Congrats to the areas newest AVA.

The long first journey from planting to harvest to wine making to bottling is finally complete. Our first vintage is officially bottled! At this point, I am quite certain nobody cares, but it was a milestone achievement for yours truly. While grape growing and wine making don’t appear to be in the cards of yours truly, I did enjoy the entire long process.

I’ve been harsh on others in the past, for putting out wine of dubious quality. But I guess I can’t blame them, decisions are made in the vineyard and once those decisions are made there is no going back that year.

I had a very experienced local wine maker make my wine, which is a field blend of cab. sauv., cab. franc, merlot and barbera. The grapes were of great quality and had some concentrated flavors due to the small berry size. They were a touch unripe, but we got them off at decent brix with healthy pH.

The wine turned out pretty spectacular. It’s a dark, inky wine with a robust nose and 13.1% alcohol. We left it unfiltered, and gave it a shot of sulfite just before bottling as the sulfite level was at 7ppm. We pushed it up into the low 30s and I bottled it, all 24 cases (with much help from another experienced winemaker I hired to help me). For a Yadkin Valley red wine, it’s a good wine, and once the sulfite dissipates in 20 or so days, it should be even better.

I used plastic corks to help guard against any oxygen getting in through a natural cork. I’ve already drank 3 bottles, Maybe it’s like all parents who think their babies are cute, when in reality some of them are not so cute. Maybe I am biased towards my wine, probably. My wife thinks it’s good…but she was a little put off at first because of the robustness of the sulfite, but after an hour of letting it settle she seemed to really enjoy it (also could be she’s just being nice?).

It’s hard to know what to do with your own wine. People clamor, “let us try your wine”, but you know they won’t be critical to your face. That part is hard. I’d rather serve them a nice 2000 Bordeaux than have them drink my wine out of politeness. So if you are ever drinking with me and ask to try my wine, of course I’ll give you some, but I won’t ask you if you’d like any more, that’s up to you to decide!

Here is a jpg of the final wine label. I found a printer in Holland, Michigan who was willing to print these up at a decent cost for such a low volume. We named it after our first born, Ella, and didn’t identify the vineyard, as I am giving the wine away to friends and family anyways.

I’ve started pruning. Honest to God, I am the slowest pruner on the face of the earth. It’s pretty fun though, I like it. Today it was 50 degrees, sunny, the dogs were playing outside with me, it was just a really nice time. I pruned up the muscadines pretty good. I think they’ll do really well this year…they started a little slow last year, but they really took off later in the year. I pruned them up nice, and expect to get some good fruit in 2008.

The Pinotage grew out nicely. I lost maybe 10 plants in the frost last year, but the remaining plants are doing well. I cane pruned all of them. Barring a hard spring frost, these plants should do well this year.

I started on the Cabernet Sauvignon near the house. I redid many of the cordons last year, so there is less work this spring. However, some of the plants lost a cordon during the Easter 2007 cold snap. Thus it takes a little more work to lop off the dead (or partially dead) cordon and train a new cane on the wire. I also had a few plants that were just trained poorly, so I am lopping off those cordons too and putting down new canes. I am pruning to one bud spurs this year. lst year I was hesitant and left two buds per spur, but it just resulted in too much growth and too much fruit.

I make pretty good attempts to keep the cordons of equal length and containing equal numbers of buds. I am much more comfortable pruning this year. However there are many more vines to prune this year…so it’ll be a lot of work.

It’s such a neat time of year. I am so geeked up for bud break, even though it’s still three months away. I think thi syear will be a fun year…I didn’t turn over the soil this year, so weed growth should be less. There are far fewer vines to train this year…90% of them are now up to the wire. This will be the first year where the vineyard should really fill out. It should look neat!

I am going to have Mt. Airy Tractor come and pick up my tractor and service it before the season begins. I still need to put down some more lime and some boron. Once the pruning is over, I hope to spray a lime sulfur spray to eradicate any disease remnants from last year. Once harvest was over, I stopped all sprays. To me, it makes sense that after harvest, the purpose of the vine has been fulfilled. Thus I am not going to worry about downey or whatever after harvest. You can dote these vines all you want, but I am not having any part of it.

I’ll whack them with a lime sulfur solution and focus on building up the soil and plant strength so that the plant fights off disease. I really dislike spraying, so hopefully it will be another somewhat dry year, that helps reduce sprays immensely.

I debated long and hard whether to post this on my blog or not. But in the end, this blog gets lots of exposure so I would be remiss if I didn’t. My wife and I are pregnant with our first child, due on Feb. 3rd! It’s going to be a little girl!! We are very very excited. After some long discussion we feel it would be best if we relocated closer to our parents in the Midwest. I love my vineyard and am saddened that I might sell it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Full details and pictures can be found here: Yadkin Valley Home and Vineyard For Sale

Preferably, I’d like to sell the home and the vineyard, but I might be open to someone just buying the house too. I’ve listed the home on the TriadMLS and am not in any hurry, so I figure I’ll try it on my own for the first six months.

