Water

We're currently in a drought in the Bluegrass.  As someone who just moved here, I never expected a drought.  I assumed that being known for luscious grass meant that there would be more than enough water for everything.  Maybe there will be in the future, but the past few weeks have been really dry.  Too dry for our vines.  Lack of water creates all kinds of problems in a vineyard, as well as all kinds of colors.

This past week, we decided to take matters into our own hands.  We're not large enough to have any sort of industrial watering system.  I'm not even sure we have water pressure for anything like that, even if we could rent one.  So, instead, we built something that we could fill with water, pull behind one of our tractors, and distribute some water to our plants.  Here's what that ended up looking like.

Our tank holds roughly 300 gallons of water.  Unfortunately, we couldn't come up with a contraption small enough to fit through all of our rows.  So, we had to skip approximately 16 of the rows.  Hopefully it will rain soon to help those rows, in particular.  We made sure to concentrate our efforts on new/young plants, since they seem to be struggling the most.  It takes almost an hour to fill this tank with water.  So, The Wizard had the idea of driving it to a nearby water utility service and filling it up for about a dollar in what seemed like seconds.  Here's what he looked like alongside Old Richmond Road in his trek back to the vineyard.

 

He'll be comin' 'round the mountain...

I swear to you, I thought he was going to get pulled over for dragging that rickety, old trailer full of water down the highway. As he was leaving, he told me to get on the back and ride with. No thank you. I opted to time him, instead. He pulled off the whole trip in 20 minutes. I think we decided that it wasn't worth paying to save 30 minutes of time, when we could take the time between full tanks to do things around the winery.

So, if you're an advocate of Kentucky Wine.  Do a little rain dance for us!
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Phylloxera

Phylloxera - the closest thing to a dirty word that can be spoken in a vineyard.

If you are any sort of wine history enthusiast, the word Phylloxera will send shivers down your spine.  Root phylloxera (it is important to emphasize root as opposed to leaf phylloxera) devastated French winemaking in the 1850s and '60s.

So, you can begin to understand the initial panic when we found an outbreak of leaf phylloxera on one of our plants, smack-dab in the middle of our rows of Moscato.  Here's what some of the leaves on that single plant looked like:

If you turn either of those leaves over, each white spot corresponds to a small, fuzzy, wart-like "gall".  (Remember crown gall?)  These galls do little damage, other than make the vines ugly.  However, since the thought of having any form of phylloxera around is nerve-racking, we decided to strip all of the leaves off of this vine and quickly remove them from the vineyard.

Grape phylloxera is a microscopic, aphid-like insect native to eastern North America, so it's not uncommon to come across it in Kentucky.  The French wine disaster of the 19th century pioneered an entire field of root grafting in order to fight off these small pests.  Since native American vines grew resistant to root phylloxera, French grapevines were grafted to North American rootstocks.  This has been the best defense against the little buggers, and grafted vines are used throughout phylloxera-known regions to this day, but it hasn't been perfect.  In the 1980s, California discovered that one of their most common rootstocks, AXR1, was no longer resistant to phylloxera and had to replant over 60% of the vines in Napa and Sonoma Valleys over 2 decades.

I first learned about phylloxera back in 2007 when I was regularly listening to the Napa Valley Wine Radio podcast.  Nancy Hawks-Miller, the wine educator at Goosecross Cellars in Yountville, CA, at the time, was responsible for most of my wine education up until 2010 or so when I decided to start studying on my own.  You can listen to the 5-year-old podcast about phylloxera here.

After spending a whole post telling you how awful phylloxera is, I just wanted to reiterate that our vineyard is in no real danger.  We have root phylloxera-resistant rootstocks, and we have a close eye on any developments from their leaf phylloxera cousins.

I had no clue that a wine podcast I listened to during my first year of engineering grad school would matter to me at all later in life,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Cream of Tartar

Did you know that angel food cakes & souffles exist partly because of wine?

Those lucky individuals who have been given tours of our winery might already know this.  It usually depends on if you happen to be visiting during one of our white wine 'cold stabilization' periods or not.

One of the key ingredients to baking powder, and an egg white stabilizer by itself, is Cream of Tartar, or tartaric acid.  I happened to pull out the Cream of Tartar from my spice pantry today, and I read the side of it:

"Cream of Tartar is a pure, natural ingredient that's created as grape juice turns to wine."

I was looking at my jar of Spice Islands Cream of Tartar, so I investigated their website.  They took the description even further.

