Moving to Wordpress

Just a quick note... I've been using Blogger since I started this blog. I've never been that happy with it and finally pulled the trigger and moved the whole shebang over to Wordpress. They make it very easy to migrate with a click of a button. I think you'll like the new layout... Please join me over there!

Moved to Wordpress

Year in Review 2009

Now that all the grapes are in, it's time to have a year in review of our weather and what we can expect from the wines of Washington state. For both sides of the state, I think it will be a blockbuster year.

If we go back to the beginning of December last year and all the snow and cold weather we had in the Seattle area, you would hardly think that we would have had such a hot summer. Here in Woodinville we recorded a low of 8 degrees one freezing morning in mid December followed by 3 feet of snow at Christmas time! Eastern Washington had a pretty normal, but chilly winter. Lows didn't get cold enough to cause freeze damage to many vines.

If we speed forward to early spring, things got off to a late start on both sides of the mountains. In my vineyard, we had a two week late start to bud break and I was starting  to grumble that we were going to have another crappy year like 2008. But that quickly changed as May arrived. We had started to have summer weather very early on. By the time flowering on the vines occurred, we had made up ground and flowering was either normal or slightly earlier.

Then summer came, and we had a one of the driest summers I can remember. We also clocked in a day at 106 degrees in Woodinville! This was the summer that never seemed to end and veraison and ripening came earlier than normal. I heard people picking Chardonnay in Eastern Washington in late August and I got panicked because we weren't ready for harvest yet! September came and we had a couple of days of rain, but the vines really needed it so I wasn't too worried. My growers on the eastern side of the state started posting ripening numbers and things came fast and furious by mid September. The grapes from eastern Washington are characterized by higher than normal brix levels and normal to lower acid levels, but  nicely balanced. Western Washington grapes are pretty ripe. The ripest I've seen in 11 years. If you look at the growing degree days for the year, Seatac Airport was at 2195, which is about 350 degree day above the "average", although if you average out the last 11 years I've been doing this (since 1998) the degree days average 2051. I think the National Weather Service must've picked an unusually cool stretch of weather to make the average because we get far more heat than that...

Harvest happened under pretty nice conditions and we picked the Pinot Noir before October 1st and only because the birds were getting out of hand. Eastern Washington we harvested early in the day because it was still quite hot.

Anyway, look for our 2009 Pinot Noir in early 2011, we should have about 80 cases of it and look for our 2009 Chardonnay in the spring of 2010!

Climate change and the Puget Sound AVA?

OK, I guess it's my turn on this article in the Seattle Time by Craig Welch today called "Puget Sound area emerging as wine region, thanks to warmer climate". I knew this article was coming. Craig called me a couple of times over the past couple of months, but we never seem to hook up. Oh well... I read the article and I generally believe what most scientist say about global warming or whatever  you want to call it. I also believe there many variables that can change our climate over decades or an instant. (I lived in Germany the year after Mt. St. Helens erupted and it was the worst winter on record that year) Be that as it may, I am here to talk about growing grapes in the Puget Sound region. The first thing you need to understand that the Puget Sound basin has a high amount of variations depend on factors like: proximity to the Puget Sound, rain shadows, convergence zones, elevations, etc... Tom Miller's vineyard near Sequim (mentioned in the article) is just about the most extreme place I'd ever want to try and grow grapes. It's extremely dry due to the rain shadow, but it's also very cool. The grape he is picking in that article, Siegerebe, is one of the earliest ripening wine grape out there. If I tried growing it in Woodinville it would ripen in August! Anyways, I'm just trying to show the variations in climate we are dealing with.

First I'll tackle the Seattle Times article...  The general premise of the article seems to be that global warming is the driving factor for the growth in wine grapes in the Puget Sound AVA. My take on this is that we've been able to grow grapes here all along, we just didn't have the knowledge and grape vines to grow what we needed to grow here. Lambert Evans planted grapes in the 1870s on Stretch Island and there was a successful winery on the island until Prohibition killed it off. If we track back to the modern start of wine grape growing in the PNW, it all really starts in the 1960s both in Oregon and Washington state. There were parallel efforts going on in the Willamette Valley, Eastern Washington and the Puget Sound. Gerard Bentyrn could be called the father of the Puget Sound AVA for being the first to plant well known European wine grapes in Western Washington in the late 1970s, unfortunately wine growing never really took off in the Puget Sound. I think the main reason are urban sprawl and lack of resources and Gerard's choices in grapes that were obscure even by European standards.

As some of you may know, I've been growing commercial plantings of wine grapes in the Puget Sound AVA since 1998. I was frustrated early on by the lack of new growers, but that doesn't seem to be a problem any more and I mainly attribute that to the explosive growth in vineyards nationwide (worldwide?). I don't think global warming has anything to do with it! People simply want to plant grapes wherever they can and the Puget Sound is ideally situated for high quality wine grape production...

OK, as I type this my RSS reader tells me Paul Gregutt chimes in. He doesn't have much to add to the argument and is mainly interested in if climate change is driving people to do things differently with their vineyards, but shared a post from a reader to the original article. In that posting, the person says "But the Puget Sound region is hardly similar to Burgundy (as Oregon's Willamette Valley is), or even the cooler Loire Valley of France. I think it will take many more years of climate change before we will see any big changes in the wine industry on the ‘wet’ side of the state, where many wineries still get their grapes from eastern Washington.” I'm not sure if Paul agrees with that statement or not, but since he posted it, I assume he agrees with it... Firstly, the Puget Sound shares a very similar climate to the Willamette valley, the Puget Sound region is just cooler. We have the same wet winters and bone dry summers. The Willamette valley climate is very different than Burgundy. They are much closer to the ocean and more influenced by it. Burgundy is more continental, less maritime, they get rain all year long. We get rain in the winter months. If anyone out there has read John Gladstones "Viticulture and Enviroment" they will note that the Puget Sound shares a climate that is very similar to the Loire river valley as it empties into the Atlantic ocean, otherwise known as Muscadet.The Loire river is long and climate along it is varied, just like the Puget Sound...

