Dover Canyon Winery

Zinfandel: King of the Gypsies

Syrah is a barbarian king. It offers roasted game, smoke, dense blue berries, sweat and saddle leather, hay, blood and iron—like a meal around a Hun campfire.

Cabernet is a queenly wine. Royal purple flavors, essences of social and political ink, jeweled daggers and kid leather tannins, a background of carved oak furniture and a rustle of silk.

Zinfandel is a gypsy king. Brightly colored and layered, using peppercorn, wild red berries and herbs to divert one’s attention from studying it closely. A wine of complexity and contradiction—brash yet deep; a wine that seems simple and rustic, but reveals aromas of white flowers and yellow fruits; a vine considered a peasant and a wanderer, yet its bloodline flows from the mists of time; and a thief of many hearts.

For years, zinfandel has been considered the bastard child of the wine world, a pretender to the throne, incapable of elegance or intrigue.  Zinfandel is recommended as a marriage acceptable for pizza, tomato sauces and rustically charred meat.   Wine critic Robert Parker recently said online that blending zinfandel with syrah gives zinfandel a "nobility" it wouldn't otherwise have.

I would like to introduce you to the "new" nobility—wines that are a favorite of chefs and gourmands, wines which are intellectually stimulating, vibrant, and satisfying.  Wines with charisma, balance and intrigue.

In our next post, we will launch The Pepper Rebellion, and we invite you to join us.

Shit Happens: The Exploding Fish Emulsion

In March and April we receive the last of our spring rains. This is the time of year we like to give the soil around the vines a little boost by pumping diluted fish and kelp emulsion through a temporary drip irrigation system. We only want to do this during the spring rains so the native precipitation will carry the emulsion deep into the soil, replacing nutrients naturally. The fish and kelp combination also encourages the biodiversity and health of the cover crop and soil life, including natural fungi, microbes, worms, and insects.  We ordered a barrel—a 50 gallon drum—of fish and kelp emulsion from a firm in Oregon. Unfortunately, the emulsion was on backorder for a long time and didn’t arrive until spring was over and the rains nothing but a memory.

So we put the drum in the walnut processing shed until the next spring. It sat in the open shed through a hot summer and fall and a cold winter. The following spring arrived. One sunny morning around 7 am Dan was eager to get started on vineyard chores.  With no particular warning to me he said, "Hey, come help me set up the fish emulsion drip!" I protested sleepily that I was still in my peejays.  I would also be working in the tasting room that day, so I wanted to change into some clean jeans and a sweater first. "No, you don’t need to change. This will just take a minute."

So I let him talk me into riding down to the creekside barn on the ATV, still dressed in my black velour pajamas, with a pair of Uggs on my cold little feet. Dan unscrewed the cap on the drum and explained that my job was to kneel at the base of the drum and hold a five-gallon bucket steady while he dumped a few gallons of fish emulsion into the bucket. Our drip emission feeder is a five-gallon model, so Dan would then pour the emulsion into the feeder and set the drip rate. Once the water was turned on, the water would pass through the feeder, dilute the emulsion and carry it up the hill, depositing it at the base of each vine in a steady drip.

So there I was, kneeling down and holding the bucket as Dan tipped the drum over. We were unaware that over the course of the year, the emulsion had fermented anaerobically in its enclosed drum. Its contents had morphed into something even more awful than the original contents.

The Pepper Manifesto

We make zins with pepper. Unabashedly, unforgivably peppery zinfandel. We gather the finest Tellicherry pink peppercorns, white peppercorns, and fat black peppercorns and select them, blend them, coarsely pulverize them (to increase the surface area of unoxidized, freshly exposed peppercorn surface) and then add them to the wine while it is still in barrel.

Sometimes, we make a slurry of the discarded peppercorn shells in a carboy of red wine, let it soak for 1 week, and stir it according to biodynamic principles. Then we pop the head off each empty barrel, and paint the inside of the barrel with the pepperslurry. After the barrel has dried, we affix the barrel head and fill the barrel with old vine zinfandel.

We also buy peppercorn in bulk and mix it into our compost piles of grape skins and seeds. Then we spread the peppered compost in the zinfandel vineyard under the vines, where insects and earthworms carry the peppercorns deep, deep into their subterranean pantries beneath the vine roots.

(This has the added advantage of giving an interesting pre-seasoned flavor to the succulent meat of our locally produced grilled gophers.)

Come on by, and see for yourself!

A Shepherd's Morning

During harvest one morning around 7 am, I was in the office and Dan called me outside.  "Uh huh," I responded lethargically.  "No, really! " he called.  "You've got to see this!"