"Tartaric acid, or cream of tartar, is the natural byproduct of fermented grapes, collected from the wall of the casks used to age fine wines.  Naturally reddish-brown in color, it's carefully refined until it achieves its signature white color, earning it the name "cream" of tartar.  Cream of Tartar is a key ingredient in baking powder and adds a fluffiness and stability to egg white dishes such as meringues."

We come across crystallized tartaric acid when we chill our white wines down to 29 degrees Fahrenheit.  We do this at the end of our white wine-making process, just before filtering and bottling, so that these "wine diamonds" don't eventually precipitate out into our bottled wines.  The crystals form all the way around our cooled tanks, and I guess we could collect them and crush them down to Cream of Tartar if we really wanted to.  Instead, we spend hours scrubbing them off the inner walls of the tanks and disposing of them.

These crystals could occur in our wine bottles if we didn't go through the extra cold-stabilization process.  These are examples of what "wine diamonds" look like, though not in our wine bottles:

So this summer when you're eating a delicious lemon meringue pie, give a silent nod to wine for making it possible.

We happen to be cold-stabilizing some white wine right now,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Frost Bite

Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

The weather was weird this year, or so I'm told.  It got warm so early that the buds on the vines broke almost 2 months earlier than they typically do.  Though it meant that it might be a long growing season, which allows for amazing wine, it left the door open for damage from frost.  From what I remember, there were at least 3 frost advisories this year after we had full-scale budbreak in the white varietals and Cabernet Franc.

Two of those frost advisories didn't drop the temperatures low enough in our vineyard.  As you're driving along Old Richmond Road, you'll notice that our vineyard is at the top of a small hill.  That's great for keeping air moving through the vineyard and not letting the cold temperatures settle.  It also allows for some great sunshine throughout the entire vineyard.

Finally, on the 27th of March, after two days of frost advisories, the cold enemy rolled in and damaged some of our plants.  At first, parts of the leaves were stained white like someone ran around the vineyard with a small paintbrush.  After a while, those leaves shriveled and died, and we were left with noticeable sections throughout the vineyard with dead, brown, frost damage.  It took a few weeks to be able to see and tally all of the damage, which is why it is easier to discuss it now.

It seems like our 1-year-old white grape vines took the most damage.  You can barely see the vines in the following pictures, because the leaves are brown and shriveled.  1-year-old plants aren't very big yet.  Since their buds and leaves are closest to the ground, where the cold air settles, it's no big surprise that they were the most damaged.

The good news is that the frost did fairly little damage overall.  It was seen on about 10% of our plants, and for those plants that were at least 2-years-old, its damage was sporadic instead of total.  Months later, you have to really look for the remnants of frost damage, since everything is growing so quickly and so full.

Next time you're out at the tasting room, ask us if it's alright to take a walk in the vines.  We'll let you know if there's anything to look out for, and you can discover this all for yourself.

In Vino Veritas,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Social Media

In my opinion, there is an under-utilization of the internet in these parts.  That's unfortunate, because there are so many free things that help notify people about the services you provide.  There are so many ways to still feel connected in a world of global media & giant grocers & mega-discount stores.  Here at Grimes Mill Winery, we have a small annual production of hand-crafted wines.  We're Lexington's newest boutique winery, and we have always relied heavily on word-of-mouth to spread the quality of our wine and the quality of our staff.

That is, until now.  Though I'm new to winemaking, I'm a veteran in social media.  I initiated the co-owners, Dr. Philip & Lois DeSimone, with this blog, but I am attempting to take it so much further.  Hopefully all of it will be successful in spreading the gospel of our local Kentucky wine a little further.  If not, it will still be fun.  Check out all the ways you can interact with us here at Grimes Mill Winery on a daily basis.

Start off with the Grimes Mill Winery website.  Here you can read all about our history and our current wines & events, as well as email us.

We also have a Facebook page.  Your 'Like' means the world to us.

We've recently hopped on foursquare.  You'll see a window cling at the entrance to the Tasting Room reminding you to check-in and challenge our regular customers for the top spot of Grimes Mill Winery's Mayor.  Unfamiliar with foursquare?  Just ask.  Or you can check it out here.

I've been posting all of the blog posts on our Google+ page.  We'd love to be part of your circle.

I, personally, have been tweeting quick notes from the vineyard on Twitter.  This is probably the quickest way to see what I'm doing on a regular basis.

Finally, we'd love to see what you think about us on yelp.

Overwhelming?  Maybe a little, but I truly believe that you'll enjoy your experience at Grimes Mill Winery (and businesses, in general) if you allow social media to help you interact with your friends to get recommendations or to meet up.  If you ever wonder about some step of the wine process, you could always just ask via one of these media.  We love to educate.  I'm learning these things along the way, too.

