Winemaking ~ 2009 Harvest
KERRY NORTON
DIRECTOR OF WINEMAKING
Kerry Norton joined Columbia Winery in early 2007 as Director of Winemaking. Prior to joining Columbia Winery, Norton served as winemaker for Covey Run in Washington, where he spent eight years crafting highly acclaimed red and white wines. Prior to Covey Run, Norton was winemaker at Eola Hills Wine Cellars in Oregon. Norton received his Bachelor of Science degree in Food Science from Oregon State University and his Master’s degree in which he focused on acids and pH in Oregon grapes and wine.
View a video clip on Winemakers Kerry Norton and Kate Michaud discuss winemaking and new ownership by Ascentia Wine Estates.
Winemakers Journal 2009
October 12, 2009
This has been an amazing vintage – the most compressed I have ever seen. I am speaking in past tense because it is already just about over. All of our red grapes are now picked except the oddball varieties – Mourvedre, Sangiovese and Barbera. These are scheduled for this week. The only whites not in are about 1000 tons of Riesling.
We can bring in 200 tons of Riesling a day and it needs to come in. This year the grapes were early, the birds left early for the south, and winter has arrived early. How did the vines and birds know what we never suspected? Last weekend cold Canadian air moved into eastern Washington and it toasted the leaves off most of the grapes in the Yakima Valley. Deprived of its leaves, the grapevine no longer creates sugar to sweeten the fruit. Add to this the threat of rain which begins tomorrow and the fruit will begin to deteriorate. So we are bringing in the remainder of the crop as fast as we possibly can.
This looks to be a very good red year with plenty of color and generous warmth in the wine. Whites are unusually aromatic and the winery smells great. I usually categorize years as red years or white years, depending on which turns out better. Wouldn’t it be great if 2009 produced both great reds and whites!
Moving
Construction of our new barrel room adjacent to Pacific Rim Winery in West Richland is proceeding on schedule. We lowered some of our largest blending tanks – the ‘Twin Sisters’ – into the room before putting the roof on as they won’t fit through the door. When finished in December, Columbia’s barrels will reside in a state of the art cellar. Our barrel crew is counting the days!
September 19, 2009
As I write this Columbia is only a week into harvest. We started bringing fruit in on the 11th with Red Willow Merlot. It really is a ritual – the first block of grapes harvested every year is the East Saddle Merlot, which benefits from the warming that the morning sun gives. Eastward facing vineyard blocks break bud a little earlier in the spring and the soil and vines warm up an hour or two earlier in the morning as opposed to westward facing blocks. They also escape the worst afternoon heat spikes because the sun angle in the afternoon is less direct on the ground. That is why some of the world’s greatest vineyards – the Cote d’Or, for example – are situated on east or southeast facing slopes.
This is an extremely early and ripe year – 7 to 10 days ahead of average – and we are seeing the grapes ripen quickly and closer together than usual. We picked the Red Willow Syrah immediately after the Merlot, and some of the Red Willow Cabernets are already quite sweet, although the flavor is lagging behind the sugar. The only remedy is to wait for the flavor to come, as it will. I am noticing this year that the red grapes do seem to have good quality tannin structure at a moderate Brix level, and I have been able to pick the grapes earlier sugar-wise as compared to 2008.
I was out at Red Willow on Wednesday morning, and life was perfect. Mount Adams loomed in the western background against a crystal blue sky. Sulphur colored butterflies chased each other through the alfalfa fields and clouds of swallows began to congregate on the telephone wires, itching to start their migration. Mike Sauer dashed from block to block of grapes on his four-wheeler. He now has many small winery customers, each with their own picking schedule and truck to load – coordinating it all requires tremendous energy and good organization.
Next week we will finish up the Syrahs on Monday and then pick the Gewurztraminer – I like to get it nice and ripe to let the spice flavor develop. Thursday we take the Riesling – I haven’t yet decided whether to ferment it separately this year or not. It makes a lovely dry styled wine with hints of tangerine in the nose. We currently don’t have a dry Riesling available for the wine club but it could happen…that is one of the great things about being part of a small company once again.
More news in a couple of weeks!
Kerry
April 23, 2009
Spring is finally here in Washington state and the recent stretch of nice weather has triggered budbreak. This is quite a bit later than average, although it may not affect harvest date, which is more influenced by bloom date. A warm spring could put us back on schedule.
