IneBrEEated.

Despite many attempts to shoo away this honeybee from the wine press, the little sot kept coming back for yet another slurp of Vinoland's 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon.  Can't really blame the bee for wanting to do a little wine tasting, the new vintage tastes lovely, hot out of the press.  Which begs the question.  Can bees get hangovers?  At the very least, this bee is going to have a bad headache come morning.

This particular pressing shows lots of promise having a concentrated cherry vibe and solid framework of tannins.  The addition of a little bit of aging in oak, with its contribution of vanillin, will no doubt round out this juvenile pandemic-vintage.  And that's it.  I'm done! 

Bee spree.

It was a gorgeous day today, the temperature got all the way up to 71°F.  Loved it!  And it seems that there is no rain in the forecast for, perhaps, the next two weeks - love that.  It means that I should be able to proceed with my pruning uninterrupted by unpleasant weather.  I actually got a little too warm whilst pruning the Pinot grigio today.
The local honey bees are loving the warm spell also.  Vinoland's industrious bees are busy filling their pollen sacs with grains of yellowy-goodness from a multitude of weeds and wildflowers that are blooming now.  Vinoland's rosemary plants are teeming with bees.
A particular, famed groundhog may see his shadow tomorrow in Pennsylvania, presaging six more weeks of winter, but the busy-bees and I will not be too concerned.  I feel I can safely predict that winter in California will not be too protracted this year.

Isn't harvest grape?

Today, Vinomaker and I did what we did exactly one year ago today: we picked our white grapes. Yes, harvest has begun in our modest corner of the Napa Valley with the picking of Vinoland's Pinot grigio (PG) and Orange Muscat grapes.
Everything was progressing along nicely, until the destemmer decided to stop working, the capacitor had failed.  Not being able to destem the fruit before placing it into the press slowed things down considerably.  We were left with no option but to whole-cluster press the grapes.  We got it all done in the end, it just took a little longer.
I was going to use a photograph of a PG cluster for this post.  Instead, I decided on an image of the one, solitary honey bee that showed up to sample the PG juice.  I must apologise, I photographed a sugar-supping bee last year also. However, he was just so cute, I couldn't resist a repeat. Anyhow, the buzz on the street is that Mr. Bee thinks the juice is delicious.  He's right, it is.
Whites down, reds to go.

Whites are in.

It's been a long day, but Vinoland's two white grape varieties are now just grape juice and are safely chilling their little bottoms off in the cellar.  The Pinot grigio fruit looked beautiful and came in at 26 °Brix (not sure about the Orange Muscat sugar).  I'm pooped.
This year we experimented with rice hulls as a press aid and they really seemed to help with the extraction of more grape juice.  There was plenty to go around, enough to share with this thirsty honey bee.
Whites down, reds to go.

OMG!

Orange muscat grapes, that is.
Vinomaker and I picked our Orange muscat (OM) today.  Well, what was left of it.  Looking almost like something that had escaped from my compost bin, Vinomaker had deliberately delayed harvesting the OM in the hopes of making a late harvest wine.  OM clusters are rather loose which generally reduces environmental favourablitly for Botrytis cinerea infection (unlike Pinot grigio clusters which are tight and thus susceptible to infection), so instead, dessication, as the result of an extended hang time, was the plan.  Coming in at 34.5 °Brix there is certainly plenty of sugar for Vinomaker to work with.
Although the fruit was quite unprepossessing, (OM never looks pretty as the grapes have a tendency to crack and amber as they ripen), the aromatics of orange skin and honeysuckle as we processed the fruit was absolutely delightful.  No wonder honey bees are attracted to this grape variety.

The Industrious Bee.

Erm, the industrious honey bees are eating my Cabernet sauvignon grapes.  I can't really blame them because the grapes are very sweet.  However, the bees should be wincing due to the high acidity - if only I could see their little, squinting eyes.
The numbers are in; °Brix 24.2, pH 3.38 and TA 8.75.  Sugars have been driven up due to nearly a week of mid to high 90s temperatures.  Time to water.

A tale of shortpod mustard.

Identifying common vineyard weeds and strategies for managing weed populations were the subjects being discussed last night at the Napa Valley Small Vineyard Association's quarterly meeting/wine social.  John Roncoroni, University of California Cooperative Extension Farm Advisor (Weed Science), was the guest speaker and just let me say this, he really knows his weeds.  An extensive PowerPoint presentation was followed by a lengthy Q & A session.  There was a lot of discussion about certain weeds and grasses that are becoming herbicide-resistant, although none of the guilty suspects have made it to the Napa Valley...yet.  Good stuff. 
Mr. Roncoroni is actively involved in advising farmers on all types of weed eradication (not just chemical weed control) and has an ongoing vineyard floor project at the UC Davis Oakville Station comparing several weed control practices with and without herbicides.  The day before he had held a field day in which he took groups through the Huichica Creek Demonstration Vineyard in Carneros to train attendees on how to identify and control weeds that commonly occur in vineyards.  Unfortunately, I missed it because I had to work.  Drat!

