A Vintage Playoff
Harvesting syrah in the Yountville AVA of the Napa Valley in 2013
The baseball season is long, one hundred and sixty two games. After six months of effort it can come down to one game, indeed one swing of the bat. Months and months of effort can come down to one second.
Baseball, grapevines and winemakers start and end their seasons at the same time and in the same way. Some teams are happy to go home with a .500 season while for others nothing less than a championship will do. Every year we swing for the fences expecting nothing less of ourselves than winning it all.
Our season came to an end last Saturday when we picked our two cabernet franc vineyards in the Napa Valley. As usual, although Oregon and California are neighbors, the vintage experience is very, very different. In the Napa Valley it was smooth as silk. The early flowering in the spring gave us all the time we wanted to ripen our fruit to the very point of perfection. In Oregon the pace was not as relaxed as an approaching storm forced us into high gear to get our fruit in before the rains hit, which we did.
Once again as in baseball, there is more than one way to win the game. The 2010 vintage may have been difficult and the 2012 vintage warm and benevolent, but we made excellent wines in both years. Most importantly we made wines of the vintage, letting the natural character of the wines nature gave us to speak their own minds. Perhaps the biggest difference between big industrial wineries and artisan producers like Cornerstone Cellars is that their wines taste the same every year and ours don't. In baseball "small ball" often wins games, but in winemaking there is only one way to the pennant and that is by swinging for the fences each and every year.
Now as we finish the 2013 harvest, we are releasing the Cornerstone Cellars Cabernets from the 2010 vintage and our Cornerstone Oregon Pinot and Chardonnay from the 2011 harvest, while the 2012's are still resting in their barrels. Each of them tells the story of our dance with Mother Nature every vintage and we are confident you will find each of their stories as compelling as we do.
Dawn Over Another Harvest
The crew starts picking Oakville Station Merlot at the crack of dawn.
The dawn has yet to glow over the Vaca Mountains to the east. I am standing in the dark morning coolness as hazy figures glide through the blackness waiting for first light to signal the start of the day's work. Harvest 2013 is now seriously underway in the Napa Valley as we prepare to pick our first grapes for red wine this vintage, Oakville Station Merlot. Theoretically the harvest started here weeks ago for sparking wines (they're done already) and some white wines, but in the Napa Valley you're not getting serious until you start picking merlot, cabernet franc and, most of all, cabernet sauvignon.
While the scene sounds idyllic, and indeed it is, there is an undeniable feeling of pressure. We get just the one chance a year to make meaningful wines from each of these sites. There are no second chances. Every decision is critical, including the timing of today's pick, which I believe we have gotten just right.
Vintage 2013 is full of potential. Our early spring combined with a warm, but not too hot summer has been ideal for developing the complexity of flavors we strive for in our wines while preserving the essential acidity, which makes them live. It is our responsibility to fully realize this potential.
The Oakville Station Merlot was of such outstanding quality in 2012 that we have decided to produce not only our first single vineyard bottling of merlot, but our first Cornerstone Merlot ever. The 2012 Cornerstone Cellars, Oakville Station Merlot will be bottled next July and released after a year of bottle age in 2015. We only produced 100 cases and it will be exclusively available to our Cornerstone Club members. Looking at the outstanding quality of the merlot we are picking this morning, I have every reason to believe that 2013 will see our second single vineyard bottling from this very special vineyard block that is tucked into the famous To Kalon vineyard.
So as it happens each year in the natural cycle that is agriculture, our goals remain the same, but Mother Nature makes the rules. Our goal is to make elegant, refined wines that elevate your experience at the dinner table. Almost every year here in the Napa Valley nature gives us the privilege of achieving our goals. It is our duty to repay that privilege by doing the very best we can do. While that's a heavy responsibility, it is also a great honor. The ultimate expression of this honor is achieved when we can share our wines with you.
Harvest Report: Napa Valley 2012
Pre-dawn picking our 2012 Stepping Stone by Cornerstone Napa Valley Pinot Gris
The vintage 2012 has the potential to be one of the finest vintages in many years, if not one of the best ever on the west coast. There is a true potential to create something special.
