No two springs are exactly alike at the vineyard, but somehow they all manage to be fairly hectic.  In the last week of May, we find ourselves at last feeling more in control than not, and “bloom” is officially upon us.  The blooms of the subtle grape flowers that will go on to become wine grapes emit a distinctive, musty, delicate, floral aroma that we look forward to each year.  Bloom is also time when we take annual stock of the nutritional status of the vines and make corrections if necessary.  Downstream of bloom we get an initial sense of fruit set and likely yield for the vintage, though it’s really not until well into the summer that yield comes fully into focus.  Even then, we must keep an eye on possible sources of attrition including fungal disease–which we and most growers seek to prevent rather than treat–as well as sunburn, dehydration, mites, song birds, turkeys, black bears…it’s a long list!

With the help of a crew, we have just completed shoot thinning, an extremely important operation for opening up the grape canopy to air flow and light and for limiting yield. The vines, after “pushing” (budburst) fairly late this year, sat pretty much in suspended animation for weeks as a very pleasant spring, temperature-wise, unfolded.  That is to say it was pleasant for humans, a little cool and wet for the vines.  But gradually and inevitably our wet season–which was (thankfully after 4 years of drought) very wet indeed this year–has given way, and we are now perched at Memorial Day weekend, which in many years marks the last chance for rain until the following autumn.   Not to say that we NEVER see a thunderstorm in summer, but they are rare at our 1500′ altitude, and garden variety storm fronts like much of the Mid-West and East Coast see in summer simply don’t happen here.  In any event, with the progression of spring came more sun and warmth, and the vine shoots exploded in growth and now range from about 2 to 4 feet in length, seemingly overnight.

So far, so good.  We do not see evidence of frost damage and that risk is now past.  We have also managed to stay ahead of the cover crop growth between rows with mowing. Unfortunately, our treatment for weeds within rows seemed too little, too late for some parts of the vineyard, so we will need to get creative with weed control in some areas to avoid excessive competition with our vines for irrigation water. Irrigation has not been required yet given the abundant rain in the wet season, but the extensive shoot and soon fruit growth, coupled with warmer temperatures, will likely necessitate that we start irrigating in June.

On the home wine competition front, we don’t know how to summarize what has happened recently without sounding like we’re bragging, which doesn’t come off well to those on the receiving end, so we’ll try to keep it as factual as possible.  The Sacramento Home Winemakers (SHW), a Sacramento-based non-profit organization that promotes education about winemaking and boasts a large membership, holds an annual Jubilee wine competition within its ranks.  The judging is done by a collection of outside experts and is conducted in typical blind and systematic fashion by panels of judges (we assisted at a judging several years ago as former members).

This May at the 2017 Jubilee, a dry red wine made from a blend of Portugese varietals from our Quinta block (2014 vintage) took Best of Red Wine and Best of Show honors.  To be named Best of Show, it needed to beat out the other 155 entrants, including, in the final round of judging, the other “Best of” wines, namely Best of White, Best of Rose, Best of Dessert, and Best of Fruit (ie, other than grapes) wines. Remarkably, the Best of Dessert wine happened to be a port-style wine made from our same Quinta block, same blend of grapes, same vintage, but in a fortified dessert style rather than dry, by Thad and Heather Rodgers.  For those with elephant-like memories of this blog, you may remember that Thad impressively won Best of Red at last year’s Jubilee competition with a primitivo made with our grapes, losing out for Best of Show honors to a port-style wine made with grapes from our Quinta.  In other words, in 2 consecutive years, wines made by our clients with grapes grown at Shaker Ridge have won Best of Red, Best of Dessert, and Best of Show at SHW’s Jubilee competition in a field of wines made from grapes from all over northern CA.  Pinch us, we must be dreaming…

THANK YOU to the Sacramento Home Winemakers for doing such great work with our grapes and, importantly, for sharing your success:  it keeps us going…!

For the 2017 season, we still have 0.85 ton of touriga–the same varietal that makes up the plurality of our Quinta block but from an adjacent, untrellised field–available for sale as of this writing.  We don’t think it will last for long, particularly if a commercial buyer finds it.  It is the quintessential port grape, but as shown above, can also contribute to a terrific dry wine and we think it is the single best varietal that we do here.  Though we are sold out of our popular primitivo, we are still taking wait list requests for that varietal and think there is a realistic possibility of availability if we can come close to matching last year’s yield.  We will start posting the waitlist in conjunction with our “Current Grape Availability” updates so that those on it and those interested can have good visibility into the availability situation in close to real time.

