfur and pine needles I need to decrease the pH for my blueberries. Even grapevine pruning has calculations such as weight of cut off prunings in relation to how many grape clusters that plant will consequently support. And now the chemistry of wine making peers at me through wine samples and fining agents. Oh frustrated teachers of my past, I thank you.

So now as I sit with a mini-chemistry lab in front of me, trying to stretch my brain in ways I haven't stretched it since that 8am neuroscience lab I tackled in '04, I'm wondering how I would be different if I would have just buckled down in that chemistry class.

Right now, we're working through what's called fining. I had no idea how many steps were in wine making!

So after a wine is pressed, it goes through primary fermentation where the sugars become alcohol. That's done. Check.
Then the whites stay in stainless steel (or sometimes a Chardonnay will be oak aged) and the reds go into oak barrels. The settle out their sediment and need racked a few times, which means getting pumped out into a new tank or barrel, leaving the sediment in the bottom which I then clean out and get rid of, leaving only the good wine behind. This improves the flavor and clarifies the wine naturally.

Sometimes the wine needs a little bit of extra help to settle out some of the off flavors or just to aid in clarifying through what's called fining. It's kinda like filtering the wine by adding something that pulls out certain particles. An example of a fining agent would be gelatin, which is added to a tank in the correct ratio and then racked off after a day or so, pulling out some of the particles that stuck to the gelatin.

I'm still so new at this, but I've got all these samples of different ratios of fining agents before I add them to the entire tank. It involves a lot of taste testing, which is always fun and simple additions and pH tests.

The warm weather has now quite officially conceeded to the unavoidable cold of winter. Construction is underway on the tasting room so hopefully we'll be cuddled around a warm fire, sipping our delicious 2009 Frontenac

harvest and crush, 2010

It's crush season. And harvest season. And pressing time.

The temperature is dropping, the days are getting shorter but the work hours just keep growing. This is the exciting time! This is so much work and so much fun all wrapped up into a ball of energy and exhaustion. I'm turning into this work-zombie where I just don't stop moving, even though I'm so tired. Between the park CSA wrapping up, the meat share getting in full swing, planting for the winter garden shares, and trying to get a chicken plucker working before the ducks are ready for the table, it's almost as if that's enough to totally fill my plate before even starting to think about the excitement of first crush, moving into the new production building, and harvesting the grapes and apples for the 2010 season.

Harvest round one came down last weekend. Started at 7am and with two different crews on two different days, we pulled down about 5 tons of grapes! The problem with harvesting wine grapes is that it's not just done when you pluck them from the vines. Within 24 hours they must be crushed and destemmed right away. The whites must then be pressed out into juice and the fermentation process begins.

The new production room is full of fresh wine smell and yeast blurps from the airlock on top of the Frontenac Gris tank. The Frontenac needs tended to several times a day and I'm trying to get together a crew to take off the netting, and harvest two days again and press on Saturday. Geez! I am completely going to make a bed in the rice hull loft at the winery.

The wine from last year has been tended by the wine doctor and turned into this smooth, amazingly beautiful finished product that's ready to be bottled any day now. Ohhhh man, it's good. I can't believe it came from our super acidic Frontenac grapes! I'd take it over a good Merlot any day. I hope that we have the same success with the batch of grapes from this year's hot, dry season. Only time will tell.

This whole thing seems like such a huge endeavor that I'm excited and scared at the same time. It's always something new and I am really looking forward to opening up the tasting room in a few months and letting you all try what we've made. What a feat of work has gone into it up until now and soon, you all will get to drink the fruits of our labor.

Cheers!

Bunch Close

Tomorrow is the first day of July. The Japanese beetles are out. The mosquitoes are terrible this year. The horse flies are still blood thirsty as ever. And the vigorous Marquettes are growing faster than I can pull them into the shape I want them.

I still watch the trains go by every day, whistles blowing deafeningly loud.



Time marches on in the season and now I'm organizing lists of tanks, pumps, mixers, hoses, and gaskets that we will need for 2010 crush. It's coming on us pretty fast. The grapes went from bloom to bunch close before I could even get pictures. Veriason is coming soon... this whole season has just been a flurry of working until I can't stand up - falling into a hard, exhausted sleep at night and then waking up to do it again. Oh, and some crappy fast food in the middle because I can't find the time to get to the grocery store to buy real food or cook dinner anymore. :( That's pretty pathetic. But otherwise, everything is good.

The next step is getting everything in order as far as tanks, presses, pumps, and grape crushing equipment. At the same time, we will be netting the grapes to keep the birds off. August was kinda slow last year and once a week, I'd go out and pick a representative sample of grapes from 3 different types to test sugar, pH and tannins. I think this year I'm going to be collecting ten different samples from 7 different types of grapes to see which ones are ripening the best and hoping that they aren't all ready at the same time.



Along with grapes, the cider is in the back of my mind as well. The late frost nipped almost all the blossoms off our apple trees, so now sourcing apples from other local orchards is in order. Nick has his cider recipe down except for the perilously high alcohol content combined with easy drinkability. It's really delicious, so much it might be dangerous.

We just tried another experimental blend with fresh pressed cherries - gorgeous in color and really smooth, slightly dry too. I'm excited to see what we brew this fall.

Alright, time for me to get back at the vines. It's 70 degrees and sunny out today, perfect weather for wrestling grapevines and looking forward to the cold hard cider waiting for me when I get home tonight.

new year... late june.

I have not updated since the end of last year, which might have left some of you on the edge of your seats like a cliffhanger of a tv series.
Well, like any good tv show, I'm back for another season of beating grapevines into the submission, battling bad bugs, and longingly listening to the trains go by.

I've seen my first Japanese beetle already. We've replanted about 600 vines. I'm caring for about 7 different varieties of grapes that are going to bear this year. It's pretty crazy.
I am happy though because I know more this year than I did last year, and I'm in a -take no prisoners- mode with the grapvines. I used to very gingerly prune them just so, but now that I know that pretty much nothing can kill them, I'm pruning hard, and stringing them up.

We're fighting weeds and fungus like crazy this year thanks to all of the early rains we had. My garden is looking pretty sad as it kept getting pummelled by rain whenever I would try to plant anything. We've only had light fungus pressure thanks to a well timed spray program and things have overall been going rather smoothly.


Now on to the hard part --- the winery.

It's hard to imagine how this whole endeavor is going to take shape. It's so hard to think about all the tons of grapes that will be pulled off the vine soon and need to be made into delicious wine.


Agh! So much work when I think about it. We'll see how it all goes. My camera went swimming while Jason and I were on a fishing trip, but I promise to post pics soon.