The Fair & Pinot Days Prep

Went to the Sonoma-Marin Fair last night. Made it through without eating ANY fried foods! In the wine garden, they were demo'ing wine pairings with fair food: I wonder what goes best with cotton candy?
In one of those "D'oh" moments, I realized that the Petaluma Gap Winegrowers Alliance SHOULD have had a presence in our hometown fair... Maybe next year??
What I like about our little fair is that it is actually ag-centric. There are 4H animal husbandry areas where you can see local pigs, goats, cows, etc... There's free local ice cream if you happen to be there at the right time. And, of course, there's the carnival rides and games. We limited ourselves to the Ferris Wheel and the Merry-Go-Round. I'm at a stage of life where I'm not so thrilled by sitting in a cage whipping around upside-down, losing my small change and my lunch.
For entertainment, besides bumping through the mass of humanity that congregates at the fairgrounds every year, we listened to the Charlie Daniels Band. We started out near the stage, but it was so LOUD that I couldn't HEAR!!! So, we made our way to the far reaches of the audience, where the sound was more tolerable. I only know one Charlie Daniels song, "The Devil Went Down To Georgia", and they played that at the very end of a 1-1/2 hour set. The only other song that I recognized was "Folsom Prison Blues", which of course, is NOT a Charlie Daniels song. For that one, they managed to sing the first verse, then the third verse, then the second verse, then repeated the first verse and ended the song without: "..Well if they freed me from this prison..." Sacrilege! Johnny Cash is my first guitar hero. I grew up on that stuff.
Late this morning, I met Joe at the park in Cotati, and we played music for about an hour. We played, among other songs, "Folsom Prison Blues"! Afterwards, I returned to the ranch to help my parents load up my dad's 1930 Model A Ford onto a flatbed trailer. They're taking it up to the family ranch in El Dorado County tomorrow. This evening, I've got to make my final preparations for the Grand Festival Tasting at Pinot Days in San Francisco. It's VERY hot outside today, and I'm afraid that I won't be able to to take cases to sell tomorrow, although at Fort Mason, perhaps the temps will be moderate enough... We'll see.
Now I've got to prepare a magnum of Syrah that I'm bringing for the charity auction - wax dip, apply the label, yada yada yada...
See you tomorrow at Fort Mason!

Pouring in the City

Kristin was a big help in getting everything together for the tasting. We've got a desk ready for her here in my office. Today she'll start at about 11. I still have to get the barn cleaned up from the bottling on Saturday past!
I arrived early last night - traffic into the city wasn't bad at all. It took me a bit of time to figure out exactly where the restaurant was located, but after a few wrong turns, I got directions that put me in the right place.
I had a table next to Ana Keller of Keller Estate, located out on Lakeville Highway. She brought a 2008 Rose of Pinot Noir. We joked about needing the Petaluma Gap sign behind us. Also there was my friend, Tim Olson, of Olson Ogden Wines. Tim was working with Cahill Winery back when I was getting label approval for my 2006 wines. We were all part of the "pre-dinner" tasting. Other winemakers participated in the main Table Hop portion of the dinner. One of our previous grape buyers, Scott Rich with Talisman Cellars, was there for the dinner.
Responses to the Clary Ranch 2006 Pinot were uniformly great! Tasters were enthusiastic about discovering our little gem. I had about 8 signups for the mailing list. While we were pouring, servers passed around appetizers - a peppery ahi poke, and a delicate whitefish-cake. The poke was delicious, if a bit too spicy to go with the Pinot, I thought. Wish I could have stayed for the main courses, but the price for winery participants was a bit steep: $100 plus a full case of wine! As it was, I was glad to be showcased for people who could afford the $150/person cost of the dinner.
There were about 20 wineries overall who participated in the evening's festivities. Contrast that with the 200+ who will be pouring at the Grand Tasting at Fort Mason on Sunday!

Working Alone No Mo'

Tonight is the tasting at Pres A Vi in San Francisco. I'll need to prepare business cards and order forms. I've hired Kristin to help me out with the wine business, and she's starting today at 10am.
This wine business is hard enough with managing the vineyards, making the wine, selling the wine... I'm ready for some help here at the ranch.
For the last year or so, I had retained a friend of mine, Tim Conner, to "professionalize" the front office operations, and to take over a good part of Sales and Marketing. He was successful in getting some East Coast distributors to take notice and order significant quantities of '04 wine, and in outsourcing warehousing and shipping, streamlining the business and making customer service easier to manage. The release of our 2006 vintage in September of last year, however, coincided with the nation's Economic Meltdown. Distributors have made no orders since then, so the vast majority of my sales since then have been direct-to-consumer, with a few wholesale sales thrown in. The overhead of an offsite sales office is no longer justified, so I'm moving all operations here to the ranch.
I posted an internship ad at Sonoma State University awhile back, and hired a student who was just about to graduate with a degree in wine business. She poured at a tasting for me in May and compiled a newsletter that was successfully implemented. Then, after her graduation trip to Vegas, she dropped incommunicado except for one email that indicated that she was swamped with work. Nothing more.
Kristin's here. Time to go...

The Days Are Just Full!

On Saturday morning I headed up to Santa Rosa, to The Beverage People, a winemaking supply store. I rented a corker and bought some potassium metabisufite, corks and a couple of new filling valves. Back at the ranch, Kristin and Barbara (aka GuitarGirl) met me, and along with my four kids, we began the process of bottling the 2003 (!) Syrah.
We first grabbed a half-ton macrobin and scrubbed it clean. After moving it into place, tipped with one corner lower, we weighed out about 25 grams of meta, added it to the macrobin, and began siphoning the wine from the barrel. The aroma of black pepper and blackberries filled the barn. Time to start the bottling line.
Barbara tended the intake of the siphon. Patrick and I did the filling, then handed off the bottles to Liana who carefully wiped them clean. Liana handed off the bottles and corks one by one to Kristin, who placed the bottle in the corker, dropped the cork into the slot, and pulled on the lever to squeeze and seat the cork. Kristin handed the bottle to Olivia. Olivia carefully applied the label and handed the finished bottle to Christopher, who put the bottles into the cases. As we completed cases, Christopher would announce the fact, and we would all let out with a Tom Swift-style, "Yay!" It was a lot of fun and went really well. I still need to finish the cleanup, though.
Sunday was Fathers' Day. Cathy treated me and the kids to brunch at Tres Hombres, then we headed back home for the kids to tend their rooms before going to Cathy's place for the upcoming week. After rooms were clean(er), we jumped in the truck and drove to my parents' house in San Rafael. My sister, Colleen, and two of her four kids, Kyra and Marcos, were there, and two of Christie's girls, Alanna and Shannon, showed up a bit later. We missed Carolyn and her family, who were there in the morning. After an early steak dinner and some swimming, the kids and I drove home for the weekly handoff to Cathy. The house gets real quiet with just me, the dog, and the cat.
Monday was filled with administrative catchup (I'm working with a bookkeeper to get the winery financial records set up correctly), and a Scout meeting in the evening. After I dropped the boys off back at Cathy's house, Barbara accompanied me to the Loomis Barn, where we sat in with some other musicians, playing rock covers for about an hour. It was an early night for partying at the Loomis's, ending before 11!
Yesterday, I returned the corker (The Beverage People are closed on Sundays and Mondays), then drove down to Cotati, where I met Joe Louvar, bass player par excellence. We played through about 15 of our songs there in the park, using just acoustic guitars (Well, Joe played and acoustic bass, amplified with a battery-powered amp...). After about an hour, we parted ways and I headed back up to Santa Rosa to pick up another sterile water sampling bottle from the lab, and to a print shop to get winery stationery started. Then back to Petaluma to do some banking, and home by about 5:30.
This morning, Galo tells me we need diesel fuel. Tomorrow evening is the Pinot Days Winemaker Table Hop Dinner at Pres A Vi Restaurant in the Presidio of San Francisco. I'll be pouring a tasting before the dinner. Sunday is the Pinot Days Grand Tasting at Fort Mason in SF. So I better get crackin'!

Emptying the Barn

We're readying the small barn to get licensed as a winery here on the ranch. Step one is emptying it of all the stuff that I've stored there over the last 10+ years. Among the things I've got in there is a barrel of the last bit of Syrah that I made as an amateur winemaker in 2003!
Today, I'll clear the area around the barrel to make a working space. I'll rent a corker this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll have some help and we'll crank out about 24-25 cases. The wine will need to rest for a couple of months after bottling. Since it's is unbonded, we can't sell it. I guess we'll just have to enjoy it ourselves - darn. I'm sure I'll need some help finishing it off...
So if you're around near the end of summer, do give a call and help me, please!

Vin de Noix, Part 1

This morning, the fingertips on my left hand are stained yellow-brown, the result of one of the processes in making Vin de Noix, a walnut flavored wine aperitif.

My sister, Christie Clary, lives on the family ranch in El Dorado county, in the foothills of the Sierras. In the mid 1970's, my grandma gave 4o acres of the family homestead to my parents. My Mom & Dad planted about 6 acres of walnuts. Now, over 30 years later, Christie has found a way to make a delicious beverage that has drawn rave reviews wherever it's poured.

The process begins by picking the walnuts when the hulls are about 1 to 1-1/2" in diameter, when the nutmeats are just beginning to form and the shell is still soft. Traditionally, in parts of Europe where walnut wine originated, the harvest happens on June 22, the summer solstice. The window of harvest is short - perhaps two weekends.

We're producing enough Vin de Noix to utilize one barrel of wine. We began our work yesterday with about 1800 freshly-picked little walnuts. Wearing vinyl gloves to protect against the staining that comes with handling walnut hulls, we sliced the walnuts into quarters. A pale yellow liquid oozed from the cuts. As we completed our batches of 100 nuts at a time, we poured off the liquid that remained on our cutting boards over the sliced nuts and dumped the whole shebang into a 200 gallon tank. After about 3 hours of slicing and dumping, we were nearly done with step one.

Glad to be finished with this part of the work, I pulled off my gloves. That's when I discovered that vinyl gloves aren't a good choice for protecting my hands from the stain! The stain had penetrated through to my fingertips. A childhood of walnut harvesting tells me it will be quite a while before the stain wears off.

At the end of step one, we poured the wine over the walnuts. It will steep for 40 days. Meanwhile, we'll need to order 375 ml bottles, design labels and so on, so that we're ready to bottle when the process is done. There are more steps in the recipe, and I'll go into more detail in future blogs.

News from the Front

My, my, but I've been remiss in updating over the last week!

This past weekend, I went whitewater rafting on the American River with my sons and their Boy Scout Troop. Christopher and Patrick and I did the South Fork (class III+) on Saturday. We spent Saturday night at Camp Lotus. Sunday, Chris and I returned home, and Patrick stayed on another day to run the Middle Fork (class IV) on Monday.

Tomorrow at 11am, Linda Murphy, a writer with Decanter magazine, will be stopping by here at the ranch for a tour. It will be one stop on a day-long trip acquainting her with the vines and wines of the Petaluma Gap. I'll give her a couple of bottles of wine to enjoy at her leisure, and hope that she enjoys them enough to write a good review!

My good friend, Jay Blasewitz, contacted me from Los Angeles late last week to inform me of a review of the 2006 Clary Ranch Pinot Noir, hot off the presses:

"A ripe, pure and elegant nose that is very pinot with intense red berry aromas that carry hints of underbrush and earth over to the rich and equally pure middle weight flavors that possess fine transparency, detail and lovely balance on the cranberry-suffused finish that also displays an attractive vibrancy. This is at once delicious and serious and as noted, the balance is impeccable. If you enjoy classically styled pinot that carries almost no youthful austerity, this would be a fine choice. 90/2012+" - Burghound.

Yowza! I think I'll use that!

Bloom has Begun!