Winemakers Harvest Journal 2008
September 28, 2008
October 12, 2008
Hello, everyone! This is the first harvest report of the 2008 vintage. Now that we have moved all of Columbia’s production to eastern Washington, I want to keep in touch with all of our west side (that is west of the Cascades, not west of Lake Washington) employees and customers and this is one way to do that.
Those of you have been to the Yakima Valley know that it is a completely different world from the Seattle area. We have been enjoying mostly sunny days with a few exceptions. It is the sunshine and arid climate that makes eastern Washington such a great place to grow wine grapes. We did have one day of rain on Saturday the 20th that settled the summer’s dust but didn’t harm the grapes. We are starting to notice a little botrytis forming on the Riesling, perhaps as a result of that rain, but this is a plus in that variety as it makes the wine a little richer. Botrytis tends to infect grapes with soft, thin skins, primarily Riesling but also Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris.
We started picking for Columbia on Friday September 19th. This is about ten days to two weeks late. We had a long cool spring and a resulting late bloom and this has made many crops later than usual. The 1999 harvest started even later. The pundits predicted disaster that year, but it turned out to be a beautiful vintage due to a long Indian summer. The 1999 whites ripened with more malic (green) acid than usual; the reds were loaded with color, tannin and acidity and are all still holding up well in the bottle. So far, 2008 looks to be reminiscent of 1999.
This year the early grapes are late, but the late ripening grapes are early. We expect to be very busy in early October when the Cabernet is competing with the Chardonnay! Perhaps the one exception to this rule is Riesling, which is our latest ripening grape and still looks to be very late. We will probably bring it in with lower sugars and higher acids just to get it all in the door by the end of October. Expect plenty of German style Riesling this year.
Our Winery
Columbia’s production is now located along the Roza canal a few miles NE of Sunnyside, along the northern edge of the irrigated district on the slopes of the Rattlesnake Mountains. If you want to see it on Google earth they are currently showing a nice picture taken during a past harvest. See if you can find it. There is a grape truck on the scale and plenty of activity. We have two large buildings and are currently getting ready to build a third to house Columbia’s tanks and equipment. The winery is large, clean and efficient and has a beautiful view of Mt Adams and Mt Rainier most days. Surrounded by the 200+ acre Phil Church vineyard (named after one of the founders of Associated Vintners), we are centrally located with respect to all of our Columbia and Yakima Valley vineyards. Logistically speaking, it is so much easier to make good wine here when the vineyards and the winery are relatively close together.
Red Willow
Red Willow is still the centerpiece of our vineyard sourcing. Mike Sauer’s fruit is exquisite this year. We have already taken the Merlot, Gewurztraminer, Riesling, Viognier, and most of his Syrah and the wines are loaded with fruit, concentration, and color. Almost everything is hand harvested with a speed and efficiency that is breathtaking. Mike built a special trailer to hold our short ‘David Lake’ bins so that the bin never touches the ground. The pickers pick into a small plastic container that is strapped to their stomach, then dump the grapes into the bin. Using this system a good picker can make up to $25/hr picking grapes because the inefficiency of holding a bucket with one hand while you cut with the other is eliminated. Full bins are temporarily housed in a refrigerated storage room before being transferred to a truck for delivery to the winery that evening.
This year we are fermenting the smaller Red Willow lots in punchdown bins. This system is more laborious but produces softer, richer wines. Most of the smaller boutique wineries in the state make their red wines by punching down. I used to make Pinot Noir in Oregon exclusively by punching down. At times we had over a hundred bins to punch down twice a day. In those days I actually did some of the punching. Today I let the younger guys do it.
The next new variety?
While walking vineyards to monitor ripening, I recently made a chance find in Dave Minnick’s Pinot Gris. A bud mutation had occurred on one vine, resulting in a shoot that carries different colored grapes. Pinot Gris at full ripeness is a deep coppery red color. The grapes that developed from the mutated bud are yellow-green and show none of the typical Pinot Gris color at all. They also taste different and they are quite good. The Pinot family is particularly prone to mutation. By propagating new plants from the wood on this shoot, one could eventually produce enough plants to plant out this new clone of colorless Pinot Gris and make marketable quantities of wine from it. Blond Pinot Gris, anyone?
