Summer Transition to Fall Respite

For a few weeks now, our friends, husband and I have been busy putting up netting and closing the netting with clothes pins and harvesting our small crop of Auxerrois. But, when the rains come and the weather turns cool, there is not much to do except catch up on all of the household chores that have been piling up.

We had our friends over on this cool bordering on cold evening, for a hearty meal of pot roast, roasted home (not my home) grown carrots and potatoes, arugula and watermelon salad and individual brownie, raspberry and vanilla topped dessert. It was her birthday after all!
My husband pulled out two red wines to have with this repast. The first was a 2006 Michel-Schlumberger, which has long been one of my favorite California reds, ever since we visited the winery in 2012.
What I like about the wine is that it is

not overly jammy and heavily extracted. It still had a tannic backbone that lent a note of dryness to the backend. Definitely a wine to drink with pot roast!
The second wine that we had with our meal was this 2000 Chateau Yon-Figeac. While the Michel-Schlumberger was a good pairing with the roast, I felt that this 2000 Chateau Yon-Figeac was speaking my palate and I enjoyed it with the roast beef. The wine tasted of red fruits, bing cherries, red raspberry, again, not jammy, but still definite fruit flavors with a mellow finish.
All in all, this was a fine way to celebrate a friend's birthday and welcome in Fall. I'm hoping for a nice long Indian summer, Mother Nature is still on the hook to ripen the Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Chenin Blanc, still hanging in the vineyard!

Monarch in the Vineyard

This year, my husband marveled at how many Monarch butterflies were in the vineyard, so many more than we had seen in the past. With all of the other things that we have to do in the vineyard, some weeds have taken over under the canopy. While I tend to pull up the bind weed, black swallow wort and tall grasses, I do tend to leave the milk weed, Asclepias syriaca L. alone.
Our clothes pin duties brings us up close and personal with the ground. One morning, I saw a Monarch butterfly caterpillar! Soon after that, I saw a butterfly. This is why working in the vineyard close to Nature is reward in itself.

Auxerrois 2018 Harvest

Rain is the enemy of ripening grapes. We already had 2 rain events the previous week, on Monday, September 10th that brought us 1-inch of rain and on Wednesday, September 12th that gave us another 2-inches of rain. We are not complaining since we know that our grape growing neighbors in the Mid-Atlantic states had to make a decision to harvest due to Hurricane Florence. While we were only going to get the after effects of Hurricane Florence, here in Connecticut, we did have advance notice that we would get another deluge of rain on Tuesday, September 18th. Knowing this, we harvested our small crop of Auxerrois on Monday, September 17. My husband and I went to the vineyard on Monday at 7:30 and harvested our small crop in 2 hours. It took 9 lugs to hold the entire crop. We went home and began to clean the grapes, something that we have done since 2015.

Nine lugs yielded 6 lugs of cleaned grapes and the approximate weight of the grapes was 132 pounds. We departed a little from our normal MO of putting the grapes in mash bags to start. Now it was stomping time. For this step, we put on food grade booties that we purchased from Uline. We soon realized that one of the reasons that we put the grapes into the mash bags is to hold back the gross pulp, skins and seeds. So, we went back to the tried-and-true and put the grapes into the mash bags to stomp the grapes.
This is always the fun part! While we stomp, we usually spritz the grape mash bag and juice with a 50 ppm solution of potassium metabisulfite to try to keep the juice from oxidizing too much. The result of our stomping was about 6 to 7 gallons of Auxerrois juice in two glass carboys.

We took the parameters for the juice in the two glass carboys and then put in 50 ppm of potassium metabisulfite into each carboy. The carboys then went into the fermentation chamber to cold settle. We called the carboy that held the larger amount of juice, Aux-1 and the other carboy, Aux-2. Here is what we found for the numbers:

Auxerrois	Brix	pH	Titratable Acids (TA g/L)
Aux-1	17	3.34	5.7
Aux-2	17	3.36	5.4

we tasted the last of the juice that was left in the bin that couldn't be siphoned into the carboy. It was delicious! Next steps will be documented in a future blog.

