Budburst came earlier this year than in the last several years, but really more like our long-term average.  Our earliest-pushing varietals barbera ,tinta cao, and muscat had pushed by March 24, the next group (touriga, tempranillo, tinta amarela) by April 2, and the primitivo and souzao by April 11.  A timely beginning to the growing season doesn’t insure a timely end, but it’s a good start.

Rainfall has cooperated since late March, with about once-weekly storms deliverying 0.5-1.0 inch of rain each.  We’d welcome that pattern continuing for a little longer, though anything we get at this point in the season is gravy, given our Mediterranean climate.  Overall, we’re in a pretty good place in terms of groundwater.  There has been no credible frost danger since the vines pushed, though we have about 3-4 weeks to go before we’re completely out of the woods.  Mildew prevention measures will start shortly once modeling suggests that it’s time–mainly a function of temperature.

As we head into wine competition season, Shaker Ridge is pleased to offer a first-ever competition of its own to recognize home winemakers that compete successfully with wines made from our grapes.  We will offer as the single grand prize 400 lbs of free grapes from our “still available for sale” inventory, good for the 2013 or 2014 season, for the best homemade wine made from our grapes based on competition results.  If the winner has already placed an order for the 2013 vintage, the prize can be used to offset the cost of 400 lbs of the grapes. The rules are as follows:

• The wine must be made at least 85% from grapes from Shaker Ridge Vineyard vintage 2010, 2011, or 2012.
• You must contact us ahead of judging for a given competition that you have entered a wine of type X, vintage Y from our grapes.  We will confirm that your entry is or is not valid for our competition based on our sales records.
• 2013 home winemaker competitions results considered:  El Dorado County Fair, Amador County Fair, Orange County Fair, California State Fair (if available), Sacramento Home Winemakers June Jubilee.  Additional 2013 public, blinded competitions will be considered with advance agreement from Shaker Ridge, provided that results will be known by August 1, 2013.  Unfortunately, for the purposes of this competition, we cannot consider past results with the above vintages, only upcoming (prospective) entries.
• Appreciating the subjectivity in wine judging, we will consider the best outcome for a  given wine unless two or more wines with the same best outcome have been entered multiple times.  In the latter case, we will consider the best average outcome.  Ranking of outcomes is: double gold>gold>silver>bronze>honorable mention.  Tie breakers would include additional distinctions, eg Best of Show, Best of Class.  If the above doesn’t yield a single winner, we may request a taste-off!
• Entrants agree that we can choose to post the results–good, bad, or indifferent–including winemaker, wine, competition, and result, on this website.  We will use your initials if you prefer relative anonymity and let us know this at the time you contact us with your entry.

We suspect that some very good wines have been made by our clients in recent years, and we hope this fun competition will encourage our home winemaker clients to submit their wines to wine competitions for independent appraisal.

We are officially sold out of barbera for 2013, though if yield is adequate, and once our current commitments have been met, we will consider wait-list requests on a first come, first-served basis.  Primitivo, tinta cao, and touriga are still available for sale.

Spring is clearly in the air, but the situation has gone from bad to worse in terms of winter rains in the California Foothills, if not in most of CA wine country.  We’ve previously reported on the paltry rains in the new year through mid-February, and there has been little incremental rain now through mid-March.  In fact, it’s been an historically dry period for what should be the wettest time of the year, turning an above-average wet season into a distinctly below-average wet season, albeit not absymal.  Fortunately, a reasonably strong storm system will move in during the next two days, though it appears to be a one-off event, with fair weather to follow.  Already, we’ve seen a streak of beautiful spring days in the 70s, and our earliest pushing varieties, such as tinta cao and barbera, are on the verge of budburst but not quite there as of this writing.  This will definitely be the earliest budburst in our vineyard in a few years, but a pretty average timing overall.

In truth, none of this farmer whining about low rainfall amounts to any catastrophe for Foothills grape growers who are not, unlike counterparts in the Central Valley, heavily reliant on fixed allocations of water from the delta and elsewhere.  At Shaker Ridge we have a highly productive well, and the dried out condition that we’re already seeing in the topsoil merely means a) that the deeper-rooted perennial grapevines will have an advantage over shallow-rooted annual weeds; 2) we will likely be able to limit early vegetative growth, since the vines should chew through the ground water relatively quickly, at which point we will be able to control water allocation for the balance of the season.  Those are positives.  The main negative will be the likely need (and cost) of irrigating earlier in the season than usual, putting pressure on groundwater supplies.

In the vineyard, we have completed winter pruning exactly a week before the end of winter itself, and are mulching in the clippings and applying our single spray of the year for weeds in the vineyard rows.  The vine rows were in decent shape anyway thanks to grazing by our older alpacas.  The alpacas will now be confined to other pastures, since the young grapevine shoots would prove too tempting a treat.  Meanwhile, the calls of wild turkeys can be heard echoing through the nearby woods, and the occasional small flock, including dancing toms, can be seen traversing the vineyard.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, all signs point to another year of strong out-of-county demand for quality Foothills grapes, so if you are pretty sure you want to make wine this fall, you would do well to secure supply sooner vs. later, no matter where you buy your grapes.  Enough said.

We are pleased to post our pricing and availability of wine grapes for the 2013 growing season. Our grapes always ripen during the September to October time frame, with the exact timing a function of the weather, the varietals, and even the field. Our minimum order remains 250 lbs per varietal.

For the first time, we are selling our Portugese varietal grapes, including those in our Quinta field, on a conventional per pound basis, with no prior restricted period where we will only sell the Quinta grapes as the full field. It remains a goal of ours to interest a commercial winery to buy our entire Quinta field and make a world-class port-style wine from the grapes, and we’d be able to offer two additional varieties that we grow in small quantities as part of the Quinta field, souzao and tinta amarela, for such a project. However, it has proven too much of a chore to market the grapes in this way, so we are going to keep it simple this year. Moreover, this will give home winemakers the opportunity to reserve the smaller quantities that they generally need.

No two seasons are exactly alike, but this winter seems to be following a pattern we’ve seen before of a wet December followed by a dry January. We saw occasional, seasonable precipitation in October and November, but this was followed by abundant December rains and cool temperatures. Then we entered a generally cool but very dry January-mid February period, with just a couple minor rain events. We’re starting to see some warming and the first few signs of spring, and we’ve completed over half of the winter pruning required to get grapevines in shape for the coming season. It’s a big job, but one that, unlike most vineyard operations, can happen anytime over a several month period, rather than in a narrow time window (like harvest). We’ll post a picture of our recently pruned barbera field on this blog.

A couple of weeks ago, we were honored to received some samples of wines made with our grapes by a home winemaker client, and while all were good, one (a 2011 touriga made from our Quinta fruit) was, in our opinion, off the charts. Nothing pleases us more than seeing excellent wines made with our grapes, and we look forward to seeing this and other wines as entrants in this year’s wine competitions.

We’re looking forward to another great season in 2013, whatever the weather may bring.