Spring Time Bud Break

Inside the lab I am still soaking corks and doing paperwork, but outside there is a lot of activity.

I took this picture back in February, when pruning was in full swing.  Depending on the year and the place, pruning can vary, but in the Napa Valley most places start by January and end in March.

The excess wood (brush) is collected into piles, chopped up, and put back in the vineyard or taken away.  The vines have been dormant up to this point, but soon it will be spring and they will start to bloom.

In addition to spring, April bring frost dangers.

Last week we had our first night of frost protection.  When the temperature dip to 32F (or below), our vineyard manager has to get up (usually at 1am) to turn on the fans.  All over the valley we have giant fans for frost protection.  During the night the cool air settles on the ground and can damage the emerging buds.  Frost is not a concern in January and February (when it is colder) because the vines are dormant.  The fans run very early in the morning to circulate the stagnant cold air.  Driving to work at 6am when the fans are running make me feel like I'm in a helicopter chase in an action movie.  

This is a guyot vine.  The buds on these vines tend to push later than cordon trained vines.  You can see a little bit of swelling (the first stage), and some buds are in the second stage called popcorn, but they still look like dormant vines.

These are cordon vines on the same day as the guyot, yet every bud has pushed.  These buds are past the first and second stages. When at least 50% of the buds have pushed we call this stage "Bud Break".

This is a well developed bud at this stage.

 And this guys is an over achiever.

-L

Wine Art

I was looking through my files, and I came across some of my favorite pictures from my time making wine.

This picture is a plastic square used to cover an open top fermentation.  The blue on the edges is also wine, but the color change is due to a change in pH.  More basic = blue.

This is said fermentation.  It's a puncheon.  regular aging barrels hold 60 gallons of wine, these guys hold about 126 gallons.  These are much better to barrel ferment in.  When you barrel ferment white wine, the barrel is on it's side (because there is only juice and not skins this is possible).  For red wine, the barrels have to be standing up with open tops to be able to punch the skins down during fermentation to maximize extraction.  We place the plastic to prevent anything from dropping into the wine, have easy access for punch downs and allow the CO2 to escape.

 

This is another one of my favorites picture from pre harvest time (late July).  These are Maturity Samples.  When we want to know if a vineyard block is ready to pick, we bring back samples of the grapes, put them in a plastic bag, smash open the berry and collect the juice.  Then I test the juice for sugar and acidity levels to see how close we are getting to our target.

Some people take the Maturity sampling process a little further and analyze the phenolics in the skins.  This is a paper towel when the skins of the grape have been dried and collected.  The person pulverizes the skins in an ethanol solution (to extract the phenolics from the cell walls), filters out the skin particles and runs the resulting supernatant in a spectrophotometer to measure the levels of anthocyanins and other important phenolic compounds found in the skins.

But my MOST favorite wine art is by a woman called Sondra Barrett.  

She looks at wine under the microscope and photographs the refracting light.  This is a 1979 Mouton Rothchild that she photographed in 1984.

I have been a fan of her work for years and I was thrilled when I learned that she was interested in photographing our wine.  She came to my lab to show us her work and collect a samples of our wine to look at under her microscope.

 Here she is laying out her work on my lab bench.  So cool!

And here I am nerding out about it.

This is one of her most popular and one of my favorites. Ah, I LOVE it!

She's currently having a show in Yountville, I'll be going this weekend, and nerding out some more.

-Lucia