This is truly one of the nicest places to live. (Note: I edited this post as I had previously had a rather off remark about my neighbor who moved away, it was unnecessary and a product of a recent discussion we had after he had sold his house. Overall he was a decent guy, nice family, etc.. and he let me keep my fence which I mistakenly erected a couple feet over his line. My apologies to him.) If we do sell, I’ll miss my neighbor across the street, he’s a great guy and friend. As is the neighbor next to me and behind me, super super nice people and families.

If God means for us to sell the house and vineyard it will happen. If not, we’ll stay put, which would be fine with me too…the painters are here today as a matter of fact, taking down the last remnants of wall paper and repainting the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms. I might have them do our master bath as well. I also need to replace a few of the older fixtures yet…otherwise, the house really looks great!

So, if you are an aspiring vineyard owner and want to get your feet wet at a very low entry cost, Villa Kleinheksel is the place for you. All equipment will be included with the sale. I’ve priced it well enough that if it turns out you don’t like running a vineyard, you could always clear the land and sell of the two lots. It’s a very desirable neighborhood to live, one of the nicest in the area.

612-501-2548 is my mobile, call me if you have any questions or want a tour! First $450,000 takes the house, vineyard, tractor, equipment and two prime one acre lots!

Additionally, I will be selling separately the domains: greatncwines.com and yadkin-valley.com. Both are for sale for $10,000 a piece. Both have been in Google a long time and offer value to someone looking to have own a premium piece of the Yadkin Valley domain market. Imagine if the Yadkin Valley ever does become the Napa Valley of the east, the domain yadkin-valley.com is a premium domain.

Actually it was complete on Friday August 24th, but it took me this long to write about it! My parents came down from Michigan on Thursday and my sister came up from Atlanta. My neighbor, Peter Ness, kindly donated his time and his John Deere Gator as well. The day dawned a bit overcast, which actually worked out well, as the heat would have been awful otherwise.

Around 8:30am, Sean McRitchie dropped off the trailer and the bins. He left me the keys with instructions to drive the grapes to the winery once harvest was complete. We all began picking at 8:30am and finished off the plot by our house at 10:30am. We then started on the plot that borders Lakeview road. We worked until noon and then Jen and I went to Subway and picked up some subs for all the workers. we started up again around 12:30 and finished around 3pm. Overall it took us about 6.5 hours to pick about 1500lbs of grapes.

The grapes looked great. The riper cabernet franc had some bees, and the barbera and carminere was pretty much completely destroyed by bees and birds. The Pinotage with it’s thicker skin held up well. Next year, I’ll have to blast some sevin in there to keep the bees out if I want to get the grapes a little riper. I’ll post my final numbers once I get them from Sean.

My dad drove the truck to Sean’s winery and the rest of us followed in separate cars. Once we arrived Sean and a couple of his helpers weighed the grapes, then ran them through the destemmer. The destemmer worked really well. The grapes were essentially transferred from 1/2 tons bins to a 1 ton fermenting bin. The grapes were then covered and allowed to begin fermenting.

Sean was very kind and gave us a bottle of cider to toast our first harvest.

I had previously mentioned that I had bought a French Oak Barrel from worldcooperage.com. They emailed me that it would take 8 weeks to produce and cost $200 to ship. I told them no thanks. Guess I am a little behind the 8 ball on that one. I spoke with Frank Hobson and a few others locally, they all buy used barrels from CA wineries. I am just not down with that. Seems like there is a lot of possibility of Brett and other bacteria in those barrels unless they are properly treated. Plus, I couldn’t find anybody willing to sell me just one 59 gall (225L) barrel. I even checked ebay, they had a few but they were 4-6 years old. Frank says they pay $50-$75 per barrel. Guess a bunch of wineries go in together.

I started calling and calling and calling, but nothing! Finally I called a home winemaking operation at beer-wine.com. They had a 60 gallon recooped barrel for $250 and $125 shipping. Ships from Massachusets. Recooped seems ok if you do your research. I was going to order from them, but then I got a call back from the east coast distributor of Kelvin Cooperage in Kentucky. They are in New Jesery. They sold me a brand new American Oak Barrel for $375.00 with a medium toast, and they have it in stock and will ship it for a 9/16 delivery. They also think they can ship it via UPS, but I am not sure how that would work.

