For those who like a hot Foothills summer, you are getting your wish.  For those of us who have to work outside in these conditions, we are strictly on the early morning and early evening routine.  Grapevines don’t enjoy our mobility, so they stick it out as best they can through the mid-day heat, turning their leaf blades more vertical to intercept less sun, closing stomata, and drawing what moisture they can–likely from the most recent irrigation– through their roots.  July was classically hot here in the Foothills, and we are in our 4th stretch of the growing season with temperatures in the triple digits.  We are hoping for a more moderate August as we coast toward harvest.

The season is rapidly progressing toward an early finale—we would expect an action-packed September and conclusion by early October.  Veraison is well under way for all of our varietals, with the exception of souzao which is in the earliest stages.  Our “Quinta” vineyard, the harvest of which will be divided up by Quinta “shareholders” on one fine day, likely in late September, is now 100% netted with excess fruit dropped.  We dropped approximately half the fruit in our tempranillo, tinta cao, and tinta amarela blocks, going for maximal concentration and ripeness in the remainder for our shareholders who are mainly looking to make world-class port style wines. The all-important touriga nacional component set relatively small clusters this year, so only a little fruit dropping was necessary, and the souzao remains untouched at this point.

As noted before, the fruit set in the primitivo was irregular, with lots of smaller, loose clusters, but we nevertheless dropped fruit to about 1 cluster/cane to maximize concentration and better synchronize ripening.  Our job now is to deploy bird netting, as the birds will love what remains.  The primitivo is sold out, but we will accept wait lists requests on a first come, first-served basis.

The barbera is coming along nicely, with the vines naturally in reasonable balance due to lighter clusters than average.  However, we are in the midst of fruit dropping to remove excess clusters in the vines that have them, with this operation already completed in Block 4, and the remainder expected within the week.  Our water supply (well) is showing some signs of being on the edge, so it remains unclear whether we will able to farm Block 1 to completion this year, which would contribute about 2 more tons to our “Grapes Available”. As it stands (ie, without Block 1), we have approximately 2.25 tons of barbera still available for sale from the remaining blocks.

Our 2014 touriga from our non-Quinta block should be outstanding, as we completed almost 2 weeks ago a definitive round of fruit dropping to 1 cluster/cane.  We recently presented at the El Dorado Wine Grape Association the results of an experiment we conducted in 2013 comparing different fruit-dropping practices in this very touriga block, and our practices this year are a direct result of that study (and a few years of experience).  We anticipate that this will be an outstanding vintage, and we seriously doubt you will find better value for this varietal given the concentration we expect to achieve.  If you have never tasted touriga, which makes a dark, fruity, aromatic wine with a firm backbone, we highly recommend it. We have approximately 1.3 tons left for reservation on a first-come, first-served basis.

We would like to congratulate John La Grou as the winner of our 2014 Shaker Ridge Home Winemaker Competition.  John produced an outstanding primitivo from our 2012 vintage that secured the victory with a gold medal at the relatively large and prestigious Orange County Fair.  He also had a 2011 primitivo made with our grapes that notched a silver medal.  John made use of a multiple-entry strategy, submitting wines to a number of competitions across the state, allowing us (in the absence of a gold from another entrant) to consider his best showing from the multiple entries, which just happened to be from one of the premier home winemaker competitions anywhere.  Congratulations to John, who will get 250 lbs of free wine grapes from our available stocks in 2014 or 2015.

Lastly, we’re happy to be here at all, as a major regional fire dubbed the “Sand Fire” (after nearby Sand Ridge road, we presume) scorched parts of El Dorado and Amador counties near their common border and came within a couple miles of our vineyard this past weekend.  Cal Fire and other responding firefighters, with considerable aerial support, were able to stop the spread of the fire in difficult terrain and in already hot conditions, but not before it burned almost 4000 acres.  We were inconvenienced by road closures but did not have to be evacuated, and we were certainly more fortunate than some who lost structures or had acreage burned in the direct path of this fire.  We thank the many who expressed concern and especially the fire crews who worked tirelessly to protect area residents and property.  Last we heard, and fairly remarkably, there was no loss of life.

The 2014 vintage is moving right along. Grape clusters are fully formed and rapidly increasing in size.  Fruit set appears variable in the primitivo, with some normal-looking clusters and some with lighter sets and variable berry sizes.  Fruit set in other varietals looks unremarkable.  We are not seeing any powdery mildew pressure.

