Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: April 2019

Hello and Welcome, 

  

This is an Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: April 2019. A FLOG Communication. 

And as the first real FLOG of the year, we would like to give you a little “peak” at what you might encounter on your visit to the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) via PDX this year where Amalie Robert Estate is a featured winery.

While it looks like a snow covered mountain, it is really a giant volcano getting ready to blow. It could happen at any minute, but in geological terms a minute can be a very long time.

Did you see any purple lilacs make their stunning debut this year? Here in Wine Country that is an indicator that the Pinot Noir vines are coming around from their 6-month hiatus (Not that they really went anywhere exciting during their time off). It is also the time of year Ernie switches his morning accelerant from French Roast to Bold Italian.

Ah, springtime in Wine Country. It reminds us that while you don’t have to be crazy to grow Pinot Noir, it certainly helps. April brings all four seasons in a weekly variety show. You want a crash course in climate change? Come on out to the farm and try to get something farmin’ (related) done!

And when that magic break of sunshine does appear, you will be glad you ordered a couple hundred gallons of bio-diesel when you had the chance and before everybody else wanted theirs. Tractors and implements, when properly engaged, can affect significant change.

As in a rotation of the cover crop from the fall mix designed to feed our vines and hold the soil onto the side of the hill in the face of 45 inches of annual winter rainfall. To the spring mix that provides a wonderful environment for our beneficial insects and also fixes nitrogen to feed our vines. These little plants draw moisture from just the top few inches of soil so as not to compete with the vines. It may be the vineyard floor, but it has a job to do like everything else. It is the Master Farmer’s job to figure that out. Sustainable cover cropping - Not everybody does it, but everybody should.

As previously described, in excruciating detail, a vineyard ecosystem is quite simply the physical implementation of a mental construct, rife with the effects of unintended consequences. In software terms, when something does not do what it is supposed to do you would say “That is a feature not a bug.” In farming, when you run a little short of cover crop seeds you say, “That is an experiment and this over here is the control.”

Another common farming phrase is “I meant to do that.” With that simple phrase, you can never make a mistake. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you brew decaf for the morning accelerant – an apparent mistake. Your caffeine deprived breakfast companion catches you out. When they push the point of you having made a mistake by brewing from the wrong container, you very boldly assert, “Oh, I meant to do that.” While this may lead to further interrogation, you have absolved yourself from having made a mistake.

But this is a powerful phrase and we caution that you use it with some discretion. At work for example, when you mistakenly open an E-mail attachment that brings down the entire corporate network – worldwide. Or maybe in front of the traffic cop who is interested in learning more about your decision to run a red light. Very powerful indeed.

And guess who is making an aerial assessment of the vineyard this fine spring. Yep, it’s our winged nemesis Vespula germanica, Aka: Those Damn Yellow Jackets. But with a little ingenuity and a strong will, we can turn this event to our advantage. And have some good fun in the process.

Yellow Jackets identified – Collect all four!

This is the time of year Vespula germanica (the chubby one with the bad attitude) is looking to establish new nesting sites. That means they are buzzing about and can be trapped. April or even into May is the right time to catch these blighters so you can fatten them up all summer long. Start with the standard cylindrical Yellow Jacket trap and add your favorite attractant. We like salmon scraps for bait, because Vespula germanica likes salmon scraps. That is bioengineering here in Wine Country.

Once you lure them into the traps, you can change their diet to suit your intended uses. Corn will fatten them up just fine and is not too expensive. Of course, once they are in captivity, they become a lot less fussy from a dietary point of view. However, they can get pretty cranky depending on how successful you were at filling the traps. You will want to resist the urge to name them.

Now, fast forward to your summer BBQ on the back deck. You can add a few of your fattened-up Yellow Jackets to the Chex mix. We recommend a little extra Worchester sauce in this preparation.

It is always good fun to add them to the ice cube tray with a little food coloring to obscure their presence. We like yellow because it looks like amber from thousands of years ago. While it is not a common occurrence, they can reanimate upon thawing.

And when someone asks how a Vespula germanica got frozen in their ice cube and then flew up their left nostril, you are ready with the most appropriate response (ever) – “I meant to do that.”

