Recapping Our 2016 Season

2016 is wrapping up, so I thought I would stick with something I did last year, Recapping Our 2015 Season.
Early in 2016, we still had our irrigation to put into the ground, fortunately January was warm enough to allow that and we finished up right before the first major snowfall and winter making it's presence known. In March, we bottled our first vintage from our 2015 harvest of Chenin Blanc. We followed that up with digging 4200 holes with a rented auger and the help of friends. We called on more friends in May to come and help us plant the 4200 vines and put in our irrigation to water the new vines in a very dry summer of 2016. We were too late to order the type of netting that we like, so we went to plan B and bagged our grape clusters with organza wedding bags. We were fortunate to have almost double the harvest that we had in 2015 and our friends came out to help with the harvest and the crushing. That was fun! The wine is resting in our fermentaion chamber waiting to be bottled. Wishing you all the Best in 2017!

A Day at Jonathan Edwards

Michael Schmidt at Spec Trellising invited us to see the unloading of two Albrigi tanks for Tapped Apple Winery at Jonathan Edwards. Here is one example of wineries helping other wineries. Tapped Apple Winery didn't have a way to unload the tanks, and the winemaker, Michael Harney at Jonathan Edwards said that they could use their equipment. How nice is that!
On Tuesday, Michael gave us a heads up that he was going to arrive at Jonathan Edwards around 9:30, so we arrived there about 15 minute before Michael Schmidt and that allowed us to bump into Jonathan Edwards! We met Jonathan Edwards in 2011, when we were in our information gathering phase. Jonathan remembered us and we spent a little time catching up on what we had been up to. While we were speaking with Jonathan, Michael, their winemaker waved to us from the winery below so we met up with him. Soon after that, the Tapped Apple Winery people, showed up and we got to meet John, John's son John, and John's friend Adam.

The unloading of the two Albrigi tanks went smoothly.

After the tanks were safely on the trucks, Michael (winemaker) invited us to taste some of the wines that he was making. We got to taste his Riesling and his Pinot Gris. We had a fun time and met a lot of great people in the business.

Access to Wine Science Online

I have the third edition of Ronald Jackson's book Wine Science. Recently, when I was reading my book, it was so heavy, I decided to see if I could locate it online, and sure enough, the entire Third Edition of the book is publicly available here:
Wine Science
Thank you, Ronald Jackson! This makes reading your book a lot easier.

Coravin---Our Handy New Wine Gadget

One day last week, my husband showed me a video highlighting a new wine tool called a Coravin. We watched a video with Robert Parker and Greg Lambrecht, the owner and inventor of Coravin. We found out that the Coravin is a unique wine access system that enables you to pour wine from a bottle without pulling the cork. As the video went on, it was clear that Robert Parker was effusive in the praises of this new system and the more we watched, the more we thought that we might be able to use the Coravin to taste our bottled wine in micro-doses without opening the bottle and exposing it to air. Nuff said! No more than a day later, my husband decided to order the Coravin and we received it no more than 5 days after we ordered it. We tried it last night on one our our Chardonnay and one of our Auxerrois bottles.
We first tested the system on another wine bottle, just to make sure that we knew how to use it. It is very simple. The Coravin comes with an aluminum cannister filled with Argon that fits into the "handle" part of the Coravin. The Coravin has a hollow needle that pierces the cork and the lever delivers the wine, all without opening the bottle!

1999 Mommessin Clos de Tart Grand Cru

We had this 1999 Mommessin Clos de Tart Grand Cru with our friends as part of Beserker Frank Murray III "Empty My Wallet Challenge". It's very nice when you can drink a good Burgundy and know that it is going to a great cause, in this case, to help stop domestic violence. My husband made roast pork loin with fennel and green olives to pair with the Burgundy.
Here is my husband's excellent tasting notes on this wine:
This 750mL bottle was pulled from cool storage 24 hrs ahead of drinking and stood upright on the kitchen counter. About 2 hrs ahead of dinner I pulled the cork and had a taste. Clearly it was going to need a little air in a decanter before serving. Within 20 minutes of the dinner course I poured it into a decanter and swirled lightly. The cork had a narrow wine soil band from the wine side. In the glass the clean wine color is a medium dark garnet with light bricking at the edges. The aroma had a light floral and leather mix that developed more fully after 1 hr. In the mouth the dark raspberry and sweet cherry fruit integrated well with the acidity and tannins. The tannins were not completely softened at this time. This was a very nice and enjoyable wine that will continue to get better with time as it has the fruit to go on for 5-10 more years. My two remaining soldiers from this vintage will continue to be stored for that latter timeframe. I'm thankful that our friends could make it to dinner and share the food and wine with us....Cheers, Gary

Parts of the Grape Berry

I started off reading an article called "Phenolics and Ripening in Grape Berries"¹ and decided that I needed to take one step back. In reading this article, I found that nomenclature can be a hindrance to understanding what part of the grape berry is being referenced, so I did a little research to learn about the various names that can stand for the same part of the grape berry. This understanding of the grape berry, I found is a necessary prelude to understanding where the various flavor components are located.
The following illustration has been modified from the original² to refer to the grape berry parts:

In simplistic terms, the grape berry can be divided into the outer skin, pulp and the seeds which is obvious to the unaided eye. However the grape berry is comprised of distinct morphological and anatomically divisions.
Parts of the Grape Berry:³

• Epidermis: cuticle covering
• Hypodermis: just under the epidermis comprising several cell layers
• Mesocarp: contains larger vacuoles and comprising 85–87% of the berry’s spherical volume
• Endocarp: consists of crystal-containing cells (druses) and an inner epidermis
• Seeds: contained in locules and composed of an outer seed coat, the endosperm, and the embryo

Not shown in the diagram is the berry vascular system composed of xylem and phloem vessels. With this groundwork laid, I hope to continue in the next blogpost with the chemical constituents that can be found in the various parts of the grape berry.
References:
1. Douglas O. Adams, "Phenolics and Ripening in Grape Berries", Am. J. Enol. Vitic., 57:3 (2006).
2. Dunsford, P.A. and Sneyd, T.N., "Pressing for quality", Proceedings of the Seventh Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference.
3. Fernanda Cosme, Berta Gonçalves, António Inês, António M. Jordão and Alice Vilela, "Grape and Wine Metabolites: Biotechnological Approaches to Improve Wine Quality"