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Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog: A Manifesto For Change In The Wine Industry.

Then make sure you join Marylanders for Better Beer and Wine Laws and, of course, Free the Grapes to show support for your local family farmers, your local wine industry, and  your state’s depleted treasury.  (Facebooker’s, you can Fan these groups as well.  Please do…)

Wash. Co. Lawmakers See Economic Boost in Wineries.

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!

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.

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…”

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…