We finally managed to get a little rainfall accumulation last week, nearly an inch last Thursday. You can also see in the image above that this has really helped push the cover crop, which is topping 2 ft. in some areas and is no less than 6″ anywhere. The bromes are setting good seed, and I’m seeing more rye and clover than I did last year. And the mix with turnip, marigold, and the many other annuals and perennials in our mix, is gorgeous.

I just like this picture. What you can’t see from this particular angle is that a very large fraction of the buds in the Pinot are pushing two shoots, and most of them are sporting two clusters. This means we are in for a lot of work to manage canopy density and crop load this vintage. Traditionally we call and end to frost season in the middle of April, but the weather pattern has changed enough that I won’t stop worrying about frost until at least the start of May and more likely the middle of May. I snapped the pic above just before leaving the vineyard this morning: a small flock of geese with a low-altitude jet still throwing a contrail.

It’s been nearly six weeks since my last post, but then there has been a lot going on. First, my assistant (and friend) Justin Moulton moved on to a new job early in the year (he’s now managing the spirits program for Bounty Hunter in Napa). It took me a while but I eventually succeeded in bringing Kyle Altomare on board. Here’s a pic of the new guy: Kyle came to Westwood from Gary Farrell Vineyards & Winery, where he managed their wine club (which is substantially larger than ours). Kyle hopes to rapidly expand his knowledge of the industry through participating in all aspects of production, sales and marketing with me.

The other thing that has been occupying my attention is preparation for bottling. We did a pretty big day on Friday, April 5^th: We had originally scheduled the bottling for Thursday, but could not guarantee we would have all our labels in time. That turned out to be a blessing, as nearly an inch of rain fell (as I mentioned at the start of the post). Friday was supposed to be clear, but we ended up with an hour rain delay after we started on the day. Wasn’t too much of an issue, but I was very glad when it stopped.

I’m really happy to have got one of the best rosés I have ever made in the bottle. We also did a bottling for custom crush client, Marcel Petard—a white blend of 80% Roussanne and 20% Viognier. Marcel bought the juice from the grapes we pressed off for us to use the skins and seeds in our Syrah ferments. I thought Enkidu, Bedrock, or Tricycle would buy the juice, but this guy showed up at the right place at the right time with cash in hand. Don’t know a lot more about him or his brand, but we will be selling the wine for him out of our Tasting Salon.

The shot of the Grenache above shows that the crew has completed pruning the vineyard. That’s about it, so far as real work goes. Wines are still asleep. My healthy hours have been spent catching up on business financials, interviewing potential new hires, and selling wine at the shop when people are around. January and February have been pretty quiet, sales wise.

The weather has been very mild. Recently, daytime temperatures have warmed up out of the high-30s-low-60s range into the mid-70s but it has not been enough to push budbreak yet. It has also been extraordinarily dry. I recorded less rainfall in January and February 2013 than I have since we started keeping records at the vineyard in 1998. People paying attention are starting to talk about drought, but I think (hope) that worry is premature. Our November and December were relatively wet, so our season-to-date accumulation for the 2013 vintage is still ahead of 2001, 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012. Even with the warmer temperatures recently, there is very little bud push visible in the vineyard. In fact there is very little sap bleeding from pruning cuts yet—perhaps a function of the dry soil. I did find a little bit of sap in the cane-pruned Pinot, and the bare beginnings of bud swell: There are a lot of trivial things going on in the industry that I will not be writing about, among them: the implosion of the Wine Advocate, balance in Pinot Noir, hipster wines (high acid, obscure varieties, orange, etc.) and the continued delusion in some circles that social media have changed everything and that Millennial wine drinkers are fundamentally different from older generations. *yawn*

As in 2007, we also have had an extended period of dry, cold weather. In 2007 the stretch was about a week long. This year we had almost 20 days of freezing nighttime temperatures—in the high 20s to the low 30s. I can’t recall such a long period of cold weather in 27 years spent here (which is one of the reasons I started keeping this blog—to help my recall). So this is probably the coldest January yet at our vineyard as well.

The cold temperatures mean nothing is happening with the vines. It will be at least a month before the sap rises. The crew pruned two rows of Syrah on Tuesday before the rain started. Unless we get an extended heat spell—and there is nothing in the long term pattern to suggest we will—we’ll have plenty of time to finish pruning before the vines wake up.

