Dover Canyon Winery

2007 Harvest Wrap Up

It's been a busy eight weeks--harvest started in early September, but then a heat spell and cooler weather following the heat delayed further picking until October, when it all began coming in at once!  In the meantime, we were also packing and labeling hundreds of Fall 2007 wine club orders.

This year we had planned to purchase less fruit than usual, but the vintage looked so good, we ended up buying more fruit than ever before.  At right, zinfandel clusters from Benito Dusi's 90-year-old vines are being gently forked into the crusher.

All the fruit this year had exceptional pigment--Dan was especially pleased with our estate fruit.  Most of the central coast was reporting lower tonnage this year, but both our estate zinfandel--which is dryfarmed and head-trained--and Benito Dusi Vineyard--also dryfarmed and headtrained--produced significantly heavier crops.  Although since these vineyards typically produce limited tonnage in the first place, any increase in cluster load is significant.  And with the quality of this year's fruit, also cause for excitement. 

At left, you can see the red-brown stems from a Dusi zinfandel cluster.  This is a sign that the zinfandel vines and clusters have had time to fully mature.

Some vineyards, including Dusi and our estate vineyard, were picked in several different passes so we could bring in the fruit at its peak of ripeness and balance.  With only a few weather hiccups, we enjoyed warm days and cool autumnal breezes throughout harvest.  (None of those grueling late nights and freezing temperatures we remember from recent El Nino vintages.)  Dan kept the fruit coming in at a steady pace so each day's work could be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time--which meant 10 hour days for me, and 12-14 hour days for Dan. 

Below, you can see the whole berries falling from the crusher into the fermenting bin.  Our crusher/destemmer is set to a slow speed, so rather than macerating the berries as they pass through, the equipment simply rips the berries from the stems and drops them more-or-less whole into the fermentor.  A good deal of juice is extracted simply by the weight of the grapes themselves.  (The crusher ejects the stems into another bin and the stems are then dumped into compost piles at the edge of the vineyard.) The bins are inoculated with yeast and lined up in the winery to ferment for 10+ days.  The bins will be punched down by hand twice a day, and when they have finished fermenting, the fruit is poured into a press.  The juice, which is now elementary wine, is extracted and barreled down--the grape skins are removed to the compost area, where birds and wild turkeys come for happy hour.

Harvest Begins!

A quick vintage update:  after a week or more of blistering hot weather, temperatures are cooling down at night to the mid-fifties, and today is very windy and cool, definitely sweater weather.  However, vineyards all seem to be getting ripe at once! 

Harvest begins tomorrow, with arrivals of cabernet franc, petit sirah and possibly zinfandel.  Emails and faxes from growers are coming in daily.  Dan is also getting ready for bottling, so as fast as he is emptying barrels, fruit will be coming in to fill them. 

As many of you already know, we are open to the public Thursday through Sunday.  On the days we are closed, Monday through Wednesday, we will be very busy with harvest duties, our September bottling, and wine club packing.  If you wish to stop by on those days to pick up your wine club, you are welcome to do so (and we'd love to chat for a bit).  However, please make an appointment 24 hrs. in advance.

May 2007 Weather Update

With the warm, dry spring we've been having, the weeds came on strong and were threatening to go to seed early, so we hired a small crew of three to tackle hoeing before the weeds propagated.  They did an amazing and very precise job of hoeing not only around the base of the vine, but all along the vine row and out about a foot on each side in perfect strips. 

We have also been seeing a lot of gopher activity, and we lost about 30 of our best vines in the center of the zinfandel vineyard, as well as some more struggling vines near the vineyard border, and yet more in the syrah.   

Generally gophers are very active in the spring when they are breeding.  When the neighboring walnut orchards are tilled in late spring, that also drives gophers toward our peaceful vineyard.  But gopher activity is much worse this year than in the last two years, so we purchased a whole box of gopher traps and put one of the crew to work catching the critters. He caught 20 in one day on one acre. 

Bud break and flowering proceeded sedately, unhampered by spring frosts, rain or wind.  So different from last year's long and late rains.  The occasional reports of early spring "storms" turned out to be gentle whiffs of rain that dispersed over northern California and bypassed Paso Robles altogether.  Our  lack of rainfall this year may cause water deficits later on, so we have watered the syrah lightly.  The headtrained zinfandel is dry farmed, and is therefore on its own.  We'll just have to see what the vintage gives us.

Pruning

This week it's supposed to climb to the high 80's, low 90's--perfect weather for the Zinfandel Festival this coming weekend.   But, alas, our region has received a paltry 8-10 inches of rain so far this year, instead of our usual 22 inches.  Hopefully we will get some more rain this spring before the vines flower.

The zinfandel was pruned in February; the cover crop is just starting to get leafy, and will need to be mowed soon.  There are no buds on the zin yet, just hard-headed, stubborn nodes. We have yet to finish pruning the syrah, but we'll accomplish that chore immediately after bottling. The syrah is on an easterly slope, facing away from the afternoon sun, and sloping down into our creekbed, so it will be exposed to frost if we have a sudden reversion to cold April weather. The late pruning (while not exactly planned to be this late) will help to delay budbreak past our last anticipated frost dates.

2006 Harvest Update

Harvest is winding down this week as we bring in the last few lots of grapes, including estate zinfandel, Benito Dusi old vine zinfandel, and some grenache, syrah, and mourvedre from Melange du Rhone Vineyard.

As you know from our summer vintage report, we had a cool, rainy, and elongated spring. August was also unusually cool, and then September brought cloudy skies with an occasional whiff of rain. Although this year was not as heat-challenged as the infamous El Nino / La Nina cycle of 1998-2000, many growers were biting their knuckles by early October. Would there be enough heat and light to ripen the vineyards? Obedient to autumn’s changing day-length and colder night temperatures, vineyard foliage colored, dried, and dropped. Canes withered and turned red.

Nevertheless, with patience, October brought more sunshine and some temperately warm days. The long cool growing season has granted us a harvest of small, tight berries, with intense pigment and spice—berries with lots of hang time, luscious skins, toasty popcorn-like seeds, and lignified stems.

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.

Vintage Come Along

This spring's endless rains got us off to a wet and very late start in the vineyard.  The cover crop was almost out of control by the time the ground dried up enough to get some hoeing and mowing accomplished. 

Spring growth on the syrah was fast and leggy, with fewer clusters of flowers than in previous years.  Dan kept more shoots on each vine than he ordinarily would as we were worried about a possible below-average fruit set.  The vines were also climbing out of control--wet weather kept us out of the vineyard, but the shoots were growing at a rate of 2 inches per day!  As fast as we could tuck shoots up into the trellis, stiff spring winds would blow them loose and braid them together, requiring us to cautiously and patiently untangle the leggy, unusually fragile shoots before tucking them up again.  Cold spring weather and cloudy skies have given us thinner, more delicate shoots than normal, which snap easily if mishandled.  At this point, we are leaving any shoots that have escaped the trellis again to dangle free, rather than risk breaking them.  So the syrah has got a kind of 'rock star hair' look this year. 

Late spring rains can interfere with fruit set by preventing pollination, but fortunately the weather calmed down in May and fruit set is unusually even this year.  In some years clusters may suffer from uneven pollination, which results in a 'hen and chicks' effect--some fully formed berries interspersed with hard green beads which never become fully formed grapes.  Zinfandel in particular is very prone to this, but this year both the syrah and zinfandel have great looking clusters.  So while our overall crop size may be down a little, the size, length and fullness of each cluster looks very promising.  It could be another high quality vintage!

A Visit With Benito Dusi

Every year we buy zinfandel fruit from Benito Dusi. Ridge purchases the lion’s share of this 80-year-old vineyard, as they have for about 25 years, and we purchase the remainder. As clearly as I can recall, Ridge was the first extra-appellate winery to actually put "Paso Robles" as an appellation on their label. A daring move for a winery with a fine reputation, to align itself with an area commonly associated with the subterranean Estrella River, which conveniently disappears under its sandy riverbed every summer.

