Check out Sonya Lowery’s “World Next Door” coverage of Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard  Who knew dogs were welcome?!  Nice!  We’ll be there soon, maybe over the Thanksgiving holidays!

Pretty cool!  I’ll bet if you’re a Boy Scout in Napa Valley you can earn a “Wine” badge.  I’d argue that it’s a skill every bit as important as being able to start a fire without matches.    Must try this the next time I open an inexpensive bottle! 

Seyval Blanc at J Rose Vineyards in Damascus, MD

For me, at least, the 2008 harvest is underway. It began on Saturday, the 13th of September when I picked 128# of Seyval Blanc at J Rose Vineyards in Damascus, MD. I was feeling really discouraged because Hurricane Hanna had dropped all kinds of water on us last week and then we got lots more rain all day Friday and most of Friday night — ending just before the Saturday harvest. So I didn’t have my hopes up…

But thanks to Jan Rieke’s excellent skills and a lay to the land that allows good drainage, the numbers were about all I could have hoped for: 21 Brix, 6.6 g/L of titratable acidity, and a pH of 3.17. I would have been pretty happy with those numbers even if it hadn’t rained!

Looks like Jan doesn’t have a web site but you can see the vineyard site on Google maps here.

A hopper full of Seyval...

My Seyval came from the vineyard at the far lower left. Chardonnay and table grapes are in the vineyard at the lower right, and Cabernet Sauvignon occupies the two vineyards nearest the house.

The grapes have been pressed, the juice cleared, the yeast pitched, and fermentation is underway. On Saturday the 20th it’s back to Jan’s to get some Muscat, which produced an incredible dessert wine for me in 2007.

A hopper on the hopper!

Following that it looks like Cab Franc and Lemberger from Bob Scott over at Bellendene Vineyards in early October.

Finally, the Napa Cab Sauv and Lodi Malbec will bring up the rear through the only guy I go to for out-of-state grapes, Rob Hamilton at MD Crush.

I’ll be reporting on all of those soon enough. Stay tuned!

OK, these past two years have been vicious. Back in 2006 a winemaker friend of mine came over and decided I had too many empty carboys. She threw down the gauntlet and I foolishly picked it up… Now I’ve got wine spread out across the whole year — a wine for almost every month it seems.

Let’s start in March — Dandelion. April? Southern hemisphere grapes, of course. Fine, skip May. June, July, and August are cherries and mulberries, wineberries, and — your pick — peaches, plums, or pears respectively. In September it’s Chardonnay and Seyval and in October the reds come in — Cabernet, Merlot and Pinot this past year. November is for Apples and sometimes late-harvest grapes. You get a few months to recover from the summer and fall whuppin’s and suddenly the dandelions are poppin’ again.

I just can’t do it any more.

I did a dandelion this year because my wife is fond of it. But I let the cherries go this time even though the 2007 vintage was spectacular. Same with the mulberries. Same with the wineberries. Same with the peaches. I have enough fruit wines to last many years at this point, even if I give the majority away. Heck, I don’t even especially like most sweet wines! :-/

But I do like grape wines. Like ‘em a lot.

So if you haven’t heard me say it before, well, hear me now. I’m quitting the fruits for a few years at least. Grapes will get my attention for the foreseeable future. I’ll gain the added benefit (in theory, at least) of getting my efforts on more of a schedule. Right now, there’s something that needs to be done to one wine or another every single weekend because I have so much wine in so many different stages of development. Going forward, I’ll have a harvest season, intermittent work, and a bottling period — I hope.

So my goal is to get all these fruit wines resolved (read: in bottles) before this year’s grape harvest — and to move forward in a sensible fashion from there.

So what’s in store this fall? Well I can tell you for sure that I’ll be doing some more Chardonnay, some more Cabernet and some more Merlot. Plus I’ve got a 100# of Cab Franc and 100# of Lemberger reserved with a local grower to experiment with. Another dessert wine? Maybe. They’re the only sweet wines I really enjoy.

But no more fruit wines for a good long time. Period. And I don’t care that my Dad wants me to “do something with those pears out back”. Seriously. I’m sticking to my guns this time.