From outside the wine barn we watched in amazement as a flock of sheep trotted down Vineyard Drive.  They were almost 10 deep across the road.  Men strolled behind them, whistling and swinging their jackets; border collies barked happily, dashing back and forth and keeping the sheep from straying off the pavement.  Some of the sheep wore bells and we could hear their languid clanking as the sheep, most white-faced, some black-faced, trotted obediently down the road. 

There were hundreds of them.  Finally, the flock seemed to pass, and we could see open road.  There was a pause, and just when we thought the show was over, another flock trotted quickly past with its attendant shepherds and collies.  After several more awestruck moments and several hundred more sheep, we saw a car with its hazard lights on following the flocks slowly down the road, and a few patient pickup trucks following behind.

"Soils are the skin of the earth . . . "

I've recently had the privilege of reading a draft of Dr. Tom Rice’s forthcoming book, Paso Robles: An American Terroir. In a casual discussion about the manuscript, Tom said a fascinating thing . . .

"Soils are the ‘skin’ of the earth."

And if you stop to think about that, it’s true—like our skin, soils need oxygen, moisture and nutrients to thrive. And like our skin, sometimes moisture and nutrients are supplied by the layers underneath, and sometimes applied on the surface. Like our skin, our soils are alive with microflora. Conversely—just as soils can become arid, our skin can become so parched that no outside intervention will cure it; only the deep moisturizing supplied by our inner water and nutrients can restore it.

Tom Rice is the director of the Soil Science program at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. His treatise, Paso Robles: An American Terroir, is scheduled for release this fall.

"While a lot of people might think of soils as being inanimate," says Tom, "I think of soils as living, because of the integration of the mineral with the organic material, which includes microbes, roots, decomposing leaves . . . soils are the skin of the earth. They have pores."

The thistles shown here were photographed near our creek bed on a morning in late August. They were approximatey four feet high. Thistles are not generally welcome in a vineyard as they spread rapidly by airborne seeds and produce tough, fibrous plants resistant to both hand hoeing and mowing. We do allow thistles to thrive in the moist creek bed that divides our zinfandel and syrah plots. According to Ehrenreid Pfeiffer, an early proponent of organic and biodynamic practices, "thistles follow man wherever he is cultivating the soil. They would in general indicate a soil where the surface is loose but where insufficient rooted organic matter is present." This sounds like a prescription for balanced grapevines. Thistles are also rich in potassium, as that is what they primarily draw from the earth, and their roots degrade into rich humus after being mowed down.

Gopher Control: The New Crew

We have to somehow justify adopting three kittens, all littermates, this month.  In fact, Dan eagerly accepted the offer of kittens, not because we need "hunters" as he stubbornly proclaims, but because he is still jonesing for kittens.  And what a delight they are.  Lily, Stubs, and Ninja Kitty have joined forces with Rebel Rose and Diablo to hold the evil rodent forces at bay.  Although at this point they're just discovering frogs, which is pretty comical as they're still a little cross-eyed, so hunting is tough. 

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves . . .

A Rude Awakening

Bottling day is always exciting.  New releases, new vintages, new blends.  We look forward to our bottling days.

However, I don't think there have been more than three bottlings in ten years that didn't arrive with a surprise or two.  (See here for pictures of bottling.)  We order our bottles from one firm, then we order foil capsules from another, corks from yet another, and getting labels printed and delivered on time would tax the patience of a Zen monk.  But I have never, until now, experienced a lonesome truck driver bleating like a lost deer outside my bedroom window at 3:30 am. 

It was a dark and moonlit night.  I was sound asleep.  Until I awakened to a loud, moaning, "Loww!"  A long pause, then another desperate moan, "Nloww!"    Where we live, one can hear a dozen owls wooing each other with their low, operatic tenor, and lost fawns moaning like bass-voiced sheep for their mothers.  But this sound was almost human.  I listened intently, my eyes bugging out as if that would help.  After some more moaning, I heard, "Eneebuddythere?"

Truly freaked out by now, I awakened Dan and I suggested (in case it was some homicidal maniac luring us to our deaths) that he should go check it out.  So Dan goes to the front door of our farmhouse and steps outside. 

Some poor truck driver had arrived with an extra-long trailer full of bottles--about 40 pallets, in fact, and he could not maneuver the 90-degree turn between the two oaks at the end of the driveway.  So he left that huge truck-trailer rig on Vineyard Drive, just after a twisty turn, walked up our drive, stood under the crabapple tree and yelled at our bedroom window until we woke up.  Dan said he felt sorry for him.  So there's Dan, standing barefoot on the front porch, trying to have a conversation with this guy, who will not come any closer than the tree.  Sound carries in our bucolic valley, so I'm sure the neighbors could hear Dan saying, "No, dude!  You cannot come up this road!  I don't know where you can turn around.  Maybe Peachy Canyon Road?  You're going to Talley next?  Do you even know where Talley is?"  The conversation went on for about 15 minutes before the driver finally padded back down to his truck and took off.  Unfortunately for him he was still pointed north, Talley is 45 minutes south, and there are few places for a rig like that to turn around on our winding country road.

Worried about him, Dan and I cuddled up on the sofa with our menagerie of pets and half-slumbered through some forgettable movie.  Finally Dan said, "There he goes," and we saw the lights of a large trailer rig heading south on Vineyard Drive. 

Winemaking Misadventures

Most people think of winemaking as a fairly simple, alchemical process that occurs briefly, and then the wines mature for two years in oak casks or kegs, requiring only an occasional tasting and perhaps a gentle racking to keep them pure.

And theoretically, that is the plan. But winemakers rely on equipment, and equipment often breaks down, or starts running backward for some unknown reason, or the winemaker forgets to turn it off and it blows something up. It’s always kind of fun to be on the fringe of a disaster—although it’s definitely not fun to be the poor sot in the middle of it.

Crush II

Crush is almost here. It's that time of year again. Time for grapes to be harvested and turned into wine. Do we call this time of year "crush" because the grapes are poured into hoppers and dumped into crusher-destemmers to be de-foliated and mangled before fermenting? No, we call it "crush" because this is the time of year when forklifts are backed into doors and tanks; tractors roll down terraced hillsides; hoses get plugged up, tanks overflow, and the winery dogs sleeping on warm cement get run over.

This is how wine is made. When a winemaker refers casually to the "blood and guts" of his winery, he is probably not referring to accounts receivable or distribution channels. He is likely referring to a dismantled crusher, sitting like a beached ship among a sea of littered parts---or the last cellar worker to explode the head off a barrel of wine.

Wayne's Tire does a thriving business this time of year, catering to the ag industry, making road calls nearly 24 hours a day to replace forklift tires, tractor tires and truck tires. The wine industry here is not a tidy, large-scale industry with predictable sizes and types of mobile equipment. Small vineyards and wineries use whatever they can find and afford; picking bin trailers have varying sizes of wheels and tires, and of course they don't just go flat---they shred themselves completely in inconvenient places like terraced hillsides and highway intersections.

Electricians are also highly popular this time of year, as every critical piece of equipment except the punchdown tool runs on electricity---and huge amounts of it. And of course all these generators and presses and whatnot have signs plastered on all their panels saying, "Do Not Open" or "Hazard--Danger," so who wants to go poking around in there?

Forklifts are definitely the most popular piece of equipment during crush---being used for forklift races, diving boards over winery fire protection ponds, to hold basketball hoops, as tire jacks, and for subtly chasing snoopy tasters who wander onto the crush pad.

It's not always fun and games however, as cellar workers wade through hordes of yellow jackets, faint from fermentation fumes (whenever a cellar worker is missing he's presumed sleeping, but we all check the fermentation tanks for floating shoes), drop heavy tools, and yank the barrel washers out without turning off the hot water.

The Art and Angst of Winemaking

I have this recurring daydream about being invited to a famous wine writer's house for dinner. I would be awful, and I would take great delight in being so.

• "I'm afraid the salad dressing is a little on the acetic side."
• "The lamb is a little overdone, somewhat dry, don't you think?"
• "The asparagus, is, well, wonderfully green. Perhaps it needs some cheese."
• "I'm sorry, I'm sure your raspberry chocolate soufflé is wonderful, but I find sweet food so cloying."

When you criticize a winemaker's wine, you are, in essence, criticizing his cooking. Nearly all winemakers are intensely interested in food: fresh ingredients, gentle techniques, attractive presentation. The same things that go into making wine.

Cellars are generally tidy places. The wines move in routine and carefully planned stages through pressing, tanks, barrels, adjustments, bottling. Winemakers shuffle around in the cellar tasting the wines as if they were pasta sauces, waiting a little longer on some, blending here and there, time to finish up on others. They also put a lot of energy into choosing their bottles and designing their labels. Some winemakers shop for glassware with the fervor of a bride looking for china. If the winemaker is also the owner, you can deduct everything his mother knows about him from his label design.

Winemakers, however, don't think of their wine as "product" unless they're talking to their CPA or marketing director. They think of the wine as a process--the elegant presentation of a whole food, fermented and finished in oak.