School Presentation and Project

So its hard not to talk about growing grapes when you are passionate about that kind of thing.  So when a teacher asked if I could provide a presentation to the class I was thrilled.

Was a bit of a history lesson (how they use to process grapes in ancient times),

bit of geography (where grapes are grown in Canada),

bit of business and agriculture and grape products.

Best part was showing the students how grape vines grow in a vineyard and how to propegate grape vines.  Each student got to help plant a grape vine cutting and now with any luck these cuttings will root and each student will take a vine home with them at the end of the school year. They are starting to bud out nicely!!

Early Spring Again - Dont Get Your Hopes Up

The vines that I have pruned are bleeding sap like crazy (see photo) so they are well on their way to bud break.  In checking the vines they all look really healthy and cutting into the buds they also look healthy with a high winter survival rate.  The only one that was not great was the pinot noir as it shows lots of fungal pressure on the canes.  This is foresure a carry over from the fungal pressure we experienced on the pinot noir last summer.  It was the mildest winter that we've recorded yet with coldest temp being -15c and as of March 31 it was 22c in the vineyard.  So in all there is a strong likelihood that we'll have allot of healthy buds and flowers this spring.

The down side - seems that there is never the perfect year, there is always something to contend with.  If you get a mild winter, good bud survival and lots of fruit, lots of rain and heat in the summer and you thought it was going to be the best year - then you get fugal pressure.  My concern with the early spring is that the vines push buds too early and then we get a late spring frost that kills them all.  Time will tell. Fingers crossed in the mean time.

Prepping for the New Vines

We are planting 2000 row feet of vines this year, mostly Marechal Foch with some Leon Millot and we spent the last few days staking out the rows and plots for the vines.  Of course if the piece of land we were working on was a perfect square then it would be really easy to measure the row distances from the edge and plot each accordingly - but that's not the case.


Not only is the piece of land odd shaped, (or rather the area that we are planting on is odd shaped) the rows are also at an angle to the property line.  Amazing how the geometry that I though I'd never use after high school comes back when you have to triangulate point to point distances.

In preparing the land we worked it in the year before and again now in the spring so its as free of weeds etc as we can get it.  What we also do is auger a planting hole for each vine about 3 feet deep as this allows for an easy conduit for the vine tap root to get deep into the ground.When the vines come its easy to get them into the ground and we'll add a stake for them to grow up on.  We'll then add the irrigation lines shortly after they are planted. 

Checking for Winter Damage

As of February 16th, this has been the warmest winter we have recorded so far since we started monitoring the temperatures in 2007/2008.  The coldest temperature to date has been -15c one night in December and at the same time we've had alot of wet snow and rain.  The wet snow has caused a bit of damage as it accummuated on some of the vines and weighed them down so much as to pull the wire anchors loose from the posts in some places.

This time of the year is a good time to assess the vitality of the vines and given the warm winter we'd expect them to be pretty good overall.  By now we would usually have experienced the most severe weather and we are now moving into spring.  The potential downfall to a warm winter is that there may have been strong diurnal temperature swings (warm during the day but freezing at night) which can cause damage to the vines.

In checking several of the varieties they appear to be quite healthy both in the canes and the buds.  This picture shows nice green healthy cane. 

We'll now move on to pruning shortly and while for some vineyards pruning in March is rather late pruning we dont want to prune until we can assess how healthy the vines are comming out of winter.  If we prune in January and then in early February we were to get severe cold that kills many of the buds then we may have a very small crop that year.  Even in waiting till early March to prune we will still leave extra buds on the vine in the off chance that there is a late spring frost.  The extra buds gives us a bit of insurance against the potential frost damage.  Once the risk of frost has past we will adjust the canes and crop load accordingly by conducting late "green" pruning in May.

Arrow Lakes White for 2015

We've bottled up the 2015 Arrow Lakes White.  We used the same blending ratios as last year with 70% Evangeline and 30% L'Acadie Blanc.  Both grapes ripened wonderfully in 2015 with the Evangeline at 22 Brix 3.3ph and the L'Acadie ripening to 21 Brix 3.0ph. This is the third year we've been able to make this blend and its nice to see a similar flavour/aroma profile with tropical fruit aroma and flavours  repeating year over year.

Evangeline is very much like Gewurztraminer and has that muscat lineage as it is a cross between Seigerrebe and St. Pepin.  This gives the Evangeline the tropical fruit flavours and aromas.  Evangeline grapes below,

The L'Acadie adds crispness and the usual hints of pear the are found in L'Acadie are elevated with the Evangeline but the citrus side of L'Acadie is still evident even at the 30% ratio.  L'Acadie grapes below;

St. Croix Rose for 2015

The St. Croix grape is a hybrid developed in the USA and produces a dark blue grape with winged clusters about 100-125 grams and 2 clusters per shoot.  It ripens about the same time as Marechal Foch but the beauty of this grape is that it shows varietal flvours early and even makes nice red or rose wine when under-ripe. Its also hardy to about -35 celcius and has outstanding disease resistance and good production. This makes it a nice grape for shorter season areas and for organic growers.  It is one of the most widely grown red varieties in the USA north central states as well as the Quebec wine industry.

