Bloom!

 

 

 

 

Our vines have started to flower!

This is a cluster of Cabernet Sauvignon from China Bowl that has started to flower. Grape flowers don’t really have petals. Instead they have a ‘cap’ of green tissue that covers the male reproductive organs of the flower (stamens). When the cap falls off, the stamens pop out, giving the flowering grape cluster its’ fuzzy appearance.

This is a very crucial moment in the vintage. The flowers are extremely delicate at this stage, almost anything could damage them or knock them off of the cluster, reducing the yield at harvest. Rain, for instance, could have a major effect during flowering because the impact of raindrops is enough to knock most of the flowers to the ground.

Fortunately, the weather is clear and dry right now, and should remain so for the foreseeable future. In fact, the conditions at the moment are ideal, it is clear and sunny, but not overly hot. The vines are very active, but not particularly stressed.

Bloom is moving very quickly in certain spots. China Bowl, near the foot of the property, is close to 15% through bloom, as is Montana Vista, near the top of the property. There is a little bit of bloom in the Grenache, and everything else is still waiting to go. Be sure to check back to see how it’s going!

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

More Rain

 

 

 

It’s raining in Sonoma Valley, which means our vineyard operations will be put on hold again for a few days. Fortunately, China Bowl was dry enough yesterday that we were able to get about three quarters of it mowed.

Mowing here, at a high point in the vineyard, was easy because drainage made the soil drier. We left the softest areas at the bottom of the hill for last, since they are most likely to bog down the tractor. We will come back to them when the soil dries out again, and in the meantime keep ourselves busy weed-eating the parts of the block that have been mowed.

Before the rains came, we also found that the Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the Southwest corner of the Montana Vista block have started pushing shoots (this is the next step following close on the heels of budbreak).

Due to the rain, we are planning to spray this area with a very light dusting of sulfur and copper oxide, to prevent mildew from taking hold.

 

We also noticed that discing made the rocky composition of this section of Montana Vista much more obvious.

All these rocks make for better soil drainage, which in turn makes for smaller vines. Smaller vines tend to break bud and push shoots a little earlier, so this is why this section of the vineyard is a little further along than the rest.

Even though it delays our vineyard work a little, we are very happy to see more rain. This is turning out to be a late year, but it could easily catch up with more warm weather, having a lot of water available to the vines will help with that process, letting the vines grow quickly as we move from Spring towards Summer.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

Weed Whacking

 

 

 

While the sun has definitely come out here in Sonoma Valley, it’s still a little too wet to get the tractor out into the lower vineyards to keep on flail mowing. Instead, we’re heading out with weed whackers to deal with the cover crop plants that grew on the berms of the vineyard, directly underneath the vines where the flail mower can’t reach.

As you can see, while the rows themselves are mowed, the areas between the rows still have vegetation growing on them. Some of these plants, like oats, can grow tall enough that they will interfere with the fruiting zone of the canopy later in the season, so they still need to be trimmed back.

Since it is done by hand, this is a fairly labor intensive process. There are tractor attachments that can be used to automatically mow the berm, but they only work well on very flat land. Most of our vineyards are very hilly, so mowing by hand is still the best option for us.

We started weed whacking in Montana Vista, at the top of the property. Since we were able to finish flail mowing this block before the last round of rain, it's currently the easiest for the workers to walk through.

It looks like we will be able to resume flail mowing sometime in the next week or so, after which there will be lot of weed whacking to do.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

More budbreak!

 

 

 

The weather is going through a nice warming trend here in Sonoma Valley, and that means that the vines are beginning to wake up faster!

Last week we found a little bit of budbreak up in the hilltop section of China Bowl, and right now we’re seeing more down in the lower section that is being T-budded over into Grenache.

We're happy to see strong growth taking off in this section, because we need it to be as vigorous as possible by the time we start T-budding these Cabernet vines over to Grenache later this Spring.

We’re also seeing continuation of the budbreak we noticed last week in the Montana Vista block.

Last week the only budbreak in this block was in the far Western corner, where the soil is thinnest and the vines smallest. Budbreak is slowly creeping East, with most vines in the rocky, rhyolitic section of the vineyard showing at least some broken buds.

Wit the warm weather on the way we’re expecting to see a lot of activity out in the vineyards this month. Be sure to stop back for more pictures!

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

Rain and more budbreak

 

 

 

California is still significantly behind on rainfall this year, so we’re pretty glad to see that it has started raining again today.

