Growing great

Wow - ten days can really make a difference. Many grape vines are 3 or 4 feet over the top wire. The grape berries are filling out fast. Some are pea-sized already.

Vineyard Overview

Madeleine Angevine unthinned clusters

and a close-up

 

Madeleine Angevine Rows

Regent Rows

If we can get some more warm weather we will have our best crop ever!

Vineyard update

Finally, some warm weather. It sure seemed like this year was challengingly cool...
Here is what we face in the Puget Sound AVA (courtesy WSU viticulture website: http://winegrapes.wsu.edu/gdd.html )

Yeah - we're the pitiful blue line at the bottom. Roughly half the growing-degree-days (GDD) of our eastern WA growers.
So here is where we are at, with respect to Growing Degree Days, compared to a number of prior years. (All reference data is from the WSU Puyallup Experiment Station, which is only a mile or so from our vineyard.).

You can see that while we were off to a dismal start, we are actually not in bad shape now compared to many years (2009 was exceptional...).
On to the crop. Here is a recent shot of the overall vineyard.

and the fruit set on the Mad Ang and Regents is very good.

and the rows of grapes look great

The Pinot noir and Pinot blanc just don't do so well here, yet they are looking better this year. Here are 3-year plants.

I've started wondering what causes tendrils to curl around objects. I took some close-ups of some tendrils.

Wine Grapes - Spring Growth - 3rd year

Things are growing nicely in the vineyard despite our cold and wet weather. Here is the Madeleine Angevine plants this morning.

Madeleine Angevine

Fruit set on Madeleine Angevine

We used no sprays this year, and hope to continue avoiding this if possible.

Regent

Struggling Pinot noir, Pinot blanc, and newly planted Siegerrebe and Pinot gris in South vineyard.

We took a small road trip yesterday and visited the Hollywood Hill Vineyard (driveby) and the Hollywood Hill tasting room. You can visit their website here:

http://www.hollywoodhillvineyards.com/

Enjoyed meeting Becky and very much enjoyed their 2009 Roussanne sourced from a vineyard in the Horse Heaven Hills AVA.

Spring has sprung at Raven's Call Vineyard

How exciting to see the grapes all leafing out. The Madeline Angevines are leading the pack.

Madeleine Angevine 30-Apr-10

Seems that every new bud from the laterals has several bunches of grape berry flowers poised to open. If all those set berries I'll have to be thinning the clusters.

The small clusters nestled in the leaves are flower buds.

The "old" (3 years old!) vineyard on the north side of the driveway.

Madeleine Angevine and Regent

And the new vineyard (planted this last winter) on the south side.

Pinot noir, Pinot blanc, Siegerrebe, Pinot gris

Can't wait to see how they all do this year.

Oh yeah - so far, no detectable difference in leaf-out between grafted and self-rooted varieties.

2010 Update on the Vineyard

Oh my, how time flies. I have spent a lot of hours this winter clearing out more trees in order to plant more grapes. The 100 or so cuttings I rooted this last spring spent all summer in pots, rather than in the ground, as there was no room for them. Not a very good start for them.
I did manage to clear out a lot of space and planted the Siergerebbe and the Pinot Gris.

At that point, my vineyard consisted of the following varieties, all on their own roots:
40 Madeleine Angevine
42 Regent
16 Pinot noir
14 Pinot blanc
22 Pinot gris
26 Siegerebbe
and still in pots...
34 Muller-Thurgau
22 Dolcetto

After doing some reading and comparing notes with fellow vintners at work, I decided to make a comparison of my self-rooted grapes with the same varieties grafted onto rootstocks. I purchased, from Raintree Nursery (Morton, Washington http://www.raintreenursery.com/ ) one each of 6 grafted bare-root plants:

1. Cabernet franc on 101-14
2. Pinot noir precoce on 3309
3. Pinot noir 71 on 3309
4. Pinot noir 44 on 101-14
5. Madeleine Angevine on 3309
6. Siegerrebe on 3309