October 12, 2008
Dodging the Bullet
Last night I went to bed fully expecting that we would be experiencing an uncommonly early hard frost of 25-27degrees F. That was the weather prediction. The good news is that we got lucky and the only vineyards that even got below freezing were those planted at the bottom of the valley. The better winegrape vineyards are always sited so that they have proper air drainage so that the cold air on frosty nights slides down the slope and away from the grapes.
If you are a grower with enough money to afford a wind machine, which resembles an airplane propeller mounted on top of a tower, you can gain crop protection down to about 27 F. The propeller sucks down warmer air from above and blows it toward the ground, creating a lot of turbulence and protecting an area of about seven acres around the machine. Wind machines are expensive ($25,000+ apiece) and may only be used a few nights a year, but they often make the difference between having a ripe crop and having no crop at all.
The Phil Church vineyard, which surrounds Columbia’s production winery in eastern Washington, sits on a long gentle slope on the northern edge of the irrigated district at about 1200 feet elevation. There are wind machines scattered about the flatter spots and gullies. These machines have to be fueled with propane or diesel and ready to go as soon as the temperature dips near freezing. Last night’s ‘frost’ was predicted several days ago, so the vineyard crew went out for a maintenance check on Friday and found – four machines had had their radiators stolen! Metal theft is a huge problem in the valley and there are well-organized and equipped gangs of thieves who routinely steal farmers blind of anything valuable that is lying around the farm – metal, diesel, equipment. Even sprinkler heads are whacked off, stolen en masse and sold to disreputable metal dealers who buy them by the pound. A vineyard or an orchard is much too large to be fenced in and locked up.
A Long Slow Harvest
We have now used about ¾ of the harvest days which nature allocates to us, but have only brought in less than 1/3 of the crop. The next week is predicted to be dry and partly cloudy with highs in the 60’s and lows in the upper 30’s. Grapes will gain sugar very slowly under these conditions. Sugar accumulation is a function of temperature and sunlight and proceeds quickly during warm, sunny fall weather. Flavor development, however, seems to proceed at its own pace and falls behind the sugar accumulation under those conditions. When it is cool, though, the flavor keeps in balance with the sugar accumulation. This coming week is going to provide us what we call ‘hang time’ – a period when the flavors can catch up with the sugars under dry, cool conditions. It will also give us some breathing room to get this mountain of grapes in the door!
This coming week is Chardonnay week – Otis Block 6 (the Espiguette 352 clone) goes to our unoaked Chardonnay wine club offering, and Wyckoff will be harvested for the classic Columbia Wyckoff Snipes Chardonnay. These will be hand-picked and delivered to the winery for whole cluster pressing. We now have all of our Gewurztraminer and Cabernet Franc in the door. Merlot will wind up tomorrow. Malbec has started and Syrah is coming into full swing. Petit Verdot and Barbera are still far away. We will leave these out as long as possible because they still have unbelievably high acidity and need to take advantage of this wonderful hang.
October 30, 2008
It is almost Halloween and we are approaching the end of the longest stretch of beautiful weather I can remember. Almost every October day has been sunny and unseasonably mild – perfect for ripening winegrapes in a late year. A month ago, I was predicting a very difficult October filled with frosts and rain and rot. What a great surprise!
We are now finished with Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Merlot, and Syrah. It is time to clean up the Chardonnay, Cabernet and the whole litany of eclectic varieties that make winemaking interesting to winemakers. We make small amounts of wine club offerings from Grenache, Malbec, Petit Verdot, Mourvedre, Sangiovese, and Barbera. All of these cutivars hail from southern France or Italy – balmier climates than eastern Washington –and need the entire growing season to get ripe here. They hang on the vine until the frost hits or until the sunshine stops. Yesterday was the last nice day of the year and we have picked our little lots of special grapes and tucked them into small tanks and punchdown bins in nooks and crannies of the winery.
We had a little scare with the last load of Red Willow fruit. There were five lots of grapes on the same truck – two lots of Cab, some Malbec, the Barbera and five bins of Mourvedre. Mike Sauer has always taped an identifying card on the bin, but in the past they were shipped to Columbia in an enclosed reefer van. Now that the grapes are coming to our eastern Washington production winery the bins were shipped on a flatbed. When they arrived after dark, the cards had blown off!
