Testing Remaining Grape Varieties

On September 26, 2020 we did a test of the remaining grape varieties to see where the sugars (Brix), pH and titratable acids numbers were at.

Here are the results of the testing:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc - Clone 982	281 g	135 mL	20.6	2.76	12.2 g/L
Chenin Blanc - Clone FPS-1	207 g	100 mL	19	2.66	16.3 g/L
Cabernet Sauvignon	121 g	45+ mL	21	2.77	18.4 g/L
Cabernet Franc	141g	50 mL	22	2.87	not measurable
Barbera	27 g	6 mL	22.2	2.60	not measurable

We're waiting for the pH to become a little higher and the titratable acids to become a little lower (measurable).

2020 Chardonnay Harvest

Exactly one week after the Auxerrois harvest, we harvested the Chardonnay on September 24, 2020. Our Chardonnay had seen a lot of bird pecking as well as some raccoon damage. We tried to clean the grapes before putting the netting over the grapes. Despite our efforts to protect the grapes, they were in less than optimum condition and we thought that we might have 600 pounds of Chardonnay when all was said and done.
Our small but hard working crew came and made quick work of harvesting the 4 rows of netted grapes. We had another 4 rows of unnetted grapes, that one of our friends stayed to help us clean. When all was said and done, we had 51 lugs distributed 26/25 on two pallets. We brought the pallets to Jonathan Edwards Winery early the following day.

We were surprised that we got almost twice the number of pounds than we were expecting. The harvested grapes looked like this:

The whole cluster grapes went into the press and the gentlest of cycles was used to extract the juice.

When the press cycle was done, we had one full stainless steel barrel of juice. There was about 5 gallons of the tail end of the pressing still left in the press pan and that juice went into the third barrel of the Auxerrois which contained the moderate lees.
The parameters for this starting juice was:

Variety	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay	75 gallons	23.4	3.0	10 g/L

On Monday, September 28, 2020 my husband and I went to the Jonathan Edwards Winery to rack the cold settled juice. Jonathan Edwards cleaned two barrels for us to transfer the juice into.

After racking the juice, we took 80 grams of CX9 yeast and rehydrated it in 800 mL water at 95 degree F for 20 minutes, then added Chardonnay juice in two 500 mL aliquots. The barrels were inoculated with the CX9 yeast at 4:20 p.m.

2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 3

We harvested our Auxerrois on September 17, 2020 and I wrote about it in 2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 1, followed up by 2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 2, which detailed the pressing and information on the Brix, pH and TA. On September 21, 2020 we went to Jonathan Edwards to rack the juice and kick off the fermentation.
The first thing was to transfer the cold settled juice from the settling tanks into the fermentation tanks.

Since we don't add any yeast food (such as diammonium phosphate---DAP), but rely on the lees to provide the necessary nutrition, it was up to us to determine when to cut the transfer. We did this by eye, looking at when the clarified juice became more like light lees in color before becoming decidedly browner indicating the beginning of the heavy lees. We feel that this change of color goes from being relatively yellow-brown to a pressed cider color. We stopped both transfers at this color point and felt that 60 gallons went from the settling tank into each of the two fermentation tanks. We took the temperature of the juice and it was at 57 degrees F. In the photo below, you can see that the heaviest of lees constituted less than half a gallon from the original approimately 67.5 gallons of cold settled Auxerrois juice.

The moderate lees were put into one of the barrels and as Jonathan Edwards explained, will be a fun experiment to ferment. This barrel might contain around 10 gallons of juice with moderately heavy lees.
After the transfer, we rehydrated the yeast, in our case QA23 and tempered the rehydrated yeast with 1000 mL of the Auxerrois juice.

The fermentation was kicked off at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, September 21, 2020.

2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 2

On Saturday, September 19, 2020 I blogged about 2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 1 about our first harvest which is Auxerrois that occurred on Thursday, September 17, 2020. We are working once again with Jonathan Edwards and his crew to process our grapes and shepard our juice into wine.
On Thursday, my husband and I took the last load and a half of harvested grapes to the winery. At the winery the grapes were weighed and put into the press.

