2015 Passionfruit Estate Chenin Blanc

A few days ago, my husband looked into our stash of wine and found this bottle of 2015 Chenin Blanc, the first wine that we made. The wine is now 10 years old!
The color indicated that it was still in good condition! The flavors were of lemon and pineapple with an acidic finish. It went well with the Asian food we were eating that evening, teriyaki mariated pork sandwiches with Hawaiian style macaroni salad.
In 2015, we might had about 150 Chenin Blanc vines that survived the disasterous polar vortex of the winter of 2014 and these vines gave us 360 clusters of grapes. Our friends who helped us harvest the grapes came to our home to foot stomp the grapes in an Igloo cooler! The nice thing about the cooler was that it had a spigot where the juice could be drained into a 5 gallon jug.
Prior to the foot stomping, my husband converted our old refrigerator into a temperature controlled environment with which to conduct a slow and low temperature fermentation.
From that initial fermentation we learned to be patient and let the yeast do it's thing. We also learned that the flavor of newly fermented Chenin Blanc can be searingly acidic! My husband refers to this flavor as "jet fuel". Now we know if we taste "jet fuel" our Chenin Blanc is on the right trajectory on it's journey to being the Chenin Blanc that our terroir produces.
Since we only use 100% grapes grown on our vineyard, yeast to ferment the juice and less than 50 parts per million (ppm) sulfites to preserve the wine, we like to say that our wine is the pure expression of the grape varietal.

2025 Annual Cycle of Growth

Every year, I try to keep track of the major events in the grapevine cycle. This is captured in a table called the Annual Cycle of Growth. Here is what we saw last year. I am also filling out the approximate date of budbreak for 2025.

The annual cycle of growth for 2024 is rather incomplete because we had an unusual ripening or should I say "unripening" year in 2024. In last July, our vines were hit with a terrible case of downy mildew in the Chardonnay. The problem was not that severe in the Auxerrois and the Chenin Blanc but for the first time, we needed to drop grapes in the Chenin Blanc in order to get the Brix to be at 20-21 degrees.
With all of the rain that we are having this year, the new shoots are growing like we have never seen before!
Photos to come.

We Love Chenin Blanc!

We have planted almost half of our vineyard in Chenin Blanc. It's one of the white wines that really appeals to our palates. Our first harvest of Chenin Blanc occurred in 2015. We took a very minimalist approach to making the wine. We let the juice that came from foot stomping the grapes with our friends and let it cold settle in the refrigerator that my husband converted into a place that we could conduct a long and slow cool fermentation.
After cold settling, we racked the juice and little of the fine grape pulp to use as food for our yeast of choice, QA23, to conduct the fermentation. At that time just shortly after fermentation was over, we sampled the wine and my husband thought that the wine tasted like "jet fuel". Over the years of making Chenin, we have come to understand that this is what Chenin tastes like just shortly after fermentation and if we achieve this, then we know that our Chenin is on it's evolution to tasting delicious!
There are many Chenin styles that include:

• Sec
• Dry
• Sec-tendre
• Off-dry
• Demi-Sec
• Semi-sweet
• Moelleux
• Sweet

We make our Chenin always in the "sec" style because we ferment the wine to dryness. We tried our hand at making "sec-tendre" where we have fermentated our wine to dryness and then added a sussreserve, in the style of some German Rieslings. We also made a pétillant naturel, which is a sparkling wine made in the ancestral method without disorgement of the dead yeast and lees. We do make a sweet wine, in our case it is botrytized Chenin that is infected with noble rot and harvested in December.
What we really enjoy about Chenin Blanc is that it is food friendly, especially with oysters and seafood that is found in our area.

2020 Robert Foley Charbono

Our friends came back from their winter sojourn to Florida so we had them over for dinner. My husband made his stuffed pork chops. We had a side of wild rice and a simple green salad. The wine that we chose to pair with dinner was a 2020 Robert Foley Charbono. Our friends were curious about the wine since they had never heard of Charbono before so we told them the story of visiting Robert Foley and tasting his Charbono. We all liked the wine very much! The alcohol level was 13.2% which is the sweet spot for a red wine. The Charbono paired perfectly with the stuffed pork chops. I tasted ripe purple grapes with blackberries in the Charbono. It had very soft tannins, but a good backbone of acidity. This is the wine that inspired Robert Foley to become a wine maker.
In Robert Foley's own words:¹
Charbono is one of the lost grape varieties – almost. Recent reports indicate there are only about 80 acres of this variety in California. The original cuttings were imported to Calistoga in the Napa Valley from the Savoie region in the French Alps in about 1880. Its original name was Doux Noir, or “soft black,” later called Charbonneau (carbon water). Subsequently, Charbono was wiped out in Europe by the Phylloxera root louse infestation.
Some believed it to be the Italian grape variety Dolcetto but this was proven not to be the case through genetic testing. After repeal of Prohibition in the U.S., Charbono was used by Inglenook for blending with their new Cask Cabernet wines and small amounts were bottled as varietal wine. I tasted the 1968 Inglenook Charbono from cask in 1969 and was inspired to become a winemaker with that taste.

The stuff pork chops that my husband makes is always a wonderful meal. Take a pork chop that is between 3/4 to 1 inch thick and cut to make a pocket. In the picture above, my husband used wilted spinach, grated gruyere, dried cranberries and garlic flavored croutons for the stuffing. He seared the pork chops in a pan and then put it into a 300 degree oven, to bring the internal temperature of the pork to 140-150 degrees. During the time the pork chop is in the oven, my husband takes the pan drippings and makes a sauce. You can stuff the pork chop with a stuffing of your choice.
Charbono and stuffed pork chops! Bon appétit!
References:
1. Robert Foley Vineyards.

Vintage 2025: May Day!

It is already May! The April showers really put us behind in our pruning duties and we are working as fast as we can to lay our canes down on the fruiting wire. With the exception of the Cabernet Sauvignon, all of our varieties are at some stage of budbreak:

Budbreak appears to be a little on the early side this year. It could be because of the way we approached our pruning this year, taking off all of the unnecessary growth from last year, leaving behind only the canes that we were considering as this year's fruiting cane. So, all of the energy was concentrated in the few remaining canes.
At this time of the year, we always keep our fingers crossed hoping that we don't have another year like 2023 when we had a frost on May 18th. As of today, we have finished laying down our canes for half of our vineyard!

We hope the weather gods grant us some nice weather for the upcoming week although by the looks of it, we might have to work under rainy conditions!