The growing season is rapidly progressing as the heat slowly ramps up and the rains become less frequent.  At this moment, we are receiving what is supposed to be upwards of half an inch of rain–not bad for us in late April.  Since the last update in mid-March, we have received an additional 3+ inches of rain, rounding out what has been a solid spring for rainfall.  Overall, we would estimate that we have received upwards of 2/3rds of our normal annual rainfall, with much of that in February and March.  Though such late, warmer rain isn’t so helpful for the Sierra snowpack needed for river flow and downstream users, it does serve our local needs for agriculture, and the only question is how well our well water will hold up in late summer.  As such, we have decided to make available an additional 1.5 tons of barbera for sale, still holding one block’s production in reserve in case we need to ration water late in the season.

Budburst for our barbera occurred on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, and the rest of the vineyard (apart from late-pushing souzao) had followed suit within a couple weeks.  For us, this was only a week earlier than last year, though we are hearing reports in general of crops starting a couple weeks earlier across California.  In fact, our own blueberries are already producing, which is a full 2 weeks earlier than in an average year.

We held off spraying to prevent powdery mildew (a critical vineyard operation) as late as possible, but have now already completed two rounds of treatments.  This will continue at regular intervals into mid-summer when high heat and, eventually, veraison, make this unnecessary.  We are now in the midst of shoot thinning operations in the barbera vineyard, where shoot growth is progressing rapidly and ahead of the rest of the vineyard.  We have also done our first round of mowing of the cover crop to improve accessibility of the vines and hopefully spare some ground water for the grapevines.  So, all is green and on track so far this season.

We are pleased to announce our second annual competition to recognize home winemakers that compete successfully with wines made from our grapes.  We will offer as the single grand prize 250 lbs of free grapes from our “still available for sale” inventory, good for the 2014 or 2015 season, for the best homemade wine made from our grapes based on blinded competition results.  If the winner has already placed an order for the 2014 vintage, the prize can be used to offset the cost of 250 lbs (our standard minimal order) 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, 2012, or 2013.
• You must contact us ahead of judging for a given competition to let us know 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.  There is no cost to enter, and no obligation for future purchases.
• 2014 home winemaker competitions results considered:  El Dorado County Fair, Amador County Fair, Orange County Fair, California State Fair, and Sacramento Home Winemakers June Jubilee.  Additional 2014 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.

Thank you, and good luck!

We still have available for sale small amounts of 2014 barbera, primitivo, and touriga nacional on a first come, first-served basis.  Please see our “Current Grape Availability”, which always represents our real-time availability for the current season.

The severe drought gripping California, including the Sierra Foothills, finally gave way to some substantial rain in the last 6 weeks.  Over 7 inches of rain fell gradually over a 4-day period from February 7-10, and this seemed to pave the way for a series of smaller storms, averaging one per week, that collectively have given us an additional 4-5 inches of rain.  Coupled with warmer days and nights, the hillsides have quickly greened to the sort of beautiful spring landscape that one would expect to see in the Sierras.  The sights and sounds of wild turkey performing their spring mating ritual is further proof of imminent spring.  Some red table grapes we grow have already budded, and budburst appears imminent in muscat blanc, our earliest-budding wine grape varietal.

Notwithstanding the recent rain, neither we nor the rest of California is out of the woods in terms of water, though the recent precipitation has certainly helped fill the soil profile and should assure a pretty normal (if early) start to the viticultural season, weeds and all.  The question remains how depleted the deeper water needed for irrigation later in the year– accessible by our well–is and whether we will run into shortages in late summer.  For that reason, we continue to hold back on production from a portion of our barbera vineyard, taking a wait-and-see attitude.  However, we are feeling more optimistic, and those wishing to secure small quantities of barbera from us for 2014 can contact us to be put on a waiting list.

In the vineyard, we are almost ready for the start of the growing season, with winter pruning complete, the prunings mechanically mulched, and weed control sprays complete.  We are in the process of supplementing individual vines throughout the vineyard with potassium, and then we will do routine maintenance of tying vines and digging out persistent in-row weeds that we can see best before the grapevines leaf out.  All-in-all, we are in great shape for the coming season.

