NEWA Network for Environment and Weather Applications

Post harvest is a time when my husband and I reflect on the year that we have just been through. So far, we have 6 years of tending vines and every year is different. In talking with Charles Massoud of Paumanok Vineyards, no two years are the same. But, with each passing year, we can learn something.
We are not alone in feeling that this year was very challenging, for us, rather devastating. According to Cornell Agritech post Veraison to Harvest, written by Chris Gerling and Hans Walter-Peterson, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity. And the Rain. And the Clouds. And the Fruit Flies.
This first line in this article begins:
"I come to bury 2018, not to praise it. I mean, yuck. New York agriculture presents challenges every season, but this one bordered on ridiculous."
Were they reading my mind? Although this article talks about conditions in New York, it could very well have been the conditions we experienced in southeast coastal Connecticut.
Further in the article was this:
Again in 2018 we were in desperate need of a warm, dry September and October to boost maturity and ease disease pressure. Spoiler Alert: no dice.
Maybe it was the damage already done by the humidity (Figure 6). Maybe it was the rain, which never left for more than three days in a row.
Maybe it was a combination of these factors or other factors that were harder to perceive, but for whatever reason, sometime around September 15th the rot index went from suboptimal-but-manageable to Zombie Apocalypse, Vineyard Edition.
Again, very relatable. We also hoped that an Indian summer would help us to keep ripening our fruit, but yes, what we had instead was the Zombie Apocalypse.
So, the question is, how can we better manage our crop? One very helpful website that my husband located is the
NEWA Network for Environment and Weather Applications.
The site looks like this:

The tabs on the top of the page include: Weather Data, Pest Forecasts, Station Pages, Crop Management, Crop Pages, Weather Stations, and Help.
We will be referring to this site frequently.

Thanksgiving Homage

In early November, we went to the North Fork of Long Island with our friends to visit Paumanok Vineyards. This has been an annual trek for us since 2016 when we were able to share our first vintage, the 2015 Chenin Blanc with Charles and Kareem Massoud. The Massouds are always so welcoming and lavish in their hospitality. This year, we went to Long Island on two of the most beautiful fall days in 2018. We were welcomed by Kareem and taken to their outdoor balcony overlooking their vineyard.

In a few minutes, the outdoor balcony was filled with all manner of comestibles to pair with the wines that we would be tasting. This year, we brought our 2017 Chenin Blanc Pét-Nat, 2018 Auxerrois, 2017 Chardonnay, and a 1997 Palmer Merlot to celebrate their purchase of Palmer. Our friends brought a bottle of Millton Chenin Blanc from their trip to New Zealand. Charles and Kareem brought out their Minimalist Chenin Blanc, Minimalist Chardonnay, and 2015 Barrel Aged Chardonnay.

As the day wore on and the sun began to set, we moved indoors to continue sampling wines, cheeses, and enjoying the stories that Charles told. Charles brought out a 2014 Blanc de Blancs, 2015 Cabernet Franc, 2013 Merlot, 2014 Assemblage, and a 2012 Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc.
This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a few of our dear friends who have helped us throughout our growing season and beyond. We wanted to pay homage to our friends on Long Island by pairing our Thanksgiving meal with the wines from Paumanok.

As we imbibed the wine and grazed our way through the starters, we recalled the beautiful day in November sitting on the balcony at Paumanok having a great time. Our friends also provided us with cheese and jams that they brought all the way from Croatia and reminisced about the vacation they spent there. There was a lot to be thankful for.

Wishing You a Wild and Happy Thanksgiving

Vineyard work is put on hold to celebrate Thanksgiving. Actually, the temperatures in the Northeast is supposed to be at a hundred year low for Thanksgiving. While working in the vineyard, we run into a variety of wild life. Recently, my husband took this photo of cedar waxwings that is just perfect for a Christmas card.

Our hunter found this shot of a very healthy bobcat with it's prey, a hapless squirrel, on his trail camera. Our hunter also got lucky a few days ago when he scored this beautiful deer. He was smiling from ear to ear and we were quite happy as well because our hunter gives us some awesome meats from the deer like breakfast sausage and venison hot dogs to name just a few.

Vintage 2018: Fall Chores

To say that this fall is quite a deviation from the norm is an understatement. On Thursday, November 15, we had our first snowfall. Since we live along the coast, we were under the mistaken impression that our snowfall would be a mixture of rain, sleet and snow which would melt very quickly. However, as early evening came around, the white stuff began to fall and we ended up with between 3-4 inches of snow!
Our plan to work in the vineyard on Friday took a back seat when the winds blew and it just didn't seem like a good idea to go to the vineyard. However, we couldn't neglect the work we had to do for 2 nice (40 degree weather) days in a row and we had friends coming to help us, so on Friday, we went back to securing our netting for the coming winter.
Without help, one person can do one row in 2 hours and 45 minutes. With one persons help, that time is reduced to 1 hour and 30 minutes, and with 3 people working, one row, which really consists of two 800 feet worth of netting can be done in 45 minutes!

