The growing season is now in full swing.  This would normally be a rather unnecessary statement approaching the summer solstice, but it has been an unusual spring…again!  As northern California residents are well aware, it’s been a persistently cool and relatively wet spring, significantly delaying most crops.  The last rain–still an abundant one–came on June 6.  After June 6, Mother Nature offered up some dry but still unseasonably cool springtime weather which was perfect for getting work done, though did not nothing to make up for the late budburst.  In the last few and coming few days, finally, we’re seeing some typical Foothills summer weather, with some hot days and cool nights.  We are seeing “bloom” (flowering) in all of our main varietals right now.  The net effect of all of this is that the 2011 vintage is likely to play out similar to last year–with late ripening across the board–and we have set our harvest expectations accordingly.

The frost that hit our barbera turned what is normally tedious shoot-thinning into an absolute slog.  Frost-affected plants typically push buds that even they didn’t know they had, and this compounded the propensity of barbera to push unwanted shoots.  But the work is done, and the good news is that the expected suppressive effect of frost on crop load has left a crop that is both adequate to meet current demand and clearly NOT in need of subsequent fruit-dropping, an operation that normally occurs in the hottest time of the year.  The vines were so nicely thinned that we were able to count fruit clusters in a large sample of the barbera vineyard, and concluded that, assuming normal attrition and cluster size, we should only come up one ton shy of target, leaving some barbera still for sale.  The vines look great now, and we’ll now focus on keeping the vines healthy for what should be some nice, concentrated fruit.

The primitivo appears to have been completely spared the early spring frosts, and the shoots are still in a rapid growth phase, with bloom fully in progress and vines looking extremely good.  Shoot thinning in the primitivo (and neighboring touriga) will commence after the impending heat wave passes.  In the last month, we completed a mundane (to the client) but extremely helpful re-jiggering of our irrigation blocks in the primitivo.  Block 6 had been added onto from the original planting in 2002, making it a little too large as a watering block for our well pump.  A portion of the block had subsequently been grafted over to touriga nacional, meaning that the two varietals were being irrigated at the same rate.  We’ve now reduced the size of Block 6 by breaking off the “new” touriga as its own watering block.  This will allow us to more effectively reach all the primitivo in Block 6 with water and customize the irrigation of the touriga.

The Quinta–our circa half-acre of Portugese varietals–is well-positioned for a great season.  It appeared that the touriga nacional portion of this vineyard was partially affected by the spring frosts, but this was mild enough, and the vines resilient enough, that crop load looks normal. The tinto cao, on other hand, was hit harder, and shoot thinning with that varietal and adjoining tempranillo was focused on preserving fruitful clusters.  We think the net effect of the frost has been to limit crop load very close to our targets from an unusually early period of the season, which we would anticipate would only help concentration.  This, together with our previously mentioned removal of a partially shading tree to the south of this vineyard have us very optimistic for this vintage.  The Quinta’s 2011 production of about 1.25 tons, which represents a turnkey opportunity for making a port-style wine with all the complexity of an authentic Portugese-style port (or an equally complex Portugese-style dry red wine), is still available for purchase.  Absent a single buyer for these grapes, we will be making available “shares” of this vineyard to give smaller scale winemakers a chance to make such a wine. 

We received more great news on the 2011 wine competition front, this time from our some wines made commercially with Shaker Ridge grapes.  Oakstone Winery of Fair Play’s 2008 primitivo took a gold medal at the Amador County Fair and a bronze medal at the California State Fair.  Oakstone’s 2009 barbera–recently released by that winery after sell-through of the 2008–garnered silver medals at the El Dorado County Fair, the Amador County Fair, and the California State Fair.  And the first-ever commercial touriga made with our Quinta grapes, produced by Obscurity Cellars of Fair Play, earned a gold medal at the California State Fair and silver medals at both the El Dorado and Amador county fairs.  Congratulations to Oakstone and Obscurity on these outstanding results.

