At last... we've finished harvest!

We finished harvest on the vineyard I manage at 5:00 this afternoon, November 5. I'm happy and tired and relieved and I think my crew feels the same. My crew did an amazing job picking 148 tons of grapes. Some of those tons in very hot weather, some in rain. At one point the tractor slid sideways down the hill in the mud - not a good thing. We had three days this week of 75-78 degree weather and it was beautiful. Just what the vines needed. The skins softened and the red color bled from the grapes as you squeezed them. A little bit of mold - hopefully that mildewy smell in the last couple lots of grapes will dissipate. I just talked to my neighbor who manages the ranch down the road and he says this was the most unpredictable and difficult year he has seen in his many, many years (well over 20 just on this mountain) of farming.

The winery will still be busy processing the grapes and helping them to become wine over the next couple weeks. In the vineyard, we can relax a little and mostly just worry about erosion control and the upcoming rains. Now we can put our trailers to rest and our picking pans in the barn for storage. Put away the picking shears and get out the rain boots and shovels!

Food and Wine Pairings on intowine.com

I've been asked to come up with a few food and wine pairings for intowine.com, and the first one has been published! Check out my suggestion for lamb shanks.  http://www.intowine.com/best-wine-pair-lamb-shanks

Harvest Report

Ashley with a bin of zin

As much as I love Fall I sometimes forget how busy we get. From our lack of blog posts you might think we've been sitting on our butts watching baseball for the last month (well now we have been doing that for the last week and a half - Yay Giants!). We have been very busy picking grapes, cooking many delicious meals, harvesting my dad's grapes, picking figs and apples, gathering walnuts, attending music festivals and concerts, and generally being really tired from working so many long hours. Harvest in the vineyard has been going strong. We started on September 30 and picked pretty consistently for the next three weeks. The weekend before last we got over 8 inches of rain here - and at least five fell all on Sunday. Last week it was cold and it rained a little more. So it has been a very difficult harvest, which seems only appropriate after such a tough growing season. It is November 2 and we still have about 30 tons hanging out on the vine - this is very late - we rarely ever pick in November. Hopefully we will finish harvest this week, but there are a couple blocks of Cabernet that just aren't quite ready yet. Will they get any better if we let them hang out for another week in November? That's the big question. The days are getting short, the weather is risky, and there is a lot of water in the ground from the last rains (more than what I would irrigate in an entire season). However, it could be 80 degrees on Wednesday, maybe it will be enough sun and ripening weather to just bump up the sugar, lower the acid a touch and soften those tannins. So far, most of the grapes we have harvested this year have had ripe flavors at lower sugar levels, which we love. In general, the 2010 harvest is following that of a typical cool climate growing area - sugar on the low side, acid on the high side, and nice flavors from a long easy, cool ripening period. I am definitely looking forward to this harvest and this growing season ending - its been pretty rough. Then it's mud, rain, scotch and cozy fires in the wood stove.

Matt picks grapes at the Anderson vineyard

Ashley in the Napa Paper

Ashley's friend Catherine writes a wine column in the Napa Valley Register. Ashley was featured last week. Check it out! http://napavalleyregister.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/wine/columnists/wine-tales/article_2fdf5fd8-e303-11df-bfaa-001cc4c03286.html

Meet Pearl

Pearl

Pearl is another Light Brahma - one of the large, fluffy white ones with feathers on her feet. She is the middle Brahma - Thelma being the largest and Bernie the smallest. But Pearl is special - Pearl was, unfortunately, a favorite of the roosters. I try not to anthropomorphize the chickens, but sometimes its hard not to. We used to have two roosters (Cornelius the red rooster (the more docile) and his brother the white rooster(the aggressor)). The roosters would tag team the hens and sort of gang up on them. Initially it was very disturbing, but then I thought - now Ashley - they're chickens - don't go putting your human emotions on them. They're animals, its just what they do. Sex among animals is different than among humans, so don't go feeling bad for the hens with the two roosters all over them. But then we noticed that two of the hens, Pearl and Rhonda, had wounds on their necks. The rooster usually grabs on to the hen's neck when it mounts. Rhonda's neck wasn't too horrible, but Pearl's was awful. That's the day we decided that the white rooster would be dinner - our first attempt at harvesting a chicken - and that the red rooster would remain as the sole rooster and be named. I got home from work the day that we discovered just how severely wounded Pearl was and Matt had turned our kitchen into an operating room. The lamp, sutures, bentadine, scissors, were all ready for me. Matt held Pearl and cleaned up her wound and I sutured it as best I could. It had been many years since my short-lived wild bird rehab career, but I managed. It took her a little while to completely heal and for her neck feathers to grow back, but she is doing just fine now. I think all the hens are happy to just have one rooster 'taking care of them'.

Harvest!!!!

Finally! The first day of harvest - September 30 (oh, and my birthday too). Yesterday we picked two and a half tons of Merlot from our mountain vineyard. We picked a ton at the top of one block, a ton at the top of another block and half a ton at the bottom of a block. We still haven't picked an entire block yet. The corner of this block is ripe, the bottom of that block - this is how it usually goes at the beginning of harvest. The soil and sun exposure is so variable that it makes for uneven ripening. After we finished picking the grapes at 10:30 in the morning, the vineyard crew went up to the winery and we toasted to the 2010 harvest. We collected a little juice from the first bin of grapes as the winery interns were crushing it and added it to some sparkling wine. Our own kind of harvest mimosa. We will continue picking Merlot, a little Malbec and maybe a little Syrah next week. The weather has been HOT this week which has certainly helped the ripening process along. It started late but those grapes are tasting great. It finally started to feel like harvest in the valley this week. The energy changes at harvest time. At the beginning the air is full of excitement and anticipation. After another couple weeks the mood is nervous, tired and crabby. Its no fun going to the grocery store - everyone is on edge. Right now I am very excited to starting harvesting the grapes we've been farming all year.

Here's to a safe and happy harvest!

Meet Marla

Marla

        Marla, oh Marla the mysterious chick! February 11, 2009 a box of day old chicks arrived for us from Murray McMurray Hatchery. Matt and I drove down the hill to the post office so excited about the arrival of our new babies. With an order of 25 you got one extra mystery chick. We had ordered Black Stars, Araucanas, Light Brahmas, and Mottled Houdans. We brought the day old chicks home and put them in the half-ton grape picking bin-turned chick brooder that we made in our shed. We kept them warm under a heat lamp and made sure they had food, water and nutrients. We picked the poo off their butts when they needed it and generally spent a lot of time the next few weeks in the shed cooing over the little chicks. We figured out which chicks were which varieties but then there was one chick that was different from the rest. She was much bigger, fluffy and bright yellow. She must be the mystery chick! We looked in our chicken books and on-line trying to guess what breed she was - buff orpington, maybe? We just called her mystery chick for the first few months of her life. No one got names until we were pretty sure they'd stick around for awhile. We gave eight away to a friend; twenty five was too much for us. We didn't know what breed Marla was until she laid her first egg. It was green! Marla was an Araucana. We had three other Araucanas, Hazel, Mabel, and Fern and they were not fluffy and yellow, but more mottled tan, brown, gold - beautiful. After reading more about Araucanas we realized how varied they are; some are even white. They are one of the few breeds that lays green eggs. So we were happy to have another Araucana. It's fun giving away green eggs, sometimes they are more blue in hue - it's like Easter all the time.