Four Blocks Down . . .

Wine areas in the United States are broken down into AVA's, which is short for American Viticulture Areas. We live in the Willamette Valley AVA. These areas are sometimes broken down into sub-appellations or areas. Coeur de Terre, where I am doing my internship, is located in the McMinnville AVA which is the smallest sub-appellation of the Willamette Valley. Coeur de Terre Vineyard is then broken down into blocks. These are parts of the vineyard which may have been planted at different times, and probably represent a different aspect of that particular place. Generally speaking, the smaller the area, the more your wine is going to cost. An American red wine will cost less than one from the Willamette Valley. Scott Neal's own Willamette Valley Pinot Noir costs less than his Estate Pinot Noir. Then he has his Renelle's Block Pinot Noir which is even more.

Renelle's Block, Sara Jane's Block, Tallulah's Run, and the Winery Block (all planted in Pinot Noir) have all been harvested. The only Pinot that has not been picked yet is Abby's Block. Scott decided to throw the dice and see if it would gain a bit more sugar in the first days of November. Also not yet harvested is the Syrah and Viognier. I was walking through Sarah Jane's block today and wanted to get over to the Syrah section, but I didn't want to walk all the way down the row to the road and then climb back up again. So I started looking for a path, and low and behold, there is one. That's a photo of the path looking down on the Syrah vines in the photo at the top of the page. I'm kind of amazed that with all of my walking around this vineyard there are still new paths and sections that I have not yet seen.

I wanted to compare grape varieties a bit today. As you can probably guess, there just wasn't a lot to do at the winery today. There was the morning punch down of the fermentation tanks, but that only took about half an hour. Then Scott had me clean out the crush machine. It is a huge cylinder laid down on it's side. There is a door in the stainless steel structure that opens so that grapes can be placed inside. Scott arranged the door so that it sat at the very bottom and then instructed me to climb in and scrub away. Let me just say I am not a fan of small enclosed spaces. Heck, I lifted my whole house up off the ground so that I wouldn't have to duck all the time when I was under the house working on it. But I did it. I got in there and I scrubbed, and then I steam cleaned. But I still had some free time, so I walked around.

The differences between grape clusters are so amazing to me. Look at the Pinot Cluster above, and the Syrah cluster to the right. See how long the Syrah cluster is and how widely spaced the grapes are from one another? Now look up at the Pinot Noir above. See how tightly bound up they are together? That's one of the reasons Pinot is so difficult to grow. No air can get around those grapes to help dry them off, so they are susceptible to mildew and mold. Pinot is also very thin skinned, so the grapes can dry out easily and they can also get sunburned. The Syrah won't quite get ripe in this cool weather, so Scott is going to make a rose out of it. A Rose wine doesn't need as much sugar as a red wine, so it will work wonderfully for that. Coeur de Terre has only been able to produce an estate Syrah once in the last three years, and it is wonderful, so if you want some, get it right away.

Coeur de Terre also has a small amount of Viognier planted just next to the Syrah. These two grapes go together. A small amount of the white Viognier is added to the Syrah wine, and, contrary to everything that you would assume, it makes the Syrah darker and richer. That's a Viognier cluster to the left. They can be almost twice as large as a Pinot cluster. I think they catch the light in a beautiful way.

Tomorrow afternoon we will be getting more fruit from another vineyard that will also go into Scott's Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. Wednesday they are scheduled to harvest Abby's Block and also get more fruit from another vineyard, so that is going to be a very long day.

I'm loving the work of being in a vineyard, and helping to make wine. I don't want to do it for the rest of my life. The work is way too difficult and it requires way too much faith.

I took a wine appreciation class at the Chemeketa Viticulture Center a while back. Someone asked the professor, Bob Sogge, about how wine was made, and he said, "I'm not a wine producer, I specialize in wine consumption." I'm with him! But it is awesome to know more about how wine is made, and to be a part of helping to create it. And not just any wine, but Pinot Noir. And not just any Pinot Noir, but Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. And not just Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, but Coeur de Terre Estate Pinot Noir. And not just Coeur de Terre Estate Pinot Noir, but Abby's Block Pinot Noir. I'll tell you, it doesn't get a whole lot better than that. That's Abby's block catching some late morning sun in the photo below.

