Toe of frog.

The American Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) is an invasive species in California.  Native to the southern and eastern United States, Mr. B. Frog, although he may not belong here, appears to be quite happy in his adopted irrigation-runoff-drainage-pipe habitat.  In fact, he seems to have quite a secure foothold in his aqueous abode which overlooks the Far Niente Chardonnay vineyard.  My BF has been in residence since the winter and shows no intention of moving on to greener pastures: they'd be far too dry.  Perhaps someone should tell him that he is persona non grata in The Golden State.  Not me, I quite enjoy his presence.  I just hope my neighbour's irrigation system keeps this little guy in the liquid-lifestyle he has grown accustomed to.

Mead indeed.

Honestly, I cannot even think the word mead without my head being filled with visions of warty peasants in dimly lit, smokey taverns - full of wenches and wolfhounds - rambunctiously sloshing around mead-filled pewter tankards. Mead, sometimes referred to as 'nectar of the Gods', is made from fermented honey and is perhaps the oldest alcoholic drink known to man.  (I daresay Saint Bede drank mead.)
Traditional mead, simply honey, water and yeast, can be dry, sweet, still or sparkling.  With the addition of fruits, grains, herbs and spices mead is known by some other names.  For example; Braggot is made from honey and malt; Cyser is made from honey and apple juice; Pyment is made from honey and grapes and, germane to this post, Metheglin is made from honey, herbs and spices.  (Shakespeare refers to metheglin, along with malmsey, in Love's Labour's Lost.)
All the meads I have ever tried have been quite wine-like and have been packaged in wine-like bottles.  Nectar Creek, a mead produced in Corvallis, Oregon, is packaged in beer-like bottles which had me wondering if the contents would be more beer-like.  (Now, where did I put my pewter tankard?)  Chicory and Sting were two very different meads - the first a traditional mead, the second a metheglin, I suppose. They drank more wine-like, but with beer-like alcohol (ABVs of 5% and 6.2% respectively).  The Chicory was extremely honey-ish on the nose, with a little floral component mixed in, and felt like it had a bit more mouthfeel than the other. The decidedly-ginger-ale-reminiscent Sting had subtle, earthy undertones of honey.  Both meads were ever so slightly effervescent, and both were lacking in acid (for my taste).  I couldn't drink a lot of this stuff.  But, (not unlike the fad for the so-called, in the USA, hard ciders), mead is very trendy right now, so I reckon a fair amount of folks are drinking it: the creed of mead.

The rain and wind beat dark December.

A rainy December day called for something robust with dinner.  The Mi Sueño, 2011 Tempranillo, Rancho Chimiles (Napa Valley AVA), was just the wine to banish the rain-blahs away.  Lots of red plum and spicy red currant, and with great tannins, this Tempranillo was a great California rendition of an old Spanish classic.
I had actually tasted this wine before, although in a very different stage of the wine's development.  Usually, I don't care for barrel samples, as I am not a winemaker and I don't have a crystal ball that will tell me what to expect of the finished product.  However, I remember the barrel-sample of this wine as being quite stunning, even in its infancy.  Now that this Tempranillo is all grown up, I'm enjoying it once again.

Ta-ta tomatoes.

It is the 1st of December already, wow!  How did that happen?  It is the Christmas season already and day one of my advent calendar is already open.
Although it is still technically autumn, there have been some rather cold days this past week and we have had several frosty mornings. Enough frost events to finally finish off my tomato plants: this is my last handful of tomatoes for 2015.  There isn't going to be any more photosynthesis now that most of the foliage has been damaged by the frosts, the plants are done.  I'm going to make the most of my last homegrown salad of the year.

Double, double toil and...

...trouble.  A stuck fermentation spells big trouble for a winemaker, as unfermented  °Brix can be a source of food for unwanted wine microbes which can spoil a whole lot of wine.  Stuck fermentations can occur for many reasons; an incorrect initial yeast selection; competition from other microbes (pediococcus, lactobacillus etc.); high fermentation temperatures. The best way to deal with a stuck fermentation is by avoiding this undesirable turn of events in the first place because restarting one involves a lot of work. 
Down in the bowels of TWWIAGE is a bubbling cauldron of 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon.  A lot of fiddly steps are being followed by the production team to get this particular fermentation going again, but restarting a stuck fermentation essentially involves a new yeast selection and a lot of granulated sugar...and perhaps throwing in the odd "eye of newt" and "toe of frog" for good measure.  The colour in the above photograph is off a little, in reality the fist-sized bubbles are a wonderful blue-purple.  Bubble on little yeasties!