The cold and lack of rain have stunted the growth of the cover crop we drilled into the soil of the young blocks after harvest. It remains to be seen if the cover will grow enough to set seed before we have to mow to get into the rows to work this year. Ah, farming.

The cold also means the malolactic ferments that weren’t complete have stalled. We have a few stalled lots with relatively high pH that keep me up at night. I’m struggling with the decision to add a little SO₂ to some of them to try to avoid spoilage, but always worry that the ML could be inhibited further as well. Ah, winemaking.

Chez Kelly have been dealing with a persistent respiratory bug since before Christmas. It’s sounded like a tuberculosis ward around here, and since everyone was sick we did very little for the holidays: it was restful, but not much of a vacation.

Prostrated exhaustion from illness is only part of the reason I have not posted here since mid-November. I’ve been experiencing social media fatigue (Facebook! Twitter! Tumblr! Instagram! Interest forums! Yelp! Trip Advisor! even SMS – all demanding immediate and constant attention) so I took a break.

Plus I just haven’t felt much like writing. I had nearly finished a snappy little rebuttal to Mark Bittman’s latest misleading screed on pesticides in agriculture when the tragedy in Newtown, CT kicked me in the gut (we have two elementary-school aged children—I suppose that’s why my reaction to the slaughter of those little kids is wrenchingly visceral to this day). So Mark got a pass. Besides, I already posted a similar rebuttal to the notion that “pesticide” use is increasing back in 2011.

I never got to my customary post-harvest review, as harvest ended so late in 2012. I’ve got a post nearly done on the tension created when wines are ideologically labeled that I may complete. And I just checked my editor to find that I have a dozen other posts in draft (schnikes!) that I need to finish or round-file.

Anyway, I’m starting to feel that the fires have been banked long enough. My urge to write is tied to my overall productivity, and it is about time for me to get my act together and rise from the dead of winter.

Simply put, in my experience, clone often trumps site—especially when it comes to Pinot Noir. For example we recently had the experience of moving cuttings from a vineyard in Napa Valley (near Coombsville) to our vineyard in Sonoma Valley (near Santa Rosa). Different soil, different climate, different rootstock, different vine spacing, different trellising, different farming—and yet the wine we have made from this block is recognizably more similar to the wine we made from the older Coombsville site than it is to the wine we make from the Dijon clones of Pinot grown at our site. For that matter, there are reproducible differences between the wines we make from the Dijon clones we grow at our site, differences that I recognize in wines made from the same clones grown at other sites.

That Daniel’s somm friend gets it so wrong is emblematic of a larger issue: a total misconstruction by the supposed cognoscenti of what is meant by terroir. This somm along with scads and scads of other “experts” has been taught that terroir is all about location, location, location. It’s not, and never has been, even in Burgundy.

We have been bringing in fruit for six weeks, just a few days longer than average but twice as long as last year and nearly 2 weeks less than our record 8-week long 2007 harvest. At this point Justin and I are working at half speed for safety, but still making a few physically painful mistakes. Winemaking is hard work—as I posted on Facebook the other day I feel like I lost a fight with a bunch of bikers.

The quantities of fruit we have brought in have been huge—and it’s not been just us. Pretty much every winery I have been in contact with has been full to capacity since the second week of harvest. The heavy yields drove spot prices for every variety down to a third of pre-harvest contract prices. This abundance may lead to some temporary softness in the local bulk market, but consumers should not expect to see lower wine prices in a year or two. The dismally tiny 2012 harvest in Europe will even out the global wine supply.

I am so thankful that the quality of the wines we are producing this year is just amazing! This is not 2007—the acid levels in the fruit were nowhere near as high—but the concentration is there, as is the tannic structure. The 2012 wines are going to be more elegant than the 2007s but no less powerful and long-lived. And there are going to be very few low-alcohol grands vins from our area this year—in general, ripeness happened at relatively high sugar levels across the board.

Harvest may be over today, but vintage is not done yet, for me or for anyone else. We have a shortage of barrels here in the North Coast. I’m getting a couple of calls and emails a day from people looking for anything to store in. We are even seeing random strangers walking into the winery asking if we have any barrels for sale. I’m going to be OK if I can find tank space to put wine that is currently in barrel but it is going to be tight.

We have another month of work before we can put the wines to bed. I have a bottling to do as well. I may be able to poke my head up by Christmas. But I’m relieved that our fruit is safely in the barn. Today is a good day.

