What's Happening Now?

Late November, 2011: 2011 Crush is Done!
The 2011s are miraculous. That they even exist is amazing, but that they taste so good, are so richly colored, so balanced, it's too much. We are so relieved that the grapes ripened that we cannot yet be certain we are being objective.

The 2011 vintage was the latest in Oregon's history. Our first fruit was harvested on October 24. That's 8 days later than the very, very late 2010 vintage. All fruit was harvested in a 7 day window, the last fruit coming in on Halloween. Yikes!

There was much more vineyard variation than usual this year. The lower elevation sites were clean, fully ripe, with normal sugar levels, while the higher elevation sites just made it to ripeness. There was greater than a 25% difference between the highest and lowest brix levels from the various vineyards. That's huge.

The wines have only just been put into barrels. They are similar to the excellent 2010s in color, balance, acid, and complexity. The 2011s are also reminiscent of the 1999s, a vintage I thought was truly excellent. But most people are more familiar with recent vintages, and since our 2010s are not yet released, I would compare the 2011s to the 2008s much more so than either the 2006s or 2009s on the one hand, or the 2007s on the other. All that said, I am looking forward to leisurely tasting through the barrels rather than the daily, frantic tasting while fermenting, pressing and barrelling. My notes for the various wines as they came out of the press say "cherry, pomegranate; great aroma, flavors of boysenberries and loganberries, big tannins; cherry; black cherry, stonefruit, black raspberries; bright red cherry and raspberry, cherry vanilla."

Now however, the wines are freshly in barrels. Wine barrels are like ovens. Both are time machines. You work really hard preparing a bread or wine, then you put them in their respective time machines. Forget about them until they are done (poetic license). Then out they come, transformed into nutrition of simple elegance. Magic? Transmutation? Wait and see!

Sept. 2, 2011: Yikes, I haven't written here in so long! Here's the news. We finished bottling most of our 2010 Pinot Noir last week, as well as the 2010 Viognier and 2009 Deux Vert Pinot Noir. They are delightful, and we look forward to sharing them with you once they have sufficient bottle age.

The 2011 vintage is in a word, late. It was one of the coldest and wettest springs and early summers on record here in the Willamette Valley. Pretty much all crops are pushed back in time from their normal ripening windows. That includes grapes. The local buzz is about how to best prepare for a late harvest, probably later than last year's late harvest, but possibly at about the same time. Either way, we need sunny, warm, dry weather, and a lot of it. In the meantime, at our vineyards we are pulling more than the normal amount of leaves to allow the clusters to have sun and air as a hedge against rot when the inevitable rains come. And we are dropping crop (reducing the amount of fruit the vines are carrying in an effort to get the remaining clusters to ripen a little sooner), big time. We are also dropping crop sooner than we would normally. It varies by vineyard, but especially at Palmer Creek and Holmes Gap, the vineyards are carrying huge loads. To give you an idea of how radically fruit is being dropped, here are some photos from Palmer Creek taken about a week ago. The first one is the crop load as nature provided:

And here is the same plant after the crop has been dropped to hasten ripening:

And here is the fruit that was thrown on the ground:

Believe it or not, we will probably drop more fruit once color change is in full swing. Then we'll drop fruit that is still green. That's a lot of potential wine being tossed on the ground.

We'll keep our fingers crossed for warm, dry weather from now through the end of October.

October 18, 2010: You know those scenes from movies where a giant wave is about to hit someone? You cannot outrun it, you cannot hide, you cannot outsmart it. All you can do is take a deep breath.
Two days ago we brought in our first fruit, part of the crop from Palmer Creek Vineyard. Over the course of the next 4 days we expect to bring in the rest of it. That will be about 90% of our fruit this year. Four days. Deep breath. Most everyone else in the Willamette Valley will be doing almost the same thing. Deep breath.
The good news is that the weather has been wonderful. Cold nights, warm, sunny days and blessedly dry with the exception of a couple of days. Flavors have developed nicely in the past week, sugar levels are acceptable and will not be too high, color is excellent, acids appear to be balanced and seeds and tannins have matured nicely. We have been very fortunate.
Since this is today and not tomorrow, I have enough breaths left to explain how we know the condition of the grapes. At this time of year we travel to each vineyard frequently. Towards the final stages as in the past week or so, we cut a small number of clusters off the vines. We try to do this randomly, from each side of the vine, from basal and distil clusters (if there are two on a shoot), in rows from various part of the block we will have harvested. We take note of the integrity of the clusters and the conditions of the skins. We put them in a gallon bag, then "press" them with the heel of our hand to extract the juice. We measure the juice for sugar content and for acidity. We estimate the amount of brown vs. green seeds. We see how crunchy the seeds are and what they taste like. We make note of the color of the juice. And then we taste the juice.
Over the course of the past couple of weeks, the descriptors of the flavors have moved from "green apple" or "guava" or "banana" earlier to "cherry" or "strawberry" or "boysenberry" recently.
They are ready.
Deep breath.

Early October 2010, The Quiet Before the Frenzy: We finished bottling most of our 2009s a couple of weeks ago, and are now getting ready for the 2010 harvest. Hope and fear alternate at the pace of a tennis match: will there be sufficient sun and warmth for the grapes to fully ripen in this late, cooler year? Or will we have to build an ark? We can have a beautiful 2010 vintage, or not. We hang on every change in the weather forecast.
In the past month, all our vineyards have dropped crop (see photos below), eliminating any green fruit. This also increases the likelihood of full maturity in a late year like this.
Seriously, it looks like things can work out quite nicely if Mother Nature bestows upon us continued mild, relatively dry weather a little longer. Flavor development is encouraging. Brix at several vineyards are 19 and 20, so we are getting close. By way of comparison, in the excellent 2005 vintage, none of our vineyards made it to 23 Brix.
Two to three weeks from now the crush will be upon us.