Here is there contact info:

Gino Pinto, Inc.
373 S. White Horse Pike
Hammonton, NJ 08037
Tel: (609) 561-8199
Fax: (609) 561-3429

e-mail: makewine@comcast.net
www.ginopinto.com

One thing I learned from them is that they also ship clusters and fruit from Cali. They ship in 36lb refrigerated containers or 900lb bins. more importantly they said they can ship me Pinotage from Vino Con Brio. That’s pretty neat. I might buy 75lbs when I get back and try to make some Pinotage wine in my basement. My pinotage won’t be ready till next year.

I am going to grab some berries and do some testing now. I found this equation, qhich might help me with determining the ripeness of my grapes:

A historical index of ripeness suggests that optimal sugar / acidity balance is achieved if the product of the Brix value times the square of the pH is in the range of 220 to 260. For example, a 22† Brix juice at pH 3.2 would yield a value of 225.3. Late harvest fruit at a higher pH (24† Brix at pH 3.6, for example) would yield a value (311) outside of this range.

Well, my grapes made some decent progress, but they did they make enough progress to warrant picking on Friday? According to the scale above, the Cabernet Franc will be ripe. The Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon will be very close. I’ll have to consult with the winemaker, but I’d prefer to harvest I think…

Here are the numbers:

Cabernet Sauvignon - House, 3.33 pH, 19 brix = 210
Cabernet Franc - House, 3.48pH, 19.1 brix - 231
Merlot - Field, 3.19pH, 20 brix = 203
Cabernet Sauvignon - Field, 3.24pH, 19.8 brix = 207
Cabernet Franc - Field, 3.38pH, 20 brix = 228

Per my agreement with the winemaker, I have to provide one 59 gallon wine barrel to age my wine. I’m not sure where I have to store the barrel, but for now, I will worry about that later! Anyways, he advised me to purchase American Oak because it’s significantly cheaper. But as many of you are aware, I pretty much have a distaste for Americans, even though I am one.

I figure I spent gobs of money on this endeavor already, I might as well give my wine th ebest possible opportunity to actually be drinkable. Thus far, I think it’s turning out ok.

(1) I arguably have the most experienced, most authentic, most talented wine maker in the area making my wine.
(2) My grapes are young, they are stressed and berry sizes are smaller, the brix / acid profile is looking ok
(3) I have a brand new french oak, medium toasted barrel to age the wine in

Sure my grapes will be a field blend of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and a touch of Barbera and Carmenere thrown in for goofd measure. But it’s going to be fun to see how it plays out in the end!

Gosh I am so close! We are targeting picking on August 24th!

Here are the readings from today using 30 berry sample from each varietal.

Cabernet Sauvignon (by house): 3.29pH at 18 brix
Cabernet Franc (by house): 3.36pH at 17.9 brix
Cabernet Sauvignon (field) 3.15pH at 18.9 brix
Cabernet Franc (field) 3.28pH at 18.1 brix
Merlot (field): 3.27pH at 19.5 brix

Here are some suggestions on sampling from Sean:

“Random berry selection from both sides of the row zig and zag…we used to do this in large vineyards and they made us run 5 seconds and stop left right etc…for your own data keep varietals/block samples separate. There should be a different maturity rate for you cab sauv. and cab franc. Be cautious of the amount of fruit you take as it is a small vineyard. Maybe 30 berry samples/block…-pick the “shoulders”-center and bottom part of the cluster. ”

Wow. Last week I left for a week in Minnesota with my in-laws. Veraison was underway, and I was worried that the birds might get at my berries. I’ve heard many a horror story about birds picking entire vineyard clean. I’ve never made it past veraison without the deer or the birds eating all my grapes. I spoke with a couple of other vineyard owners who do NOT use netting, while I also spoke with others who would never risk their grapes and ALWAYS use netting. Regardless, I don’t have the time or the money to fool with netting right now. Mark Greene thought those fake owls might work for this year, so he let me borrow a few of his. I mounted one on my deck and another atop one of my 15 foot cedar poles. They look fairly menacing and have startled both my wife and I since I put them out.

Well they must work since I came home last night and had difficulty finding any berries that had been destroyed by the birds. No deer either. My grapes are looking great! I found a local wine maker who is willing to take the grapes, but I need to have at least 1 ton of harvestable grapes. Do I have that many? I don’t know. It will be close. I don’t really think I do. Maybe 3/4 ton. I bought a 1/2 ton bin, so I guess if I don’t have enough tonnage this year, I’ll either give it a whirl myself or perhaps I’ll approach another wine maker I know to see if he is interested.

Next year should really be a fun year, 95% of all my plants are on the wire now, which means that next year, will be the first year I take nearly a full crop. I have a little bit of additional trellis work and some earth anchor to put in, as well as some cover cropping to do, but next year should be far less work than this year and this year was far less work than last year! In theory I should harvest 2-3 tons next year, that would be great!!

Here are my first pics of MY grapes that actually made it past veraison and are now sitting at about 15-16 brix: