Sitting in on the Portland Indie Wine Festival jury

For those of you not familiar with the Portland Indie Wine Festival, back in 2005, Lisa Donahue of LAD Communications and Catherine Healy of Flint Design were brainstorming about how to promote their new, small winemaker clients. They came up with the idea of a juried event for small, independent wineries along the lines of the Sundance Film Festival. This is a fanstastic event!! We have participated since the launch....which happily corresponded to Boedecker Cellars' first release, our 2004 Purity Chardonnay.

Anyway...Each year the wine for PIWF are selected by a jury of wine judges, wine media, and established winemakers from around the US. This year, Athena and I were invited to sit in as "observers" during the judging. This meant that we sat with one of the jury panels and listened to their judging criteria, comments, and debate. It was actually quite enlightening to experience.

The scores are based on a consensus of the jury members, so there were a few quite lively exchanges over a few wines. More surprisingly, though, all four judges rated most wines within one category standard of each other most of the time.While Athena and I didn't taste alongside the judges, we did sneak a few sniffs and sips, and I must say that I would have scored these wines the same as the judges.

Wines were rated Gold, Silver, Silver -, Bronze, Bronze -, Average, or Flawed. No wine in our jury's flight received a Gold -- they really held all these wines from new producers to HIGH standards -- but there were a couple of Silvers and many Bronzes.

Overall, the wines were the range of quality and stylistic correctness you'd expect from new small wineries. Some were great, some were odd, and some were straight up the middle.

The wines receiving marks high enough to enter the competition will provide everyone who comes to the PIWF this year a great experience. Come check it out, and support the growing wine industry in Oregon!

See you there - SB

Checking out a little Pinot Blanc

What's Pinot Blanc?

This is one place where the Wikipedia entry is pretty lame. Come on folks! To describe one of the great white wines of Alsace (one of my favorite wine regions in the world) as "a full-bodied white wine" is like calling Pierre Robert "a soft, creamy cheese".

At it's best, Pinot Blanc can be either spicy and round or massively flowery and aromatic. True, when overcropped or poorly made, it's a pretty generic white wine....But the same can be said for Riesling, Pinot Gris, or Chardonnay, too.

Why am I suddenly talking about Pinot Gris? Well, we might have lucked into some really beautiful wine that someone needs to unload to generate some quick cash flow. While we normally do not like to work with wines we don't personally make, this is an exception. The nose is hugely expressive, floral, and complex. On the palate, there's a nice balance of sweetness and slightly perceived astrigency - it'll definitely hold up to those late winter and early spring dishes. Likely, we'll bottle this under the Pappas Wine Co. label. Watch for it in May!

Anyway, tomorrow, we're back to notes about the 2006 Pinot Noirs.

-sb

2006 Pinot Noir Futures tasting

We just held our annual WineSoup&Futures tasting at the winery last weekend. This was the first public preview of our 2006 Pinot Noir blends.

I have to say, the reaction to these wines was phenomenol, even to me (I love them all like children). We had planned for ~ 85 people to attend, but were instead faced with a winery-busting crowd of 105. This lead to a few logistical issues throughout the evening, but Athena and I enjoyed the buzz created by so many loyal customers providing reaction to the wines.

Here's a quick rundown of the 2006 Pinot Noirs sampled:

2006 Stewart Pinot Noir
2006 Athena Pinot Noir

2006 Anderson Family Vineyard Pinot Noir
2006 Momtazi Vineyard Pinot Noir
2006 Shea Vineyard Pinot Noir
2006 Cherry Grove Vineyard Pinot Noir

I'll get some more coherent tasting notes for each wine up later this week as I catch my breath, but suffice it to say that all of these already tasted like finished wines that had been in bottle for 6 months. The 2006 vintage is really amazing - the wines are silky soft from a tannin perspective yet still have the acid structure to remain vibrant. Athena and I have often used "Wow" and "Yum" when tasting during the blending trials.

For more info on the development of the wines, check back here or visit our website (http://www.boedeckercellars.com/).