A week of rain is not a good thing for grapes hanging on the vine, as we demonstrated in 2009, 2010 and 2011. After the last three difficult vintages we were all excited about the potential for 2012 to be the “perfect” growing season, but it is shaping up to be just another year where we have wines made “before the rain” and stuff we made “after the rain.”

Still I’m jazzed at what we have accomplished so far. We started this harvest a month ago and the fruit we have brought in has been outstanding. By comparison, in 2011 we didn’t pick our first fruit until October 19^th—ten days after a huge storm that dropped 5″ of rain across the region.

This weather has the potential to hurt us, but probably won’t do much more than knock down the dust. The upside is that the break will give us a chance to catch our breath in the winery—we still have a lot of stuff we need to press and get put down to barrels.

Yes, that’s right—it’s the second week of October and I think we are about halfway through the harvest. So far I have brought in 32 tons of Pinot Noir from our Estate vineyard, and drips and dabs of a few other varieties, mostly for customers. By comparison, this is at the tonnage (or more) than I brought in for all varieties in every vintage since 2007. Partly this is due to seven acres of young vines that we cropped for the first time this year, but the big news of the 2012 vintage is that, across the North Coast, for all varieties brought in so far, nearly without exception, the crop load is unexpectedly heavy.

Forthwith, here’s some bullet points on what I believe will define 2012:

• Grapes are coming in at 50% over estimates. Anybody who tells you different is lying. The culprit here is mother nature, not “greedy growers.” Nobody planned to hang this kind of tonnage. We thinned to set cluster counts per vine as we always do, and for whatever reason the cluster weights just blew up.
• Despite the heavier-than-expected crop loads, quality is outstanding—the best I’ve seen since 2007: excellent physiological ripeness, thick deeply-colored skins, high seed content, and intense flavors.
• The weather has been as perfect as the weather can be. It has been dry, cool, warm when we needed it, and dry. Did I mention that it’s been dry? Dry is good. Unlike 2009, 2010 and 2011 we have absolutely zero rot. So far. (But it’s only halftime, so “shhhhhhh.”)
• The cool, dry weather has meant long hang time. This has led to moderately low acids (unlike the high acids in 2003 and 2007) but with better tartaric/malic balance than in recent years, relatively low potassium levels and decent pH levels—all amenable to judicious adjustment.
• The heavy crop correlates with lower than average juice nutrient levels: there’s only so much nitrogen to go around, and when the crop comes in heavy the levels of ammonia and assimilable nitrogen are lower. Winemakers that are not feeding their ferments are going to run into trouble, especially if they are relying on feral yeasts to do the job.
• The heavy crop correlates with other things—logistical things. First we ran into labor shortages. The industry relies on migrant labor. The poor economy has meant fewer migrants, which means we have to rely on the smaller pool of skilled permanent residents to manage a larger harvest. Add to this gas prices north of $4.50/gallon and it’s no surprise that the crews are going for the picks where the biggest money is. Several times so far this harvest I have had to delay bringing in fruit because my crew decided they would rather jump on a 20-ton pick before my 8-ton pick. The driver for the decision on when to pick went from “are the grapes ready?” to “is there a crew and equipment available?”
• The labor situation has turned around a little since the start of harvest. The heavy crop has meant that growers have been delivering well over contracted tonnages, unless the wineries have been adamant about only taking the contracted amounts. And ripening has been bunched up: for example, Chardonnay and Cabernet are both coming in right now, which is unusual. What this has led to is no empty fermenters in either valley for the time being. Many of us, myself included, have grapes ready to pick but no place to put them.
• And these delays in picking mean that the fruit that is going to be coming in over the next couple weeks, as we free up fermenter space, is going to have higher sugars than we might prefer. Remember how all the cool kids were blathering on for the last couple of years about how “alcohol levels are coming down”? Well, they are going back up.

And that’s about it from the trenches.

We are starting to press and barrel down some of the best Pinot we have ever made over the next couple days. The band and cheerleaders are coming off the field, and by next week we will have the team back out there, bringing in grapes as fast as we can manage: Tannat, then Syrah, then Mourvedre, then Grenache, and finishing with Counoise. Wish us luck, and pray for more dry weather.

