Serve Reds at room temperature: "Are you kidding me?"

There are generally 3 questions we hear at the tasting bar, time and time again. These are (1) Do you grow your own grapes?, (2) What is it in wine that causes headaches?, and (3) At what temperature should I serve my wines?

The answer to #1: We grow most of the grapes that are in our wine....there is one however that we don't and for that one we look high and low for one that the winemaker approves of. Surry County with it's hot humid (day and night) summers makes it uneconomical to grow thin skinned whites.

For #2: This is a blog subject in and of itself, so the quick answer here is it could range from over indulgence to sulfites (scientifically not likely, though one can be allergic to sulfites) to tannins and then some. Every body has different tolerance levels for different things, and to choose one thing to pin it on would be too easy.

Now, on to #3: At what temperature should I serve wines? This is really not that hard a question, but it compares to the easy answer one gets on what do you pair with chicken or fish and you constantly get White Wines, of course.

Serve whites chilled and reds at room temperature is the common understanding. Serving whites chilled is generally easy to agree on, since most people keep their refrigerators set at about the same temperature, i.e. around 40 degrees. There are those that set the frig. lower, say around 35 degrees or so. This as a basic setting is OK once you recognize there may be some colder spots on the shelf, and those items tucked in the back might get a little frozen. For wine this isn't much of an issue.....our wine never makes it back where it can get hidden.

As for room temperature, this is where it is very easy to "loosen up the crowd" by throwing the question back to them. "Well, room temperature is room temperature!" they proclaim. Unfortunately, as they are describing it, no it's not. The problem is that in their restaurant experiences this is what they're told, and that is how it's served, the temperature of that room. Yuch! I have been served reds that were stored under stairwells, or against the warmest wall in the restaurant which happened to have the kitchen on the back side. For someone who takes a fair amount of pride in raising the grapes, getting them into the wine making process, and eventually through bottling and sale to the customer, all I see here is the equivalent of torture. These grape juices are still considered young and impressionable and unable to defend themselves.

Room temperature is cellar temperature, not the 70 degree temperature the restaurant thermostat is set at.  According to Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson ( 1 of 23 female sommeliers in the world), she says room temperature was the case when wine was served in cottages and castles! Since people tend to want to deal in absolutes, I say this is about 55 degrees.

Now, how do you get there? What I did was put together a rather unscientific experiment by inserting a chef's thermometer in a bottle, and in a glass of chilled wine and counted the minutes it took to get up to 55 degrees. This was more a measure of pure discipline as I stared at my wine, determined not to cheat and start sipping it. Gosh it took so long.

Our refrigerator is set just below 40 degrees and our kitchen was around 72 degrees as Diane started to crank up the heat by cooking dinner (told you this wasn't very scientific, but it makes a point). The bottle took just shy of an hour and a half to get up to 55, while the glass of wine only took 30 minutes. Obviously this is way too long to wait to dive into a good Cab, and it might make you consider keeping your reds in the basement instead of the refrigerator to get them table ready sooner. But if you didn't finish that dry Bordeaux the night before, it is the best way to keep it another day or two with the least possible chance for mischief. I'd rather have a cold wine than a bad wine any day.

But then again, it is rare we put a partial bottle back in the refrigerator to live another day !

All Politics Is Local

Nothing better describes the priorities and values of rural life than a newspaper headline in the latest issue of the Smithfield Times. In bold letters, the headline reads "IW will allow chickens, but they must be 'documented' " Granted, this headline is below the fold, but that doesn't make it any less important than the other articles on the front page.

Documenting chickens is the result of some passionate pleas by local citizens to keep chickens in their backyards. Certainly there is a bit of tongue in cheek sarcasm in choosing this description, but the locals take it very seriously. As towns try to figure out how to expand their tax base, whether it be by pushing new industry in a corner of the county, or trying to add hundreds of high rise or low rent housing units in available space, there is the competing desire to maintain some resemblance of rural / agricultural life that the area has been known for during the last 300 years. The tussle over keeping chickens in something other than a farm setting has become the battle cry of these normally quiet citizens.

"Cried like a baby" when a hawk wiped out his chicken flock, said one chicken owner. "They are my companions. I do talk to them." was a comment made by another. "A stress-reliever" was a positive tribute given to these 2-legged creatures.

Just to have to discuss having "illegal" chickens in one's yard brought on stress, not to mention having to explain to the children how their favorite pets might have to be removed from their property.

And now if you want to use politically charged rhetoric and characterize chicken lovers as gun-totting vigilantes who would protect their flocks at all costs, it would bring the discussion to a new low.

I don't know if sanity eventually took over, but the Isle of Wight (IW) Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to allow up to 6 chickens in certain residential backyards, no roosters allowed however. This rooster exclusion is not without merit (and let's not make it a sexist thing). Roosters are noisy, and would gladly poke your eye out given a chance, and basically do nothing to help the egg-laying benefits of chickens. There is a problem here though, and that is Tractor Supply or Farmers Service do not guarantee the sex of the chickens they sell. So if a rooster develops, an axing in the dark (so PETA doesn't get uptight) may be the only solution, but a good coq au vin recipe might be the way to arrive at some benefit for the slaughter.

The good news: one can now obtain a zoning permit to have chickens (permit fee is waived.....hoorah!)

Temperature Variations and How They Affect the Grapes

                                                             (bud break - 2016)

One of the more popular questions I get from customers is: "Are the grapes affected by the fluctuation in temperature we see in the early Spring?" I wish the answer could be provided with a simple yes or no, but the fact is that only a long-winded answer provides the detail needed to fully understand what happens.

To begin we have to go back to October or November. It is after harvest now, and the grapevines have been collecting the needed carbohydrates to get them through the winter and jump start their growth the following Spring. As the temperatures start to drop, there is something called "cold weather hardening" where the shoots begin to change from their green color over to brown, and as time goes on a covering of bark will develop. The buds, as small as they appear to be, begin going through a dehydrating process that will provide a kind of protection from the icing conditions that are apt to follow during the winter months.

I am not sure when we arrived at our "rule of thumb", but what we have found is that when temperatures begin to warm up, we forecast our bud break (or bud burst) when we have 10 straight days of 50 degree average temperatures.During these warmer days, the air and the soil begin their climb, which influences the flow of water and nutrients from the soil up into the trunk, and eventually to the buds. To put it in more scientific terms, the warming of the soil is associated with the increased osmotic pressures in the xylem, with the upward movement of the water containing various cellular signaling molecules, hormones, and nutrients. The buds become re-hydrated and they become deacclimated (i.e they get re-introduced to warmer temperatures and less resistant to cold spells). You know all this is in high gear when you go into the field and find that the vines are bleeding from all the pruning cuts made during the winter.

If the vines have started to wean themselves out from their winter mode, there is apt to be plenty of water now in the trunks and buds. A reduction in temperature in and of itself is not really a problem here.A mild short term cold front is likely to just calm them down a bit, but a freeze has the potential of causing severe frost damage by killing the newly formed buds or splitting the trunks. A prolonged cold period can also cause problems, because once a vine has decided to come out of dormancy, it is very difficult to return to it's resting phase.

So what can be done? Prayer is on the list of viable options. There are other choices however, and one has to consider the cost vs. the potential losses. For a consistent year to year problem, wind mills have been set up to keep air flowing through the vines. Having a helicopter hover over the vineyard is a variation of this. Burning tires(certainly not preferred)  or having other small fires may raise the temperature in the vineyard. I have heard of spraying oil on the buds, which may delay bud break by 2 to 20 days. And yet another option might be to spray water on the vines, thinking that a thin layer of ice might protect the buds from even colder damage.

What we did last year was to "long prune", which recognizes that we will loose some buds but hopefully we have enough good ones left to achieve the harvest levels we need. Delayed pruning was not really an option for us because we have a lot of vines but not a lot of hands to perform all the pruning required in a limited time before bud break.

Now let me add two other variables to this. Grape types come into play. Our Seyval Blanc has already seen some bud swell, which puts it on the teetering edge of popping open. Our other varieties show bud formation by their hard knobby presence, but they haven't shown signs of increasing in size due to tissue wetting. Some say that younger vines have bud break sooner than older vines; I have not seen any consistent example of this. Lastly, how much water is in the soil has an influence too. Wet Falls, melting snows, or Spring rains all add water to the root absorption zones, and it this water that finds it's way up to the trunks, buds, and shoots via capillary action or transpiration.

I have looked at last year's temperature charts which confirm my 10-day hypothesis (a sample of one year I might note). In this month of March 2017, even though we have had fond memories of warm spells, the fact is that the longest period of 50+ average daily temperatures has been only 3 days (March 7th through 9th). What I do see down the pike in the last week of March is a forecast of a week long string of very warm 80+ days but sub-freezing temperatures at night. These all satisfy our 50+ rule. All I can say is: "Pray".

It's All About The Wine

As we slowly perform our final pruning tasks in the vineyard, doing some last minute weedwacking, and making plans for what we want to do in regards to fungicide spraying and fertilizing, we often are too concerned with how we want this coming season to perform than the final results of this past year.

Spring not only brings on bud break, which is apt to be really early this year, but it corresponds with the bottling of the 2016 harvest. We try to get it done in March and April; after that it starts to become warm in the winery which may negatively affect the wine. Diane, who has the primary winemaking responsibilities, is doing a balancing act as to how to apply all the fluids we have in the tanks. From what is still there,there is nearly enough to make 600 more cases of wine. Some of our prior year wines are running low or have run out. Others have been a rousing success and have to be replaced or backed up.

She recently released two wines that are starting to have a nice customer following, even after only a few weeks. Our Petit Verdot, another one of our red Bordeauxs, is an inky red color, more body than our award-winning Cabernet Franc, with the dark cherry, red currant, and spice notes. Those that fell in love with our Cabernet Sauvignon have now made this their new favorite. This is our first vintage year for this grape.

  The  other wine that we released just last week is our new Hog Island Sweet White. Over the last 2 years we have offered it's counterpart, a Hog Island Sweet Red, which is very port-like with 3% residual sugar. We sold out of the 2014 and are now in the 2015 vintage year. The "White" is a blend of Seyval Blanc and Scuppernong, which is an American grape, quite sweet in nature and when the time comes to harvest it, it is the size of a ping-pong ball. The Seyval Blanc "tames" the Scuppernong, which is a cultivated muscadine. The Hog Island Sweet White is more in line with the local's preference for sweet wines, just as they like their sweet tea. If one had to find a comparison, I would say it is like a Moscato, with 10% residual sugar.

So, as we head into the 2017 season, our motivation is that the quality of our wines start in the vineyard. The healthier our fruit, we believe, will be positively reflected in our wines.

Just a One Bull Town

Number Eleven.

For those of you that follow my blogs, if there is any conclusion you come to, it's that none of my lessons have come to me the easy way. And increasing the size of my herd is one of them.

I remember when I purchased my first four cows, all having been inseminated and confirmed pregnant. I did the quick math and thought 9 months from then I would have 8 cattle. And then 12 months from then another 4 to make 12. And then another 12 months later up to 20. You get the drift. Compounding cattle is soooo easy.

If you travel back in time I had to ditch 2 of the cows with their new calves because they were killing me with their nightly escapes through the fence. There weren't holes in the fence. The fences were't collapsing for any reason. They were 4-wire fences that were tightly built. Cows didn't care. Every night they would go over to this one particular spot....do a body slam, and off the entire herd (8 cows and calves by this time), traveling the back way 1 1/2 miles until they "joined" another herd of cows in another farmer's field. Sound travels easily in the flat lands, and my cows knew where their fellow bovines were. The grass had to be greener over there, right?

So in this business you trade off trouble makers or lack of sleep and stress will kill you. Moving them to someone else's herd isn't sending them trouble, because the herd dynamics in the new location, not to mention the scenery, is different and it quickly eliminates their escape instinct.

The following year I was now down to 2 cows and 2 heifers (their female calves). I had them all  A.I.'d, but only one out of 4 took. Talk about bad odds. And the one that took gave me a bull calf. Geez.......and this was using sexed semen which was to have given me an 85% chance of getting a female calf. Where are the statistical odds when you need them to  work in your favor?

I watched the bull grow, and fortunately I was able to trade it off for another bull from a farmer located one county over. He also has Red Angus.....400 of them! Didn't feel like line-breeding my stock, which is what they call a son being allowed to impregnate it's mother and sisters who happen to be near by. My new bull is tagged #11.

The following year I did the A.I. thing again. Even had the Vet come back and confirm that all 4 were pregnant. He used the ole "hand up the you know what" method instead of his Ultrasound machine. He said they were all pregnant, but once again the touchy-feely method had it's flaws. Only my 2 new cows provided calves; the 2 oldest cows didn't take. Don't know what the Vet felt, but it wasn't a 1st trimester calf in these two instances.

If you've been keeping count, I now have 7 cattle: 2 older cows, 2 new mommas, 2 heifer calves (thank heavens sexed semen worked this time), and a bull. Recognizing I purchased my original 4 cows in December 2012, we are now 4 year's later and I haven't quite gotten my head count to where I started. So easy.....I think not.

Now let's see if the bull has better results than semen in a straw!

Matthew, Marriage, and Motherhood: Part 5 Pruning Again

It is December now. We have done all we can do for the 2016 season, shy of completing the 2015 bottling which we are way behind on. The vineyard lay dormant now. Though we haven't had any deep frosts this fall, we have had a few lighter ones which have led finally to complete leaf loss. Our American grapes were the holdouts as usual, hanging on to their leaves until a windy rainy day finally provided the power to blow the leaves off.

This is the 2nd season that Rich has been here to help with the pruning. He remembers that things get mighty cold in February if you wait that long to complete the pruning. He has already jumped into the Seyval Blancs to begin the process of "long pruning"; getting rid of the majority of the growth and only paying marginal attention to bud count. There still is some attention given to spur distribution, but it comes as a subconscious act instead of a planned endeavor.

Rich and I seem to communicate via psychic transfer. He leaves me the Scuppernong grapes to prune. They are a bear to cut back. For every one vine I train, he has done 4 of the French. There is just so much crazy growth in these American grapes. The vines look like vineyard anarchy in action. But if you don't train them, they will train you (into complete dismay).

Rich tackled the Nortons (another American grape) last year and feels comfortable pruning those back. They are trained different than these Scuppernongs, using the the Geneva Double curtain trellis system.

When you first get into pruning the Scuppernong, you are trying to set up a trimming system where there isn't one readily apparent. If you look closely at the picture above, off on the right side above the rip in the cloth you see 2 clumps. Look even more closely now and you can see between the 2 clumps a couple of wires.   Basically speaking, everything above those can be cut off. One can do that once you identify the cordons (the 2 side arms), and any other long growth that should be kept if you are planning on rooting some cuttings in the Spring.

The shoots and canes are all tangled, and when you prune there is no time to be tender. Grab a shoot in your left hand, cut it to length with the shears in the right hand, and pull mightily to remove the tangled shoot from the mass. Repeat until all are trimmed to the wire....maybe 50 times.The entire vine shakes when you pull, and unfortunately there may be another shoot you wanted to keep that was torn off by the impatience and lack of care in the pruning process. But if you are careful to the nth degree, you can easily spend an hour on just one vine. As it is, this one took 20 minutes.

What I have described is "long pruning". We purposely worry less about final bud count or spar dispersion. Those are concerns we worry about during the 2nd pruning in March. This is when we go back and make sure spars (what is left of the cut shoots) are spread out among the 2 cordons, and that these spars are left with 4 to 6 buds. It is a counting game, but with practice  it moves along.

In the spring Hampton Roads Vineyard & Winery will be holding a series of seminars. The Vineyard will be having 3 sessions that are titled: "So you want to be a wine grower", which will include the basics to put together a commercial vineyard, a thorough pruning session, and lastly a Business Plan for establishing a vineyard.  Right now there are 30% fewer vineyards in Virginia than are needed to support the growing number of wineries. Anyone wanting to attend should drop me an email (DSheldon23883@gmail.com)so I can send out the registration form. Point of note: there is a fee and limited seating. The Winery will be providing seminars for the aptly titled "So you want to be a winemaker", that will cover the basics of wine making, offer tasting and blending sessions, and hopefully get involved in the actual bottling process. Watch our website for details.

Matthew,Marriage,and Motherhood Part 4:2016 In Review -Calving Season

Even though the vineyard and winery are the mainstays which keep this operation running, I need to remind people that it is still a farm. Sure, we farm things other than peanuts, corn, cotton, and soy. Grapes are our "row crop" of choice. But we still have our animals (Diane says they are my animals, not hers).

Our four Red Angus cattle were artificially inseminated (AI) way back in January, and if they were true to form, they were all due October 22nd. There really isn't much for me to do during these 9 months, but as the date came ever closer, I went back to the fields 2 or 3 times a day and walked around the cattle to see if we had any new arrivals. I've gone through this calving thing a couple of times, but it is always a high time of anticipation during calving season.

The first calf to drop was from one of our heifers. It was her first (that is what a heifer means, afterwards it is a cow) born early on October 16th. Sprite little calf. Was up and hobbling within hours. Had many of Mom's features.....nice shaped head, ears that went out horizontally. We don't name our cattle, but this one will get a tag number: D44A. The D represents the year born 2016, the 40 shows the female blood line, and the A shows who its mother was in that blood line. No need to give the bull in the process much significance, though it is noted on the tag above the number. "Sun King" was the absentee father.