This year the grapes did ok.  St. Croix doesn't like our sandy soil so much and generally prefers rich soils. However we had moderate production and ripened the Arrow lakes Vineyard grapes to 18 brix in the vineyard (19 brix after crush) with ph of 2.9.  This is not ideal given the strong heat year we had but the test vines are young still.  Yet, at these parameters the grape makes a really good rose' and that is what we went with.  Typical crush and press and fermentation with 71B yeast.  Back sweetened with sugar to 14g/l and this is a beautiful rose'.  Pear and melon aromas dominate.  Again fresh pear comes through in flavours with pineapple and strawberry hints - I really like this grape and the wine "rose'" it makes... simple goodness.

First Bottling for 2015 - Marechal Foch

This style of wine is more fruit forward with low skin contact. We also added a small amount of oak this year to see what that would produce and it is quite nice.  In fact I'd consider adding a bit more in future years.  The wine has excellent fruity aromas of prune, chocolate, cherry and pretty well balanced all around.  Really happy with the wine.  Its really new and for sure in a few months we'd see the acid come down a bit more although its acceptable now.

Wine Progress - Age, Clearing and Acid

So the wine finished fermenting several weeks ago and now we wait for it to age, clear, and drop some acid.  Aging is literally a function of time and over time the wine changes - fruitiness gives way to more complex flavours, acidity subsides and wine becomes softer. This great for some wines and aging will bring them into their own but others that are meant to be light and fruity with acidity suffer.

Also over time, usually just a few months, the suspended sediment drops out and settles on the bottom.  Some wine makers use clearing (fining) agent and filtering to clear wine of suspended sediment.  Others like to let nature and gravity do its work and the sediment will settle to the bottom in time and the wine will clear all on its own.  For wines that are not really meant to age, choosing to filter and/or using a clearing agent is often in order.  We usually just let gravity and time do its work but sometimes its hard to tell if the wine is clear.  The wine in the carboy may look completely clear and the sediment is settled on the bottom so you go and bottle the wine and three months later your opening up a bottle and see that there is a sediment film on the bottom.  It can be hard to tell just how clear the wine is but for whites at least you can do this little trick.  You simply shut the lights off and shine a narrow beam flashlight through the carboy (see above).  The light beam will pick up on all the suspended solids and you can readily see just how much sediment is still suspended.  If so, better leave the wine to settle out a little longer and keep checking each month till the sediment can barely be seen in the light beam.

The other thing that time will do to wine is reduce the acid content.  This happens for a few reasons but what I have found is that the biggest drop in acid happens over the first 6 months as a result of oxidization of acid in the wine. So as we make the wine and pour it into carboys and rack it between carboys etc etc the exposure to the air adds oxygen to the wine.  The oxygen then combines and neutralizes some of the acid right away within the first few months. After that reduction of acid is slower and often involves more complex molecular changes to acid.  Another way that acid is reduced over time, quite quickly, is through cold stabilization.  With all wine, but especially cold climate wines, it is not uncommon to have high amounts of tartaric acid in the juice and resulting wine.  Cold stabilization is an excellent way of reducing the acid level and should be done regardless for most wines so that you don't get tartaric acid crystals (often called wine diamonds) forming in the wine after it has been bottled. While often called wine diamonds, which sounds nice, I really don't find it appealing to have these crystals come pouring out of the bottle with the last glass of wine.  So the cold stabilization process is literally putting the wine in a cold temperature area at about 0 degrees celcius for a bout 2-3 weeks.  During this time the tartaric acid will begin to form into crystal that will grow on the walls of the carboy or on the bottom of the carboy (see above) or they may even form and float on the surface of the wine and later fall to the bottom. Over the 2-3 week period you can see the crystals grow bigger and you are really seeing the acid dropping.  If you've ever seen those crystal growing kits that they sell in toy stores for kids, that is kind of what happens with the crystals growth in the carboy.

Crush and Press 2015

One thing always leads to another and as soon as you've brought in the grapes you've got to get to processing them.

The reds are put through the crusher to essentially break open the grape without crushing the seed inside.  Really its to let the juice flow out and expose the inside of the grape to the yeast that will be added to the must.  Once crushed the slurry of grape juice skins, pulp and seed makes up the must (we pull the stems out).  We then add the yeast and let the yeast work its magic on the sugars and turn them into alcohol.  After about 7-10 days the fermentation is pretty much complete and we drain off the free flowing wine and then we have to press the skins and pulp etc must (now wine) to release the rest of the wine that they may hold.  Once that's all done the wine finishes fermenting, usually another few more days and we'll rack the wine off the sediment into a clean new carboy.

The whites are treated a bit differently.  We crush and press them the same day so only the juice is fermented (no skins).  We add the yeast and after about 7-10 days the fermentation is all but done.  We then syphon the wine off of the sediment into a fresh carboy.

Always great to get the grapes processed and fermenting, even better when you've got some help and have some fun.

Evangeline (KW96-2) Grape

Just a quick update on this great grape.  Again its real name is KW96-2 but we will call it Evangeline until it gets officially named.  This vine gets stronger each year and produced heavier than I had expected this year.  Clusters can be 8-10 inches long and loose and some weight easily in the 200-300 gram range.

This grape is a cross of St. Pepin and Seigerrebe - early ripening, hardy to -30c, some good mildew resistance.  We harvested at 22 brix and 3.5 ph, almost too late.  Could have picked it 2 weeks earlier at about 20 brix and 3.1 ph. Created in Nova Scotia by Dr. Andrew Jamieson - thank you Dr. Jamieson!