Pruning Worries

Last Sunday, during a break between downpours, I snuck out into my backyard micro-vineyard and got to work pruning.

It took me an hour and twenty minutes to lop off shoots from my one Cabernet Sauvignon and 6 Petite Sirah vines, which would have gotten me instantly fired if I’d been on a pruning crew.

(Pruning just one acre of 1,000 vines would have taken me the better part of a month, at my slow rate!)

I will say I was slowed down by errant vine shoots that climbed 20 feet and more up my birch trees. Ripping those tendrils down also brought down tree limbs.

Showing my lack of seasoning, I’m worried that my fresh cuts are going to become infected with a fungus called Eutypa and “dieback” in the spring.

Dieback hasn’t been much of an issue during all those vacation-like mild weather years we’ve seen. But now that everything is continuously damp, there’s more of a threat.

Probably more than half of Lodi’s vines have been pruned by now, since it’s such a big job. Most winegrowers have learned long ago not to sweat what you can’t control. They’re probably just happy to catch up on rain.

I’m looking forward to bud break mid-March!

Wine, Chocolate, Bed & Corkage

The ideal lover’s wine vacation weekend is coming up. If ever there was a good opportunity for Bay Area friends to visit Lodi, this is it.

40 Lodi wineries are banding together for the 13th year to present our Wine & Chocolate Weekend, February 13 & 14 from 11am to 4pm.

In an unprecedented display of teamwork, 14 of our best restaurants will extend the festivities to the dining table by offering free corkage on all your Lodi wine purchases.

Alebrijes Mexican Bistro, Crush Kitchen & Bar, Revolucion 1910, Rosewood Bar & Grill, School Street Bistro, Wine & Roses Restaurant, and Woodbridge Crossing will all waive the corkage fee with a flash of your event wristband.

Many of these restaurants are offering special Valentine’s-oriented pre-fixe menus on both days, so you’d better make reservations now.

After dinner, spend the night at Hampton Inn & Suites, Holiday Inn Express, or Lodi Inn. Slip them the secret code “LCVBE” and you’ll be given a special Wine & Chocolate package that includes free tickets to the weekend event.

If you are a wine club member, contact your Lodi winery for a promo code to plug in at www.lodiwineandchocolate.com for $10 off the $35 per ticket advance purchase price.

En Masse

At the Lodi Winegrape Commission this past Monday, 7 of us winery owners put our brains together again to further explore ideas for marketing Lodi wines.

When you think about it, about a tenth of Lodi winegrape growers (as opposed to just plain “grape growers”) now own wineries. The goal is to get over ten times more money per grape by crushing each one into wine, rather than selling each one whole.

But, as I’ve said before, it’s much harder to sell wine than it is to make it.

That’s where the idea of a critical mass of Lodi wineries working together can be a formula for success.

The common theme in all our discussions was getting off the farm and out onto the road en masse.

As it is now, there are a handful of stalwart heavy travelers that can be seen representing Lodi at many wine tasting events throughout the country. We’re hoping that at upcoming tastings wine lovers will see the Lodi logo on winery name posts throughout the room.

Ultimately, more and more of the wine drinking public will come to associate Lodi with great wine and great people, as we market our 100,000 acres of vines through our sought-after, award-winning wines.

Shaving Nickels

Go into most Lodi wineries and ask how much of the winegrapes they grow winds up in their own bottles and you’ll hear, “Only a tiny amount.”

A San Joaquin County “boutique” winery is allowed to crush no more than 20 tons of winegrapes per year, which is small potatoes in the wine industry.

Compare that to a million-case brand, like only one of Woodbridge Winery’s many bottlings, consuming around 15,000 tons and you’ll get a feel for the vast difference in scale.

With around 100,000 acres of winegrapes farmed by over 750 growers, yielding somewhere close to 600,000 tons, it’s obvious why the huge wineries control the amount of money Lodi farmers get.

That’s the reason cheap import of bulk finished Australian Chardonnay, for example, is so frustrating to local winegrape growers.

With a background in the manufacture of external hard drives, I know that if I wanted to impress the boss, all I had to do was shave a nickel off the cost of a circuit board. That nickel multiplied by a million just paid someone’s salary.

But if you impose a tariff on the import of bulk wine, that hurts the bottom line for Lodi’s biggest customers.

How would you solve this problem?
(This is a great time to leave a comment below!)

A Syrup Substitute

Attention dessert wine fans: I may have found a wine other than Champagne to pair with your Valentine’s Sunday brunch that you could pour right over your pancakes.