Imagine it is 1959.  Driving down Highway 101 to the beach towns of Morro Bay and Cambria, Dusi Vineyard was a charming stop on the way to a clamming weekend with the wife and kids. Women wearing loose rayon sundresses, silk stockings and open-toed heels accompanied their husbands on the short walk into the Dusi tasting room—a small, separate cottage between the home and vineyard. A six-foot tasting bar hosts the southern side of the cottage. Magazines lauding the four San Luis Obispo County wineries are still carefully fanned out on the corner of the tasting bar. I pick up the 1959 Sunset guide to California wineries. A two page black-and-white spread with brief descriptions of each of the four wineries also includes photographs of sleepy Cambria, a rickety one-boat dock with a view of the Rock at Morro Bay, and a family clamming on a local beach.

In a daring leap of faith, central coast zinfandel grower Sylvester Dusi and his son Benito raised the price of their wine by ten cents a case. Dusi zinfandel went from $5.90 a case to $6.00. They held their price at $6.00 a case for fifteen years—from 1959 to 1974.

In 1959 Benito Dusi was a young man in his mid-twenties. Although now in his seventies, it’s not hard to see Beni as the young man he was and always will be. He has a way of flashing oblique glances at me under his lashes, as though he knows a good joke but is too shy to tell it. He’s not tall, but he’s muscular in a wiry kind of way, standing upright with his shoulders unconsciously back and open, even when the room is cold. It is easy to see him as a young, bashful, and incredibly smart farmer.

A Paean Salute

Zinfandel. Primitivo. Guttural pagan names that perfectly elucidate the robust, peppery, shamelessly lusty fruit of the zinfandel grape.

March. The end of winter and cold feet, of leaving for work in the dark and coming home in the dark. It's almost time to dust off the barbecue; our hunter-gatherer instinct awakens and hungers for blackened, peppered steaks and grilled vegetables.

This month is our paean salute, our end-of-winter bonfire, our celebration of everything wine symbolizes—good food, warmth, red berries and red lips, sunlight and firelight, and most of all, the mystery of earth's bounty and man's eagerness to preserve it.

Some zinfandels are elegant yet barbaric contenders for a Gallic throne, mysterious and powerful, with layers of complexity under a velvet mantle. Some are distinctively New World zinfandels—brash, bold and individualistic. Late harvest zinfandels and syrahs with dark, divine flavors strike a resonant note deep in your soul on a chilly night.

Each season's harvest is different, a reflection of the winds, the moons, and man's ability to capture earth's magnificence in a bottle.

It takes a lot of good beer . . .

Harvest season in the wine industry is hot, thirsty work. The vines are covered with a summer's worth of dust, and inhabited by black widow spiders and other crawling, climbing, biting insects. Workers who peel back the bird netting draped over the vines have the pleasure of removing dead birds, squirrels and possums entangled in the net. Driving the tractors which tow the picking bins up and down the rows is hot work too, and bees follow the picking bins in swarms, lying thick on top of the sweet, sticky grapes.

In the winery itself, cellarmen drag heavy hoses from one tank to another, even up onto the catwalks, so wine can be pumped up to the top of a tank and sluiced over the grapeskins floating near the top. Others are standing inside fermentation tanks, shoveling out the heavy pomace, the residual grapeskins left after the wine has been pumped off. Everything needs cleaning, all the time. Tanks, barrels, buckets, hoses, fittings---everything is washed, brushed, scoured and sanitized in a continual war against nasty organisms and fruit flies.

This time of year, you are likely to find local winemakers enjoying a hot dinner at Papi's Mexican restaurant, arguing the merits of various yeasts with a hot tostada in one hand and a cold beer in the other. Cellarmen and winemakers sit in the shade at the end of the day with--you guessed it, a cold beer. The cellar refrigerators hold equal parts of yeast, bottled wine samples, steaks, and beer.