Of course the more creative adults will want to pull the wings off of them. Kinda cruel we know, but just remember they do have it coming to them. And much like ordering diesel, you will want to get your Epi-Pen prescription filled before you actually need to use it.

So there it is. The vines are awake, the vineyard floor has been turned, reseeded and showered upon. And we are on the hunt for Vespula germanica. Springtime in Wine Country, vintage 2019.

And that brings us to the numbers, with a brief introduction from the patron animation of farming.

“This April it was hot, and then it was not. And sometimes it rained, but only on you and for no more than just a day or two.

Tilling the soil and mowing the grass, that doesn’t leave much time to sit around on your …”

The first number to be aware of is 60. That is 24 old G’wzr vines and 36 new G’zwr vines, while in separate blocks, they will all be in fruiting harmony this year. Add that to the 50-some thousand Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Viognier vines and we have quite a unique mix of varietals here on the Estate. You may say random, we say eclectic. And yes, we meant to do that.

April Degree Days, aka heat accumulation, started the growing season off with a very respectable 105. Add another 2,000 and we can call it the vintage of the year. What follows is a somewhat brief description of the farming construct “Degree Days” for those inquiring minds that were too shy to ask or had more important mental challenges to conquer. As if…

A Degree Day is a made-up number. But it does represent the full wine growing season beginning in April through harvest. And being a number, it can be compared year to year providing all sorts of analysis paralysis (hard to do with colors). Numbers give us confidence, validation and a sense of comfort in knowing where things stand in relation to other similar things. Age, they say, is just a number, but hair loss is real.

Take wine reviews for example. Regardless of what you may have read, the 100 point scale is in reality a 16 point range from 85 to 100 inclusive. Degree Days here in Wine Country run the range from a very cool to cold growing season of around 1,700 to a very hot and intolerable 2,700. That is a 1,000 point range that provides a wide variability in the styles of wine produced from vintage to vintage.

Now wine berries have distributed themselves around the planet based on where the heat is, or is not. The Willamette Valley is a good home to Pinot Noir and other varietals that have a tendency to develop very expressive aromas and flavors while only accumulating enough sugar for moderate alcohol potentials. These two phenomena should occur at about the same time. Most of the time. And that is the time to harvest and ferment them into wine.

Other varieties grown in warmer regions, like the Napa-Sonoma nebula, would not develop aroma and flavor in the Willamette Valley before the end of the growing season. This would make poor quality wine that would have to be augmented with Syrah from eastern Washington. And the “Red Blend” category was born…

Thinking caps on. Back in the day when a loaf of bread was a quarter, Degree Days were calculated on paper ledgers using a pencil. A person with an outdoor thermometer would write down the high and low temperature of the day and average it. Please note the inherent systemic variability of sampling error in this system. If the average was below 50 degrees there were no Degree Days recorded because the vines are not getting anything done when it is that cold.

Any value above 50 degrees was written down as the Degree Days accumulated for that day. So let’s say your office thermostat is set to 72 during the working hours and 68 the rest of the time. The daily average high and low temperature is 70 degrees. That means you are accumulating 20 Degree Days per day, or about 600 degree days a month. Apply that to 7 months from April through October and you have 4,200 Degree Days in your office space. Maybe it’s time to change out the office vegetation with some Tempranillo vines.

But you don’t. Because the real average temperature is 72 degrees for about 8 hours and 68 degrees for about 16 hours providing a real average temperature of 69.33 degrees. This works out to 19.33 Degree Days per day, 580 per month and 4,060 per growing season. The variation in the vineyard space is significantly more pronounced with daily diurnal shifts covering 50 degrees or more. So just like evaluating fine wine, more samples are in order!

We derive Degree Days, as you would imagine, differently than most. Our weather station takes a reading every 12 minutes. Each 12 minute temperature reading is logged into an electronic spreadsheet that converts the temperature reading into a number representing the Degree Days for that 12 minute period. We then have the computer sum the 3,600 individual temperature Degree Day values into a monthly total. Add the months from April through harvest or October 31, whichever comes first, and that is the total Degree Days for the growing season. We then overlay the rainfall each month to add a bit of complexity to the growing season. Easy peasie, lemon squeezy.

And that is how we can tell you the high and low temperature of each and every day of the growing season and at what 12 minute interval it occurred. For April, we will just split the month into the first 15 days and the next 15 days. The first half of the month was cooler on average, with a high of 62.4 and a low of 35.1 (27.3 degree diurnal shift). The second half of the month was where the real heat was with a high of 78.4 and a very chilly low of 32.7 (45.7 degree diurnal shift). The Degree Day totals were 18 and 87, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

April 2018 came out of the gate with 110.1 degree days with a high temperature of 82.9 and a low of 31.50 degrees (51.4 degree diurnal shift). We are hoping to avoid the arid conditions that finished off that vintage, but the tail does not wag the dog as they say.

And yes, we had rain, 5.33 inches to be exact. We got all the right drops in all the right places. That served as a reminder that Ernie needs a new hat…

Join us next month when we will do a deep dive on shoot spacing, the number 12 and why you can never get rid of all those water sprouts. Here is a hint, they are called “epicormic buds.” You know, suckers.

Kindest Regards,

Dena & Ernie

Amalie Robert Estate Vintage Update: Bud Break 2019

Hello and Welcome, 

  

This is an Amalie Robert Estate Vintage Update: Bud Break 2019. A FLOG communication. 

They're back. On April 18, after a long winter’s nap, the vines are starting to show signs of life. And pretty much right on queue, you have just mailed off your National Mathematics exam to Uncle Sam. 

Why is it that the vines start to wake up when your dear uncle is collecting his due? Some have suggested making Election Day the very same day as Tax Day. Alas, that would take an act of Congress. The vines just need a little warm weather.

And some Farmin’ rain! We have had our share of that and more. The first two weeks of April saw quite the downpour here at Rancho Deluge. As a quick reminder, one-acre inch of rain is about 27,154 gallons and weighs in at about 113 tons.

Let’s break that down. An acre is 43,560 square feet and we farm about 35 of them. A football field, including the end zones, is about 57,600 square feet, so just about 1.32 acres. Now an inch, that is a pretty common measure. So just imagine an inch of standing water on top of a football field and that would be about 35,843 gallons.

Here at the farm, our 35 acres received around 5 inches of rain during April - before bud break. Temperatures were visiting the mid 30-degree mark and the cherry growers were praying that the intrepid little bees would venture out and pollinate their sweet little blossoms to prevent a very little harvest. Cherry trees are not self-pollinating, you see. Otherwise, it is going to be a short year for Willamette Valley cherries. They say cherries are a 2 in 10 crop. That means you make enough money on 2 seasons to ride out the other 8. That’s farmin’ in a nutshell.

Right, so the answer is 35 acres times 27,154 gallons divided by 1,452 vines per acre over 15 days will yield just about 44 gallons of water per vine, per day, every farmin’ day for the first couple weeks of Growing Season 2019. That kept Ernie off the tractors, which in turn saved on the diesel bill. A bit of a silver lining. But he will get his tractor time soon enough.

And so it begins. Tucking shoots and raising wires is next up on the agenda. Till in last fall’s cover crop then go back and plant a spring mix of Buckwheat and Vetch. We have taken the master farmer exam before. The questions are the same, but the answers change.

As far as the numbers go, don’t expect too much in the degree day category for April. But we did have both days of spring last week – the first day and the last day – where we breached the mid 70’s. Yeah, that was nice. Didn’t last though.

Our next big milestone will be when the vines begin to flower. That is usually in the first half of June, but not always. Vintage 2011 was an after vintage. As in flowering in July and a harvest after all the birds, rain and the rot. But it is all good - now. The wines, much like vintage 2007, are oh so pretty.

Once we see the flowers, then it is time to place your bets on a harvest date. Flowering plus 105 days in the Willamette Valley usually means Ernie can find something that is ready to bring into the winery so he can ferment it.

Kindest Regards,

Dena & Ernie

Amalie Robert Estate: 2019 Spring Cellar Report

Hello and Welcome, 

  

This is the 2019 Spring Cellar Report from Amalie Robert Estate. A FLOG Communication. 

It’s pruning time in Oregon wine country and let’s all pay our respects to the field hands that are actually doing the work. It is a cold, rainy, windy, flat out miserable time of year for field work. But a necessary function in the lifecycle of the vine. It is a New Year’s resolution we must keep as winegrowers. But soon enough it will be done, and new growth will emerge signaling the start of our 19^th growing season. Of course, your New Year’s resolutions may last longer than our winter pruning, but history and the human condition would not be on your side.

We would also like to open this Spring Cellar Report with a “Thank You” to everyone we have had the pleasure to FLOG this past year. Some of you have enjoyed it more than others and some of you more than you should. So, it should come as no surprise that Ernie has taken stock of all of your feedback and channeled that energy into his new book. You have no one to blame but yourselves.

My First Colonoscopy is a tender, probing, coming of age exposé of a young man relinquishing control to the invasive medical field for the first time. Set inside the healthcare labyrinth of today’s current state of affairs, Ernie relates his journey in excruciating detail from the posterior, first person point of view. As you might expect from Ernie, the appendices include a full and complete compendium of the Supreme Court oral arguments of each healthcare lawsuit adjudicated to date. Until a publisher is found, this will remain an “E-book”. E-book for Ernie, get it?

Right. While we do not have the traditional numbers of a growing season FLOG communication, we do have a single number to share. Standing alone, and unafraid is the number 94. Well actually there are three of them, but each presented individually.

“Amalie Robert, whose vineyard is in the western part of the Willamette Valley, makes a very strong case for Syrah, but production of their two graceful wines is painfully small, as in just a few barrels of wine per vintage.”                           - Josh Raynolds, Vinous, February 2018

And this is the segue we were looking for to cover the main topic of this Spring Cellar Report FLOG. Going it alone or blending for complexity – how to decide? When Ernie took the CPA* exam at the University of Montana, seemingly a lifetime ago, it was a 3 day exam. East Coast and West Coast all started at the same physical time, so no one could call to the other coast and reveal the mental horrors that await. Back in the day, the University of Montana did not offer PTSD counseling. But there was the Foresters Ball.

* CPA is a TLA that means Certified Public Accountant, which allows you to guide others out upon the great accountant-sea. FYI - TLA means Three Letter Acronym. Now you know.

The 3 day CPA exam was comprised of the standard multiple choice questions, compare and contrast scenarios, explain this (if you can) in the limited space provided and the ubiquitous true or false. Ah, the binary choice of yes or no, go or no go. Ernie knew of these things as he had already earned a degree in the Byzantine new world of Computer Science. He had been a bit-twiddler for 4 years. They were 1’s and 0’s in the newfangled computer world but still, a binary choice would apply to the second oldest profession. Derivatives be damned!

While we make no secret that the 5 gallon bucket may in fact be the most useful piece of winery equipment we own (just don’t bucket-up), the unadorned quarter is the tool of choice for conquering the true false scenario. The quarter is ideally designed to help you cope with this challenge. It is unambiguous, it leaves no doubt in the course of action to take. Heads it’s true and tails it’s false. Next question, proctor.

These matters are usually handled in a very discreet manner. Typically, the quarter is flipped in such a way that it lands on the back of one’s hand, quietly revealing the correct answer to the flipper. However, at 8:00 am on the third morning after a hard day’s night, the physical dexterity of the college student can falter. It is at this moment you discover, along with the entire population of the exam room, that the hardwood floor, while it is there for you, is not your friend.

Now it is theoretically possible that the quarter may land on its edge and quietly roll away before turning on its side to reveal the correct answer, but that is simply a mathematical construct. Much the same way that the square root of negative 4 includes an imaginary number – how convenient for mathematicians. In other words, it never happens in the real world and certainly not when you would desperately need it to. The proctors usually recover enough quarters over the 3 days to keep them each heavily caffeinated for a week or so.

The barrel room at Amalie Robert Estate provides a similar challenge. There are about 200 barrels of wine each year, more or less depending on the vintage, that need to be blended and bottled. Our job is to find a blend for each barrel. How do we do that, you may be asking yourself. Gird your loins, for the answer is about to be revealed.

It all starts, as you are free to imagine, with the bung hole. The bung hole is typically stoppered with a 2 inch diameter, silicone bung. A little-known fact is that Peanut Butter is colloquially referred to as “Bung Solder” – from Old English. Of course, it doesn’t really fit with the whole PB&J TLA. BS&J anyone? NFW!