Wine Spectator just posted a mini-survey of California dessert wines, recommending 14, including the 2006 JC Cellars “Cuvée Alexandra” Late Harvest Viognier from Lodi’s Ripken Vineyard, which received an outstanding 92 points.

Per the notes from winemaker Jeff Cohn, “The aromatics alone, ripe peaches, dried apricots, roasted almonds with spicy hints of cinnamon and vanilla, will make you want to dab it behind your ears… The Ripken Vineyard allows us to produce an ultra-ripe Late Harvest with just a touch of Botrytis in most years. We are fortunate to have growers with the patience and passion to go the distance.”

The wine came from 42-Brix grapes, which is practically syrup, finishing with 20% sugar and an easy-on-the-head 11% alcohol.

The only wine to receive a better score was the 2006 Chalk Hill Botrytised Estate Vineyard Selection Sémillon at 94 points and $80 per half bottle. Compare that to $24 per half bottle for the JC Cellars.

And if you don’t want to pay freight, you can get the nearly identical wine directly from Ripken Winery for less.

A Flood of Winemakers & Fanatics

This week’s forecast calls for the flooding of Sacramento by winemakers, followed by a heavy downpour of Zin fanatics on San Francisco.

Don’t expect to see many winemakers in their tasting rooms this weekend. If you do, try not to ask them any questions, because they won’t have a voice left to talk to you after several days as grueling as crush.

Tuesday through Friday, just about everyone that is anyone in the world of wine will jam into the Sacramento Convention Center and Hyatt Regency for the 16th Annual Unified Wine & Grape Symposium.

It’s like a wine club pickup party for 12,000 winemakers escorted by cellar workers and owners. It’s often the one time during the year when old friends can literally bump into and catch up with each other on the enormous “showroom” floor.

Nearly 600 exhibitors crowd the building, tempting wine producers to part with profits to purchase big-ticket items, such as tractors and mechanical harvesters, bottling lines, glass bottles, crush equipment, and the latest fad, egg-shaped concrete fermentation tanks.

The goal is to fill a plastic bag with a selection of literature, business cards and chotchkies, while traversing the many aisles of booths before your legs give out in this adult-sized Toys-R-Us.

Those who anteed up a bit more cash sit in on presentations, such as, “Free to $5,000: Promoting Your Brand on a Limited Budget,” “Social Media & YOU,” and “How to Make Your Tasting Room More Profitable.”

Of course there’s lots and lots of wine tasting and chatting, including special tastings at local restaurants hosted by barrel makers, cork suppliers, and just about everyone else that contributes to the bottle you eventually open at home.

City of Many Zins

There will be many masochistic winemakers burning the candle at both ends by shopping the Symposium during the day, then speeding down to San Francisco for the 19th Annual ZAP Zinfandel Festival, informally starting this Wednesday night with the “Lodi Zins in the City” Winemaker’s Dinner.

Van Ruiten, m2 Wines, Macchia and Klinker Brick will be on hand at Albona Ristorante Istriano at 545 Francisco Street from 7pm till whenever the hugging stops. Eat and drink through a scrumptious meal for $70 per person. Call 415-441-1040 for reservations.

Thursday night is ZAP’s “Good Eats and Zinfandel Pairing” from 6-9pm at Fort Mason, featuring nearly 50 Zinfandel producers, including Klinker Brick, Macchia and St.Amant, standing shoulder to shoulder with creations from restaurant chefs guaranteed to show off our beloved grape. Think Taste of Lodi, but indoors, and you’ll have a good idea of Good Eats. Tickets are $125 each and must be purchased in advance.

The Zinfandel Festival continues at 4:45pm on Friday night, when you can join such famous Zinmakers as Ravenswood, Ridge and Rosenblum for a $260 per plate live auction and winemaker dinner at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel’s “Evening with the Winemakers.”

Finally, if the Symposium and nightly entertaining didn’t wear winemakers out, Saturday’s massive “Grand Zinfandel Tasting” – the “Superbowl of all tastings” – at Fort Mason from 2pm to 5pm, will do them in.

The real deals are made with restaurants or wine shops looking to discover new wines at the right price an hour before the gates release 10,000 of the general public.

Despite the herd of wall-to-wall Zin fanatics, you won’t find a better collection in one place of almost every Zin currently produced. It is an excellent opportunity to grab a baguette and red plastic beer cup (because you’ll absolutely need to be spitting) and see how Lodi’s big fruit style stacks up against Napa, Sonoma, the Sierra Foothills and Paso Robles.