We’ve enjoyed a little of everything so far in May, with summer-like heat giving way to perfect, low 70’s, springtime-like weather, followed by relatively rare May rain, more hail storms, and overnight temperatures in the low 40’s.  As expected, the vines exploded out of the gates in late April, and the cover crops between rows shot right up with them, the latter needing to be mowed early so that we could even move around out there. 

As predicted, we suffered some frost damage to our early-pushing tinto cao from a pair of early April frosts; the surprise was that our barbera got hit to some extent as well.  Apparently the buds–which were on the verge of pushing but had not yet pushed when the frosts hit–were sensitive enough to be affected.  The damage was random and, as the recent vineyard gallery pictures will attest, have hardly stopped the vines.  Indeed, it is rather hard to kill a grapevine; the main impact of mild frost like we experienced is to kill off some of the fruitful buds intentionally left behind from pruning, and lead to germination of less fruitful secondary buds, which we find that barbera push in abundance in a normal year.  The net impact of the frost is to decrease yield, though the magnitude of the impact will not be clear until we set select shoots and set fruit in a few weeks.  We expect that our committed barbera is quite safe at this point, but we may need to lower the estimate of barbera still available for sale. 

In the primitivo vineyard, we are experimenting with some nutritional supplementation in alternate rows derived from our cover crop.  In addition, we will be punching extra irrigation emitters in the rockier portion of the vineyard that dries out first in the summer heat.  Adjacent to both the primitivo and Portugese varietal vineyards, we’ve removed some trees that mainly provided easy cover for marauding birds and squirrels, which we think can only help our cause.

We received some fantastic news from the first of the regional home winemaker competitions, the El Dorado County Fair (our home county).  Our three entrants–a 2009 touriga nacional varietal wine, a 2008 dry red blend of our Portugese varietal grapes, and a 2008 dessert wine we call “Dorado” made from our Portugese varietal grapes in a vintage port style, all won gold medals.  We are particularly pleased to report that the Dorado won “Best of Show” in the El Dorado County Fair home winemaker competition, our first wine with this distinction.  All of these wines were made from our estate grapes. 

We have been “pounding the table” (in Wall Street speak) on the Portugese varietals for a couple of years now, and we hope that the strong showing of the wines made from these grapes will encourage more takers for our “Quinta” grapes.  As noted elsewhere on our website, if we are unable to sell the Quinta grapes to a single producer by July 1, we will be offering 10% shares in this year’s production to give smaller producers a chance to play with them.  Separately, we have varietal touriga for sale and suspect that you will enjoy its qualities as much as we do.

It has been a busy few weeks as we prepare for budburst of the grapevines and the between-row mowing and mildew-preventative spraying that will ensue.   The string of March rains/hail storms finally relented, and beautiful spring  to early summer-like days (albeit a bit chilly some mornings) followed, starting to bring the vines to life.  We rapidly completed “winter pruning” of our primitivo and port vineyards in advance of budburst.  In total, we logged over 120 hours over several weeks pruning our ~7 acres of grapes, which represents only the first of several times that each vine will be touched throughout the season. 

Budburst was observed in our earliest pushing varieties (tinto cao in our “port” vineyard; muscat blanc which we use for eating/juice) on April 6, only to be greeted with light frost on the mornings of April 8 and 9.  The extent of damage, if any, to these varietals is not yet clear, but cooler temperatures and a little April rain/clouds have nevertheless reined in early growth.  Fortunately, our earliest pushing main varietal, barbera, had not pushed as of April 8/9 and indeed has not pushed as of this writing (April 15), though bud swell is evident, and budburst seems imminent.  A couple of pictures showing the deceptive “calm before the storm” of our dormant 9-year-old barbera vines (10th “leaf”) just before budburst are posted as part of our “vineyard gallery”.

All in all, we’re looking at a later-than-average start to the growing season, but we’re in good shape with adequate winter rains and  time to complete the necessary pre-season activities.  We look forward with optimism to the coming growing season and fair wine competitions.