Yes, the first flowers of the year have thrown off their caps in blocks 1 and 4, our Pommard 4 clone. We dodged a bullet with the recent rains, although in the end we didn't get as much moisture as we might have.

The grapevines' flowers are insignificant things, not showy like a rose. They are about as simple a flower as can be - merely a naked ovule and pistil surrounded by six stamens - not much bigger overall than a BB. From such humble beginnings, if all goes well, we'll end up with the elixir that inspires men to poetry and fosters the camaraderie and conversation of the table, spread with good food and goodwill. Hail the magic of the vine!

Rain and Flowers

We've got just a couple of acres left to sucker. When that's done, we'll do one more pass with Roundup under the vines. The sporadic rains of last week have given the weeds new life. Luckily, we haven't hit bloom yet.

Back in 2005, we had rains during bloom, which reduced fruit set by in excess of 50%. That was a disastrous year, in more ways than one. My customers may wonder why there was no 2005 vintage for Clary Ranch Wines. All along, we've sold grapes in addition to producing our own wines. In 2005, there wasn't enough fruit for my own program after fulfilling the contracts that I had. For a number of years (2003-2005), we sold fruit to Schramsberg for sparkling wine. Unfortunately, the economics of sparkling wine require a higher number of tons per acre than we get out here on the edge. In any case, you can taste the results for Schramsberg in their Reserve de Noirs for those years.

Another thing that the rains and weeds have brought up is allergies that I've never suffered with before. I'm wondering if the severe cold that I suffered through earlier might not have been allergies instead of a cold (?). Then again, it WAS over the top for a week or so. But the post-nasal drip is sure hanging on! TMI?

Petaluma Gap AVA

The Petaluma Gap Winegrowers Alliance Board Meeting on Monday had a number of visitors. Tom Wark, a well-respected wineblogger came and spoke about establishing a Petaluma Gap AVA. He thought that if ever there was an area deserving of an AVA, the Petaluma Gap exemplified such a place. Such an effort would require, however, far more cash than is in the PGap kitty.

There are many in the community who would love to see the Petaluma Gap established as an AVA. However, the current AVA, Sonoma Coast, offers at least two advantages. According to Michael McNiel from Hanzell Winery, "the first is 'Sonoma' and the second is 'Coast'". For consumers in Iowa or Manhattan, what does "Petaluma Gap" mean? It certainly has a very real meaning for us growers here in Petaluma, but even local wine consumers have no idea what it is.

There may be a Petaluma Gap AVA in our future, but there is a lot of groundwork to be laid before we make it a government-controlled-and-mandated labeling issue.

One board member feared this road so much that he surreptitiously invited just grower members to pack the board meeting. He had unsuccessfully tried to stifle the discussion, arguing that we should not even hear from Tom Wark. But this discussion clearly was and remains a part of our organization's mandate. In the four days since the board meeting, the other members of the board have asked for and received the lone board member's resignation, arguing that his actions have been to undermine the board repeatedly, even after being voted down on issues. His constituency had been solely grape growers, ignoring the implications of an interdependent wine industry that needs cooperation between growers, winemakers and consumers.

The Petaluma Gap Winegrowers Alliance was originally called The Petaluma Gap Wine & Grape Alliance. Our "Lone Ranger" was the 2008 President of the organization, taking charge by virtue of acquiring matching funds from the Sonoma County Grape Commission. Part of getting the matching funds was the condition that we be a Grower organization. That was initiated by changing the name of the organization, and constituting the Alliance as a Wingrowers Alliance. This was done with the consent of a cash-blinded board, changing a grassroots community organization into one that represented only one tier of the community. The implications of this strategic blunder were felt fully over the course of the past year, with our Lone Ranger consistently arguing to limit our organization's activities to those that benefit only growers. When I joined the Board, there had not yet been a single public event, such as a wine tasting. Our events were limited to our own private parties, where we drank our own wine, and patted ourselves on the back for doing a great job.

Much work remains to get us back on track as an effective grassroots alliance, but I am cautiously optimistic that we can do it. I am hopeful that we can wean ourselves from the dollar-spouting teat of "Others' Milk".