Dear “Industry”:

Please don’t come into my tasting room, flash some sort of business card, announce that you are “in the industry” and demand a free tasting for you and your friends.

Not gonna happen.

We don’t give free tastings to anyone anymore, except to our Wine Club members. Our production is tiny. We pour over 25% of our inventory in the tasting room – think about that.

I appreciate that the winery where you have worked for all of two weeks gives free tastings to “industry.” I imagine that the fraction of that winery’s hundred-thousand-case-plus annual production that gets poured off in the tasting room is on the order of a rounding error. Just because some wineries do pour free to “industry” does not mean that you should expect that every one will.

And hey, take your shitty attitude with you when you leave. I will have forgotten about you in a few days, and don’t expect we will cross paths again.

We won’t hesitate to keep referring our guests to the tasting room at the winery where you currently work, because I have known the owner there for decades and he’s a great guy making great wines, and lord knows I have also made hiring mistakes in the past.

Sincerely, and with all due respect,
The owner, winemaker, and dictator of free tasting policy.

These “distractions” (HA!) have been keeping me away from posting here. There are only so many hours in the day available for writing. And there’s the rub; it’s not just a heavy workload keeping me busy. I’ve been actively engaging in a little benign neglect with respect to regular posting here. Yes, I’m trying my hand at something… longer. I’m giving myself a year, devoting most of my prime 9:30pm-1:00am writing slot with a goal of 500 words a day. Posts here will be shorter and come out at more random times (granted it’s pretty random already, but you get my drift).

Out every other morning, wandering the vineyard counting clusters and guessing at what the weights are going to be—I have no doubt in my mind that I am looking at my largest harvest yet off the Estate vineyard. Partly it is that I have 7 acres of young vines coming into production. But mostly it is that I’m seeing the best set of fruit I have ever seen at this property. I need more picking and fermenting capacity.

I’m also in the middle of managing construction in our production space: new water, power, and drains. Need to get this work done before the bottling truck gets here, and bottling needs to get done before I start picking any grapes. Since my last post was about the start of veraison, I’ve got about two months to get ready.

And this year I will be ready.

All of my own efforts to manage alcohol levels in our wines are mentioned here. In the vineyard every year we reduce canopy leaf area to balance crop load, and I have found that irrigating to 85% of evapotranspiration demand right up to harvest prevents runaway sugar accumulation. I have always disdained wines with over-ripe flavors, and so have always picked at the earliest date that I find the various components of the grape to be quote-unquote “ripe” – a personal definition, but one that I am happy with.

I found it amusing that the AWRI paper discusses water adds under the heading of “blending.” Adding a “reasonable” amount of water, for one reason or another, is a common practice in winemaking. We just don’t talk much about it.

I was left scratching my head over the mention of glucose oxidase to decrease the level of fermentable sugar in juice or must. I recall reading a few research papers in the 1990s about this, but didn’t think the technology ever made it out of the lab. I honestly don’t know of any winery that uses this enzyme. Nor have I ever come across a commercial preparation for use in wine. So, pace, “natural” wine aficionados.

Fermenter design does make a difference. I prefer to use fermenters with a must depth of 38″ during peak fermentation, regardless of diameter, and seek to achieve peak fermentation temperatures of around 90° F for my red wines. I have empirical evidence that this approach reduces our so-called “conversion ratio” (the percent alcohol immediately after fermentation divided by the Brix before fermentation) by up to 5%.

By contrast, I have found no consistent evidence that yeast selection has any effect on alcohol level. Whether I conduct a ferment without inoculation, or by inoculation with a selected commercial strain, the final alcohol is the same within measurement error. Incidentally, these days I start every fermentation without inoculation. If the initial Brix is high or if the ferment shows evidence of stress, I inoculate with a commercial strain I feel most suited to the variety. In effect, all our ferments are conducted by mixed strains of yeast.

The AWRI paper discusses the most obvious, the most used, and the most discussed (and often reviled) method of alcohol level management: physical removal of alcohol from finished wine by reverse osmosis or vacuum distillation. I have experimented with these methods on a limited basis with mixed—mostly negative—results. My biggest concern with large-scale alcohol removal is that the wine is nearly always rendered “hotter” by the treatment. I speculate that this is due to removal of ethanol at a faster rate than alcohols of three carbons or more by the processes.

