Winemaking Update - 10/27

Fermentation is winding down. Brix readings range from 0 to -2.1. I expect to start barreling down fermenters by the weekend.

New Restaurant - Farm to Fork in Dundee

My wife and I went out to dinner on Friday night to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We finally made it to Farm to Fork, the restaurant at the Inn at Red Hills in Dundee, Oregon. They focus on local ingredients and have a gourmet deli as part of the restaurant. Can't believe we haven't been here before. We had the carrot soup and pork and duck rillettes as appetizers and the duck breast and scallops for dinner. And (not like this has not happened before) we wound up spending more on wine than the food - we had a 2006 Louis Michel Chablis Premier Cru from a vineyard I can't remember. We both thought the food was excellent and the prices were very reasonable consdeiring the quality. We'll have to go back.

Winemaking 2009

All the pinot is in fermenters. We used roughly 30% whole clusters in all but one fermenter. (You always need a control lot) We cold soak and gently pump over for a few days before we inoculate with yeast. Right now the first lot that was picked is in active fermentation, the second lot is just starting, and the third lot is still soaking and expected to start soon. We've seen temperatures in the mid to high 80s - which is where we like them. One thing with using whole clusters is that the fermentations take a little longer to get going and a little longer to end. Everything looks good so far - I'll update in a few days.

More Harvest 2009

Final numbers - 16 tons of Pinot Noir from 11 acres or 1.45 tons per acre. That's a little less than we were expecting. We definitely had some dehydration in the vineyard - it looked a lot like 2003 and 2006 out there. Sugars were higher than normal, but we also saw that in '03 and '06. We deliberately maximized hang time even with the higher sugars to help develop the right flavors. We picked on Oct 6, Oct 9 and Oct 11. The fruit was extremely clean with no noticeable botrytis. The "farmer" part of me is always happy to get clean fruit into the winery quickly, but the "winery" side is always greedy and wants as much hang time as possible.

I think we're going to have very nice wines from this vintage. I attached some pictures from Oct 11. You can see Charlie, the Twelve mascot, patrolling the filled grape bins in one. Our picking crew was amazing - they pick extremely fast and clean, so that we can get the fruit to the winery before the day gets too warm.

First Crush 2009

We finally picked some Pinot Noir yesterday.  It was our Block 1 Pommard which was planted in 2000.  It's been the first block picked for the last four years.  Yield was only 1.5 tons per acre and 3 tons total.  We would have been much closer to 2T/acre if we hadn't had the dehydration that you can see in the last post.  There are some pictures of the bins at crush pad, a bin loaded in the sorting line and some clusters on their way to the destemmer.  We filled two fermenters - each with 1.5 tons of fruit.  We dumped one bin of fruit directly into the fermenter and then destemmed and crushed three bins to wind up with 25% whole clusters.  We'll be picking more later this week.

Harvest

We are picking grapes later today.  This is our first pick of the vintage and we're bringing in the Pommard block that was planted in 2000.  The fruit is definitely ripe.  I've attached a picture of a Pinot Noir cluster and you can see some shriveling from the warm weather we had a couple of weeks ago.  We plan to pick the rest of the Pinot Noir before Monday, but we'll see. If we can squeak out some more hang time, we'll go for it.  I also attached a picture of some Pinot Blanc clusters (they're huge, as usual) and a picture of the harvest bins cleaned and ready for use.  They're upside down to prevent the one that don't have slots from filling up with rain.

We had a little rain last week which actually helped firm up some of the clusters that were showing signs of dehydration.  I'll post more pictures from the harvest process over the next couple of weeks.