New Toys..

In advance of the harvest we ordered two of these 500L wooden fermentation vats to experiment with. French oak, low toast and all very exciting....

Made even more exciting by the delivery truck knocking out power to the whole area by hitting an overhead cable when driving off. Shocking.

2012 Growing Season

It’s now almost the end of October, and in most wine growing regions in the Northern hemisphere, the grape harvests for dry wines are drawing to a close. The pickers have had their last lunch, gulped back their last glass of fresh grape must and the presses have been cleaned that one last time. The daily ritual of taking readings during fermentation slows – just like a fermentation – and a certain loneliness descends. It’s over for another year…..

But in order for us (and this Blog) to go forwards, we have to go backwards first (hopefully only metaphorically..). The growing season in 2012 was a mixed bag – to say the least. There were more peaks and troughs as the weeks passed than I can remember in a long time.

The season got off to a slightly shaky start after a relatively mild winter. Following a bumper harvest in 2011 of generally high quality, expectations actually weren’t that high for 2012. Irregular flowering in the Spring was a little worrying, but the fruit set was reasonable – and in some ways, pointed to a natural lowering of the yields. Also, depending on the grape variety, irregular flowering can also help to open up some tight bunched varieties such as Sipon/Furmint. So we were relatively happy by early Summer.

As the weeks passed, things looked good. Weather was warm, precipitation was average and both oidium and peronospera seemed relatively benign. Veraison came and went – it’s an amazing thing to see – when the grapes of red varieties turn from green to red – it’s difficult to describe exactly how quick it happens, but you can get up more morning and suddenly notice it has started. One of the amazing tricks that Nature can pull and that reminds you how little we often understand about what goes on around us. For example, why don’t red grapes start out as red grapes – why do they need to change colour halfway through…?

Veraison

Around this time (July) thoughts also turn to a de-leafing strategy. There are two main reasons for doing this in a vineyard:

1. To open up air circulation around the bunches – and thus lower problems with fungal diseases such as oidium – and to increase the effectiveness of any sprays being used – so that they actually get as far as the bunches.
2. To open up the bunches themselves to additional sunlight. In many vineyards, there is a sunny side of each row, and a less sunny side – normally the side that gets the morning sun. Aside from the fact that the majority of the actual ripening work is done by the leaves (photosynthesis), there’s a school of thought that believes that exposing the grapes/bunches to sunlight at an early stage actually helps build up a resistance to possibly sunburn later on in the season. Think young pale-skinned kids on holiday – or maybe not….

The second option, irrespective of your opinion as to its effectiveness, it of course rather difficult to plan for – to the best of my knowledge we’re still a awaiting the ability to see into the future and thus the power of accurate advance weather forecasts still eludes us. But this hasn’t quenched our obsession for just trying to guess what’s coming down the line….. take too many leaves off and get a serious blast of sun (e.g. 2003) and you get burnt grapes, take too little off and get lots of rain and grey days (e.g. 2010) and they never ripen properly.

Anyway, we went the full hog and decided we’d let the wind and sun dance around our bunches’ nether regions… and happily stripped away most of the surrounding foliage from the bunches.

But it wasn’t the extreme heat that was to prove problematic, rather the lack of rain. For almost five weeks from the middle of July to the end of August, there was no rain. It was of course sunny, with a few days that touched 40 degrees at the end of August, but the lack of water was more noticeable. To put it into perspective, I cut the grass only twice from the beginning of June to the end of August!

Yet vines are amazing plants – we read a lot about terroir and the suitability of one place or another to host vines, but until you see a really challenging growing season at first hand, you forget how resilient these plants can be – provided they are in the right place in the first instance. We were amazed at how the vines coped – even late into each afternoon, their shoots would still be standing proud, dancing in the breeze, with no sign of wilting.

But there are some vines that are less able to adapt – even if they are on an appropriate terroir. Young vines are particularly susceptible to drought as their root systems haven’t developed sufficiently. In and around Jeruzalem there has been a huge amount of activity planting new vineyards – a sure vote of confidence in the region – and these new vines were severely tested during the dry spell. As it wore on, you could begin to see how the soil in an individual vineyard was responding – the general types are heavy clay and also sandy soils – with vineyards that have both showing a remarkable difference in how they coped.

