I’ve got a red red robin that comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along every day to pick off a few more of my meager first crop of backyard Petite Sirah.

He and his friends starting picking when my grapes reached the 11-13˚ Brix range, when a nice sweetness is balanced by some unripened acid.

They’ve been doing a good job picking the grapes cleanly off the bunches, leaving empty skins littering the ground.

Many birds are a bit more messy eaters, ripping open grapes and letting the juice seep out all over the bunch, causing rot.

Starlings and robins can be a big problem in some vineyards, especially along the outside rows of vines, and they are troublemakers at the winery as well.

Woodbridge Winery was fighting off birds nesting right above visitors’ heads for months (not exactly the best first impression!), before putting up netting, which is the only sure-fire way to keep the birds out of vineyards.

At another winery, a bird built a nest inside a large rotary fermentor, which is a big tank on its side that you can spin like a cement mixer. The pesky guy snuck right in though the six inch valve opening a cellar worker forgot to shut.

Sometimes the perfect wine for an evening isn’t even a wine.

Last night, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at a wedding reception, where the closest we came to wine were several toasts of Martinelli’s sparkling cider, filling in very nicely for Champagne.

There were even a couple of bottles that produced the classic, wonderful, Champagne-style pop all on their own, as they caught just a little too much sun on the white-clothed tables.

Growing up, I remember how special Thanksgiving was, with beautiful wine glasses provided not just for my parents and grandparents, but also for my sister and I. We felt privileged to be guzzling Martinelli’s as everyone else sipped on Chardonnay. Even when we were offered little sips of the real stuff, we felt ours tasted so much better.

Even now, when we get together to taste wine with our winery partners, we make sure to provide that perfectly-chilled bottle of Martinelli’s for their son. I enjoy watching his eyes light up with the V.I.P. treatment.

Ultimately, wine or no wine, just get a bunch of great people together, forget about the time and the cell phones, and start talking. I can’t think of a better way to spend an evening.

A few years ago, if someone said they wanted to just crush grapes and sell the wine on the bulk (unbottled) wine market, I’d say they were crazy.

At the time, large wineries were importing vast amounts of bulk wine from overseas, especially Australia, giving them leverage to keep their per-gallon costs for California wine down.

Fast-forward to 2008, with a prolonged Australian drought and a short California crop, and you have a completely different situation. Six months from now, it should be no problem selling bulk Chardonnay to large wineries trying to meet their sales forecasts.

One winery I know is going to speculate on the bulk market more aggressively than before by filling their larger tanks with wine they expect to sell for somewhere between ten and fifteen dollars per gallon.

Doesn’t sound like much money, considering that many of us pay that for only one bottle of wine. In the wine industry, however, ten bucks a gallon works out to over a thousand bucks a ton – or more if the grower doesn’t have to pay much for making the wine.

This is likely going to be a year where the odds are in the smaller players’ favor for a change.

Starting last week, white grapes, such as Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon blanc have been steadily rolling in to Lodi wineries. This week’s higher temperatures should keep the pace up without shutting down the vines.

Bokisch Ranches is booked with back-to-back requests to harvest whites. Borra Vineyards is picking some Chardonnay this morning in Clements at the lower sugar levels necessary for sparkling wines.

According to Peter Brehm of Brehm Vineyards, a supplier of grapes to home winemakers, “The spring frost caused many varietals in California to have poor sets.  This means the vines are carrying low yields. The lower yields tend to ripen sooner than vines with a full set.” Translation: we’ll see fewer grapes this year and they’ll be ripening rapidly.

After the worst frost in decades, an early heat wave, and unwelcome wind during bloom, the summer settled into an almost ideal growing season, with daily afternoon temperatures in the range of 85 to 95 degrees.

Even the nasty smoke probably played a part in toning down what would have been higher temperatures.

Reports from Napa and Sonoma wineries say that quality is already very high. I’m looking forward to getting out to the vineyards Friday to get a taste of our grapes!

After a long afternoon of garden work under the sun at ninety-seven degrees, I could think of nothing better than grabbing a glass of sparkling wine. There’s something very refreshing about those bubbles with crisp acidity.

My brother-in-law had asked us to relieve him of three cases of aging wine that he couldn’t bring with him to their new home in Wisconsin. One of those wines was a sparkling Domaine Chandon non-vintage (probably 2001) California Extra-Dry Riche, which had obvious flavors of sparkling cider, as well as cheese.

Almost by accident, I stumbled on one of those perfect food and wine pairings.

We had some Cambozola, Stilton, and chèvre cheese left over from the previous night of “low flex” (meaning we didn’t go all-out, impressive gourmet) BBQ chicken at the house of some close friends.

I pulled the cheese from the fridge. The Stilton and chèvre were OK pairings with the Chandon, but the Cambozola, purchased from Safeway, but available at most stores, was fantastic.

The Cambozola, a soft combination of buttery Camenbert with veins of Gorgonzola Bleu-cheese and mushroom-like bitterness played perfectly with the cheese flavors of the Chandon. An amazing pairing that you must try, especially on a hot Lodi summer afternoon!