...And silver fountains mud.

Until Caymus Vineyards were sued by Napa County, and the amount of wine they actually produce was revealed, most folks, that I have at least spoken to about wine over the years, considered Caymus to be a premium, family owned winery. (For family owned here, read exclusive and small production, that's the common perception).  The details of the lawsuit, made public this past August, revealed that Caymus bottled 830,000 cases of wine in 2012: some 788,000 cases in excess of their use permit which allows for a mere 42,000 cases to be bottle per annum.  Talk about having your cover blown!  I was shocked upon hearing this, after all Caymus is the winery that gave us Special Selection, a wine that frequently scores high with wine critics (don't get me started on scoring).  Really just how special is Special Selection?  In all fairness, under the Wagner Family of Wine, the makers of Special Selection also produce several other wine labels.  Which brings me to a particular Chardonnay I tried recently.
The Mer Soleil, 2011 Silver Chardonnay (Santa Lucia Highlands), is an unoaked Chardonnay.  In fact it is fermented, and aged, in stainless steel and small Nomblot cement tanks.  Then it is bottled in a stone bottle, or as the winery's website puts it, "...unique ceramic bottle is reminiscent of the cement fermenters."  Okay.  Overall, the producers have a very lofty opinion of this wine.  "We believe that the Santa Lucia Highlands appellation in Monterey County is the best appellation in the world for producing Chardonnay."  Of course they would say that, wouldn't they?  But I'm thinking they'd lose an argument, and badly, with the growers of, oh I dunno, let's say Corton-Charlemagne.  Just saying.
Anyway, back to the wine.  I can't began to describe my experience with this wine.  The nose had something a little tropical going on, but it was sort of a clumsy jumble of over ripe fruit.  On the palate I got a sweet-mystery-fruit, hay-baley, briny-flabbiness that sort of flapped around my mouth like a floundering fish.  Briny?  Floundering fish?  Maybe thoughts of la mer were muddying my tasting experience because, in the end, my poor palate was just so confused.  However, I am going to give this wine the benefit of the doubt and I'm going to say that perhaps this was just a bad bottle...because I can't for the life of me believe that the folks at Caymus/Mer Soleil intended the wine to taste this way.  At least I hope not. 
The moral of this tasting?  Not every bottle has a silver lining - and this bottle isn't even recyclable.  Utterly confounding!

My salad days.

My go to salad dressing is Newman's Own (NO) Lite Balsamic, I rarely use anything other than this particular dressing on my rabbit-food.  Love it.  I even have my sister-in-law OTW, and her sister Tenbellies, hooked on the stuff.  I have never, however, purchased any other NO products; no popcorn, no pizza, no pasta sauce.  I certainly have not ever bought NO wine.  In all honesty, I didn't even know the company made wine until I saw a coupon for it in the Sunday newspaper.  Perhaps I should clip this coupon and procure for myself a bottle of NO Chardonnay (just kidding!) and see what passes for a wine that raises money for charity.  I may.  I may not.
No doubt this fermented grape juice is made by some Goliath of a bulk wine producer like Bronco Wine Company.  And it's probably not a flawed tipple, just something that you wouldn't bother writing home about.  But here I am blogging about it.  The irony.  The coupon just amused me.

What's in a name?

Speaking of all things worldly and winey.  I am quite happy to be an Englishwoman, with an Irish surname, living in the USA.  So I can't help but wonder why Mr. Sattui isn't happy being plain, old, American Daryl.
(Public Notice courtesy of The Napa Valley Register, 30th August 2012)

Not so vile a zin.

I really like Zinfandel.   I generally find this particular wine varietal's combination of raspberries and pepper to be a winning one...that is when it is made well.  Unfortunately, this evening's Zinfandel selection did not deliver the goods.

It's not that the 2008 Turley, Duarte Zinfandel was horrible.  It was pleasant enough, but it was slightly thin and, disappointingly, a little too oaky for me. Vinomaker and I acquired this bottle, and also one bottle of 2007 Turley, Cedarman Zinfandel, in a silent auction.  Thankfully, we didn't pay that much for the two bottles.  I'm hoping the second bottle is better than the first.