In the Napa Valley we have already harvested some amazing fruit at Cornerstone Cellars. Our new Stepping Stone Pinot Gris, picked on September 11th, has just started it's long cold fermentation and the juice could not be more exciting. Packed with fresh peach and melon flavors and explosive acidity the wine is sure to be exceptional. This new vineyard, located directly in front of Silver Oak, is an A+ quality site and will produce a very complex pinot gris. A few days later, September 13th, we picked our sauvignon blanc. To the excellent Talcott Vineyard in St. Helena, this year we have added a new sauvignon blanc vineyard, Ink Grade on Howell Mountain, the same site where we harvest our Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon. We are co-fermenting these sites and fermentation is progressing slowly and perfectly. We ferment our whites at very low temperature to maintain all the aromatics so fermentation can take months, instead of weeks as in the red wine. The juice now is packed with mineral-ly, grapefruit flavors and aromas. It's delicious.
The red wine harvest started last Monday and Thursday, with merlot from Oakville Station/To Kalon and Ink Grade Howell Mountain. Merlot is the earliest ripener of the Bordeaux varieties. To say that this first fruit has lived up to our high expectations of this vintage is an understatement. The color is rich and dark and the juice is full of the velvety plum flavors that define great merlot. These tanks are now all yeasted after a cold soak of several days and fermentation is just starting to really roll.
With temperatures spiking into the 90s this weekend we could not have hoped for better weather to push the cabernet sauvignon to perfect ripeness. Over the next several weeks things will go into overdrive as we rush to bring in this perfect fruit before the rains and birds arrive.
- Upcoming scheduled picks:
- 10/1 - Oakville Station/To Kalon Cabernet Franc and Block 2 Merlot
- 10/3 - Ink Grade Cabernet Sauvignon, lower block 5
- 10/4 - Ink Grade Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon and Stewart Ranch Carneros Merlot
- 10/5 - Losey Vineyard Riesling and Atlas Peak Syrah
In Oregon the quality of the vintage looks equally sensational. Harvest should start in about two weeks, which should let me finish here before I have to head up there. While in Napa we have the staff at Laird to support us, in Oregon its totally hands on wine production with harvest meaning about three days of concentrated harvesting for Cornerstone Oregon. As the pinot noir and chardonnay must get into the fermenter as quickly as possible that means days that begin long before dawn and you finish only when that day's fruit is all processed - often long after dark. We have no scheduled pick dates in Oregon yet, but the upcoming week will give us a good idea when crush time will arrive.
Our biggest challenge after this heat spike may be that all the fruit will ripen at once, which will test our logistical systems (read Jeff and my backs) to be be sure we don't let any of this great fruit get even one more day on the vine than it should have. We want perfect fruit in such a perfect year. You can't waste such a gift.
One, Just One, Green Grape
It was just one green grape. It was one green grape too many. It's always something.
It has been a picture perfect vintage. A lovely spring, with warm, dry weather for flowering and fruit-set. A “three bears” sort of summer: not too cold, not too hot, just right. So why was it there? As you passed through the vineyards you could not miss it standing out like a sore green thumb in the middle of a bunch of gloriously deep purple cabernet sauvignon, there would be one, just one, green berry.
No big deal, right? How could just one unripe grape on some bunches make any difference when all the others were perfectly ripe? One green grape is a very big deal if you want to make wines that are special.
Also there was another issue. Everything else this vintage has been perfect. The gorgeous weather has produced fruit capable of making wines from this vintage something very special indeed. When Mother Nature gives you such a gift you must take advantage of it. There is a sense of duty, responsibility, to take this gift and do everything in your power to make not only great wines, but memorable ones.
What could we do? For us there was no choice. Out into the vineyards went our crews with one mission: to remove one-by-one those individual green grapes. Armed with scissors they went down the rows with the precision of a Bonsai gardener. Was this expensive? Certainly, but this is the price you pay to go beyond good, or very good, on to greatness in a wine. For us there was no choice.