The weather has been exactly as expected, with not a drop of rain and mostly sunny skies.  We have enjoyed a higher than normal period of days in the 80s or even the upper 70s for our region for this time of year, making for very pleasant working conditions.  However, we had a few days of low triple digits in early June, and we’ll be climbing into the upper 90’s again this week.  We hope that these periods remain few and far between, but we wouldn’t bet on it.

We have begun irrigating regularly, but have been able to water at less than maximum rate thanks to generally moderate heat.  We started to see some dry tendrils following the big early June heat wave. The vines have put on a fair amount of growth in the form of lateral arms, but they remain green and healthy at this point.  The weeds such as horsetail that tend to come up at this time of year immediately adjacent to the vine rows are off to an early start and growing in earnest; we may need to do a lot of manual pulling to keep them from competing with the vines for what will likely be precious late summer water.

Our 2nd annual competition to recognize the best home winemaker wines made with our grapes is heating up, with the results of a couple major competitions still pending. With the the Amador County Fair judging complete but results not posted, and the Sacramento Home Winemakers June Jubilee judging set to go in about a week, the updated standings are as follows:

Winemaker Initials                           Wine                          Top Medal

JL                                                     2012 primitivo                     gold

JL                                                     2011 primitivo                     silver

JDP                                                  2011 port style                   bronze

NG                                                    2012 touriga                      bronze

This means that someone will need at least a gold to force us to look at our tiebreaker criteria, and a double-gold would be needed to grab a commanding lead.  Entries are still accepted up to the day before judging of a given competition by contacting us to confirm eligibility.  The grand prize is 250 lb of free wine grapes (2014 or 2015 vintages).

The 2014 growing season is progressing extremely well at Shaker Ridge.  An unexpectedly generous bolus of nearly 2 inches of rain on April 25 recharged the surface soils that were already going dry, postponing the need for irrigation in the vineyard and elsewhere.  It did, unfortunately, also breath new life into weeds and grasses between vineyard rows that were already setting seed and prepared to pack it in for the year, but it would be rare for us to get away with a single round of mowing.  We gladly took the additional rain.  Yesterday, we got we would expect to be the last rain until fall: some passing, almost East Coast-style late afternoon thundershowers.  Our soil water measurements had just told us that it was time to start irrigating, which we began in a block of the primitivo.

The vineyard is in full “bloom”–the small, non-showy flower clusters that mark the beginning of fruit formation.  We first noticed this on the back hilltop of the primitivo about 2 weeks ago, but pretty much the entire vineyard was in bloom by May 16.  This is right about the same time as last year and keeps us on track for another early-ish year on harvest.

Vine growth has been vigorous, and we just finished a massive shoot-thinning (“suckering”) operation in the entire vineyard, probably the earliest that we’ve every completed this critical step.  Shoot thinning removes unwanted shoots or canes–typically well more than the number retained–which increases sunlight penetration and air circulation around the future fruit clusters on the remaining ones.  An added benefit, especially important in our third straight drought year, is to dramatically decrease the overall surface area of leaves, which should help conserve water that would be lost through transpiration.

We are seeing no evidence of powdery mildew pressure, but continue regular treatments to prevent this, as weather conditions remain ideal for its formation.  We just completed our second (and we hope last) round of vineyard mowing, and we’ll be monitoring soil water carefully to time irrigation on an as-needed basis.  Right now, we’re off to a picture-perfect start for 2014 as we look toward fruit growth and the hot summer.

In our second annual competition to recognize the best homemade wines made with our grapes by home winemaker clients, several medals have been won and we have a leader, but major competitions remain and all it would take is a gold medal to improve upon the current entries.  The leader board looks as follows:

Winemaker Initials                         Wine                            Highest Award

JL                                                  primitivo                        silver

JDP                                               port-style                      bronze

NG                                                 touriga                         bronze

We hope for additional entrants (free, see our April Diary post for details) with the Amador County Fair, Orange County Fair, and Sacramento Home Winemakers June Jubilee competitions still to come.  The grand prize is 250 lbs of our wine grapes (2014 or 2015 vintage).

We have updated our “Current Grape Availability” to reflect what we believe will be a harvest window no later, and quite possibly earlier, than last year.  A little bit (500 lbs) of 2014 primitivo and about a ton and a half each of barbera and touriga nacional remain available for sale.