The next tool we employ is the wine thief, again from Old English. This is a somewhat slender, one inch diameter glass cylinder that is about 10-18 inches long. Some are curved, some have a bulbous end and some are straight, with a point. However, each are designed for one purpose and one purpose alone, to directly enter the bung hole and “thieve” the contents.

The CBO (Chief Bung Operator) removes the bung from the barrel in question, inserts the wine thief straight down allowing it to fill with wine, and then with the opposing thumb sealing the top end hole, extracts the wine from the barrel. Opposing thumbs are so useful, they keep the rest of the animal kingdom from thieving our wine. That and a security system.

The contents of the cylindrical glass thief are then deposited into a wine glass for a thorough evaluation. Another portion of said contents is reserved for the lab where we will perform analytical analysis to ascertain its chemical composition. All very technical and not unlike the lab report from your annual exam. Milligrams per liter and parts per million, oh my!

Sensory evaluation is what is performed with the contents in the glass. The color of the wine, for everyone captivated by such things, is noted to be particularly red in most cases. Vehemently red in the case of Syrah.

WTF (Waft The Fruit) is a TLA for deploying the olfactory senses to the contents of the glass. This is usually done after one volatizes the esters with a twist of the wrist that sets the wine in motion against the curvature of the glass releasing aroma compounds. That simple procedure will display the vibrant colors of the wine and simultaneously release the captivating bouquet. It’s a twofer at no additional cost, a concept missing from most insurance EOB’s (Explanation of Benefits).

WTF?! Sometimes that TLA means the contents of the glass must stand alone. The wine is just so compelling that it would be a severe injustice to blend the wine from this single barrel with any other wine from the cellar. We mark that barrel as The Reserve in the case of Pinot Noir, or Top Barrel in the case of our Syrah. It is at that point that the winegrower at Amalie Robert Estate is bestowed a special gesture of gratitude.

As we continue to probe each barrel’s bung and examine the contents, we discover that certain barrels appeal to us in different ways. Dena may become very excited about a specific barrel of wine and Ernie, while acknowledging his vinicultural prowess, may find the wine to be very good, but not as compelling. Rinse and repeat and the roles are reversed. This is how Dena chooses her barrels of wine for Amalie’s Cuvée and Ernie marks his territory for Estate Selection.

From the more than you really wanted to know section, we can tell you that each barrel has a purpose in the blend. Mind you that we like to keep our wine in barrel for around 18 to 20 months. Somewhat of a rarity in Oregon Pinot Noir.

Some barrels are first fills. The wine is absorbing the character of the barrel’s newly toasted oak. This can add a pretty aroma and a sense of richness in the wine’s texture, provided the wine itself is up to the task of supporting this concentration of oak aroma and flavor. The amount of oak influence you detect in a wine is often dependent upon the number of first fill barrels in the final blend. Unless you were born upside down*.

Wine from barrels that have been filled 2, 3 or even 4 times still have some oak influence. Their primary contribution to the blend is in the mid-palate and finish. Stem tannins are more present when not masked by first fill barrels and will contribute length and staying power in the blend. These barrels can provide the structure or “back-end” to our blends.

And lastly, we have the Deadwood barrels. These barrels are sourced from the town of Deadwood in the old west. They are coopered out of long ago dead trees and have been preserved for several years in damp cool cellars. The air channels in the staves have been plugged by several generations of indigenous yeast lees to prevent air from coming in contact with the wine as it ages. Deadwood barrels do not impart any new oak aroma or flavor. The outside of the barrel is colonized with a cornucopia of mycelia (aka cellar flora). You never want to touch a Deadwood barrel, and yet we are drawn to them.

The wine in a Deadwood barrel is truly something to behold. No interference from new oak aromas, flavors or textures. The Deadwood barrel bouquet is subtle, savory and sweet, calling forth enduring memories. You are harkened back to summertime and the horse drawn carriages up and down the dirt roads of Deadwood, where street cleaners had yet to be invented.

The palate is ethereal elegance – presence without weight as they say. The wine from Deadwood barrels is simply sublime. Deadwood barrels are used in the blend to soften rough edges and expand the core of richness in the mid-palate. They allow us to complete our blends without the use of modern chemical fining agents or old world additives such as fish bladders, egg whites or ox blood.

We use Deadwood barrels to help us blend for complexity without the use of modern, or medieval chemistry. They are truly the key to our house style.