New Tasting Room at Maysara is Open

Driving home Robin and I decided to stop at Maysara which is located just a bit up the road from Coeur de Terre where I am doing my internship. I love the Momtazi family. Moe, the patriarch of the family, has created an amazing new edifice on their estate. The scale of the building is hard to imagine, but I think it would be safe to say it's the only winery in the state with abundant indoor parking for the tasting room.
The new building is up the hill from their older one. As you enter the estate you drive past their irrigation pond, and see a building straight ahead of you. Veer to the left, go around that building and follow the signs up to the new one. I predicted that the ambiance and cave-like feel of the new tasting room would be popular, and it is. The tasting room counter is glorious, I think. The first time I saw it, it was covered up for construction. This time it was covered with people. All of the wood in this project and most of the other materials we harvested from the estate. That's Naseem trying to keep track of everyone's tasting, working behind the counter in the photo above. The scale of everything in the building is huge. The tasting room counter seems to go on forever.

I asked Flora, the matriarch of the Momtazi family, if they had hired some artist to do the doors and tasting room counter. "No, our workers did all of it" she proudly proclaimed. And rightfully so. They have concentrated on finishing the multi-story section of the building which is to the right hand side as you drive up the hill. The tasting room is at the bottom with an outdoor entrance. Above is an office, a small gathering space and an industrial kitchen.

I predict that this new building is going to build a lot of interest for Maysara. It just seems so brilliant to me to use the employees who work at your truss factory to build a beautiful building in a down economy. As things pick up Maysara is beautifully positioned to attract new visitors, and to bring back some folks who haven't been there for a while.

Oh, and the wines are great. The three daughters have their own label now called 3 Degrees. They make an all estate, Demeter Certified, Bio Dynamic, Pinot Noir for $20. That's just ridiculous. We sell a lot of it at Wednesday Wines. So, head up to Maysara for a tasting soon. You won't even have to get out of your car. Then while you're there swing on up to Coeur de Terre and say hi. They are two of my favorite wine destinations.

Harvest 2

Last night I fell asleep with my fingers on the keyboard of my laptop. I figure that 's a sign to go to bed. This morning Robin and I made a quick trip out to the winery. Scott wanted to start the fermentation on the three bins that were picked last Wednesday. I thought it would be a simple process of throwing in some yeast. Nothing is simple in a winery. First we have to heat the grapes up to around 70 degrees. They are still at a chilly 50 degrees when I arrive. Also, when you use any piece of equipment, any hose, any stainless steel that is going to come in contact with grapes, it must be cleaned. Some are simply steam cleaned, but the pump and the hoses takes a more involved process. First you make a garbage can size container with a product that is similar to Oxy Clean. This must be continuously run through the pump and hoses for 20 minutes. Then you flush everything out with water, then you do a citric acid run, then flush out with water again. You do this before you use them, and you do it again when you are done using them.
Last night as the grapes came out of the destemmer most of them were moved into the barrel room, where it's around 50 degrees all the time. One particularly exciting transfer was a huge stainless steel fermenter which as it was lifted actually caused the back of the forklift to come off the ground. Scott quickly grabbed a hand jack and helped to lift the load while several of the guys hopped onto the back of the forklift. At one point Scott and I are moving one of the plastic fermenters into the barrel room. Scott has neglected to give me the stupid end of the job, so I have the handle of the jack. When we have the extremely heavy bin in place I pull the handle all the way instead of easing it down slowly. I know I've made a mistake before Scott even says anything. And it strikes me, I could have cracked that fermenter, releasing over a ton of estate fruit onto the winery floor and down the drain. It still makes me shiver a little bit to think of it.