One consequence of the rain is that budbreak will probably slow down a little bit. Budbreak in grapevines is stimulated by warmer weather characteristic of early Spring. The rain is keeping the temperature out in the vineyard down around 50 degrees F, so it’s likely that we won’t see very aggressive pushing until the weather clears up.

On the other hand, we are still seeing small signs of budbreak in certain parts of the property.

Several vines in the Western end of the Montana Vista Cabernet Sauvignon block have pushed their buds. The soil in this end of the block is very rocky, and the vines are a little bit smaller here than elsewhere, which predisposes them towards going through budbreak a little earlier.

While it would be great to get the buds pushed and the vines growing, we are still very happy to have the rain. When rain comes this late in the year it is actually more beneficial for us, because the water status of the soil will remain elevated for longer into the growing season, keeping us from needing to switch on our irrigation systems.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

Flail mowing

 

 

 

Budbreak is right around the corner for most of our blocks here on the property, so we’re taking advantage of a break in the weather to go ahead and start flail mowing our cover crops. It’s a good idea to get flail mowing done before budbreak if you can, because taking a tractor down the vineyard rows when the shoots are very small can cause ‘tractor blight’, which is to say that the tractor can knock the young shoots off the vine if you’re not careful. We would have liked to start this process a little bit earlier in the month, but the recent rains left our vineyard rows too soft to get the tractor through without it getting bogged down.

Flail mowing a cover crop is not entirely dissimilar from mowing a lawn. The first step is to secure the mowing attachment to the back of the tractor.

If you look carefully, you can see where the tractors' hydraulics link into this attachment, allowing us to lower it to whatever height we want, and shift it from side to side as needed.

The flail mower gets it’s name from the blades it uses to cut vegetation.

These blades are set on hinges that let them swing as the axle they are attached to rotates. This allows them to 'flail', or gather more speed as they approach the vegetation to make a more effective cut.

There are several reasons to flail mow a cover crop. One is to reduce competition for the vines; during the early stages of shoot growth we like to make sure that there is nothing (like the roots of the cover crop) restricting the vines’ access to water. This is especially important in organic vineyards like ours, in which the vines tend to have very loose, spread-out networks of roots. Another reason for flail mowing is to provide nutrients for the vines; as the mowed cover crops decompose they will slowly release nutrients into the root zone of the vines that will help them to grow more healthily. This form of fertilization of the soil is one of the reasons that organic vines tend to have such spread-out networks of roots, the nutrients are not concentrated at the base of the vine (as they tend to be when commercial fertilizers are applied) and so the roots have to quest outward from the plant to find what they need.

As you can see, the flail mower makes short work of the cover crops. The pulverized vegetation left behind is called 'green manure'.

Flail mowing pretty drastically changes the appearance of the vineyard.

Here is a picture of Montana Vista taken yesterday.

Here is a picture taken today from the same spot. As you can see, the volume of vegetation is much less after it has been mowed.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

More Pruning

 

 

 

We finished up pruning in the Montana Vista block yesterday afternoon, and this morning we moved on into the Foxtrot block.

We managed to get a little less than half the block done today.

This is the oldest block on the property, and so the vines here are the largest and most vigorous. Pruning these vines is a little bit more difficult than pruning the slightly younger vines in up in Montana Vista, because there are more canes to remove, and because care needs to be taken to make sure that the vines will not get too tall for the trellis wires in the next growing season. We are also having to adjust our pruning slightly because of the rain we are expecting.

There are two things to see in this picture. First, note that we chose to keep canes that start below the trellis wires. This will keep the vine from getting too tall next year. Second, note that we left a pretty good sized piece of the vine still attached above the cane on the right. The vine can tolerate little cuts without a problem, but large cuts coupled with damp weather can stress the vines immune system and lead to disease. Since it is going to rain soon, we don't want to leave any really large pruning wounds on the vine, so we will wait until the weather clears up and then go back through to remove any excess tissue.

Check back tomorrow to see how we’re dealing with the weather.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

Winter Pruning

 

 

 

Today we began pruning our Estate vineyards in preparation for the Spring. As you may recall, we began pruning some of the Cabernet Sauvignon vines down in the China Bowl recently in order to prepare them for T-budding in the Spring.