The article mentions de-alcoholizing small parcels of wine and blending back. I have had some good results with this approach and I am experimenting with this method on an ongoing basis, because of the next topic discussed in the article: loss of alcohol by evaporation during barrel aging.

In fact, during barrel aging in our cellar the alcohol level of the wine increases by up to 1.2%-1.5% over two years. During barrel aging, the wood of the barrel acts as a semi-permeable membrane. Wine components inside the barrel migrate through the wood at various rates and evaporate from the outside surface. My a priori assumption is that the rates of migration of water and alcohol are dependent on the differences in concentrations between the inside and outside of the barrel.

Let’s say I put a wine to barrel at 13% ABV; this wine is approximately 87% water. In our barrel cellar, the concentration of alcohol in the air is essentially 0%, while the relative humidity averages about 35%. Water leaves the barrel faster than alcohol because 87%-35%=52% is four times greater than 13%-0%=13% (52/13=4); therefore, the thermodynamic drive for water to leave the barrels is 4x the impetus for alcohol to escape.

The AWRI paper discusses how alcohol levels decrease over time when the average relative humidity of the barrel cellar is 70%-90%, but also discusses the negative issue of mold growth in the cellar in this wet environment. Our barrel aging area was not designed to be wet, and we also store cased goods in proximity to our barrels. Humidification of our cellar is not an option.

My intent is to experiment with vacuum distillation of the wine I use to top our barrels. If we decrease the alcohol level of the topping wine, I believe we can slow the rate of alcohol increase in our barrels over time in our dry cellar environment.

We have had surprisingly mild weather: while the east of the country swelters, the mid- to high-80s we have experienced for the last 10 days are forecast to persist for the next 10 days.

The data show US wine consumption per capita from 1940 through 2010, along with figures for total gallons consumed and gallons consumed of “table wine” (defined as wines under 14% alcohol by volume).

I pulled these figures into a spreadsheet and subtracted the table wine gallons from the total wine gallons, to calculate the gallons of wine consumed that is (by definition) greater than 14% ABV. Then I expressed this as a fraction of the total wine consumed, and graphed it: No question that today we are drinking wines with lower alcohol than we were in 1948. Six decades ago more of the wine Americans drank was fortified, compared to what we drink today; the fraction of wine consumed qualifying as “table wine” (under 14% ABV) exploded after 1968. There is definitely a trend to lower alcohol from 1968 through 2000.

What’s interesting is that the fraction of wine consumed in the US that is over 14% ABV has been increasing steadily over the last decade. So it’s safe to say that if there is some trend to lower alcohol, consumers in general don’t know about it yet. (Click here to see the complete spreadsheet.)

In reading through these reactions, I was struck by the similarity between incidental comments by two professional wine writers. Stephen Eliot of CGCW commented: “[i]t has been some years since I made my way to Paso Robles for the festivities…” and Steve Heimhoff said:”…I haven’t been to HdR for a couple years (I keep meaning to go, but something always comes up)…”

These comments are telling—that an event with the repute and record of success of HdR has ceased to be a draw for some in the trade. The organizers acknowledge that ticket sales for HdR were good, and that financial considerations were not the reason for discontinuing the big event in Paso. So what is up? I think we are in the middle of a paradigm shift…

Inside the trade, the luster is off of big wine events.

The HdR organizers say they plan to “…seek out new audiences through smaller events in more accessible locations.” Along similar lines, a couple months ago I expounded on the position that the large wine festival is a singular waste of time and resources for small wineries trying to build a brand and a loyal customer base. In the comment thread on that article I said:

“I would rather fly all over the country every week pouring for private groups of 30 or less, where I have motivated, interested potential customers all to myself (or sharing them with one or two other producers) than waste another dollar on a regional association’s festival event.”

Becky Tyner and Ramon Sandoval, aka “Small Lots Big Wines” (among others) are pursuing a great idea for offering in-home wine tastings. It does not take much extrapolation to predict that, soon, winemakers will be coming to a home near you.

And we are right in the middle of bloom. In the Pinot, many of the clusters have set and berries are beginning to size. Weather should not be a problem for Pinot. But Tannat and a little Mourvedre at the top of the slope, Marsanne and Rousanne, and even the partners’ Cabernet, have all started to bloom. Rain and a big swing in temperature might decimate the set, or worse.