Since it was the end of the work day for the Jonathan Edwards crew, we left the grapes in the press and agreed to convene on Friday morning. At 9 a.m. on Friday, September 18, 2020 the entirety of the Auxerrois harvest, all 1670 pounds were pressed using the gentlest press cycle:

The pressed juice was put into two stainless steel barrels and we estimated the juice to be approximately 135 gallons.

We left the juice in the barrels to cold settle over the weekend. Stay tuned for Part 3 of what we did after the cold settling.

2020 First Harvest Auxerrois---Part 1

We had our first harvest on September 17, 2020. We harvested our Auxerrois grapes which so far has always been our first variety to ripen. One of the parameters that we look for is the value of the titratable acids (TA). On September 8, 2020 when we took the Brix, pH and titratable acid information of the Auxerrois and Chardonnay, we saw that the TA was 8.2, so we knew that harvest time was approaching. Since we want to make a balanced wine, we aim to keep the TA at a level which we feel is appropriate. Sometimes, that means that the sugar level is not quite as high as we would like it to be but we take what Mother Nature gives us.
This year, we had almost 3 rows of Auxerrois to harvest. This may sound like a slam dunk but our rows are 800 feet long so it is not trivial. Harvest time was set at 9 a.m. but thankfully some of our friends arrived before that time to help us lift the nets so that we could access the grapes. The day began as a moderately cool day but by the time we were half way down the first row, the sun came out and it was a pleasant day to harvest grapes.
Here are photos of the people who came to help us harvest the Auxerrois:

We finished harvesting the grapes around 3 p.m. We are working with the crew at Jonathan Edwards Winery to process our grapes. We got to the winery 10 minutes before closing time and Jonathan was kind enough to help us weigh the pallets and put the grapes in the press. We agreed that we would convene on Friday morning to press the harvest. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Auxerrois harvest on this blogsite!

Vintage 2020: Heading into Autumn

This past week has seen temperatures moderate from the 80's into the 70's and as one of our friends remarked, it seems like Nature turned off the summer switch after Labor Day. All of our various grape varieties are looking really good.

We have netting to put over a few more rows of our Chenin Blanc which is the last of the white varieties to ripen.

Recently, on September 8, 2020 we took some samples of the Auxerrois and the Chardonnay:

Variety	# of Berries	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	80	18	3.05	8.2 g/L
Chardonnay	40	19	2.85	10.4 g/L

As a comparison, when we took these numbers on September 14, 2019, they came in at:

Variety	# of Berries	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	140	18	3.06	13.5 g/L
Chardonnay	44	18.6	2.86	14.7 g/L

The two tables show that the Brix and the pH are tracking similarly but that the titratable acids are much lower this year than last. My guess is that the hot summer this year must have induced the malic acid to respire more than it did in 2019.
The next few weeks have us planning for harvest and putting netting on our Chenin Blanc as quickly as humanly possible for 2 people.

Auxerrois in Our Vineyard

Our Auxerrois is beginning to ripen. We have learned that these grapes are very susceptible to too much sun. In past years, we have had a lot of sun burnt grapes so this year we tried a new tactic and left the leaves on the west side of the canopy. Still, there were bunches that were exposed to this year's record number of heat waves. Here is what the Auxerrois grapes look like.

Yesterday we took the first of our numbers to determine how far along it is. It takes a while to get a statistical sampling because the Auxerrois is netted, but fortunately, we use clothes pins so although it is a bit of an impediment, what needs to be undone, needs to be done. We gathered 80 berries from 3 rows of Auxerrois, picking berries from the top, middle and bottom of the cluster as well as berries that seemed to be more advanced in ripening and some from clusters that appeared to be behind the ripening curve. After picking the berries, we did the following tests and here are the numbers we came up with. We also took the juice and sampled the juice for the flavors. It's coming along. Harvest could occur perhaps within the next 10 days.

Status of Our Various Grapes

Harvest time is quickly approaching and we are trying our best to keep up with the ripening grapes. We are still in the process of netting our grapes. So far, we have put the nets on all of the Auxerrois, half of the Chardonnay, all of the Cabernet Sauvignon (2 rows) and all of the Barbera (1 row).
Our Chenin Blanc is almost half of our production and it is a little behind in the ripening trajectory so we are just now getting around to putting up the netting on those grapes.