Winter pruning is a slightly different process. In the case of the pruning we did in the China Bowl, we were trying to set the vines up so they would grow vigorously and produce a lot of vegetation in the Spring. In the case of the vines we are working on today, we are trying to set the vines up to create a balanced canopy that will produce high-quality fruit. This is what one of the vines looks like after normal winter pruning;

There are many different pruning methods that can be used for shaping and trellising grapevines. In the Amapola Creek estate vineyards, we use the 'Guyot' system, which leaves two canes on every vine, each of which has 7 or 8 buds on it (buds are the little bumps you can see every few inches along the canes, each of these will push a shoot out in the Spring). Later on this winter, vineyard workers will tie the end of each cane down to the trellis wire, forming them into arcs. In the Spring, the buds will push and the green shoots will be draped over trellis wires that are higher up (outside the frame of the picture). The fruit will hang down in the open area that the naked canes are currently occupying. Each shoot will have one or two clusters on it, so each vine will probably yield somewhere between 20 and 30 clusters of grapes.

We always start pruning at the top of the property in the Montana Vista block. Here is what the block looked like before pruning,

A little messy, as is normal in winter.

And here is what it looks like after,

A little cleaner post-pruning. The canes that were dropped on the ground will be gathered and burned after the next rains.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery website, please click here.

Barreling down the 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon

 

 

 

Today we are putting our 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon down to barrel. We ended up with three different lots of Cab this year, each of which is going to contribute some volume to the final blend.

This has been a very unusual year, the timing of harvest coupled with the volumes of fruit we received meant that we had to organize the lots of Cabs in a slightly different way than usual. Generally we try to keep the wines from every vineyard block separate before going to barrel to maximize our flexibility at blending later on. This year, in order to keep topped tanks, it worked out that we had to do a little bit of blending beforehand. For instance, we found it convenient to crush the Petit Verdot directly to tank with the Cabernet, while in previous years we have kept it separate until the final blending. The result is three distinctive lots of Cabernet Sauvignon that, taken together, make a gorgeous example of what our estate vineyards have to offer.

Since this year was very cool, the wines are slightly more delicate than usual, so we’ve decided to pull back just a little on the American oak in our barrel profile for the Cab, from about 20% American oak to about 15%. American oak adds strong flavors of vanilla and butterscotch, so a lighter handed approach will better suit the elegant profile of our 2011 Cab.

The largest lot, 12 barrels that will likely form the base of the final blend, is a mixture of China Bowl, Montana Vista, and approximately 8% Petit Verdot. The second lot, 7 barrels of pure Cab, is comprised mostly of the Foxtrot block with a little bit of China Bowl blended in. The third lot, also 7 barrels, is a mixture of China Bowl, Montana Vista, and close to 20% Petit Verdot from Bobcat Run.

It’s hard to know exactly what these wines will taste like when we pump them out to prep them for bottling two years from now, so we will refrain from any further blending until then.

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.

Exciting news…

 

 

This week we are proud to announce the release of our 2009 Cuvee Alis! As you may recall, Cuvee Alis is our Rhone blend of Syrah and Grenache. 2009 was the first year we produced it, as opposed to the varietal Syrah we produced in earlier vintages. The word went out to our ‘A-list’ members yesterday (if you wish, you can sign up for the A-list here), and we’ve already received a number of orders.

To ship wine out, we wrap the bottles in custom printed tissue paper and then re-pack them to fit the size of the individual orders. These bottles of 2009 Cuvee Alis were sent on their way to the East coast earlier today.

In addition to getting orders ready to ship, we’ve been busy dealing with the new 2011 wines. We went ahead and pressed out the Cabernet Sauvignon second crop at the end of last week. The wine turned out to still be slightly sweet, possibly because it is difficult to keep the fermentation temperature up in T-bins, so we attached the tank warmer to the porta-tank we crushed it into to help it finish out. Now it’s sitting at about 70 degrees F and it seems pretty happy.

 

The little rafts of bubbles that have formed on the surface let us know that the fermentation is still going in the tank.

 

On top of that, this week we’ve racked the Cabernet Sauvignon from the Foxtrot block and the blend of Petit Verdot and Montana Vista Cabernet off of their lees. Splash racking is a great opportunity to get a sense of how the wines are shaping up, you can stick your head down in the sump and get a nosefull of aromatics. Both of these lots are smelling great, lots of cassis and black cherry, with just a hint of anise and baking spices.

 

 

Even though harvest itself is done, there’s still a fair amount of work to do on the 2011 vintage, be sure to check back and see what we’re up to!

 

To visit the Amapola Creek Winery main site, please click here.