Both Hal Hanifl, our new assistant winemaker, and I spent an hour and a half trying to identify each box by taste. Fortunately, Mike had loaded like with like and our efforts were successful. Some hints: Barbera has large berries loaded with acidity; Malbec is a very juicy, slip-skin grape; the two blocks of Cabernet were not together; and Mourvedre grapes have a unique flavor that is hard to describe, but distinctive.
Celilo Chardonnay
I am happy to announce that Columbia is now receiving Celilo Chardonnay for the first time. This old planting (dates to the late 70’s or early ‘80’s) is situated above a 600 foot cliff at White Salmon, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon. The vines are planted on extremely deep soils of volcanic ash and grow without artificial irrigation of any kind. The vineyard’s location places it on the cusp of western Oregon and eastern Washington. Hood River is the wind-surfing capital of the nation because of the near-constant winds that howl back and forth through the Columbia River gorge, and the cool weather that comes with the winds tempers the heat and dryness of the Columbia Basin to create unique growing conditions at White Salmon. Celilo Vineyard’s Chardonnay block sits on the southeast side of the hill, which protects it from the winds yet exposes it perfectly to the eastern Washington sunshine. The result? Exquisite Chardonnay that ripens during the cool weather of late October. We took ours yesterday, pressed it whole cluster, and the juice is fragrant and limpid.
Otis’ Vineyard
Columbia’s long association with Otis’ Vineyard, named for owner Otis Harlan, has produced some great wines (try the 2002 and 2003 vintages of Columbia’s Otis’ Cabernet). The vineyard is located in one of the cooler areas of the Yakima Valley, just north of Grandview. It sits on the edge of the first shallow bench above the valley floor on a very deep soil of powdery silt. The combination of deep soils, higher elevation and old Cabernet vines (the 1957 block is still producing – we picked it yesterday) results in very late harvests. Otis’ fruit will continue to trickle into the winery until sometime next week.
Many of the old vines are infected with various strains of leafroll virus which turn the leaves purple. This loss of chlorophyll slows down sugar accumulation so that the grapes ripen very late, but with moderate levels of sugar. As a result, the wines more closely resemble their Bordeaux counterparts than any other Cabernet that Columbia takes. I went to France this last summer and made sure to take along gifts of the 2003 Columbia Otis’ Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon because I knew it would appeal to the French palate.
Riesling
We are plunging headlong into a vast sea of Riesling. Riesling is our latest ripening white grape and it accounts for 50% of Columbia’s volume – more than 50% if you count the hundreds of tons that we are making for our custom crush accounts (yes, we make wine for other wineries as well as for ourselves). The trucks just keep rolling in, night and day. For the Cellarmaster’s Riesling, we need the fruit to hang until the grape berries have turned from green to whitish-yellow and have developed that wonderful peach and honeysuckle flavor. This means hanging it until the leaves have turned yellow and it is dead ripe. Tomorrow we begin picking Phil Church vineyard - 550 tons and our last Riesling vineyard. Phil Church was named for one of the founders of Associated Vintners, Columbia’s forerunner, and is the vineyard surrounding our eastern Washington winery.
Ice Wine
As usual, we will let Phil Church Block 12 Riesling hang for ice wine. After harvest, the vineyard crew will drape bird netting over the grapes and everyone will cross their fingers. There are no guarantees with ice wine – the grapes need to freeze and that means it has to get down to at least 19F to freeze them hard enough to get slushy ice in the berries. We pick them while frozen and pop them into our Willmes press, conveniently located about 300 feet from the grapes. Pressing frozen grapes is a slow process, especially in cold weather. The juice is released drop by drop over a 24-36 hour period and contains the sugar, acid, and flavor of the original grapes concentrated into perhaps half the volume of juice. The other half of the original juice volume remains inside the still-frozen grapes as ice.
What if it doesn’t freeze? At some point we will have to assess the chances for a successful ice wine harvest against the deteriorating quality of the fruit as it repeatedly frosts and thaws and gets rained upon. We can always bring it in for a late-harvest style or for blending into the Cellarmaster’s Riesling. Riesling makes wonderful, rich almost oily late-harvest wine that fits right into the Cellarmaster's Riesling style.