Here’s an interesting post off of Belief.net by a spiritually and politically conservative blogger who calls Barack Obama “The Democrats’ Reagan”.

No matter who you support in the political process this year, I find it hard to believe anyone could find Obama’s South Carolina victory speech anything less than inspirational. It’s about 15 minutes long but if you’re as jaded and disappointed in the American political system as I am, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I, for one, have found the last 20 years of politics exhausting for the most part. So many people have subscribed to the fear mentality that Washington has built to bolster the status quo — fear of terrorists, fear of illegals, fear of a shaky economy, fear of diversity, fear of conservatives, fear of liberals — that the fear mindset will be difficult to shake off.

But not since King and Kennedy has anyone communicated as emotionally stirring a message of hope for the future as has Obama. Can he do it? Who knows. But at this point I’m inclined…no, eager…to meet the devil I don’t know. Because I know the other devil all too well…

And please folks, whatever your political bent, please, please participate in the debate…and then vote. Make no mistake, we’ll all be eating “Change” a year from now. Can we make that change be change for the better? I fervently hope the answer is “Yes, we can…”

If you look at this post by Amy Lillard, over on La Gramiere in my Blogroll, you’ll understand where this is coming from.

Wines really are a lot like your children in some ways. That is, they both are a product of nature and nurture, you make every effort to see that they turn out well and be all they can be, and you don’t really know how you did until years later when they make you proud (or profoundly disappoint you). And, of course, no matter how good or bad they turn out, you end up second-guessing yourself. If only I had done this differently or been more on top of that… Oh, if only I hadn’t had to go on that business trip I wouldn’t have had to miss that birthday party (or leave the wine on the gross lees a week longer than I had intended) and now…my baby…my baby is scarred for life. Etc., etc…

So I was really pleased to get some validation on my 2006 Chardonnay at the Frederick County Fair and the Maryland State Fair this year. A 1st Place ribbon from Frederick in the “Grape Wines, Dry, White” category and a 2nd Place ribbon from Maryland in the “Maryland Grapes, White” category. Because sometimes it’s easy to overlook faults in your own wines. (Or children, or pets for that matter. After all, you “grew up” with them and over time you develop certain calluses to their rough edges and other flaws.

So when someone compliments your child on his manners, or her poise, you get a nice warm feeling that maybe you did alright. Maybe the things you did right outweigh the things you did wrong. (Was it a Mondavi or a Rothchild that, to paraphrase, said “Wine is perfect while it’s still locked in the grape. Our job it to release it with as little damage as possible”. Or something like that…) Maybe…

It’s only a year old. It’s still a bit green. And the oak is just a bit too forward. But it’s an adult now. It’s in the bottle and, for all practical purposes, it’s “out on it’s own”. I’ve set the trajectory of it’s life for better or for worse. And only time will tell. If I think it’s showing nicely in the spring, maybe I’ll send it over to Winemaker Magazine’s national amatuer competition. After all, I think it’s a lovely wine.

Make me proud, baby…

Wow, I’m incredibly far behind on this blog and there’s so much to tell!  The 2007 harvest is over and the wine is well on its way to becoming what it will be.  But that’s all for another day.

For now, here’s your chance to comment my newest labels.  Only one shows the octagonal gold-leaf border but both are printed on the same stock.  One is more casual, the other more formal.  Should I stick with one or use both?  I was thinking of using the one on the left for my “formal” wines (Cabs, Merlots, Chards, etc.) and the one on the right on my fruit wines. (Blueberry, apple, peach, mulberry, etc.) But maybe you have a better idea or alternative…

Have an opinion? Please leave a comment!!

Thanks!!

Cowboy Junkies — Long Journey Home

I only recently fully “discovered” this incredible Canadian band even though they’ve been around for over 20 years now. Formed by three siblings and a “best friend” in the mid-80’s, I think everyone has heard this uncompromising group’s cover of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”. Don’t ask me why, but I never looked any further than that. Perhaps because — in spite of the incredible amount of talent here, and millions of record sales to their credit — they’ve never really had a chart-topping single. But, while their musical honesty keeps them a little below the mainstream radar, it’s also what makes them so satisfying to hear — especially live.