Still Netting

We are in a rush to put up netting on our grapes ever since we saw a flock of starlings when we arrived at the vineyard on September 6. Half of our vineyard is already netted, but the netting had to be dropped and cinched. We still had to put up the moveable wire for the netting on the other half of the vineyard.
It's a good thing that we have such dedicated friends who come and help us in the vineyard. After putting up the moveable wire, they came to help us put up the anchor clips (check out the blog How Long Does it Take to Net, to see what an anchor clip and a vin clip look like).

They also came to help us close up the netting that we already have in the vineyard with our newly acquired netting closures, clothes pins. My husband sourced these clothes pins from China. Last year, he got an assortment of possible styles of clothes pins and we selected this one because it felt durable and had a strong grip.
Last year, when we used the vin clips, we found it to be difficult to put on and even more difficult to take off. This hampered us during Brix sampling and especially during harvest when it was imperative to remove the vin clips and move the netting out of the way of harvesting grapes.
Our new solution, goes on quickly and comes off quickly and is no impediment to getting in and out of the netting making sampling of Brix easy to do.

We put the clothes pin on either side of the grape vine and on either side of the line post. For one person to do one row (756 feet) takes one hour. There are approximately 460 clothes pins holding the netting shut. We ordered 15,000 clothes pins to do the entire vineyard. Amazingly, the shipping cost more than the clothes pins. The cost of the clothes pins when shipping is factored in is about $0.08 (eight cents) per pin.

Berry Sensory Assessment (BSA) for Cabernet Sauvignon

We have ripening Cabernet Sauvignon! Now, we are on a crash course of how to vinify red Cabernet Sauvignon. Making wine from red grapes is a totally different beast from making wine from white grapes. I am reading an article from the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture titled Linking Sensory Properties and Chemical Composition of Vitis vinifera cv. Cabernet Sauvignon Grape Berries to Wine.¹ The research was conducted in South Australia during the 2014 and 2015 vintages.
What peaked my interest was the tool used called Berry Sensory Assessment (BSA), so this blog is about BSA. So while I began with reading the AJEV article, that took me on a slight digression involving BSA. I came across a great introductory slide deck uthored by Jacques Rousseau called Berry sensory analysis, a simple tool for maturity assessment.²
What are we doing when we taste a grape for maturity? There are two types of grape maturity: pulp maturity or technological maturity and seed maturity or phenolic maturity. The following illustration is color coded blue for pulp maturity and brown for seed maturity.³

The BSA relies on:

• Visual Examination
• Tactile Examination
• Taste Examination

A scoresheet to aid in the qualitative BSA with a scoring scale from 1 (unripe) to 4 (ripe) with the exception of acidity and astringency:

References:
1. Jun Niimi, Paul K. Boss, David Jeffery, Susan E. P. Bastian, Linking Sensory Properties and Chemical Composition of Vitis vinifera cv. Cabernet Sauvignon Grape Berries to Wine, Am J Enol Vitic. July 2017 68: 357-368.
2. Jacques Rousseau, Berry sensory analysis, a simple tool for maturity assessment, BCWGC Conference, Penticton, July 18, 2017.
3. Vintage Direct 2.10 Making Sparkling Wine (Methode Champenoise)
Illustration is from Dunsford, P.A. and Sneyd, T.N. 1989. Pressing for quality. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference.

Vintage 2018: End of Summer

Doesn't it seem that when children go back to school, summer has ended? Mother Nature doesn't think so. This last week in August we had temperatures in the 90's with feel like temperatures either close to 100 or exceeding 100 degrees.
There are still many chores to do so we were fortunate that our friends came to help us this week during a time when it is infinitely better to be in the cool and comfort of the air conditioned indoors. We limited the work day to the morning hours and hid out during the afternoon scorching heat.
There is always the bad news, good news aspect to such a heat wave. Difficult for people to work in the vineyard, but good for ripening grapes.

This is the first year that we have red varieties that set fruit, our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. We had no idea when véraison would be for these red varieties. We noticed that one precocious vine of our Cabernet Sauvignon was changing color on August 25th.
Today, when we went to the vineyard, we noticed that at least 80% of the Cabernet Sauvignon, pictured on the right were changing color! We were at véraison! Checking the Brix of one of the grapes showed that it was at 11.
Then we looked over at our Cabernet Franc and it too was at véraison with Brix at 13. The Cabernet Franc is shown below:

Our Chardonnay is also at 13 Brix. Our Chenin is lagging behind!