I have up to 3 days max to tag this calf before it can out run me or squirm it's way out of my arms. Also, it is during this very short period when the mother has this rude awakening that it has a young one to care for and becomes very very protective. Nothing worse than a 2000 pound angry mother coming straight at you. You can't stop it. You can't out run it.Dangerous times for someone only carrying a tagging gun.

So I was out walking the next day to see if the maternal instinct had arisen in this new mother. She was in the middle of the pasture, eating grass with the rest of the herd. No calf in site. Did she abandon her? Is the calf lost or did it die overnight? Just seems strange to me that a cow would just leave it's new calf and go off on it's own to chew grass. So I started criss crossing the field trying to find the calf. I always keep an eye on the mother to watch it's eyes watching me. Generally they tend to look where the baby is to see if I am getting close, too close. The new mom gave no indication this time. Pretty much ignored me completely. But in time I found the calf, curled in a ball hidden in some tall grass.  It was in the next field where mom must of been hours before. It's ears were flickering. Must have just been tired from all this earthly stuff outside the womb.

Not to lose track that this was a major opportunity, I raced home to get my tagging gear. I returned to the field and pretended I wasn't interested in the calf and in a round about way worked my way over to the calf. Straddling the calf I held it down. It was not happy, or maybe it was just scared. A calf bawling for mom is a bone chilling sound.....enough to capture the attention of the entire herd, and especially mom. I had about 30 seconds before I would be head-butted into the next county.

Under duress the tagging gun always seems clumsy. I had this bright orange tag (think Home Depot orange) with the number already inscribed. I had to get it on the ear straight, with the number facing forward. I didn't want to hit any blood vessels in the ear so I had to feel around where I could penetrate the ear with this arrow sharp tag. I had done this before, but that didn't matter. this time A44X was coming at me. The cries were getting louder, or so it seemed.

And then like the calf roper in a rodeo competition, I jumped up having completed the task. The calf bounced up too, now that my human weight was removed. Mom was not pleased, but she had her calf back. Time for her to bond again. Licking the sore ear. Offering milk to her young one; warm milk solves a lot of ills.

D40A was the next one to drop, born five days later on October 21st, only one day early. It mother, another first time mother, seemed so disconnected from the whole process. This distance I see between the new mothers and their newborns is hard for a human to fathom. Just seems strange to me. Everything seemed fine for a couple days, but on Sunday October 23rd I spotted a problem. The calf had a severely bulging right eye. The swollen eye was white. Even a neophyte in this cattle business knew this wasn't good, so I called the vet right away.

My normal vet was not on duty that Sunday, so I ended up talking to a new vet I had never worked with before. Typical of vets who live around these large animals all the time, they asked that I have the calf segregated from mom before they come out. Nothing worse than wasting time as the owner chases down a sick animal. (P.S. to the Vet: nothing worse than taking a newborn away from it's mother !)

The mother in this case was the one heifer that had always allowed me to scratch it's ears. None of the others really let me get too close. Would it be equally friendly "knowing" I was here to help? I asked Diane to get involved here, primarily as a distraction. She walked in front of the cow, trying to turn it's attention towards her as I walked around the back side of the cow to get close to the calf. The calf was circling its mom about as fast as I tried to calmly approach it, always considering I might have to do a quick dodge out of harm's way should I push mom too far.

At some point the calf stood still, right next to mom. I slowly walked in, put my arm around the calf, picked it up and walked ever so cautiously towards the squeeze pen, where I could close up the fencing to protect myself from a cow who realized a bit late that it's calf had been kidnapped.

The vet finally showed up and gave the eye a good look. The prognosis was bad. She thought that maybe mom had given the calf a kick when it tried to get some milk. The eye looked lost, and there was some concern that the calf might be totally blind; fortunately it was not to be the case we found out later. Blood work was taken, an IBR shot was administered, and some antibiotics were delivered under the eyelid to reduce the swelling and deter any infection. We even got a chance to weigh it; a sprite 63 pounds after 2 days!

As of today, almost a month later, the two older cows have not provided calves. At this time they have zero chance of coming through. So what does that say about AI, even after the vet had confirmed they were pregnant? Not much I'm afraid. In the last 8 AI applications, I had 1 bull (last year) and these 2 new calves (both heifer calves by the way). 3 out of 8 even though I am paying for sexed semen, AI injections, and pregnancy checking is not a very good ratio.

Time to bring in the bull!