Our 2014 primitivo production is almost sold out, and our Quinta field of mixed Portugese varietals is fully committed.  Still available for sale is the ~1.5-ton production of our non-Quinta field of touriga nacional.

On the commercial wine front, we are pleased to announce the release of the 2012 Due Vigne de Famiglia primitivo, a vineyard-designated wine made from our grapes.  Due Vigne produces many fine Italian varietal-based wines and has a tasting room in the Old Sugar Mill in Clarksburg, CA.  We look forward to great things from this wine.

Shaker Ridge Vineyard is pleased to post its grape availability and pricing for 2014 (see separate post).  Serious drought conditions prevail in the Sierra Foothills, as in most of California, so we may need to idle a portion of our vineyard to conserve water.  At this time, we are only committing to about half of our typical annual barbera production.  However, some time remains for Mother Nature to come through.  We recently received a little over 5/8th’s inch of rain–a small start and the first precipitation since a little snow in early December–which at least provided a drink for the parched landscape.

This season, we will once again be offering fixed-price shares in our “Quinta” field of Portugese varietals.  See elsewhere on this website for details.  The goal is to provide, in one location, a high quality field blend of sometimes hard-to-find Portugese varietals in proportions suitable to make an outstanding port-style wine or, potentially, a dry red blend.

Shaker Ridge Vineyard was honored to receive, on January 15, the first-ever Community Partner Service Award from the Sacramento Home Winemakers (SHW) in recognition for service, including educational outreach, to the SHW in 2013.  The SHW are one of the premier home winemaking clubs in California.

2013 was another very good growing season in the Sierra Foothills and a successful year at Shaker Ridge.  We provided wine grapes to 5 commercial wineries and approximately 30 home winemakers.  The season started earlier and finished earlier than in recent years, but overall was an average year in terms of timing.  It was pretty much a classic Sierra Foothills summer pattern:  hot and dry, with occasional excursions into the 100’s F.  For the most part, the heat backed off nicely and the rain held off (and continues to hold off, unfortunately) for an easy and orderly harvest.

It was also a strong year on the wine judging front, with a barbera made from our grapes (DK Cellars, 2010) taking a double-gold medal at the Amador County Fair and one of our estate touriga nacional’s (2011) taking a double-gold at the Orange County Fair (home winemaker division).

It was also a productive year scientifically for us, as we completed a 3-way trial to compare fruit thinning practices in the our non-Quinta touriga block which we think will be very informative.  We are making wine from the outcome of this and look forward to presenting the results at a future El Dorado Wine Grape Grower meeting.   We also gained some highly significant data from a nutritional trial that we ran in our primitivo and barbera blocks 3 seasons ago–the results of which finally became  apparent this season.  The results provide us great insight into our viticultural practices going forward.

We thank our many clients for meeting their commitments for grape pickup in a timely, enthusiastic, and cheerful fashion.  We hope that you produce some outstanding wines.  As always, we look forward to seeing (tasting is okay too!) the results of your efforts.

Until next year….

Little is left in the 2013 season but the waiting (and watching, and testing, and coordinating, and harvesting, and…).  Fruit dropping has been completed for all of our varietals, veraison is well past, and we’ve deployed all the bird defenses on hand.  Weekly grape chemistry testing has begun, beginning with earlier ripening varieties, with additional ones to be added as they get within a relevant range.

On the primitivo side, we found that the first round of fruit dropping completed in early July, which mainly removed side clusters, was not enough to facilitate full ripening, and we “dropped” (cut off, removed) a large number of clusters in early August.  The crop now looks to be in balance, and the most vulnerable portions have been netted to protect from birds, who had already found them.  It seems like the bird pressure is worse than usual, perhaps due to the prevailing drought-like conditions.  This pressure includes wild turkeys, who appear to have enjoyed a very successful hatch this spring, as we’re seeing large families of them visiting the vineyard daily for the first time in several years.  They have done a number on clusters within their reach in our early-ripening muscat grown for home use.