I was touched a few days ago by something that shouldn’t even faze me.

Over a hundred thousand acres of vines have been up-rooted in San Joaquin Valley over the last ten years and turned into orchards. Seven-foot-tall piles of broken vines waiting to be burned commonly littered plowed land last year.

What got my attention was one vine neatly climbing over a trellis that I walked past each time I visited one of my winery clients, now knocked over and dying.

The vine must have been over thirty years old, though its eight inch trunk felt more like a hundred. I helped myself to some of its nearly-ripe, yellow-green grapes, for the last time. They were sweet, seedless and delicious.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the broken trunk. This was solid wood. Just like a two-by-four. In fact, I even knocked on it and it sounded like wood.

The wood thickens (“lignifies”) every year, and a vine that is allowed to grow up to cover an extensive trellis will thicken fairly rapidly.

All those years of careful pruning and satisfying fruit will be gone, to make room for a larger building.

Reflecting, even my own home is built on a former vineyard.

I had mixed emotions when our winery’s grape contracts starting coming back this year as much as twenty percent higher than last year.

A good portion of the increase goes straight to the bane of our existence: higher fuel prices for tractors. But some of the increase is genuinely due to higher demand for what could be a smaller 2008 crop.

We had heard earlier in the year that larger wineries, especially Gallo, were getting contracts out sooner than usual after the drier- and frostier-than-normal start of the growing season. Also, lakes of surplus bulk wine from the huge 2005 crop have mostly been emptied.

“Wineries are offering better prices than any of the past seven years, and they are offering term contracts,” said Nat DiBuduo, president of Allied Grape Growers, in Western Farm Press.

As a winery owner, you’d think I should have my head examined for saying I want grape prices to go up. But I do want prices to go up.

I think of it this way: if growers can make better profits, they’ll be much more interested in having vines in the ground than houses. And a good moat of vines helps keep Lodi “Lodi” and not “North Stockton.”

I have to admit that when I saw the headline, “Wine grape harvest under way in Sonoma,” in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat last Friday, an excited chill ran down my spine into my stomach, like I’d forgotten to pay my credit card bill.

Even though the first harvest of grapes we’re contracted for couldn’t possibly be until September this year, I couldn’t help thinking what all other winemakers are thinking right now, “Whoa. I’m not quite ready yet.”

I immediately got about ordering a couple of radiator-like, stainless-steel Macrobin heaters, that will allow us to use hot water to heat up any sluggish fermentations, rather than having to move them outside into the sun every day.

One grower grabbed his electronic sugar-reader (refractometer) to check if the battery was still good before beginning the months-long drill of grape sampling.

Everyone is getting the black widow webs and hornet’s nests out of their stemmer-crushers and presses, and then turning them on to see how they sound. There’s still just enough time to rush-ship those odd-ball replacement parts from Italy and France.

So when you visit your favorite winery this weekend, ask them what we are all asking each other, “Are you all ready for crush?”

For all the glamour and romance of winemaking, at its core, a winery is still a business. Cash comes in. Cash goes out. If the cash flow gears are turning smoothly, the winery can operate successfully for years. Turn off the cash flow, and the winery’s heart inevitably stops beating.

The first release of a winery’s wines poses significant timing challenges. Lots of money is required to bottle wines.

Glass, labels and capsules need to arrive just in time for the bottling date. If they arrive too late, the bottling can’t happen. If they arrive too early, huge payments are due that much earlier.

Government agencies need to be on board, because each winery needs to have valid permits with the federal government, the California Alcoholic Beverage Control Department, the California Board of Equalization, and the local city or county. Some of these can take months to secure.

The wine also needs to cooperate and be over bottle shock, ready to taste as soon as possible to be able to start sales. Otherwise, the winery will need a line of credit from a bank or some other bridge financing to pay off the bottling vendors.

These are the times that try winery owners’ souls!

There’s been a lot of hype in the wine industry about next week’s limited release of the new movie “Bottle Shock.”

The movie tells the back-story of how Chateau Montelena beat out the best Chardonnays of Burgundy at the 1976 Judgment of Paris, effectively putting Napa on the world wine map.

The writers of “Bottle Shock,” in a recent Grape Radio interview, said that they wanted to focus on the struggle between a father, Jim Barrett, and his son, Bo, set in a beautiful background of vineyards, a la “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

From the Sundance screening months ago, I’ve read that the film is not exactly correct from a technical winemaking point-of-view. The writers did, however, seem to capture the issues with handing down a winery to the next generation.

In fact, just last week, Montelena was sold to a prominent Bordeaux estate for over $100 million. Bo Barrett admitted he really wasn’t interested in running his father’s winery.

Bo’s own wife, Heidi Peterson Barrett, has had much more success with winemaking over the last decade, creating cult wines, such as Screaming Eagle.

The consensus is that “Bottle Shock” isn’t expected to boost Chardonnay sales the way the movie “Sideways” ignited Pinot noir sales.