Young vines - note how the different soil types show up in drought

As the dry spell dragged on, it began to wreak havoc with other crops – corn was particularly badly affected, with many planting just simply shutting down, unable to ripen the cobs. Over in the west of Slovenia, in Primorska on the border with Italy, the drought had a devastating effect on the vineyards as the soil structures are quite different.

But over in our corner in the East, the vines soldiered on very well. However there were some strange things going on in the background. A quick check on acidities showed them to be all over the place. Ripening was far from even. Vines that had been left with a heavy yield struggled to get everything ripe. The difference between “morning” and “afternoon” sides of the same rows became greater.

Pretty high acidity!

Sugar levels did continue to rise, albeit slowly. It became clear that much of this rise was more to do with evaporation within the grapes (and thus higher sugar by default) rather than an actual ripening process. The vines had effectively shut down.

And as for our de-leafing strategy? Well, on the Sipon we had some bunches with sunburn (so much for that theory), but mostly we had grapes that had hard skins, with searing acidity. For the Blaufrankisch (Modra Frankinja) things were better: the bunches were more open with a lower yield and no sunburn – although there was a little bit of raisining beginning to set in by the end of August.

Sunburnt Sipon - should have used suncream... Note how unripe the gapes in the background are.

Checks at the end of August indicated a very early harvest was on the cards – and one that could be very irregular – acidities and sugar levels were still all over the place.

I was reminded of a marathon – I can cycle until the cows come home, but running still eludes me – but in a marathon people talk about hitting “the wall”. As we came to the end of August, I really felt the vines were hitting the wall – they were tiring from the effort, the ground was parched, the fruit was heavy – and they just wanted to give up.

And then there was word of rain on the way. Never was something so hoped for, and yet so feared at the same time! Too much rain and everything would be ruined overnight – vines drinking up all that moisture and dumping it into the grapes, to have them rupture and rot straight away whilst still unripe. Or too little, and the vines go on struggling and will deliver unbalanced grapes. There was plenty of discussion as to what was the “right” amount of rain to wish for…

In the end, the rain came – and would keep some people happy, and other not so much. Typical of 2012!

Rain on the way....hopefully...!

What is it about Wine Ads....?

The French used to advertise wine with all sorts of references to silkiness, smoothness, femininity and occasionally sexuality. That is of course before they were effectively banned from even mentioning it in their own Press......nowadays we're lucky if we see a moody shot of a lonely glass of wine with some "vague" tagline... "Merlot... soft and sophisticated" or "Les Vins de Bourgogne.... Simply Classic (or Classique!)"

The Americans seem to have taken a more "in-your-face" type approach. Strong male characters who manage to be a weird hybrid of confidence, arrogance, humour and vaguely annoying....

I wonder how many times they had to re-shoot him catching the bottle as he gets into the Limo....

And then the Aussies - well, as we have seen, they're a pretty blunt bunch of people as we saw before.....

Fancy a Beer for St. Patrick's Day?

The Return of Merlot.....

I'm supposed to be doing a million and one other things, including writing some proper blogs, but just stumbled across this....

 

 

Nicely done!

Rotten Neighbours - Part Three...

Ok – one more quick thing…

We hear a lot about rot and how it causes problems with grapes – either during the growing season, or at harvest time. What does it start out like, and how quickly does the problem spread? Of course, there aren’t any absolute answers as we’re dealing with Nature here, but it’s interesting to look at some generalities.

Above are two bunches from different vines at the same time. The one on the right looks much healthier (more uniform etc.) and the one on the left has some evidence of mildew – but at first look it doesn’t seem too bad…

The same two bunches three hours later…..

The rate at which the bunch on the left has declined is astonishing. Of course, being cut from the vine does accelerate the process, but the path to decline had already started by the time it was picked.

As an interesting end note, it’s worth remembering that many vineyards are often far away from the actual winery and we hear a lot about the transport of grapes. Conscientious producers may pick and transport at night – or in smaller boxes – all to avoid what you see above. Essentially, once picked, any less than perfect grapes will immediately start to decompose more rapidly and risk spoiling the rest of the bunches they are in contact with. Of course, diligent picking should have eliminated them in the first place – but that’s not always the case – and of course where machine harvesting is employed (in more places that you would think) it’s impossible to control…

Getting Bottled....