Fortunately the Syrah, Grenache, Counoise and most of the Mourvedre are still closed up tight. A close look shows that the pollen on the flower stamens is starting to mature under the calyptra—the little caps that cover and protect the nascent flowers. Grape flowers often self-fertilize before cap fall, so these varieties might be fine so long as the rain doesn’t promote the growth of Botrytis. We’ve put out a prophylactic spray in any case.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying one of the sublime joys of being a grower—I get to wander the vineyard in the stillness of the early morning hours and stop to smell the flowers, literally. Grape flowers may not have petals, but they do have perfume—and each grape variety has its own subtly distinctive aroma.

In contrast none of the Rhône varieties have popped, nor has the Tannat. About a month ago, budbreak in the Tanant was uncharacteristically ahead of all the other varieties but with respect to bloom it has taken its proper place in the scheme of things. At this point it looks as though the Grenache could bloom before the other varieties. The Counoise is still bringing up to the rear.

My best guess at this point is that based on the number and size of flower clusters, the Pinot and Grenache could yield heavier than average this year. The Syrah and Mourvedre will be lighter than average. The Tannat and Counoise look to have thrown an average set of flower clusters.

The crew was out today finishing up crown and trunk suckering. They are starting to lift the lower trellis wires, and doing some shoot thinning for excess density. I’m looking for just two fruitful canes per spur position on the cordons, and just one upward-pointing shoot per bud on the canes.

Anybody recognize this? Hint: it’s not Pinot, or a Rhône variety. We will see if it can actually set this much crop—this variety tends to shatter and shell if the weather cools suddenly.

Aye, and there’s the rub; the weather forecast calls for a late-season cold front to blow through Friday. Temperatures, which have been in the 80s, won’t get out of the low 60s, and there is a chance of showers, thunderstorms, and even hail.

Years ago, restaurants like Square One and Zuni Cafe pioneered that balance of fancy and fun. Later came Nopa, with its wildly diverse collection of more than 250 wines assembled by wine director Chris Deegan, with everything from Swiss Chasselas to Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot Noir. It had all the length of a fancy list, with none of the pretense, yet it now feels big by comparison to the svelte lists at, say, Piccino or Bar Tartine.
That reflects another theme mirrored in our dining habits: a communal fatigue with endless choices. The success of focused wine shops like Biondivino in Russian Hill or Dig in Dogpatch shows that we’re ever more content to let someone else curate for us.
So while the list at Perbacco remains an encyclopedia of Barolo and Barbaresco, it has always seemed beholden to expense-account Financial District customs. When Barbacco opened just two doors down in 2010, then-wine director Mauro Cirilli devised an avant-garde selection – on iPads, no less – that veered toward Slovenian Ribolla Gialla and Oregon Gamay Noir.

This piece generated a mild furore over short vs. inclusive vs. comprehensive wine lists among the thirty or so people who actually read and comment on the wine blogs I follow.

Thursday, a wine rep acquaintance re-tweeted a consumer’s lament: “ack! so sick of ‘_____ curated the wine list.’ no they didn’t. they made the wine list.”

My response was: “‘Curating’ is 1 way to make a wine list. Letting the SWS rep write it for u is another. I’ll take curated.”

My wine rep acquaintance thought that in my response I might be broadly bagging on wine reps. On the contrary…

Wine reps are some of the hardest-working people I know in this industry.

They are often passionate, knowledgeable, witty if not outright funny, deeply cynical, simultaneously self-assured and a bit insecure, and sometimes slightly self-destructive—not unlike some of the winemakers and chefs I have known over the years.

The ones that I find the most fun generally work with smaller, well-curated books, ones where they know the products and the producers well. Then there are the reps that work for big, corporate distributors, companies with giant books: thousands of SKUs covering more beverages than wine. Overhearing their conversations, the orbital center of these reps’ worlds is how many boxes—doesn’t matter “boxes of what”—they move in a day/week/month/quarter. The most self-aware of these reps have described working for these companies as “soul-sucking.”

It’s not much of a secret that, outside the bubble of hip and trendy fine dining, most of the restaurant wine lists in this country are written by reps working for big distributors, reps who receive incentives based on how many boxes they can move of the products their overlords bought the most of and paid the least for. I’ve been on the inside of this industry for a while. I can sit down at one of these dining venues, browse the wine list, and often figure out in a couple minutes which corporate distributor wrote it for them. And those lists are B O R I N G.