Variety	September
Auxerrois
Chenin Blanc
Chardonnay
Cabernet Sauvignon
Cabernet Franc
Barbera

2018 Ratti Battaglione Barbera d'Asti

We had this Barbera with pizza one evening last week and it was a delicious, yet inexpensive wine, less than $20.00! This wine is made in a fruit forward, easy drinking style. We liked that it paired well with the pizza and probably will pair well with tomato based foods.
We are growing Barbera so we like to experiment with drinking different kinds of Barbera in our vinous education.

St. Laurent Grape--Chasing Down a Mystery Parentage

Our friends treated us to dinner al fresco and brought with them a Michael Cruse St. Laurent Pétillant Naturel (Pét Nat), a sparkling wine made in the ancestral style.
I had never heard of the St. Laurent grape so I did a little research into what that is and here is what I came up with.
First, I turned to the Internet and learned from Wine.com that featured Michael Cruse's sparkling made from the St. Laurent that the grape is a high quality Austrian grape. The label on the back of the bottle informed me that the grapes were sourced from Ricci Vineyard in Carneros. Ok, that's a start. I wanted more.
When I Googled St. Laurent, and looked at Wikipedia I found that the grape could also be called Sankt Laurent and is generally believed to be a natural crossing between the Pinot Noir grape and some unknown partner.
That's when I turned to my goto book, the grape Bible, Wine Grapes¹ and while looking in the index, could not find St. Laurent. Wikipedia did mention that Sankt Laurent was a synonym and that's what I found in the index. Sankt Laurent whose principal synonyms include Sankt Laurent, Laurenzitraube, Laurenztraube and Saint-Lorentz Traube in Austria, Saint Laurent and Schwarzer in Germany, Saint-Laurent in France, Svatovavřinecké and Vavřinecké in the Czech Republic and Svätovavrinecké in Slovakia. What Jancis Robinson and her co-authors said about the Sankt Laurent is that the DNA profile is genetically distant from Pinot Saint-Laurent. This was not what I read on Wikipedia.
I was interested to know if the Ricci Vineyard Website had any information about the St. Laurent grape that went into Michael Cruse's sparkling Pét Nat: In 2000-2001, Ricci Vineyards imported budwood from the last known St. Laurent vineyard in Germany. They currently have 6 acres planted in this variety. The genetic parentage is not clarified on their website because this is what they say:
"St. Laurent is a mysterious grape in its origins and ancestry, but has found a dedicated foothold in the wine growing regions of the Czech Republic, Austria, and other assorted pockets around the world. Bordering between the fringes of a Burgundy and Rhone varietal, St. Laurent could best be described as Pinot Noir with sultry underpinnings. "
One last try, a suggestion from my husband. If the St. Laurent was brought into the U.S., it would have had to undergo testing at Foundation Plant Services so there should be some information there. Indeed, there is.
This is what is written under the information for St. Laurent: This variety is today commonly planted in Austria and Germany. DNA results have shown a parent-offspring relationship with Pinot noir. Since the initial budwood from Ricci vineyard came from Germany, it does appear that it is related to Pinot noir, but it would be very nice if Ricci Vineyards could do a DNA test to see if indeed their St. Laurent really is related to Pinot noir.
References:
1. J. Robinson, J. Harding and J. Vouillamoz, Wine Grapes - A complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties, including their origins and flavours, ppg 958- 960 and 962-964, Allen Lane 2012 ISBN 978-1-846-14446-2.

Al Fresco Dinner with Our Friends---Part 2

I blogged about Virtual Tasting with Michael Cruse---Part 1, which was part one of the treat from our friends. Part two was the dinner that they prepared to pair with the sparkling wine from Cruse Wine Company, made from the St-Laurent grape.

The label on the back of the bottle says it all. There were only 3800 bottles made in 2019! The grapes are from the Ricci Vineyards in Carneros.
Our friend made the entire dinner. We began the meal with fresh peach soup topped with cucumber, croutons, yellow pepper slices, micro-spinach, with goat cheese. This was followed by an arugula salad with sliced blood oranges and a delicious dressing. The entree was smoked salmon on a toasted English muffin with a spread of cream cheese and capers topped with chives. The dinner was delicious and it was so nice to see our friends! In addition, the sparkling St. Laurent was an interesting pairing.