Happy St. George's Day, 2011.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,—
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

~

Is there any better way to honour our patron saint other than drinking a chilled glass of a pleasantly crisp, white English wine in the English countryside? I think not.

Happy St. George's Day to my family, friends, and anyone who loves England as much as I do.

When words are scarce...

I came across something interesting this morning whilst reading a few of my favourite blogs over breakfast. As you may have ascertained from some of my past posts on Vinsanity, I am not a fan of wine reviews in general and I personally think the 100 point wine rating scale is a load of phooey!
A certain Dan Sogg, who used to work for The Wine Spectator, has a new blog: thesoggblog. However, it was not one of Mr. Sogg's posts that caught my attention but rather a comment on his post from a gentleman called Tom Ferrell. I have no idea who Tom is (so I can't give him proper credit) but his comment went something like this;

"...an interesting exercise is to go to the Wine Spectator web site and search, sort, show, copy and paste wine descriptions into a document, then after you have accumulated a bunch, cut and paste all that verbiage into a word counting tool, (like www.writewords.org.uk).  The tool will list all the words and show the number of times each is used.  If, for example, you do this for the 303 Cabs that scored 95-100 at W.S. you will see that, after sorting out non-descriptive words (the, and, J.L., Napa, etc), the three most widely used descriptive words are “black”, “rich”, and “ripe”.  Do the same for the first 303 Cabs they list that scored 84 and the most often used words are “cherry”, “currant”, and “plum.”  For the high scoring Cabs the word “concentrated” is toward the top at number six, whereas for Cabs scoring 84 “concentrated” is in 39th position.  Whether you do this for Pinot, Zin, Chardonnay, or any varietal it is easy to see that for the critic who judges wine, dozens of them at a time, size definitely matters."

I don't have time to perform such nonsense as cutting and pasting wine reviews and the suchlike, so I am simply going to take Tom at his word. Besides, I already knew that "black, rich, and ripe" were synonyms for cult, overpriced, and unobtainable.
Wine reviews...gotta love 'em!

As plentiful as blackberries.

In spite of an unusually cool summer in Northern California, we seem to have plenty of vigour in the vineyard. The results from the petiole sample I took at bloom, came back within normal ranges (except for a slight Boron deficiency in the Cabernet sauvignon vines.) The combination of available nutrients, ample rainfall last winter, and a fair amount of sunshine, (despite Vinomakers griping that this summer is the coldest he has ever had the misfortune to live through), the vines seem to be finding everything they need to succeed. All in all, the vines appear to be in a fairly balanced state.
However, in a vineyard there will always be a few areas of over achieving vines, so I spent most of the afternoon hedging the enthusiastic sun canes, on the east side only. As I came around the last row I was met with the heady aroma of hot, sweet, luscious brambles. I stopped to admire the abundant crop of blackberries flourishing on the banks and the bed of the small creek that runs along the property line. I invested in a quick snack of sun-warmed, sweeter than sweet berries until my thumb and forefinger were stained a deep purple, a shade not unlike the almost squid ink-like hue of a good Petit sirah.
The Himalaya blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) is the most common, and prolific, non-native bramble in this part of California. It seems to have taken it's reputation to heart and has flourished along the length of the creek, through the wire of the deer fence and is rambling it's way towards the stationary rows of vines. Aside from the fruit being delicious, this tangle of evergreen growth provides another favourable component to Vinoland; the promise of a fatal demise for the Grape Leafhopper (Erythroneura elegantula.)
The GLH is a major pest of grapes, vines can tolerate a fairly large population but left unchecked GLHs can infest an entire vineyard. The GLH feed on the leaves by puncturing leaf cells and sucking out the contents. As injury to the leaf structure increases, photosynthetic activity declines...no photosynthesis, no sugar, no alcohol.
The most important natural enemy of the GLH is a tiny, almost microscopic mymarid wasp called Anagrus epos. These wasps are particularly valuable in the vineyard for their amazing ability to locate and attack GLH eggs. The fact that they can parasitise 90% or more of all GLH eggs makes them a very welcome and beneficial wasp to have around. Anagros bolsters it's numbers of egg laying adults in the spring by first parasitising the eggs of the Blackberry Leafhopper (Dikrella californica), thus ensuring it is more than ready to take on the GLH in the summer months. Thank you little waspy.
Phew! That was a long post...now where is that tub of vanilla bean ice cream?