“Getting bottled” had an entirely different meaning to be when I was growing up…, but those young, foolish (and so, so fun!) years are long behind me.

Now getting bottled involved something a little less dangerous – and in reality a lot more fun. As many of you will know, we ran some trials on making both a red and white wine last vintage. The white (Sipon/Furmint) is still at a rather awkward stage (what a great euphemism that is) and is languishing unloved in the corner of the cellar.

But the reds are proving lots of fun at the moment. There are three variants of Modra Frankinja (Blaufrankisch): a cold macerated steel tank fermented one (“Marbles”), a normal temperature, open fermented one (“Traditional”) and a final one comprising the press juice from the first two combined (“Press”). The cold macerated version had been tasting delicious, and since there are only about 150 litres of it and it seemed “ready” (whatever that is – we have yet to discover) so we decided to bottle it. And I think – if we are very honest – part of the thought process was to stop ourselves drinking our way through it bit by bit – as if opening a screwcap was ever an obstacle….

I’d like to think we were following the great Burgundian tradition of bottling direct from the cask or tank, but the reality was that we just didn’t have a bottling machine. And anyway, doing it this way was much more hands on!

So we now have a little stash of regular 75cl bottles, some Magnums and a few smaller 50cl “sampler” bottles all packed up in the corner of the cellar. It’ll be interesting to see how long we can keep our hands off them….

The Traditional one has been racked from the barrel and is now resting in a steel tank for bottling around harvest time. Meanwhile the Press version continues to be the awkward child – with a heavy bout of reduction making assessment particularly difficult. So like any bold child, we have banished it to another room – in this case, the darkness (and oxygen) of the barrel that the Traditional juice just came out of.

We’ll see how it responds….

Rotten Neighbours - Part Two

Two years ago I wrote a Blog about the problems that can arise when neighbouring vines aren’t looked after – I called it Rotten Neighbours (Rotten Neighbours). To my surprise it became our most viewed Blog – not because I think people are interested in the challenges of inter-vineyard oidium spread, but more because quick look at Google analytics showed that many people are obviously doing searches for “Rotten Neighbours”. Says a lot for the community spirit…

Incidentally, our second most popular Blog (isn’t Google analytics great!) was about luxury Champagne and contained the all important keywords “Cristal” and “Ace of Spades”. If I just add “sex” to this one, the combination of all of the above should ensure many people without any interest in wine whatsoever will stumble across this post….

Anyway, for anyone with some interest – or who hasn’t given up reading by now – you will hopefully be pleased to know we have new neighbours. And more importantly, they have an interest in returning their vineyard to a workable and cared-for state.

My enthusiasm for supporting this approach led me to offer to help out in clearing the vineyard. There are lots of pleasant things in winemaking (not least drinking the finished product), but there are many undesirable tasks that should always be avoided wherever possible: shovelling pressed pips and skin from a finished press onto a trailer along with ten million fruits flies is a good example. Climbing inside a press to clean it along with same flies is another. Clearing a vineyard is also now a good contender for a high ranking. It’s all done manually as a tractor can’t even get into the vineyard because it’s so overgrown. Sweat, sneezes, scratches, bites, trips, sore arms, sunburnt face, soggy shorts, itching, tears (almost), salty skin (from sweat), thirst, stings, blisters, aches and many more whingy ailments contribute to making it an “interesting” experience for a soft-skinned Irish lad.

But we did it – or rather Miro did the majority of it… and I did a bit…..

But underneath all that jungle of growth lay something rather special – or at least potentially rather special. A vineyard that hadn’t been sprayed regularly – and thus free of a build-up of insecticides. A vineyard that hadn’t been artificially fertilised for years. A vineyard where the vines, through lack of attentive pruning, had in many cases found a natural, low yield for the fruit. And of course, plenty of rot. But great potential to start afresh next year….. In the meantime, Miro decided to green harvest all the fruit with the exception of 1 bunch per shoot. It’s a risk given the dangers of the last bunch getting rot, or being hit by hail – but if it pays off (and it has so far), some very interesting wine could be produced from it….

And so we wave goodbye to the Rotten Neighbours – and hopefully hello to a hole new bunch of readers who came looking to find out how to solve that awkward problem of neighbourly music being played too loud, unsociably late parties, rubbish being dumped in the garden… and of course luxury Champagne and sex….