May 2010: We are done racking our 2009 pinots and have started blending trials. Racking is siphoning the wine from one barrel to a clean barrel, leaving behind the solid matter (like dead yeast cells) behind. Then we clean the emptied barrel and continue with the other barrels. We do the racking to ameliorate the need for filtering or fining later on in the process. It's a long, dirty process that nonetheless has to be done carefully and with attention to sanitation. Kudos to David H, aka The Ozonator, aka Cocktail Boy, for a lot of hard work.
Blending as we do it has two stages: first we taste through all the barrels, carefully evaluating various parameters. Next we postulate possible blends of barrels and evaluate these for the single vineyards and for our blended wines. The reason we need to do this for the single vineyards is that we use the subset of barrels from a given vineyard that most characterizes that vineyard.
We are nearly done with the first stage. We make notes on those barrels where there was a different evaluation from each of us so that we can come back and try it again later. Since pigheadedness is a family trait, one of us mercilessly beats the other one into submission. But fear not, we take turns.

January 2010: It's relatively quiet in the cellar now. The major activity is monitoring the progress of malolactic fermentation (ML). ML is a "secondary" fermentation. Instead of sugars being acted upon by yeast to create alcohol as in primary fermentation, malic acid is converted to lactic acid by a particular bacteria in secondary fermentation. The "so what" of this is that ML reduces the acidity a tad, but more importantly it changes the mouthfeel of the wine. This is because malic acid (like the acid in apples) is sharper than the creamier lactic acid (the acid in milk). So much of the angular harshness that was present a month ago is rapidly disappearing.

Once ML is done, we replace the bubblers on the barrels with solid bungs for a more secure seal. The bubblers were allowing the CO2 that is a byproduct of ML to escape. We monitor the rate of conversion of the malic acid using paper chromatography, an example pair of sheets is above. Small samples of wine are placed at a uniform distance from the bottom edge of filter paper. After the samples dry, the paper is rolled into a cylinder and placed into a jar containing solvent. The solvent travels up the paper by capillary action over the course of a few hours. As it travels up, it carries the components of the wine sample. These components are carried different distances up depending upon their solubility in the solvent. Using these distances, we can see which components are present once the sheet of paper has been removed from the jar and dried. If you look at the two dots on the left end you will see not wine samples but samples of pure malic and pure lactic acids which serve as a reference. Using these references, you can then see how close (or not) to completion each wine sample is. For example, on the right hand sheet you can see three samples that are clearly only partially through ML since there is still quite a bit of malic acid appearing in them. The other samples are either done with ML or are mostly done.
LIke I said, there isn't a lot going on in the cellar right now, and this is about as exciting as it gets now!

Crush 2009

Beginning of September 2009: Bottling is done, and now we are prepping for the harvest. It's looking like the first fruit will arrive late this month, the rest in early October. The grapes are looking good. They are fully colored now (except for our tiny vineyard at 1000', but that's normal). There was a bit of sunburn earlier in the summer, but with all the dropping of fruit (see below), that should be a neglible problem come harvest.

Interested in helping Et Fille during Crush?
Give us a call at 503.449.5030 to learn about it, or email howardm atsign etfillewines.com

Early August 2009: We are now visiting all of the vineyards that will produce the grapes for our 2009 wines. Besides observing general conditions and deciding upon any adjustments that may need to be made, we also plan the crop load and thinning instructions. The vines have produced a very large amount of grapes this year. So much that if we were to leave it all on the vine, the wine produced would be inferior, lacking body, flavor and aroma.

We do this most years, but this year the crop load is unusually high. Deciding upon crop load is one of the most important decisions made during a vintage. Too much left on the vine and the wine will be insipid, too little and you are throwing good grapes away needlessly. So we are trying to decide upon the "sweet spot" and anticipate what quantity/quality we will have on the vines at harvest.

Below are three photos showing the crop load at Palmer Creek Vineyards from one vine if we were not to drop crop, the crop load after the thinning instructions have been followed, and the clusters we threw away from this one plant. In fact, we are throwing away more than half of the fruit so that the remaining fruit will meet our standards. It's actually more than that, because we will again discard some fruit when the color changes in a couple of weeks and we will be tossing the green laggards away.

This is the full crop load

This is the crop load once we have dropped crop

This is the fruit from one plant that was discarded

 

Summer Solistice 2009: Bloom! The aroma in the vineyard is intoxicating. It reminds me of visiting a local hop kiln with thousands of pounds of dried hops neatly piled into a mound. Confronted by this mound, the aroma fills your entire head. Although hops smells nothing at all like the grape bloom, it does the same kind of thing to your head. It fills it, makes it lighter, and the world seems like a wonderful place indeed.

Bloom at this time implies that the grape harvest, given normal summer weather, will be right about at the beginning of October. We couldn't ask for better than that.

This week Jessica and I are tasting through all the pinot noir barrels in order to decide which goes into our single vineyard wines, and which goes into a blend. It's a fun part of the process, but it does require a lot of concentration.

As we said in December, the 2008s are very deeply colored wines with intense flavors, excellent acidity, and big tannins. Now that malolactic fermentation is done, the wines have softened.

 

 

 

2008 Crush Photos