On the barbera side, we recently completed fruit dropping, which included a fair number of clusters that were sun-damaged during the early July heat spike.  A reasonable crop remains which should ripen well, though likely on the low end of our target yield, and perhaps a little light.  The coming weeks will be critical as we try to protect what is left from excess sun and avian visitors.

Our Quinta fruit looks good and has enjoyed unprecedented successful protection from overhead netting.  Though we provide this every year in this trellised block, a few birds typically manage to get in and need to be chased out.  This year, we really haven’t seen this since shortly after deploying them in July.  Fruit has been dropped, and there should only be the waiting here.

Our non-Quinta block of touriga is looking good  but may need bird netting to get through the coming weeks.  We are watching with interest fruit ripening in a few experimental rows where we have employed different fruit thinning practices.  The fruit load looks to be in good balance with the vines.

There is not much fruit left for sale in 2013:  a little non-Quinta touriga and tinta cao are all that remain.  We would entertain waitlist requests for barbera or primitivo, but frankly don’t expect there to be much left once confirmed clients get their fruit.

It’s been an interesting ride weather-wise this year.  It was generally a cool spring, with a series of isolated and limited late rains, but summer has been a scorcher.  We endured about a week of 100+ daytime high temperatures leading up to and a little past the 4th of July, followed by the briefest of respites into the upper 80’s.  We’re now back to highs in the upper 90’s, with no cooler than the mid-90’s forecast in the foreseeable future.  There’s really nothing unusual about this for summer in the Foothills, though we hope we get a little more of a breather at some point.

The net result of the weather has been plenty of heat for ripening, which seems to be moving right along.  Our first tell of this was our tempranillo, perennially our earliest-ripening red varietal–and we detected veraison in that grape already on July 7.  The same milestone for our vineyard in recent years is shown below:

Year                 Date of Veraison in Tempranillo

2013                 July 7

2012                 July 16

2011                 Aug 2

2010                 July 31

Of course, 2010 and 2011 were particularly late years, but 2013 is on track to be an “early” year for harvest, given the persistent heat we’re seeing now.  Expected harvest windows have been updated accordingly in our “Current Grape Availability” postings and will continue to be fine-tuned as the observations and data come in.

Visually, our vines are holding up well.  We did see some new sunburn damage in the barbera fruit during the oppressive triple-digit temperature period.  Barbera is our most susceptible variety to this, probably due to its thin skin.  The damage (which results in affected berries completely drying up) typically affected an exposed portion of certain clusters, the rhyme or reason for ones affected not always obvious. Fortunately, we had not yet done any cluster thinning in the barbera at the start of the heat wave, which will allow us to “select” significantly affected clusters for removal when we do this.  As a result, it’s not clear that harvestable fruit load will be net reduced, though we’ll have a clearer picture of yield next month.

Fruit load is generally average this year, with the exception of the primitivo which had a pretty heavy fruit set for the second straight year.  We have accordingly already done a major round of fruit dropping in the primitivo, and expect the start of veraison within the week.

Congratulations to Gin Yang, who won Shaker Ridge’s inaugural contest for best homemade wine made from our grapes with her port-style wine made from five Portugese varietals; she will receive 400 lbs of free grapes.  Gin won a gold medal with her 2011 port-style wine in the 2013 Sacramento Home Winemakers’ June Jubilee, and this proved to be the highest competition honor achieved for an entrant in our contest.  Gin was actually one of several Sacramento Home Winemakers (SMH) to make a port-style wine from our 2011 vintage, a year in which we sold “shares” of the vineyard to many home winemakers.  Gin also made a dry style red wine from the very same Portugese grapes (including same harvest) as her gold medal winning dessert wine, and this garnered a bronze medal in the June Jubilee.   An honorable mention in our contest goes to JD Phelps, also from the SMH group, who took home a silver medal in the 2013 SHW June Jubilee with his rendition of a port-style wine made from our 2011 vintage.