Pinot in the winery - More on the way for Friday

First Boedecker Cellars fruit of 2007
Our first fruit of the year came into the winery yesterday! We processed 1.8 tons of Pinot Noir from Carlton Hill Vineyard. This is a beautiful little (6 acre) site in the Yamhill/Carlton AVA. David Polite, the vineyard owner and winemaker in his own right, dotes on his beautiful corner of the world. This is small viticulture at it's best! David personally loaded bins of grapes from his tractor to the Boedecker Cellars F250 after supervising the picking crew.

This year, we received Dijon clone 777 from Carlton Hill, and if this fruit is indicative of the vintage, 2007 is going to be fantastic for Oregon Pinot Noir. Just into the fermenter, we have ripe flavors, great color, and tart, zingy acidity! This will make for some really graceful wine.

Picking Calendar:
We're trying to fight off our urge to pick in the face of the coming rains, as most of the flavors are not really there yet. We do, however, have ~ 25% of the Pinot Noir fully ready to bring in thanks to the efforts of Bob Van Steenberg at Cheery Grove Vineyard. The rest of the dates are very speculative and will have a lot to do with the rain we do or do not get the first week of October.

Friday, Sept 28th: Cherry Grove Vineyard, Block 3 and Block 8 ~ 8 tons
Rain -- Sat/Sun/Mon???
First Week of October (maybe): Cherry Grove Vineyard, Block 6, Block 7
Momtazi Vinyard, Block C
Stoller Vineyard, 115 block
Second Week of October: Anderson Family Vineyard, South Block
Amalie Robert Vineyard, Block 10
Stirling's Vineyard (?)
Third Week of October: Anderson Family Vineyard, Chardonnay
Stirling's Vineyard, Pinot Gris
Fourth Week of October: Aardvark Vineyard, Grenache
Wren Vineyard, Chardonnay

Well , I knew this fall was likely to be fun, and it certainly is turning out that way. With some significant level of rainfall expected next week, we're making the decision to pull in some fruit this week. Even with the cold weather, we have a couple of blocks that are ready to go today, and we could have another 4-6 tons coming in over the weekend.

Here's the schedule as I know it:

Wed, Sept 26: 1.5 tons Pinot Noir from Carlton Hill (sometime in the afternoon)
Friday or Saturday: 2.0 tons Pinot Noir (I'll know the actual date on Wed)

This first fruit is quite ripe (already 24+ brix) and the flavors are good, seeds are brown, and color looks nice. So we have nice signs of physiological ripeness. On top of all that, we have really zippy acidity! Fruit like this produces bright, razor-sharp wines that show good complexity early and age forever...and it's the type of wine I love! Finally a vintage where we'll produce more wine for the Stewart blend than for the Athena blend - Cool!

Seriously, though, 2007 has all the hallmarks of a world-class Pinot vintage. All we need to do now is pray that the forecasted rain turns into irritating showers next week. Keep thinking sunny thoughts.

Cheers - Stewart

Vineyards looking good, but not quite time to pick

Athena and I trekked up and down the Willamette Valley last weekend, checking on all of our Pinot Noir sites. We had clouds, we had showers, but we saw fantastic-looking fruit.

THIS IS GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL PINOT YEAR! While ripeness is still quite a ways off, the brightness and beautiful acidity present in the grapes right now point to a classic cool-climate vintage in Oregon.

I'm really excited, as this is the kind of Pinot I wanted to make when we started the winery.

All we need now is 10-15 days of relatively sunny weather (or at least not much rain). Sugar levels are between 18-20 brix right now at all the sites. Usually, I'd predict only 7-10 days, but the nights are so COLD and a the days are cool enough that I'm predicting a slower than normal ripening.

More from May 22, 2007 trip to Vineyards

It was very interesting traveling around this week, if for no other reason than to get some really great photos that demonstrate the difference location makes in Pinot Noir growth.