And, in the end, we're hoping that you'll come visit us in the winery to interact with us the ol' fashion way, face-to-face.  Until then...

In Vino Veritas,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Planting Baby Vines

I've always wondered about the process of planting new vines.  One day, I hope to have my own vineyard, but I had no clue how grafted vines even arrive, or where you can buy them.  That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the process of planting new vines to replace those that didn't quite make it through the past year.  We started immediately after we finished pruning.

This is how they look in the box.

We order most of our vines from a company in New York.  They arrive in a long box, wrapped in shreds of moist newspaper and plastic wrap.  They're bound in groups of 25 and labeled with the varietal.

The same baby vines out of the box.

We take the young, grafted vines out of  the box and place them into a bucket of water.  You'd be surprised to see how much water they drink up in the short amount of time before each one is planted.

New plants in a bucket of water. It gets murky.

Then, the real back-breaking work takes place.  We dug a fairly large hole for each plant.  We dug it with shovels, no fancy tools, and we filled the hole back in with a new vine and the just-removed soil.

Only the slightest bit of the plant sticks out.

After packing the soil back over the plant, you can see just the slightest hint of the baby vine sticking out of the mound.  (See if you can find it above.)  Then, you start over.  In about 3 years, these young plants will have matured enough to provide us wine-quality grapes.  I'm excited to watch the whole process, though it will happen very slowly.

A new row of new vines.

If you swing by the winery, you can see the process of adding entire rows of new vines to our vineyard.  It's a ton of work, but it is exciting to know that we'll have more grapes to tinker with in the future.

See you at the winery,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Crown Gall

Sometimes, you have to battle nature to make wine.

Pruning is finally complete.  My hands couldn't be happier.  Now we are moving on to planting baby grapevines where previous grapevines didn't quite survive this last year.  It wasn't a huge percentage of the vines, but more often than not, a dead vine was killed by crown gall.  I slowly became better and better at recognizing the symptoms of this disease.

Crown gall is caused by a bacterial infection, usually located near the base of the vine.  A dark, soil-y substance fills in between the root and outer surface of the vine, slowly choking it.  In the picture below, the dark substance pushes out the 'bark' of the vine to make the base look big and thick, but once you break it open, you can see that the actual root (the rust-colored core) of the vine is only a small portion of the mass.  We typically inspect all dead vines to try and determine the cause of death, if nothing else just to keep a mental tally.

Though not deadly to the grapevines, birds can be devastating to the fruit.  They love sweet grapes, just like we do, and they can be relentless in eating an entire crop.  No matter what people have done around here, nothing really deters these hungry, winged grape-devourers.  That's why it's so difficult when we run across a nest while we're pruning.

We actually left these nests.  They were just too cute to destroy, even if it means that we may just be encouraging the very pests that we'd like to deter.  If nothing else, they'd be decorative eggs for the upcoming Easter weekend.

Aside from that, you can find all kinds of spiders, snakes, bugs, fungus, etc. throughout the vineyard.  Some are beneficial, while others may be the opposite.  It comes with the territory when you're playing with nature.

I can't put into words how amazed I am by the progress of some of the vines since I pruned them just a couple of weeks ago.  It's like I'm watching my children grow.  The bright green leaves from the Cab Franc and the distinctive reddish color of the Moscato leaves are easy to see from the tasting room.  Though I can't put it into words, I'd be happy to show you if you swing by the tasting room.

In Vino Veritas,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Budbreak

♫ [Spring] is in the air, everywhere I look around.  [Spring] is in the air, every sight and every sound. ♫ - John Paul Young [kinda]

This is what the tulips in front of my house looked like last week:

Beautiful, right?  The only problem:  it was mid-March.  When I moved to Kentucky from California, I was anticipating enjoying all four seasons again.  This isn't a luxury that Californians have.  However, the Winter here was less extreme than I expected.  It sounds like it was even mild by Lexington standards.  Though that sounds nice, seasons greatly influence the vineyard.  First of all, bugs are expected to be a big problem this year.  Mosquito bites are annoying on our arms and legs, just as small bites taken out of our vines and canopy can bother our grapes.

It didn't get very serious until we had the warm spell in mid-March.  It takes an average temperature above 50 degrees Fahrenheit before there is much motion/growth in the vines.  As we were pruning, I got some nice color on my skin, but we also noticed that some of the buds were starting to break.  We didn't expect to see budbreak until late-April if not early-May.  So, this budbreak was happening about 6 weeks earlier than a typical year.