In other wine competition news, we are pleased to report that our own homemade wine made from 2011 estate touriga nacional (Quinta) won a double gold medal at the 2013 Orange County Fair.  Our 2010 vintage port-style wine earned a silver medal in the same competition.   The touriga outcome was particularly gratifying, as it’s not a varietal that most judges would be familiar with, and so they were likely reacting to their overall impressions of the wine.  One concluded, in the judging sheets, “My first ever [touriga], wow, it stands alone.”  Truly, this was a wine that made itself in 2011, but we’re glad that others appreciate the qualities of this varietal as a dry wine.

Some primitivo, touriga nacional, and tinta cao grapes remain available for purchase from the 2013 vintage; we are also accepting wait-list requests for barbera.

It’s been a beautiful late spring in the Sierra Foothills, with temperatures on the cool side, and even a little bit of rain past the traditional end of the region’s rainy season around Memorial Day.  Rain is not necessarily appreciated in the vineyard at this time of year since, if it’s significant, it can wash off the latest spray applied to prevent a major bane of wine grapes, powdery mildew.  This can mean additional rounds of spraying to assure good coverage, which amounts to yet more work.  Fortunately, any rain has been minor or well-timed so as not to create the need for additional spraying.  We did endure a quick, withering shot of mid-summer weather last weekend, with highs in the low to mid 100’s across the region, but daytime highs plummeted some 30 degrees by Monday and are forecast to stay moderate in the coming week.  We noticed some sunburn damage to portions of scattered barbera bunches following the heat spike, but the damage was limited and almost immaterial, as the affected berries will dry up and fall off well before harvest.

Certain lower-lying vineyards with relatively poor air drainage in high elevation areas of the Sierra Foothills actually experienced frost and significant grape losses in the latter part of May. This was fortunately a complete non-event at Shaker Ridge, with temperatures not nearly cold enough for frost.

It is too early to estimate yields, but fruit set seems reasonable at this point. It is also too early to predict harvest dates, but so far we remain on track for a normal to slightly early harvest time vs. historical norms.

We will be completing our shoot thinning in the primitivo tomorrow, which will end the frenetic spring period in the vineyard created by rapid shoot growth of the vines and weed/cover crop growth.  The young grape berries are rapidly increasing in size, with the barbera grapes in the lead, and are already well on their way to filling out full bunches.  Shoot growth has slowed significantly, and we’re beginning to irrigate more frequently. Bloom elemental analysis looked pretty good in our vineyards, though we failed to see much difference among our different rootstock/clone combinations in the barbera.  Apparently, the more limited sampling that we have been conducting in past years is adequate to understand what is going on nutritionally in the barbera.

With a couple past vintages of wine made from our grapes lost in a fire at Oakstone Winery last year, it’s been a lean year in terms of the number of commercial wine competitions entries made with our grapes.   However, the little news we have is very good:  DK Cellars’ 2010 barbera, which was made with Shaker Ridge grapes, recently took a DOUBLE GOLD medal at the 2013 Amador County Fair.  This was one of 3 barbera wines to earn this honor, alongside perennial excellent examples from Cooper Vineyards and Jeff Runquist Wines, very good company indeed.  For those not familiar with wine judging, the “double gold” signifies that all the judges in the tasting panel–typically 3 in number–thought that the wine merited a gold medal.  Such consensus on something as subjective as wine quality is actually relatively rare, with many more “gold” (vs. double gold) medals awarded in any given competition, the plain gold medal usually signifying that most but not all of the judges rated the wine to be a gold.  DK Cellars’ effort, which is an outstanding, varietally correct wine made in more of an Old World style, represents the highest honors achieved for a barbera made from our grapes to date.  The wine is currently released and available for sale at DK Cellars’ tasting room in Fair Play, CA.

Our own contest for best homemade wine made from Shaker Ridge grapes is drawing to a close with Amador County Fair judging coming this Saturday.  We will report the outcome in next month’s diary entry.

Both of our main varietals, barbera and primitivo, are now sold out for 2013, but we are accepting wait list requests for extra grapes.  Yield is conservatively estimated, so we often have some additional grapes to sell once commitments are met.

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.