This is our second year at securing netting. Last year, we thought that the best thing to do was to secure the netting to the trellis wire. When spring came around, we found that the wind had blown one side of the netting and caught on the anchors on the other side. It was a mess. This year, we are trying some thing different. We have always used grapevine rubber bands for the various securing and tethering activities that we do in the vineyard. Our strategy this year is to put the rubber band very close to the anchor clip that holds the netting. We hope that this weight will keep the netting from getting caught on the netting on the other side of the trellis.
Our anchor clips are spaced (should be) 4 feet apart from each other. By trial and error, we learned that the best way to get the netting as tight as possible is to begin rolling the netting at one end of the row, and then move to the third anchor clip and roll the netting back to the second anchor clip. There will be eight feet between anchor clips that have been rubber banded. We'll see in the spring how our method held up. Meanwhile, we have just 10 more rows of netting to roll up. (For those of you keeping track, for one person that would equal 137.5 more hours of work!)

Cabernet Franc Vinification: First Racking

This is the first year that we are trying to make a red wine from our small harvest of Cabernet Franc. Here is a short recap. Our friends came to harvest the grapes on October 20th. On the following day, some other friends came to help us with the destemming and crushing of the grapes. The Cabernet Franc was inoculated on October 22 after an overnight maceration. This overnight maceration is done to extract the anthocyanins, the red color that resides in the skin of the grapes.

We inoculated the must with the yeast strain, F15. The fermentation lasted 5 days so by October 28th, juice had morphed into wine. We took a little of the wine out into a glass to test and taste. The wine, as my husband likes to put it, tasted like jet fuel. Newly made wine doesn't really have the flavors that one expects from a wine that has been aged. The color, also was a little disappointingly pale. We transferred this wine that we had fermented in a plastic barrel into a 7 gallon keg to sit on the lees.
First racking: We left the wine on the lees from October 28 until November 9. Then we used nitrogen to push over the Cabernet Franc from the 7 gallon keg into a 5 gallon keg. After we topped the 5 gallon keg, we had about half a gallon left. The color of the Cabernet Franc was decidedly darker.

The Cabernet Franc will rest in the 5 gallon keg. We will monitor the resting wine periodically and top it off with the wine from the gallon jug. We hope that we can achieve a style of wine that we once tasted in Ontario when we went to Visit François Morissette at Pearl Morissette. François had fermented this Cabernet Franc in stainless steel. What we remember about his wine was that the aromas that came out of our tasting glass was like violets and the flavor reminded us of a delicate Pinot Noir!

Vintage 2018: Post Harvest Recap

Our 2018 harvest is now safely fermenting away. We have already bottled our 2018 Auxerrois! We had very good luck with last year's attempt at Pét-nat (Méthode Ancestrale) so, we've turned our entire 2018 Chardonnay harvest, all 6 gallons into Pét-nat and also another 6 gallons of Chenin Blanc as well. Our Cabernet Sauvignon is fermenting away to become a rosé and our Cabernet Franc has finished fermenting.
It seems like a long time ago, this time last year, when we were experiencing a beautiful Indian summer that lasted way into December only to culminate in a cold snap just in time for the Christmas holidays. New Year 2018 brought a weather event that the weather forecasters called a Bomb Cyclone.
There was a warming of temperatures in February and for a fleeting moment, we thought that we could begin our pruning chores, but March brought a month of storms that seemed to occur once a week for the entire month! The rains and the cooler weather during the spring lead to a delayed budbreak in the vineyard.
Summer brought heat like we'd never experienced before with little rain, so we needed to deploy the irrigation system in early July. On many days, the feel like temperatures hit the high 90's with occasional feel like temperature exceeding 100 degrees! The summer heat wave, while hard on vineyard workers, were great for the grapes and the Brix began climbing!
Alas, the end of summer brought rain, rain, rain like we'd never seen before and that was devastating to our harvest. In keeping with tracking the important phenological events in our vineyard, 2018 gives us more data points:

There are still things to do in the vineyard to button it up for the end of the season. And the rainy days keep on coming!

Cabernet Franc Fermentation

After our friends helped us with crushing our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, we put the crushed grapes into 30 gallon plastic barrels overnight to extract some color (anthocyanins). We tested the juice from both of the varieties:

Due to the low Brix in the Cabernet Sauvignon, we decided to turn that into a rosé. We had about 6 gallons of juice and we inoculated it with VIN13. For the Cabernet Franc, although the flavors and the Brix were on the raggedy edge of being acceptable to ferment, we decided to try our hand at making a red wine from the destemmed and crushed grapes. After consultation with some friends in the business, we decided to ferment the Cabernet Franc using the yeast F15. F15 is a yeast can yield fruity and round, aromatic wines. The yeast also produces glycerol which can lead to wines with a good mouthfeel. When we began rehydrating the yeast, the smell was slightly earthy and a little offensive. We inoculated the Cabernet Franc on October 22 and decided to put a plant seed starter warming pad on the bottom of the plastic barrel on October 24 to warm the must. The seed starter warming pad is at just the right temperature, between 70 and 98 degrees F.

The heating pad was just the ticket! The must was not too cold and not too hot and yielded this fermentation kinetics graph of the Brix (y-axis) versus date (x-axis):

All told the fermentation lasted 5 days. We put the grapes into the mash bags and extracted the wine into a 7 gallon keg. We may have about 5 gallons of wine which we will rack in the coming days into the appropriate 5 gallon keg. Since we don't have oak barrels, our wine will not have the oaky flavor.