Then a few weeks later I had the chance to visit Cloud Mountain Farm (Eversen, Washington  http://www.cloudmountainfarm.com/ ). They have collaborated for years with WSU and the viticulture program, so had a fantastic selection of wine grape plants suited to the Puget Sound area, and most on any of 3 rootstocks or self-rooted. I purchased one each of the following 7 grafted varieties:

1. Ortega on 3309
2. Siegerrebe on 101-14
3. Madeleine Angevine on Riparia Gloire
4. Madeleine Angevine on 101-14
5. Pinot Gris 146 on 101-14
6. Zwiegelt-Rebe on 101-14
7. Regent on 3309

With this collection I hope to be able to compare, in at least a limited way, on my specific site and soils, Regent, Madeleine Angevine, Siegerrebe, and several Pinot Noir cultivars on several rootstocks, compared to self-rooted. It will take several years to be confident, but one must start somewhere!
 
More later...

Grapes all harvested, vineyard all pruned

It's been pretty frosty here overnight for the last couple days. I've been watching my pitiful Pinot blanc crop, and finally picked the surviving cluster.

Pinot blanc

This clump tested out at only 16 Brix - meaning there was very little sugar development in the last few weeks. I guess when the temperature is rarely above 50 degrees F there isn't much more development. Time to pick in mid-October - next year.

All of the vines have been now pruned. I forget the name of the method I'm using. It trains two lateral cordons off the upright stem at about 30 inches. A second high wire at about 5 feet will accept the upright growth next year from spurs on the cordons.

Overview of the Madeleine Angevine and Regents

Showing the training style.

About all that is left now for harvest are the kiwis. All in all a good year on the farm.

Fall harvest at Woodland Creek / Raven's Call

Time to recap some of our fall harvest and button things up for the winter.
The Regent grapes were harvested on 09-Oct-09. I had about 15 lbs from the 32 plants in the vineyard. Brix tested at 19 - not bad for Puget Sound AVA. I still chaptalized the must to 25 Brix - went a bit overboard.

Regent Grapes

Birds were starting to feast on them.

The 2009 Regent harvest

The same day the Syrah from the prior week was ready to press. Some additional modifications to the home-built press now have it working quite well. Time to rebuild it in oak.

Pressing the Yakima Valley Syrah

The 100 lbs of Syrah yielded about 7 gallons of wine into the secondary fermenters.


The Yakima Viognier has been racked to a secondary fermenter (6 gallons), and the Madeleine Angevine as well (3 gallons). I currently have 6 varieties under airlock right now.


As for other crops - our two chestnut trees both produced well this year. The trees are each about 12 years old now - having been planted before we built our house here. One is a seedling from nuts from the tree in the backyard of our prior residence, the other is a seedling from a heritage tree - the "Carson Chestnut" located in the interchange at Highway 167 and Meridian just north of the Puyallup River bridge north of Puyallup. Quite a magnificent tree.


At any rate, this year I detected clear difference in the bur sizes, nut sizes, and ripening time between the two trees. I did some on-line research and decided that the earlier one, with larger nuts, from the Carson Chestnut, must be a Spanish chestnut, Castanea sativa. (I just did a google search and this site http://www.halcyon.com/tmend/heritageplants.htm asserts that the Carson Chestnut, planted before 1861, is C. sativa). The other tree has to be Chinese Chestnut, C. mollisima. I also have a couple American chestnuts C. dentata, one of which finally produced nuts inside the usually empty burs. Boy, are those nuts tiny. Here is the entire crop.






The darker ones (darker only because they ripened sooner) in the back on on the left are Spanish chestnuts. The lighter tray in the front right are the Chinese. And the few tiny ones on the bowl are the American. Despite their tiny size, the American chestnuts are by far the tastiest. We probably had 35 to 40 pounds of chestnuts - time to find some recipes.