Amalie Robert Vineyard just South of Dallas, OR. This is a pretty warm site, and Block 10 (my little acre) is quite vigorous. The shoots are 12"-16" long now, and the clusters of buds are well-formed. All shoots had 2 or 3 clusters, and they were monsters. We'll certainly be doing some cluster thinning and shoulder removal after bloom here.



Momtazi Vineyard in the McMinnville AVA. This is another warm site, although Block C is right at the crest of the vineyard (cool night temps) and receives a lot of wind, which keeps the temperatures low early in the season. Here, the shoots are only 6"-10" long. You can see in the picture to the right that the clover cover crop has been tilled under in every other row. This block produces wonderfully cherry-centered Pinot Noir from Dijon Clone 115 vines.





Anderson Family Vineyard at the North tip of the Dundee Hills AVA, right above Hwy 240. The South Block is aptly named. It's South facing, sloped nicely, and warm, warm, warm. This site was the furthest ahead, with shoots 16"-20" long, essentially ready for the first set of catch wires to go up. These vines have always been dry farmed, sending the roots deep into the rocky soil over the last 14+ years.




It's interesting to see how early season growth rates correspond to harvest dates later in the season. Of the three sites, we'll generally harvest Anderson first, Momtazi second (hot days there later in the summer help it catch up), and Amalie Robert last (the Wadenswil clone is a late ripening clone). More on this later, and more info on other sites will come soon.

First trip out to vineyards in 2007

I took my first swing of the year through the valley yesterday. I have to say, the vineyards all look fantastic! There seem to be few issues with shoot length and inflorences this year (unlike the last couple of years). As I get some time, I'll keep updating this posting with photos from the trip. In the mean time, you can see a couple of shots at http://www.boedeckercellars.com/Cellar%20Updates.htm.

Nostalgia

Yes, this is our first truckload of grapes ever received. The fruit on the truck was 667 clone Pinot Noir from Cherry Grove Vineyard. Wow! that seems so long ago now.

Mar 27th, 2007:
Athena and I would like to say THANKS! to our fantastic bottling crews

Without them, we could never have finished the bottling, and we wouldn't have had nearly as much fun putting our 2005 Pinots to bed.

Three days, 1041 1/2 cases, and quite a few bottles of beer...

So thanks to
Ralph and Megan, Charlie and Stacey, Zoe and George, Loran and Cathy, Leif, my dad Mike and my uncle Dan, Jeff Q, Sean and Stacy, Andy, and Eric K the master of the line.
We want to ensure that the rest of the world knows what rock-stars our friends truly are.

Check out upcoming events around the state at www.boedeckercellars.com

Cheers! - sb

Ripeness racing along...boy are we going to be busy

We brought in our first 1.5 tons today from Carlton Hill Vineyard. Great flavors, and nice, ripe fruit. If it's any indication of things to come, this is going to be one kick ass vintage.

This hot spell is really pushing the ripeness quickly. While we currently have a total of 1.5 tons in the winery today, we'll have 11-12 tons by Friday and 20 tons by Monday night. For those who want to help sort fruit as it arrives, now's the time!!

More pictures coming tomorrow...along with more fruit on Thursday and Friday

We'll get the pix from today online tomorrow night sometime....The winery looks empty now. Soon it'll be crammed full as all the wineries rush to get fruit in before it turns too raisiny.

Here's a preview of coming attractions at Boedecker Cellars (all still tentative beyond Thurs):

Thursday: 7-8 tons from Cherry Grove Vineyard
Friday (?): 2.5 tons from Shea Vineyard
Monday: 4 tons from Anderson Family Vineyard
4 tons from Momtazi Vineyard
Tuesday: 6 more tons from Cherry Grove Vynd

Weather Looking Good:

• Sunshine is in the forecast until around Oct 7th! This is absolutely perfect for this year. All the fruit in our vineyards is creeping along toward ripeness, and if the temperature and sunshine hold, we should have everything into the winery by ~ Oct 3-5.
• All this heat will absolutely push ripeness along. Two days ago, I wasn't thinking we were going to pick anything ahead of next weekend. Now I'm sure that we'll have somewhere between 6-10 tons of fruit in the winery by next Sunday. Which leads me to....

First fruit in the winery on Tuesday this week!!!

• We are expecting to have our first 1.5 tons into the winery on Tuesday
• The fruit comes from Carlton Hill, which is a new site to us this year. The fruit will be a mix of Dijon 115 and 777 clone, and should be dark, flavorful, and in good shape. David Polite (owner and vineyard dude extrordinaire) should be on hand, hopefully.
• If anyone's interested in sorting fruit, we're planning on hitting the winery with fruit around 11 am, which means we'll be on the sorting line sometime between 11 am and 1 pm. Please just drop me an e-mail (stewart@boedeckercellars.com) or a call (503.866.6699) if you'd like us to wait to start sorting before you arrive.

Harvest notes on boedeckercellars.com: Please give us feedback regarding my new public bloggish thing (http://www.boedeckercellars.com/Boedecker%20Cellars%20Harvest%20Updates.htm). I'll tweak as I go, but I'd be curious what you, your friends, and/or your mothers all think and what folks would rather see.

Talk to you soon - sb

Waiting for the rain to stop....

What do you do when it keeps raining?

Well....first of all, you try to remember that you live in Oregon and that this is normal. Then you fight the "AAAHHH, is it ever going to stop?" panic. When you've finally calmed down, you start working on cool, useful things. Athena and our friend Anna spent the day building cool new Tyvek lids for our 1.5 ton fermenters. They did an AWESOME job of getting about a dozen of them cut and sewn...You might ask, "Why are tyvek lids so cool?" Well, they breath (no codensate falling back into the wine), they're easy to clean, and they help us maintain better temperature control of the ferments...basically, it's a winemaker geek thing.

Other Happenings

Otherwise, we're probably over-prepared for fruit now. All the barrels are in the racks, everything's clean and ready to go...and we might actually get the morning off on Saturday.

I'll be in touch with everyone regarding picking dates, and I'll try to get some more interesting info up on the web soon. In a more abbreviated version, I'm also launching a "Harvest Notes" section on our web site - check it out and let me know what you think.

Think sunny thoughts...

Oct 10 Update -- More fruit on the way! Anyone want to help sort?...And other updates from BC

Hi all! Well, the first couple of ferments are almost finished now (the Cherry Grove Vnyd fruit we picked on 9/29), and we're stacking more and more fruit into the winery every day. Most of the vines are beginning to go dormant, so everything is about as ripe as it's going to get. The only thing to do now is wait for some dry weather windows and pick like mad weasels.

So...We'll have everything into the winery by Friday, and we'll likely have some wine in barrel by the end of the weekend. However, by the time I go back to work on October 24th, there will still be plenty of wine bubbling away in fermenters.

More of today's update:

- Big Thanks to Dave and Ralph!
- The Picking Schedule
- Update from Dave's micro lab
- Margot Arrives!
- More chances to help with the wine-making

Big Thanks to Dave and Ralph
- Huge thanks to Ralph Leftwich for showing up to help sort fruit on Friday! After waiting around for everything to arrive, for lunch to start and finish, etc., we sorted 9 tons of fruit! With Ralph's expert help (who knew that he'd worked in a fruit processing plant?), we got everything into fermenters in around 4 hours! We couldn't have done it without him.
- Dave Shykind has also started his efforts (even with the total lack of focus from your's truly). He's now cooking up agar and slants and getting our baseline micro-biology samples established...More on this below.

The Picking Schedule
There's lots of fruit coming in this week! If anyone would like to help out for an afternoon, please just give me a call (503.866.6699).

Tuesday
--> 1.5 tons of Pinot Noir from Justice Vineyard in the Eola hills
--> 1.2 tons of Pinot Noir from Maresh Vineyard in the Dundee hills
Steve K. is showing up to help - What a great guy!!

Wednesday
--> 3 tons of Pinot Noir from Stoller Vineyard...Uncertain schedule, as TONS of people are picking and sorting on Wednesday, but this will likely be an afternoon affair. This block from Stoller Vineyards delivered some of our most beautiful wine in 2004.

Thursday
--> Rest day...If you'd like to show up and help with the "in between" winemaking tasks, feel free.

Friday
--> 0.5 tons of Pinot Noir from Anderson Family Vineyards
--> 3 tons of Pinot Noir from Momtazi Vineyards
If you'd like to see fruit coming into the winery, this is your last shot for the year. Other than a little bit of Chardonnay later next week, after this, we're all in!

Update from Dave's micro lab
Dave stopped by on Sunday afternoon to collect samples for the beginning of our micro-biological studies. We're trying to figure out what levels and species of yeasts and bacteria are coming into the winery on the fruit, are resident on the winery equipment, and are present in my cooperage. This should be really great, as Dave has the best scope and camera set up to capture images of what he finds. He's already talking over my head! I'm psyched! Stand by for update photos.

Margot arrives!
Tomorrow, our new part-time cellar hand, Margot, arrives. I'm very excited, as I'm pretty old and out of shape, and I can really use the help! We're sharing Margot with Patrick and Lee from Dominio. I'll be sure to you all when you stop by.

More chances to help with the wine-making
If anyone wants to see more “behind the scenes” activities like pressing or sending wine to barrel, let me know, as Athena and I can always use an extra set of hands, and everyone can be useful. Just give us a buzz or send an email!

Info on media for culturing samples

Dave - Sorry it took me so long....I've been slacking. For some reason, I can't respond to your last posting; it might have something to do with the fact that my interface crashed as I was trying to post a response...

Here's the info on growth media. We'll need two different types of media. The first is a generic growth media for grape must - this'll highlight the good and bad yeast, as well as the other bacteria growing in the fermenter. The second will be a Brettanomyces-specific media that will not grow Saccharomyces (the good yeast) but will allow the Brett to grow.

An ideal sampling protocol would be as follows:
- One day after destemming into the fermenter, we'll pull a sample to see what survived the initial dose of SO2. This'll let me know if I'm taking any risk letting the native population of yeast take off or if I should innoculate with a cultured strain.
- As we drain off to barrel, we'll pull another sample to check for Brett on the way to barrel. This'll let me know the risk level and management I need to do in barrel.
- About 3-4 weeks after the wine's in barrel, we'll pull a sample from each lot (not each barrel) to check for any Brett growth. Again, this'll help determine if we need to pull any special tricks to control contamination.

One question for you - Do you have a filter housing that we can use to filter a large (300 ml) sample of juice through a .45 um filter? It's pretty easy to get quick growth from smears made from the concentrate on the filter surface. If you don't have one, how about BC funding some capital equipment for your lab? Think about it, and let me know.

Here are the media recipes:
(Everything below is from "Wine Production and Analysis" by Bruce Zoecklein; in the BC library)

General grape juice growth media:
- Mix 20 g of agar (YM) in approx. 800 ml of grape juice diluted 1+3.
- Fully dissolve agar by holding in a boiling water bath and bring to 1L volume with reserve juice.
- Sterilize by autoclaving

Brett selective media:
- In approx 600 ml of deionized water, add the following:
2.4 ml Bactoglycerol (or equiv)
48.3 g agar (wort or YM)
50.0 mg actidione (cycloheximide)

Actidione is what kills off the Saccharomyces while leaving the Brett happy to grow. It may be incorporated directly into the water used in making he agar.

Let me know if any of the ingredients are expensive, as you now have the open BC expense account for lab supplies. Keep in mind that I can by pre-prepared culture plates (either standard or Brett-selective) for ~ $1/plate from Vinquiry or Millipore...We can always go that option, too.

Thursday, Oct 6th update from BC Harvest

Two weeks into vacation...two weeks to go...Not a single fermenter close to finished yet, and 80% of the fruit still in the vineyards. It looks like I'll be pretty sleep-deprived once I get back to work - The winery should still be crammed full of bubbling fermenters that will require attention before and after work.

Things are moving slowly, but they're still moving...I still don't have any pictures ripped off the camera, but I SWEAR that either Athena or I will do it soon and get some visuals up. We'll be slowly bringing fruit into the winery over the next few weeks, and should (hopefully) have everything in barrel by Halloween. Lots to see and do, so come on out and join us!

- Update on Ferment '05
- Latest Update on Friday Picking
- How's the weather?

Update on Ferment '05

So far, things are looking really good (despite the weather that's been giving me a heart attack...www.accuweather.com). Fruit quality continues to look good, and the long, slow ripening is allowing lots of flavor development while maintaining the acidity.

We've still just picked one lone block of Clone 667 Pinot Noir from Cherry Grove Vineyard. The two lone fermenters in the winery are being heated today to get the yeast off to a strong start after a long cold soak. So far the inky black color and sweet flavorful juice are making me happy...if only I can get the ferment started today.

Latest Update on Friday Picking

Since the rain's taken a bit of a holiday (showers just bum me out, but don't really affect things that much), the fruit out in the vineyards has had a chance to ripen up. We're picking ~ 7 tons of Pinot Noir tomorrow:
Cherry Grove Vinyard: Block 3 (Pommard) ~ 3 tons
Block 7 (Wadenswil) ~ 1 ton
Block 8 (777) ~ 0.5 tons
Shea Vineyard: Block 11 (115) ~ 1.5 tons
Anderson Family Vineyard: South Block (115) ~ 1.5 tons

So far, Ralph's confirmed that he can help out - Thanks Ralph! For anyone else who wants to show up, come on out. We'll likely be sorting fruit off and on (as it comes in) from ~ 11-ish until ~ 6 pm. Food and bevs. will be provided to all helpers.

For those of you with more traditional schedules, let me know if you'd like to come out on a weekend sometime, and we can plan some work for you.

How's the weather?

While I would certainly have picked cool, sunny days over the off/on showers/rain we've been having the last couple of weeks, the vineyards are holding up remarkably well. No signs of disease pressure, no split berries (yet), and mostly green, leafy canopies. The flavors I'm tasting in the samples are great, so other than my cardiac health, this looks like a fantastic year for Pinot Noir!

BC Harvest Update Oct 5 -- Anyone want to work in the winery on Friday, Oct 7th?

Just a quick update from the Harvest '05 crew at Boedecker Cellars.

- Thoughts about the rain
- Help needed this Friday at the Winery
- Micro work on the way for Dave

Thoughts about the rain
Well, I'm sitting here watching it rain, but breathing a quick sigh of relief that the weather forecast looks better moving forward....

So far, we've picked one block from Cherry Grove Vineyard in Gaston - That's a grand total of 3 tons (out of a planned 20 tons) in the winery so far. I've been filling my time with worrying about the rain, wondering when everything else is going to ripen, worrying about the rain, thinking about other things I can do while I wait for fruit to ripen, worrying about the rain, etc.

Honestly, I was out in the vineyards today, and other than the water that the grapes have taken up over the last few days, there isn't any significant damage at this point. It's going to be a great year!

Think happy thoughts of nice looking grapes

Help needed this Friday -- Fruit sorting!
It looks like we're going to have a big picking day on Friday - We'll pick another 3-5 tons from Cherry Grove, pick ~ 1.5 tons from our block at Shea, maaayyybe pick our block at Stoller (another 3 tons), and probably pick our Chardonnay from Anderson Family, too.

--> If anyone would like to come and help sort fruit (it's really fun, and we feed you...free beer), this Friday would be a wonderful time! Even if you can only make it for part of the day, we'll definitely be able to use the help.

For those of you who are interested, just send me an e-mail (stewart@boedeckercellars.com)

Latest micro work for Dave!
I've taken the first juice samples for Dave's mad lab! For those of you who don't know, Dave Shykind is our unofficial microbiologist and photo-microscope guru. I'll soon have some really cool pictures of yeast cells up on the web site from Dave! Right now though, Dave has graciously offered to help me culture some juice and wine samples to ensure that all of my ferments are clean and free of any nasty little organisms.

Until later!