One weed that was profiled by Mr. Ronocoroni was shortpod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana).  He explained the mustard's growth habits and how it can thrive under certain vineyard conditions - those in which the weed is faced with little competition from other weeds.  I can attest to the fact that it doesn't like to compete with other weeds, as hitherto Vinoland had been an any-type-of-mustard-free zone and now there is a sizeable stand of this weed on what is normally a weed-free gravel access road to the barn.  I have to begrudgingly admit that the mustard looks very cheery and honey bees really seem to love it.  Yes, Vinoland's pollen-pluckers have been at work daily, from dawn until dusk, minding their own business whilst performing flower related bee activities.  That is until somebody (me) walked through the mustard and disrupted their apian-industriousness.  Consequently, one particular bee displayed his displeasure, perhaps because he was unceremoniously catapulted down my left welly, by stinging me on the foot.  Ouch!
I have always maintained that mustard is bad for a vineyard.  To emphasise my point of view I have been walking around like the Emperor Claudius all week.  Sigh.

Here ever hum the golden bees.

This past Sunday, whilst walking the Vinodogs I happened to glance down at a cluster of California poppies that were flowering at the edge of the road.  It wasn't the orange-ness of the poppies that caught my eye, instead it was something in the centre of the bloom.  On closer inspection, what initially looked like a dark, shiny bead turned out to be a bee's bum.  And there wasn't just one bum, there were three all perfectly spaced around the filaments of the flower.  I peeked into the next poppy, same thing.  Then another, and another.  Again, housed within each were three bees, heads down.  So I looked inside all the blooms, perhaps 20 in total, and each one had 2 or 3 bees inside, but now some were lying on their sides.  I brought along my camera the next evening and took this photograph.
I had just recently met a apiarist at TWWIAGE, when he was hired to help relocate a rather large swarm of honey bees that had decided to take up residence just to the side of the winery's front door, so I sent my photograph to the Bee Man to see what he thought the bees were doing hanging out in the poppies.  His theory was that the bees had been out collecting pollen when they were taken by surprise by the high winds the area was experiencing at the time and had simply decided to shelter in place.  Seems like a reasonable explanation to me, I don't much like wind either.
I checked in a couple of the poppies on my walk last night and only a solitary deceased bee remained (least I think it was dead), curled up in the middle of the flower.  Hope the others got home safely.

Codswallop!

Vinoland, my tiny corner of vineyard heaven, is a pretty healthy place. Any regular visitor to Vinsanity can probably deduce from the various posts I pen about wildflowers, weeds and creepy crawlies that the flora and fauna here are rather diverse. Of all Vinoland's cultivated ornamental plants, lavender grows particularly well and attracts copious numbers of bumble bees and honey bees.  The bees whilst not necessary for the pollination of grape-flowers are beneficial to every other flowering plant on the property.  Vinoland is certainly no monoculture.  
Sustaining the health of the vineyard, through cover-cropping and composting etc., is of the utmost importance.  In winter, when the vines are dormant, Vinomaker will apply a narrow strip of herbicide directly beneath the vines to discourage unwanted weeds from becoming a problem later in the growing season.  This means that Vinoland could not be certified organic, but is instead sustainably farmed.  However, I think this method of weed eradication is much preferred over repeatedly driving a tractor, with a French plow attached, through the vines burning diesel and compacting the vineyard soil in the process - not good.  Also, Vinoland is far from being biodynamic as I personally don't work to an astronomical timetable.
Yesterday, whilst trying to catch up on a weeks worth of Napa Valley Register articles that Vinomaker had put aside for me, I spotted this story: Purple haze - Harms Lavender Fields hosts annual open house. Well, I like lavender, and I love Jimi Hendrix, so I read on.  There is, apparently, a farm in north Napa that was originally planted all to vines, but now includes 1.5 acres of several different lavender varieties. In 1999, experiencing farming difficulties and facing possible financial ruin the owners of the land sought help from a consultant who, upon examining an offending block of vines that would not ripen, advocated biodynamic agricultural techniques as a solution. Soon after adopting biodynamics, the Virgin Mary appeared and the vineyard owner observed that  "...The vines progressed through six weeks of ripening in just 10 days."  Really?  Well actually no, I made up the viticultural-visitation bit, but I think somebody else made up the viticultural-miracle bit.  Methinks some fantastical wizardry, other than simply embracing biodynamic farming, would have to be employed to produce such sensational physiological results in any fruit bearing plant.  
Like I said, codswallop!   
Have a happy solstice everyone!

Workers of the world, unite!

Happy May Day to this industrious little bumblebee (Bombus californicus). Although not needed in the vineyard as grapevines are self-pollinating, (their flowers include both stamen and carpel), there are plenty of other trees, shrubs, and flowers for this worker bee to busy herself with.
Vinomaker is out in the vineyard sulphuring the vines and I am in the middle of studying for an exam on Monday, so the only malingerers around Vinoland today are, as per usual, the Vinodogs.