A sensory epiphany.

This morning, as I walked from the south building to the north building at TWWIAGE I got a whiff of a familiar smell, (something is rotten in the state of Oakville). With the temperature reaching 70° F today in Oakville I tried to find any excuse to be out of doors, it was just gorgeous.

There is a very definite seasonality to the wine industry.  Of course many peoples day jobs are cyclical; there are often tasks that need to be performed on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis etc., but no occupation is quite as seasonal as farming.  Unlike an office job, where ones immediate environment changes little, if at all, especially with HVAC, working at a winery one is fully immersed in the daily changes in ones immediate environment - there is constant awareness of exactly where one is on the viticultural calendar. My olfactory epiphany today was triggered by the smell of compost in the air: a neighbouring vineyard was spreading composted grape pomace amongst the vines, a typical vineyard operation this time of year (to take advantage of the winter rains). It's not a bad smell, (it reminds me of being on a Greek island after an olive harvest/olive oil pressing), but it is strong and evokes in me an almost tangible awareness of the passage of time.

This past Sunday, Vinomaker and I bottled a 2013 Chardonnay, (grapes from the Carneros AVA, all stainless steel fermentation and sur lie aging) and it smelled great.  Wineries often have very definite bottling schedules, we don't.  Sometimes our day jobs just get in the way.

Happy Epiphany!

A Chianti fiasco.

I have gotten off to a rather slow blogging-start to 2014. Being on holiday will do that to a person: rest and relaxation have been available in abundance.  What hasn't been available in abundance is wine. Vinogirl has been a tad under the weather, so, consequently, I have been a little off the vino.  However, I did imbibe in a cheap and cheerful Chianti, a 2012 offering from Famiglia Castellani, which paired very well with Thud's beefy-bucatini dinner offering. To be honest, a lot of time wasn't spent in the choosing of this £6.99 ($11.00) wine.  Thud picked this particular bottle of Chianti because it came in a flask, or fiasco, a familiar sight on shop shelves years ago, but not so common now. This uncomplicated wine paired fairly well with the pasta...and the packaging was, for me, nostalgic fun.

Git the water, Gunga Din!

And quickly, even if it is 'arf-a-pint o' water green - anything would taste better than this, the first wine that I have ever had from India.  

A gift from Vinomaker's friend, Sky King, this bottle of Sula Vineyards 2008 Shiraz (hailing from the red hills of Nashik) was extraordinary, but not in a good way.  I have to admit that the nose was very fruity, but the fruit proved to be rather unidentifiable which is always a bad starting point when tasting a wine.  On the palate this wine was borderline undrinkable, it was almost like there was ground up, charred-wood in the mix and I just couldn't get past that.  Laughably, maybe, the label on the back of the bottle describes the wine as having "nuances of oak".
Would some people find this wine palatable?  Of course.  Just as some dogs like to quaff out of toilet bowls, conceivably somebody might find this wine drinkable - everyone's tastes are different.  But this wine is most definitely flawed.  I sometimes wonder why wineries would bother to bottle something this undrinkable in the first place.  Perhaps it is simply a bad bottle, but I don't think so. Vintage is not even an issue: I can't see this wine as having been any better right out of the barrel, and it certainly is not going to improve with age.    
The back label also states that the wine is 'For Overseas Export Only'.  Aren't we lucky?

An epiphany, of sorts.

It suddenly came to me today, on my annual New Year walk through the vineyard (delayed this year due to the abysmal weather and my day job), that I should adopt a different approach to pruning this year. Nothing too drastic, just a small change in the order in which I prune the Cabernet Sauvignon (CS) and Syrah vines.
Typically, I prune the CS last with the objective of retarding budbreak, thus avoiding frost damage in that particular block of vines (we have no fans or overhead sprinklers in Vinoland). Consequently, budbreak in the CS is on average a full 3 weeks behind the Syrah...a great cultural approach to frost protection but one that results in very late maturation in the CS vines. Having been plagued with early rains the past two harvests, I have decided to address the late budbreak issue by determining an earlier start to the growing season for the CS. And I can affect that change in the vines by altering the sequence of my pruning schedule.
Accompanied as usual by the Vinodogs, who were more interested in the cornucopian gopher activity along the vine rows than the vines themselves, I was rather pleased with what I saw in the now skeletal-like forms of the dormant vines - balance. Balanced grapevines do not require much in the way of canopy management, thank goodness. There was no need to hedge the vines in Vinoland last summer, unlike in some vineyards that display excessive vegetal growth. The uniform length of last years now leafless shoots stands as a testament to the importance of influencing the ratio between crop and vegetation. This is another result of effective pruning.
V2 only seemed like she was interested in what I was doing; instead she was really only focused on where her next, super-fresh and furry, snack was going to appear.