Puget Sound Wine Growing FAQ

Puget Sound Wine Growing FAQ

Here is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about growing grapes in the Puget Sound AVA:

1. You can’t grow grapes in Western Washington!

I get this all the time. Of course we can grow wine grapes here in western Washington. Grapes have been grown commercially since the 1870’s and modern viticulture and wine making have been taking place since Gerard Bentryn founded Bainbridge Island Vineyards in the 1970s. High quality wine grapes can be grown in most of western Washington. It’s not too cool or wet to grow grapes. Period.

2. It’s too rainy!

True it seems to rain a lot in the Puget Sound area, but compared to other growing areas in Europe, we get significantly less rain during the growing season and more sunshine than Burgundy. The key is “during the growing season” (April-October). SeaTac airport gets an average of 38” of rain a year, which mostly falls in the winter time.

3. It’s too Cool!

Not really. When many people think of Washington state wines, they think of eastern Washington with it’s hot, arid conditions. While it may be cooler than eastern Washington state, it is just as hot as place such as Chablis and parts of the Loire valley in France.

4. You guys grow grapes with funny names!

True that some of the grapes grown in the Puget Sound area have names most people wouldn’t recognize such as Siegerrebe, Madeleine Angevine, Regent and Muller Thurgau. But there are many grapes names you would recognize such as Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris. I suggest that you don’t look at the grape name and just taste the wine and see if you like it!

5. Why don’t more people grow grapes in the Puget Sound region?

Mainly because many of the prime locations have houses and roads on them. It has not been economically viable for large vineyard operations to locate near Seattle due to high land prices. Most new vineyards are going in the more rural areas to the north and south of the Seattle metro area.

6. The wines from the Puget Sound are whimpy!

Yes and no. They are not high in alcohol, but they do make it up in the flavor department. Puget Sound wines are typically less alcoholic than eastern Washington wines. They are higher in acids generally, but this makes them great food wines. Wines that you can drink with getting a buzz after one glass and wines that pair well with our local foods such as seafood, fish and cheese.

91 Points! Wine Spectator

Just a little bit of celebration here at Hollywood Hill Vineyards... We just word that our 2006 Rattlesnake Hills Syrah from Portteus Vineyards got a 91 points from the esteemed Wine Spectator. You'll be seeing it in the July 31st 2009 issue where the focus on Washington State.

To quote them: "Bright and jazzy, with a meaty component that adds depth to the lithe, beautifully focused currant and blackberry flavors, which linger effectively against fine tannins and lively acidity. Drink now through 2014. -HS"

The curious thing is that we submitted three of our wines and I know that the Red Mountain Syrah that we make sells far more wine in our tasting room at the same price and I don't think that it would score less than a 85, but for some reason didn't get rated... probably just not enough room in the magazine to print everything!

We still have about 30 cases left... get them while we got them... the good news is that we have plenty of 2007 and 2008 in the barrel and we think they taste even better! After the Gold medal at the Seattle Wine Awards, we need a trifeca with Robert Parker's Wine Advocate!

Warmest Spring in 10+ years!

I don't know how we went from the coldest winter in 30 or more years to having one of the nicest springs I can remember. If you recall, the grapes started growing later than normal in April, by a couple of weeks. In a year like last year, it spell doom and gloom and one of the latest harvests I've ever seen.

Flash forward a few months, when I look at all the temperatures for this spring and add them up (this is called Growing Degree Days), we are so far a head of last year it's ridiculous. The vines are responding in kind, they are growing so fast it's crazy.

Actually, it's about time we had some warm weather, we have had one of the longest cold streaks I've seen here in Western Washington. There is some evidence that we are heading into a strong El Nino pattern over the next couple years and for us here in Western Washington this is great news! If you look at the chart above, (taken from Cliff Mass' blog http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2009/06/el-nino-returns.html) he says that he might not get a season pass for skiing next year because it might be too warm. I can only hope!

Double Gold!

We are shocked and awed that we have won not one, but two medals at the prestigious Seattle Wine Awards.

We won a Double Gold medal for our 2006 Rattlesnake Hills Syrah from Portteus Vineyards. 100% Syrah, 100% Portteus Vineyards. This an absolute shock for us to win something like this for little ole winery...

But it doesn't end, we got a Bronze medal for our 2005 Yakima Valley Syrah, which is 60% Red Mountain (Ranch at the end of the road) and 40% Rattlesnake Hills (Portteus again). So, in our price category, we took two out of four medals!

We'll see you at the Grand Awards Ceremony on June 14th at the Rainier Club!

Spring is here

Well, I've been crunching weather numbers for this year so far. Things aren't all that bad in the weather department. I've been tracking daily temperatures for several years, but I've not been tracking winter temperatures since it's never been an issue with us. We have mild winters and bud break happens in the first week of April. That was until last year... Last year we had bud break almost 3 weeks later than I remember it in the past. I knew that the winter tempertures were cold, but not how cold they really were. Then again this winter we had abnormally cold temperatures, but not as bad as last winter. This year we had bud break about two weeks later than normal. But, unlike last year where we were cool all year, this year is shaping up to be warmer. This past April was the warmest in the last four years. A warm April usually predicts that the whole year is going to be warm. Two week late on the bud break won't stop us from getting ripe grapes, but we really need to have a nice warm summer and dry Fall to get ripe enough grapes for still, dry wine... Here is keeping my fingers crossed!

Bud break is here! (finally!)