Only slightly less bad are the lists where someone at the restaurant actually selected the wines, but purely according to bottom-line driven criteria. The worst of this class are the buyers who bring on whatever their reps show them that is wet and cheap—and then they mark it up 3x or more, and the average bottle price is still around $30-$40. At the other end of this spectrum are the lists that have been selected solely based on name recognition, with anchor wines like Rombauer Chard and Silver Oak Cab—still bottom-line driven and heavily marked up, but with an average bottle price somewhere north of $100.

The consumer who is sick of curated responded to me on Twitter with: “‘curating’ is not 1 way to make a wine list. ‘selecting’ is. ‘selecting’ is not ‘curating.’” Yeah, dude—from what I wrote above you can see that I agree selecting is not curating.

I think the guy’s point more than likely was that he objects to the semantic connotations of curated. It does sound a bit pretentious. It also stretches the literal meaning of the word, but not that far. A wine list that has been not just selected, but also interpreted, organized, dynamically overseen and thoughtfully presented by a content specialist can properly be described as curated.

And whether that thoughtful list is long or short, and described as curated, or simply as assembled, such a list is instantly recognizable to me, and infinitely preferable to one that’s just been selected, much less one that was written by a rep for a large distributor.

I am getting a bit tingly about the nascent crop I am seeing out there: Above is Pinot clone 943. I’ve been so used to seeing these vines throw clusters like tiny hand grenades that this is quite a surprise—they are long and straggly for a change. This is potentially the largest Pinot crop I’ve seen at our vineyard since 2006, and the most uniform ever.

Several weeks ago I thought the Grenache was preparing to throw a short crop. No longer: We are going to have plenty of thinning options. I’m thankful to see a potential increase in yield for the Pinot and Grenache after two very short years. The Syrah and the Mourvedre appear to be throwing an “average” crop. The Tannat and Counoise look a little light, as of today. Next steps at the vineyard:

• continued sulfur applications, timed according to disease modeling,
• complete all crown and trunk suckering,
• start the first pass of shoot thinning for density and position, and
• start lifting the lower trellis wires into position as the shoot thinning is completed.

It is hard for me to believe the vineyard is already over a decade old. I’m seeing a little Eutypa in the Mourvedre which we need to manage. Since the very heavy crop load in 2006 we have seen some early decline in Syrah—a vine here, a vine there. The worst affected block was the Tablas Creek A selection on 420A rootstock. The 420A is slower than other stocks to develop a deep permanent root structure, so the timing of the heavy 2006 crop was especially unfortunate for this block, where the vine root system simply was not developed well enough to keep up with the demands. We have been grubbing out the dead vines and replanting for a couple years: This is what came out of the TC/420A block this year.

Overall I am guardedly optimistic that the 2012 growing season is going to be better than 2010 and 2011 were. I’m not alone in this assessment. Kimberly Hatcher of Morgado Cellars sent me in an email the other day:

I am so excited about this weather and how all of the vineyards are looking. I feel so strongly that 2012 is going to be an awesome vintage…

A friend posted on Facebook the other day: “In Hungarians’ eyes an optimist is a person who is poorly informed.” I’m feeling like I could be a bit “poorly informed” regarding this season; perhaps Ms. Hatcher is a little more so.

For these folks, and their 200-year-old forebears, vaccines are bad because they are not “natural.” This is true, but isn’t the point of civilization to rise above the blunt cruelty of nature? To arrive at some higher ground where we, and not Mother Nature, can call a few shots? … One of nature’s charter members is measles, which, even with WHO’s impressive efforts, still kills hundreds of thousands of children annually. Its victims die a slow, miserable, natural death as the virus overwhelms every organ within a few weeks, culminating in respiratory failure. Vaccination has saved tens of millions of lives, more than any other medical invention. It is one of the few health-care heroes out there. Wouldn’t it be more natural for us to be thankful?

This got me thinking about the insistence in some quarters that un-inoculated wine is “better” wine. I am in no way equating the importance or consequences of choosing whether or not to vaccinate children with whether or not a winemaker chooses to add yeast to a wine, or with a consumer choosing to only drink wines with no added yeast.

I AM wondering if there is any intersection between the set of “natural” wine advocates, and the anti-vaccination set.

If there is strong overlap, it would clarify things for me a bit. If there is little or no overlap, that would raise questions for me of coherence and consistence in the philosophy held by “natural” wine advocates.