Anyway, what does this all add up to? My feeling is that the Puget Sound region has been capable of growing high quality wine grapes all along, growers didn't have access to easy and cheap land like they did in Oregon or Eastern Washington. The knowledge needed to grow in cooler climates simply was not here yet (although it has been in Europe for centuries). We are just now uncovering higher quality grapes that will grow well in our climate and still make excellent wines. Also the public's acceptance of offbeat wines is at an all time high. I think this all adds up to a rosy future for the Puget Sound AVA!

Riesling in the Puget Sound?

I finally got a harvest out of my four Riesling vines this year... I'm not suggesting you go out and plant Riesling any time soon, but based on my four vines, I would say that you could make an authentic German styled Riesling (low alcohol, off dry) based on the numbers I got off these vines. I picked about five lbs of fruit. Bare in mind that this is probably an old California clone of Riesling, no rootstock, not cluster thinned and I got 19 brix and a pH of 3.1. I'd love to get my hands on some of that new clone (new to the USA) of Riesling called N90 that Dr. Frank winery brought into the USA a couple of years ago. Supposed to achieve much higher levels of sugar. In the meantime, until we can get some N90 here in the Puget Sound area, I don't suggest running out and planting acres of Riesling, but in the right location and training, I think you could be successful. If you can't wait, I suggest you get some Muller-Thurgau or Ehrenfelser for a similar flavor profile...

For all you science geeks out there, an evening with John Vidale

I'm a huge fan of science and I've been interested it in ever since I was a little kid. When I was in college I skipped around majors a couple of time from Computer Science to Geology and back to Computer Science. I always was into rock collecting when I was little. Even today I still am always looking at ground trying to find some interesting rocks. Now that my boys are getting to age where they can appreciate the same stuff, my older son is really getting into the sciences and especially rock collecting. We'll see where it all leads...

Anyway, we are hosting John Vidale at our tasting room on October 16th. He has got quite a resume and we are honored to have him speak here. Here is the details:

"An Evening with John Vidale"

Friday, October 16th 6-9pm in our Tasting Room
$20 per person; space is limited to just 30 people

(Please see our website to sign up)

And now for something completely different! Join us as we welcome John Vidale, award winning seismologist and noted lecturer, and receiver of the James B Macelwane medal, for a discussion on "Earthquake History and Future Around the Puget Sound".

Kick back with a glass of wine and hear John's perspective on the past and future of earthquakes in our area. We met John at an event recently and thought it would be so interesting to hear him talk about this fascinating topic! Kids are welcome (space permitting), wine available for purchase, light snacks. Who knows? This may become a series! "Really Smart People We've Met?" "People With Really Interesting Jobs?" Hope to see you this evening!Read more about John Vidale, PhD, UW Professor, Director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at: http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/

Harvest at Hollywood Hill Vineyards

On Monday, we picked our Pinot Noir before the rains came on Tuesday. Many thanks to Shona, Mike, Katherine, Lauren, Stacia, Greg, Josh, Elizabeth, my Father and my wife Becky (for putting up with this whole thing). We had a great time, the weather was really nice and we picked about 3000lbs of Pinot Noir. The Chardonnay wasn't quite there, so we are letting it hang another week, but it will really nice when we pick it next week.

We had a nice picnic lunch and had a bottle of the last harvest I had avaailable of the Pinot Noir 2006.

The grapes came in at 22 brix and it wasn't even October yet! This is the earliest and best looking grapes I've ever picked from a Puget Sound vineyard. We still have Regent hanging Nelson Vineyards, which we will pick next week...

Harvest Update #2

It's been a week since my last update...

We've picked up 1.5 tons of Portteus Syrah last Wendesday, 25 brix ph=3.61. Pretty good numbers. Brix a little high for Portteus, but it is odd that we are picking a couple of days before our Red Mountain fruit. He said he had a pump go out on his irrigation system in June and that created really small berries and a small crop. Which ripened really early. The good news is that this will be an intense Syrah with very concentrated flavors. The bad news is that we are probably only going to get 75 cases of it (instead of 150 or more we made in 2008).

We unexpected picked up a ton of Cab Sauv from Portteus. I think he was feeling bad about the crop levels on Syrah and sold me some of the Cab he was crushing that day. We should have two barrels of Cab to play with. This is the first time we have made a Cab and are thinking about blending it with some Syrah to make a Provence styled blend.

Then on Friday last week we picked up our Red Mountain Syrah from Ranch at the end of the Road (aka Kiona). Again, 25 brix and ph 3.70. Pretty typical for Red Mountain fruit.

The winery is really starting to smell like harvest with everything fermenting in there!

Today my father is out picking up Viognier from Portteus and then tomorrow Cab Franc. Monday we are off to Elerding to get Roussanne and the Grenache and Mourvedre are way out, maybe at the end of next week or the following week.

The only other things we have going are Regent and the estate grapes.

Regent was at 17 brix a couple of days ago. I'm going to let it hang until at least 22 brix if not more. We should be getting into the low 20s by the end of next week with a record breaking heat wave on tap.

I just checked the HHV estate vineyard two days ago and we had 19 brix on the Chard and 18 on the Pinot Noir. Long range forecast is for record heat so I would expect to add about 3-4 brix by the end of next week. I'll have a look at the forecast then and see where we are, but if I can keep the birds away I'll let the fruit hang as long as I can....