Recently, I found their album “Long Journey Home”, a live album and DVD combo from 2006, featured at one of the music stations at Border’s. And that was it — I was hooked. In addition to “Sweet Jane”, try my favorites from this album: their cover of Robert Johnson’s “32:20 Blues”, the raw twang of “Cheap Is How I Feel”, the hauntingly conflicted “Good Friday” and, naturally, the spare and definitive Junkies song “Misguided Angel”.

You’ll be hooked too…

Well, if the weather cooperates, it looks like I’ll be heading to Paw-Paw, WV, this weekend to pick wineberries. I’m planning to take more than a few pictures so watch for them soon.

The berries here in Maryland are really sporadic this year. You can find three bushes side by side on the same hillside with the same exposure and one will have berries so ripe they’re falling off the plant while the others are mostly green still — or orange at best. It’s gotta have something to do with the Easter freeze or the dry spring, I’ll bet.

My intent was for this to be my one and only summer wine this year. I’m out of carboys and I’m out of time. Something’s got to give, so…no peach wine, no cherry wine, no plum wine. Sorry. No. I just can’t do it…

Well, as those of you who know me may have predicted, I couldn’t just sit around waiting for the wineberries to get ripe. Making wine gets to be a compulsion at a certain point. I go to my Dad’s house for an innocent visit and, Lo! his Montmorency cherry tree is loaded with fully ripe, red fruit — and boy, it looks, smells, and just tastes great! Which reminds me of some of the awesome Door County, Wisconsin cherry wines I’ve had in the past.

“Hell, I can’t pick it”, he says, “Take it…or leave it for the birds.” So what can I do? I mean, come on, I can’t very well leave it for the birds, now, can I?? Really…what would they do with it?? So I pick it…and pick it…15 pounds worth.

Cool! That’s enough for a good batch of wine. Now I’ve got something to do while I wait for those wineberries.

It’s practically dark by now. I can’t tell a clean cherry from a blighted one anymore. So I go into the house with my bucket. I’m done.

“You know, my buddy Hiram has a couple of trees that he put in at the same time I put in mine”, my Dad says. “We bought them together from Don Deckman’s nursery”.

Cripes, here it comes…

“I called him and he says to come on over, they’re just going to rot.”

Sigh…I am so, so weak.

So 20 pounds and another day later I’ve got 35 pounds of fruit to process. I can’t say no. I just can’t. It’s a character flaw I guess…

Is that it? (Those of you who know me will say “Of course not”!)

Of course not! Because Dad has also got a Mulberry tree in his back yard. And I had an absolutely wonderful Mulberry wine that George Carroll made when we went to his house for the May wine club meeting.

Well, as long as I’m picking cherries anyway, I might as well, you know, throw a tarp down and see what I can shake out of that tree, right? I mean, at this point I’m overdrawn on time and carboys anyway. And I’m coming back tomorrow anyway to take advantage of Hiram’s trees. It really wouldn’t be any trouble to swing by here again on the way. Might as well go a little deeper into “debt”, I figure. Now I start to get excited…

(Oh how it all stinks of rationalization when I write it down!)

2 crummy pounds. The worst possible scenario. Too much to leave on the ground but not nearly enough for a worthwhile batch of wine. (Can you see where this is headed yet? Yeah, I thought you could.)

But that’s another post…

…are mostly taking place on the other pages of this blog at the moment. Sorry about the lack of “formal” posts lately. I want to get the infrastructure down first to make future updates quicker and easier. Thanks for your patience!

What to watch for? Well, for one thing, wineberries are coming in the first part of July. We’ll be making a trip to Paw-Paw, West Virginia, with friends to visit a special stretch of land where you can supposedly pick a 5-gallon pail full in 2 or 3 hours. Watch for pics and a write-up on that experience for sure!

Also, notice the new Bon Chiens tab above. If you have a good dog would like to represent him/her here, send me his/her pic (or a link to it) and a brief write up. I’ll see that it happens…