We’re getting pickier and pickier every year as finicky is a virtue when it comes to winemaking. Not satisfied with just dropping any less than perfect fruit in the vineyard, we are going beyond just sorting out any bunches that don’t meet out standards and this vintage will be sorting individual berries on a special sorting table specially designed for nit-pickers like us. Note this is not a job we farm out, Jeff and I do all the sorting ourselves.
I'll spare nothing, not only in this glorious vintage, but in each-and-every vintage to make wines that I love to drink and, most of all, that I am proud to share with you.
A perfect bunch of cabernet framed by the light of this morning's dawn
Never Boring
Their shrill barking woke me from whatever dream I was having. A pack of coyotes was having a debate in the vineyard outside my window. In my sleepy stupor I tried, but could not remember the day of the week. It sounded like dozens of them, but it was probably just a few being particularly rambunctious. Suddenly the report of a rifle echoed sharply across the valley and the coyotes were silent. Just a few hundred yards from our house, in the other direction, the first crew of cooks were arriving for work at The French Laundry. Such is life in Yountville during harvest. There is this incredible mixture of nature and urban sophistication, which only intertwines so completely in the Napa Valley. The reason I could not remember the day was simple: during harvest all days are the same. There are no regular patterns, hours or life. It’s exhausting, stressful and the best thing that happens to you every year.
So what does this vintage mean to us? It means another debate with Mother Nature, much like the coyotes outside my window had last night. As winemakers we all bark at the weather, but in reality we live within it and in the end treasure what we have been given each and every year. Like a parent we don’t have a favorite child, but revel in their differences and the memories of their unique strong and weak points. The critics will give this harvest a rating, but numbers have no soul and harvests, like all things in nature, do.
So what should you expect from a wine or from a vintage? I think you should expect personality. Those who rank vintages by number in the modern era miss the fundamental character of wine and truly do not understand wine itself. The question should never be what is the greatest vintage of this wine can I have with my dinner tonight, but should be what vintage will taste the best with my dinner tonight. The disaster vintages of days past are no more due to the dramatic advances in enology and viticulture over the last decades. On top of it we live in the Napa Valley where, let’s face it, the weather is never really that bad. The ranges of vintages today runs more from producing earlier or later maturing wines and from bigger or more elegant styles. It’s a fact of the matter in the Napa Valley an overly hot vintage has a more negative impact on wine quality than ones that are overly cool.
It often strikes me that critics want all vintages to be the same. I cannot think of anything more boring: or unnatural. Tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. we start picking our Talcott Vineyard Cabernet Franc in St. Helena. It will make a wine different from last year and from the one it will make the next. I would not have it any other way.
Cabernet Franc Harvest, Napa Valley
Haymaking and Grape Picking
We’ve been blessed in San Francisco to have two extensive exhibitions of works from the famed Impressionist museum in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay, at the de Young Museum of Fine Art. In the first of these two exhibitions one work haunted me a bit more than some of the others. That work was Haymaking by Jules Bastien-Lepage. In this piece the exhaustion of the agricultural worker at the end of the day is powerfully portrayed.
In California and most agricultural states the majority of the real work is done by Mexicans who risk arrest and face the brutal prejudice of Americans (none of whom seems to want the jobs they take) to earn a living for their families. If you think you have any idea what they go through you are lying to yourself. From the most expensive California wines to Two Buck Chuck, none would exist without these workers. This is a concept that few consider as they sip their expensive wine in an even more expensive restaurant while raging on about how we should be building a wall along the Mexican border. It seems that good taste in wine does not improve the conscious of those drinking it. When we take a sip of wine, it seem the least we could do to remember and honor those that sweated to bring it to us.
What struck me in the photo above was the ballet-like symmetry which flowed through this crew as they worked. They are picking Stewart Vineyard Merlot just south of the town of Napa. The wine from these grapes is beautiful and they are a part of it.
Photo Camp: Frost Protection