Notice the small blooms coming out of buds on the vine.

On one side of the coin, it is exciting that we may have a very long growing season in front of us.  This allows for further development of flavors and sugar (which becomes alcohol) before there is threat of frost or excessive rain forcing us to harvest the grapes.  On the other side, budbreak leaves the vines in their most fragile state.  You really don't want it to occur until after there is no more threats of frost, or you could lose your whole crop.  Sometimes you can save parts of it, but it's never as plentiful as a harvest not damaged by late frost.

That made this morning's frost advisory very nerve-racking.  It's a little early to say if there was any damage to our vines.  Much like farmers, we found ourselves hoping that the weather would pull our way.

Soon enough, we should be in full bloom, which is an exciting thing to see from our tasting room.  Due to the nicer weather, longer days, and excitement at the winery, we'll be extending our hours and days that we're open at our tasting room.  The changes will start next week.  Swing by, taste some of our wine, and take a walk with one of us out to the vines to see all of this stuff yourself.

All of my pictures taken for this blog come from an original iPhone that I've managed to keep alive for 5 years, so I apologize for their low quality.
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Pruning

"You cannot ruin a whole vintage with one bad snip.  It's ok to make mistakes.  In general, you're doing dramatically more good for the vines than bad." - Philip "The Wizard"

It's March.  Most people that work for wineries are abuzz with the first real work of the year:  pruning.  In my head, I always pictured a man in denim overalls walking down the rows of vines and snipping a few branches here and there.  I pictured a zen-like Mr. Miyagi trimming a bonsai to pristine beauty.  In a way, pruning grapevines is similar to what I pictured.

However, with everything else I've experienced at the winery so far, there are so many other things I didn't picture.  First of all, there is so much work to do.  In the first day, while I was being trained, it took us roughly 4 hours to prune one row of vines.  We finished triumphantly, but looking around at the roughly 60 other rows was depressing.  We need to get all of these pruned within 2-3 weeks.  Though all of my snips are beautiful and well-thought right now, I've heard that the quality of the pruning goes down as the days progress.

 Click on the pics to zoom in on before (Left - wild & tall) and after (Right - trimmed & pristine) pruning.

Luckily, we just got some seasonal reinforcement, and it's so refreshing to get so much more done each day.  It finally looks manageable, but tiring nonetheless.  I'll just be working farmers' hours for a few more weeks.

It was really nerve-racking at the beginning.  I hate making mistakes.  I realized that making a wrong cut doesn't really matter after it's done.  You can beat yourself up about it, or you can move on.  It's not really a wrong cut after it's been done, there's just a new right cut to be made.  I'll probably make thousands, if not tens of thousands of cuts of the vine before I'm done this season.  I can't get stuck on one that went poorly.

The first stack of trimmed vines. We've had 4 more of these so far!

If you see us in the vines when you come out to the winery, give us a wave.  We don't bite.  We may, however, wave back and show you the blisters on our hands.

I've already got a good farmer's tan, and it's mid-March,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

Farming

More than anything else, winemaking is farming.

Some farmers only grow grapes and sell them to wineries.  Some wineries just purchase grapes from growers.  Some wineries do it all.  We don't just purchase grapes from other farmers, and we don't just purchase juice.  We do everything from the ground up, even though we are a very small operation.  It requires you to know all aspects of grapes, from the vine, to the wine.

The vineyard can really be thought of as a farm.  And where there's a farm, there's manual labor to be done.  Winemaking is not just sitting around at a bar deciding which cheese pairs best with the sparkling wine while you slowly get intoxicated.  There is a never-ending list of chores that need to be finished.  The first chore we tackled was spreading gravel in the driveway leading to the back of our winery and throughout the vineyard.  We knew the ruts would only get worse as the seasons progressed.

Just before we started shoveling the first ton.

Luckily, there's a gravel quarry across the street.  Literally.  So, it's pretty easy to swing over there and get 1-2 tons of gravel and bring it back on a trailer.  The machine that actually dumps the gravel at the quarry is a giant, metal monster.  It was a little intimidating.  I was really surprised with the finesse that the controller was able to operate it with.

That's 1 ton of spread gravel.  We spread 4 tons before the rain got us.

The heavy rain pushed us inside, but not before we drove around and filled in little puddles that were already forming along the driveway.  Four full tons of back-breaking shoveling.

Rain clouds over the vines.  It ended up soaking us.