It's been another cold winter and the vines show it this year. All across the Pacific Northwest grapevines have been coming out of their dormancy more slowly than normal, sometimes delayed by 2-3 weeks. I guess the good news is that while it was cold last winter and one of the snowiest on record, it wasn't as bad as last year where we didn't have bud break until May! In Woodinville, my Chardonnay is usually the first to break out and it usually happens the first week in April. In my vineyard this year, things are about two weeks late. Chardonnay is already coming out and the Pinot Noir is coming out this week.

On the other end of things, we are getting ready to bottle our 2007 red wines from Eastern Washington. We have a couple of new Syrahs and a Mourvedre. We are also going to do a Syrah/Mourvedre blend. I love what Mourvedre can do in Washington state and I think you'll agree when you taste our Red Mountain Mourvedre at our barrel tasting event next month!

2007 Puget Sound Regent is finally in the bottle!

I just wanted to announce that we finally got a commercial bottling of Regent in the bottle last week! As far as I know, this is the first commercial 100% Regent in the USA. (If anyone else out there is making a commercial Regent, please tell me!)

It's been a long trip from the first time we planted Regent vines to getting some in the bottle. It all started way back in 1998 when Jeff Jernegan and I started work on Maury Island Vineyards. At that point in my life I drank way more red wine than whites (things have balanced out a little more) and so did Jeff. We were on a mission to find a red grape that would ripen in the Puget Sound climate area reliably and make a decent full bodied red wine. What I've learned over the past 11 years is that red wines from the Puget Sound will never be those rich, luscious southern Rhone style wines we make from Eastern Washington. But that's not a bad thing! We have really fallen in love with lighter styled wines from Oregon, Burgundy and the Loire Valley and the red wines from the Puget Sound are very similar.

Anyways, way back when, Jeff and I were on a hunt for red grapes that ripened before Pinot Noir. I had my favorites back then. The books told me that St. Laurent, Zweigelt, Pinot Meunier and such ripened up to two weeks earlier than Pinot Noir. Sources for these vines were non-existant in the USA back then. Lucky for us the WSU Mt. Vernon Research Station had just aquired a whole bunch of vines from British Columbia after a research station shut down in Canada. Shortly after that Gary Moulton, who ran the grape program there, handed out his extra vines. We were lucky to get some St. Laurent, Zweigelt, Gamay Noir and some Regent. (Later years we got Garanoir, Auxorrois, Meunier and Pinot Noir Precoce amongst many others)

At that point I didn't know much about Regent and there wasn't much out there in the books (the internet was just barely getting going back in those days) about it. Gary said he'd heard good things about the vine and it was highly disease resistant. So we put in 25 vines as an experiment.

After a couple of years the vines grew big enough for a crop and we were surprised to find that almost none of the vines ripened earlier than Pinot Noir, but Regent was different because of it's high disease resistance it could hang out longer in the rain and fog and not get any rot. It also has a long vegetative cycle so it is still accumulating sugars in the grapes far after other vines have started dropping it's leaves. We were pretty impressed and in 2002 and 2003 I was able to make a couple of cases of wine from the grapes at Maury Island Vineyard with decent success.

Somewhere around 2000 or so, Ron Nelson came poking around looking for some cuttings for his vineyard in Grapeview. I gave him cuttings of all the usual suspects, including Regent. I didn't hear anything from him for a couple years and I get a call from him telling me that he has decided to rip out his Pinot Noir, St. Laurent, etc because he was tired of getting Powdery Mildew and ruining his crop. The only vine that worked for him was Regent! Somewhere around 2004 he gave me about 200 vines that he ripped out and replanted with Regent.

As I've mentioned in this blog before, we lost Maury Island Vineyards in 2003 because the owner wanted to sell and I wasn't in a position to buy since we just bought a new house in Woodinville. Plus the commute to Maury Island would kill me... Oh and my wife was pregnant with our first son... you get the drift... any way we lost all those vines we had out there. I did take cuttings of everything before I left and I still have a couple of rows of vines from there as a continuing experiment.

OK, in 2007 Ron Nelson tells me he's got enough Regent to sell me. I think we had 900lbs, more than enough for a barrel. At first I was a little worried. The acids seemed a little high when we picked, but ML kicked in and knocked back the Malic acids to a reasonable level. Also barrel aging has done wonders for it. We started it in a new French barrel and changed over to a neutral barrel about nine months later. Regent has taken quite nicely to the oak. In the future I might go even lighter on the oak. Maybe in warmer years a little heavier. 2007 was a pretty cool year so I'm excited about the potential in warm years.

So, you may be asking how does the wine taste? In 2007, which was a pretty cool year by Puget Sound standards, it made a wine that I think tastes a lot like a wine made from the Gamay grape grown in Beaujolais. It has bright, upfront fruitiness with nice acids and a decent finish. It's got some nice spiciness you don't usually find in cool climate grapes. The alcohol is 12.5% so you won't get sloshed drinking a couple of glasses. I aged it in some French oak for about nine months and then into neutral barrels for seven months, so there is a little oak, but the wine has taken nicely to the oak. The wine should age for several years, but with no background making this wine I'm not sure how long it will. I will be putting a couple of cases in the "library" and pulling them out every so often to find out.

So, if you read this far, we have it for sale now. Only 25 cases. We are selling it for $24/bottle. We can ship to many states in the USA. If you are interested, send me an email and we'll work something out.