* Do you ever notice that sometimes when you are tasting wine with a group of people, there is one person that never seems to get on board with the really great wines? Everyone is going off about the wonderful aromas, flavors and texture of the wine. The room is filled with evocative descriptors and high praise. And yet, this person is not engaged. Well, there is a simple explanation for all of this.

That person was born upside down. While a rare phenomenon, it does occur. And when it affects a wine drinker, the results are predictable and well documented. You see, for the person who is born upside down, they are the opposite of the rest of the population - their nose runs and their feet smell. When you come across this person in a wine tasting setting, or locker room, please, be kind.

Moving right along to the edge of the cellar, and what have we here? A single barrel, albeit a very big one, of Chardonnay. As big as that barrel is, it has the same size bung hole as all the other barrels. A deep probing of this barrel results in a sunburst yellow stream filling the glass. The BFC (Barrel Fermented Chardonnay) is a good thing. However, a little stainless steel fermented Chardonnay in the blend helps to rein in the fatness from a new French oak barrel that can arise in the azimuth of the wine. A fat azimuth is not what we are looking for in our BFC.

Now here is an easy one, a gimme. These four barrels, which look like they came over on the Mayflower but are actually from Deadwood, hold Pinot Meunier. The wine came out of a single fermenter from wine berries harvested from a single block. Block 1 for those of you who are tracking and posting such things on social media, or are being tracked and posted on social media without your knowledge or consent by one of an ever growing number of “apps”.

Our goal here is to verify the quality of each barrel. Often times with the Pinot Meunier it takes more than one session to ascertain the quality level in each barrel. This procedure is repeated until Ernie finally says, let’s get this in a tank and bottle it before it is all thieved away and there is nothing left to bottle!

At this point in the cellar discourse, you may be wondering when the ubiquitous quarter will appear. Well, truth be told, it landed on its side and rolled into the farmin’ drain before we could catch up to it. You can only imagine the contortions on Ernie’s face as his eyes tracked that coin and his mind raced back to the shame of losing his quarter during the CPA exam.

However, all is not lost. Excel has a random number generator function that can produce 1’s or 0’s. We know this because we see some of the reviews that come out of the Wine Spectator (not ours, of course). Actually, we just made all that up. We are pretty sure they have a quarter. Full Disclosure: We do not submit wine to the Wine Spectator.

Let’s leave the barrel room for a moment and visit the CGR (Case Goods Room). Here we find our Bellpine Pearl Rosé (Blanc de Noir) and Pinot in Pink Rosé. You may ask yourself how did these wines get here? Why are they bottled just a couple months after harvest? We ask ourselves the same question. Apparently here on planet Earth, the cognoscenti decree that these wines must be consumed within 6 months of harvest date. Horseradish! This is one of the wine world’s greatest disservices to the wine consumer. Great Rosé wines should really be given the opportunity to at least come out of bottle shock, if not allowed to develop somewhat, before they are foisted upon the unsuspecting wine consumer.

And while we are all about transparency, hence the clear glass bottles holding our Rosé’s, we do have another one of Ernie’s experiments to report on. That bucket perched on the lab table holds half of this years G’WZR harvest. Just about 5 gallons, or 2 cases of his latest love of labor. He thinks it is his best ever, pretty farmin’ good he will tell you. Come on by this spring and we will just see about that.

A successful failure is what happens when you do not succeed at your primary goal, however find yourself better off than when you started your endeavor. Put another way, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Well, 2017 gave Ernie a successful failure with his S. Rosie (Syrah Rosé). The good news is that the fermenter of Syrah was great, but the Rosé, well not so much. So he tried again this year deploying his prior year’s experience, and Voila! we have a S. Rosie from 2018. Just 7 bottles (minus 1), that Dena got to bottle by hand, but it is a damn righteous wine. After that bottling, Dena was bestowed a special gesture of gratitude by the winegrower at Amalie Robert Estate.

So, that is a little peek inside the bowels of the cellar at Amalie Robert Estate. They say every picture tells a story and certainly every barrel has a bung (hole). Look out for our upcoming Earth Day Open House E-mail and then come scope us out!

Kindest Regards,

Dena and the Winegrower at Amalie Robert Estate