Going inside meant that we could tend to organizing the barn.  It wasn't in awful shape, but it was easy to trip over things strewn along the ground when you were looking for a specific tool.  It also meant that we could get rid of some of the old fertilizer that had been stacked on a pallet for years.  That required a pallet fork attachment for the tractor.  That also required me to learn how to drive a tractor.

As I was driving the tractor at a brisk 10 miles an hour across the property to dump the fertilizer, the song from the Footloose scene where they had the tractor chicken fight was on loop in my head.  So, yes, I've been officially inducted into the large network of farmers.  If only all of my engineer friends could see me now.

Looks like I'll need to invest in some overalls,
The Winemaker's Apprentice

First Day, First Bottle

I never realized how much alcohol a winemaker might consume before noon on any given day.

Today was my first day as The Winemaker's Apprentice.  I met Philip, owner and winemaker of Grimes Mill Winery, on site at 9am.  He had already been there preparing for my arrival.

We got straight to work.  Though I'm unfamiliar with all but the last varietal, the 4 white wines currently fermenting at the winery are:  Catawba, Cayuga, Chardonelle, and Pinot Gris.  (I'll have future posts about information that I collect about these varietals, but their names are about all I know right now.  We'll learn more together.)

Since the wines are actively fermenting, it is important to track the sugar percentages.  Once the sugar percentage goes to zero in a batch of wine, the yeast that converts sugar to alcohol has nothing to feed on and dies off.  At that point, fermentation is done.  So, tracking the sugar tells us when the wine will be done fermenting.  It also gives us a chance to sneak a taste at the flavors that are developing as the wine ferments.

You actually measure the sugar percentage via measurement of specific gravity of the wine by floating a glass bobber in a graduated cylinder.  The bobber is designed with markings on it that tell us how much sugar is left in the solution.  Apparently, the density of wine decreases as sugar is converted to alcohol, so this is a really easy way to measure the sugar in the wine.  All 4 wines were measured, and little sips were taken of each one to compare sweetness, tartness, flavor profiles, etc.

The glass bobber inside a graduated cylinder is in the center.

At first I thought we were going to drink all 100 mL from each wine, which is necessary to measure the specific gravity.  After all, I've never thrown wine out before.  I've never spit it out of my mouth, either.  Maybe it's the cheap graduate student inside me, but wine is for drinking and cooking.  Not for wasting.  Today was a first for many things, including pouring perfectly good alcohol down a drain.  Otherwise, I would have been a thoroughly intoxicated Winemaker's Apprentice before 10am.

After finishing the documentation for the 4 wines that were measured, we moved on to actually making wine.  Yeah, on my first day!  There is a batch of Vidal Blanc that is resting in a tank in the back of our cellar.  The task for the rest of the day was to decide on the sugar content that was necessary to balance out the flavors in this particular wine.  I discovered that Vidal Blanc is a fairly simple varietal (*subconsciously typed as Vidal Bland*).  It doesn't have a strong bouquet, it doesn't have strong fruit flavors, it's not very floral, it is typically not as tart as other white varietals when it is dry, the minerality isn't very noticeable, and it isn't too acidic.  So, it was a perfect grape to start off with.  I'd be able to see how small increases in sugar alter the wine.

Though some wines have residual sugar left over from fermentation, it is much simpler to just let the yeast use up all of the natural sugar.  Then, you can add back in sugar after fermentation so that it isn't too terribly dry. That's precisely what we were experimenting with.  We tried a range of sugar concentrations from 0.5% to 2.5%.  0.5% still had too much of the harshness of the original wine, and 2.5% started to get way too sweet.  We settled on 1.75% as the optimal amount of sugar for balancing the wine without letting it get too sweet.

This didn't come without some mental effort.  Our scale for measuring sugar is only accurate to 0.1 g.  In order to get percentages like 1.25% and 1.75%, some very crafty math and pouring had to be utilized.  It felt like a series of brainteasers, only harder.  Not only was it early, but there was also some alcohol floating around in my stomach with this morning's cereal.

After settling on the optimal sugar content, I mixed up my first batch of wine.  I poured it into a bottle, and I learned how to cork the bottle.  Before long, I had completed my first bottle of wine.

My first bottle of wine. The corker is on the right, the capsule applicator on the left.

I bottled 2 other bottles of wine with this sugar content for the owners to take to a party tonight to see what people thought.  I got to take this, my first, bottle home.  Cleaning up the mess I made concluded my first day.  Tomorrow sounds like less wine and more manual labor.

So many firsts,
The Winemaker's Apprentice