The 2017 vintage is underway, though barely.  We enjoyed heavy rainfall in the Sierra Foothills this winter and spring, with record snowpacks in the High Sierra.  It was frankly just what the doctor ordered.  It’s hard to believe after several years of drought (though we think that was a bit of an exaggeration for our area last year) that the current concerns and headlines would be more about flooding, overburdened spillways, and reservoirs filled to the brim and being forced to dump water.  Feast or famine.

The frequent rains and still persistent cool but beautiful weather have led to a late budburst, or at least later than the last 2 very early years.  This year looks like it may have been average to slightly on the late side for budburst, which will likely be reflected in harvest timing.  We also pruned very late this year, with some early varietals just starting to “push”, and that probably added to the later appearance of buds in our vineyard.  In any event, though it looked like we would never get our in-row weed control spray down in time, we managed to do that, and now we wait for warming and more sun before rapid shoot growth and the imminent start of routine preventative spraying for powdery mildew.

We weighed a number of options for our barbera in the off season, a variety which is a bit of a “water hog” and also prone to raisining in our hot late summers.  One section of our barbera vineyard is on a rock outcropping with particularly shallow soils, and that section is the first to raisin, which is a perennial discouragement as harvest approaches.  We were prepared to graft this section to another varietal or take other extreme measure, but in the end we decided to remove vines selectively to allow those remaining to access more water.  Visually this will be barely noticeable to the casual observer, and yield-wise, we hope it will actually be a wash:  while we lose production from the vines removed, we hope that production will be higher from the remaining adjacent vines, with less raisining.

We’ve received word of additional outstanding results for home winemakers making wine with our Quinta Portugese varietal grapes including a pair of double golds (one for a dry wine, one for a port style) which we plan to update on our website soon.  On the commercial front, we are pleased to report that Due Vigne di Famiglia’s 2015 barbera and primitivo wines made with Shaker Ridge Vineyard grapes each took silver medals in the 2017 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.  Congratulations to Due Vigne’s winemaker Ken Musso!  We look forward to reporting on the many upcoming commercial and home winemaker competitions.

Pre-season sales were brisk, and our only remaining 2017 grape inventory–at least until we get further in the season and are able to better assess yield– is  less than 1 ton of touriga, a fabulous red wine grape suitable for both dry and dessert wines.  If you’re interested in making wine this year, we recommend you commit to grapes early…

On the morning of September 30, we–the royal we–completed our last harvest for 2016.  As anyone who follows California viticulture can appreciate, wine grape vintages are a little bit like the children of Lake Wobegon–they’re all above average (at least until the wines made from them are all sold).  We’ve been doing this long enough to know that that’s not only mathematically impossible, it’s not true:  some really are below average.  However, 2016 was not one of them.  In terms of timing, the vintage was only slightly later than last year’s historically early vintage.  However, at least at Shaker Ridge, we had no frost damage, no issues with powdery mildew, plenty of sunshine without excessive heat and wind for most of the growing season, and a relatively high yield that we were able to fully ripen.  It was also the first year we employed the services of a vineyard manager to remove some of the burden of vineyard logistics, but we remained heavily involved nonetheless, particularly as harvest approached.

It was certainly on the warm side in late August and much of September, but we’ve seen a lot worse, and apart from our barbera which got partially nuked (lowering yield) by the high heat from a string of triple-digit days in July, ripening conditions were reasonable, there was no rain after May, and the grapes managed just fine.  In the end, we had a record harvest of nearly 21 tons that went to 4 commercial wineries and approximately 20 home winemakers.

We thank, as always, our clients for working with us with harvest logistics, keeping commitments, arriving on time to pick up grapes, and in many cases sharing wine that you have prepared from our grapes in the past.  In that regard, a special thanks to Thad Rogers of the Sacramento Home Winemakers (SHW) for sharing his 2014 primitivo made from our grapes that stunned the cabernet- and Rhone-focused wine judging circuit by taking Best of Reds at the SHW’s Jubilee competition this year, a remarkable accomplishment that reminds us why we do this.  And by the end of the season, that’s a reminder we usually need.

We plan to be on time next year in posting availability and pricing of grapes for 2017 by the end of January, but will consider requests for reservations on a case-by-case basis.  Until then, we hope you enjoy the “off season,” as we certainly intend to!

“Here in a small town, where it feels like home,

I’ve got everything I need, and nothing that I don’t.”

–Zac Brown Band (“Homegrown”)