As of Tuesday morning, tickets were still available at www.zinfandel.org or by calling 1-877-772-5425.

(Photo of Egg-Shaped Concrete Fermentation Tank courtesy of Sonoma Cast Stone.)

Craggily Old Vines

One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How old do “old vine” vines need to be?”

The short answer is that there is no State or Federal law that specifies an age for vines used to make “old vine” or even “ancient vine” wine.

Tim Spencer of St.Amant Winery used to say, “They’ve got to be older than me if it’s going to be called old vine.”

If you back me up against a wall, I’ll blurt out that the vineyard should be at least 25 years old to be “old” and perhaps 100 years in the ground to be “ancient.” Only a handful of wineries use “ancient vine,” such as Jessie’s Grove, Van Ruiten, Moss Roxx (Oak Ridge) and Cline Cellars.

Buy why the fuss over old vines?

According to Tim’s son, Stuart Spencer, those old vine Zins were planted in the days before grafting onto special rootstock began, and “own roots” results in more intense berry flavors without as much of a tea leaf flavor.

Also, those craggily old head-trained vines tend to balance themselves out better, producing a lower crop and requiring less water.

Check out my posting on line at lodiwineguy.com for more interesting old vine fun facts.

Blown Away

Though we desperately need this rain – and about 3 more years of above-average soaking – these blustery days can make working outside in the winery a challenge.

On days like these, 16 foot aluminum ladders crash down from tanks, cards showing what wine is in which tank scatter everywhere, and cheap canopies set up for filtering literally take off and land in cow pastures.

The biggest challenge is bottling.

Few wineries can afford their own automated bottling line and therefore depend on a bottling truck scheduled long in advance. If it rains on bottling day, the truck doesn’t much care because it is set up to be completely washed down anyway.

Cardboard cases for wine bottles, however, cannot be allowed to get wet.

One particular rainy bottling day at Jessie’s Grove, after a lousy night of worried sleep, I had to tarp thousands of dollars of empty glass showing up early in the morning.

As we bottled, we carefully drew back the tarp to get at more bottles, while stretch-wrapping the bottled wine as it was loaded into trucks.

Sure enough, a few cases got wet and tore open, breaking glass and spilling Earth Zin & Fire all over. And, yes, we cried over the spilt Zin.

Reporter Turns Rat

I had a strange feeling that Andrew Adams, in his last days as Lodi News City Editor and Reporter, had caught the “wine bug” – an insatiable desire to crush grapes.

Sure enough, Andrew landed a gig on the cellar crew at Merryvale’s Starmont Winery in Napa, and journaled his adventures in theuncorkedlife.com, with entries such as this:

“Sometimes you’ll need to pull a sample from a barrel stacked high on top of other barrels. Barrels are laid on racks that hold two barrels. These racks then can be stacked on top of each other. The stacks can stand as high as 30 or 40 feet.”

“To reach the top you squirm into the tight space between stacks and grab on to the barrel racks to hoist yourself up using the racks and fat part of the barrel as kind of a ladder. To keep yourself steady you rest your rear on another stack of barrels.”

“But as you work higher up in the stack your weight and movement can cause the stacks to sway back and forth. Standing with your feet on swaying stacks of barrels about 20 to 30 feet in the air gives you the sense of working on a mast of a sailing ship.”

The Decade Ahead

Jumping on the tempting train of predictions for the next decade, as an eternal optimist, I’m thinking things look hopeful.

Though the recession is officially over, I’m hearing that unemployment should be back under control sometime this summer, which could further speed America’s increasing consumption of wine.

The jury is out on whether wines priced over, say, $50 per bottle will fully recover in the foreseeable future, but most of Lodi’s wines, already priced in the market sweet-spot under $20, are positioned very nicely to land on tables throughout the country.

While the major wine critics are still not completely on board with the amazing fruit in Lodi wines, the everyday Joe wineblogger is starting to spread the word for us, especially through Facebook and CellarTracker.com, which is just now reaching a popular critical mass of amateur critics.

Though our boutique wineries only sell a tiny fraction of our winegrape growing, these family-owned businesses will lead our focus on high quality at reasonable prices.

The real challenge continues to be our sheer size and keeping quality up for all that quantity. If we can keep tasting better than Australia, for example, we’ll be able to keep growing dollars for our thousands of tons of winegrapes.