Several of the bins were emptied into one of the huge wooden fermenters that I was cleaning earlier this week. In the photo above you can see Umberto emptying one of the bins into one of the larger fermenters. That board you see is the one we stand on when we punch down the grapes once fermentation starts up. People die doing this. When you crack the cap CO2 is released, and if you inhale too much you go head first into the mix and don't come out alive (but what a way to go!) Scott warned me about this and told me to be careful, because . . . well . . . it would ruin the wine!

To get the grapes to come up to temperature Scott has two instruments that transfer heat through the mix of grapes in the fermenter. One is a stainless steel hose that has another hose inside of the first. Water is circulated down the hose through the inside hose and back through the outside. The other instrument is a huge steel tank. The wine is run through some pipes inside the tank, and hot water is added to the tank. The system works really well and we go from 50 to 68 in about 30 minutes.

Then Scott adds the yeast. Well, first he adds some food for the yeast to make sure that they stay healthy. It's kind of like yeast multi-vitamins. Then he gently pushes his hand down and makes three little nests. This is where the yeast is actually placed. He will let it sit there for about 24 hours just to makes sure that the colony is well established. If you are a baker, it is something like proofing your yeast for bread dough. At one point Robin was up in the tasting room hanging out and some folks came in to taste wine. She asked Scott what she should do. He said he'd be right up. Robin said, "I have my pouring licence, would you like me to get them started?" Scott says that would be great. Soon there are several people at the windows looking down at what we are doing. I feel a bit like the monkey at Alf's. But I remember the curiosity. I so desperately wanted to learn how all of this is done, and wanted to be down there in the cellar asking questions about what was going on. It's why this experience has been so amazing.

Another reason is the food. We eat very well during crush. Last night Budd White make some amazing BBQ'd pork ribs for us. There was about 5 pounds of ribs per person! Lisa had made a beautiful, hearty soup earlier in the day for lunch with homemade tortillas on the side. I was so hungry both times. At dinner Lisa tells Scott to bring up something special to go along with the meal. He heads down into the library and comes back with a 2005 Renelles Block Pinot Noir. It could be my favorite wine that I have tasted at the winery. And it tastes as though it is still a baby--like it will continue to mature and develop for another decade in the bottle. Could it be possible that I'm helping to make something that amazing? Scott said that 2005 was another cool vintage. I hope and pray that it will be. And I also hope and pray that I don't do anything stupid and mess it up.

Robin grabbed the camera and took some shots of the vineyard while I was working. The one below could be my favorite shot of Coeur de Terre so far.

Harvest 1

From the sounds of it not many of us on the Coeur de Terre team got much sleep last night. I was pretty wide awake at 4:00 a.m.. Lisa Neal, the co-owner of Coeur de Terre said that she didn't sleep at all. I was just so excited to see harvest happen first hand. I'm now home early, well earlier that I thought I might. I was in the vineyard at 7:30 AM, and got home around 10:30 PM. That's a very long day of physical labor. But what I did was nothing compared to the hard work of the people actually harvesting of the grapes. I went down to get a few photos, and I just couldn't believe how fast they were picking.
There are sixteen pickers and they each have two five gallon plastic buckets. They throw one of them up the row a ways, and then start picking with the second. The bucket is held under the clusters of grapes which are cut to fall into it. I've talked to a number of people who have done this work and they all say about the same thing. The first time the tried it they about cut their fingers off. While the speed of harvest is impressive, the next step is unbelievable. When the two buckets are full they grab them and run up the hill. That's right, they run. When they get to the end of the row, the buckets are emptied into one of the bins, and the crew chief checks them off on their picking card.

Ryan and I decide to head up to the wine cellar at about the same time, so we walk up Sara Jane's Block together. I am winded by the time we're half way up the hill, and I'm not carrying anything. I don't know how those folks do it.

The permanent crew at the vineyard don't do the picking. A special crew is contracted to do that. The pickers are paid by the bucket, and the contractor is paid by the ton of fruit picked. The guys who are full time are doing logistics. Martin is on a tractor ferrying bins up and down the vineyard. Roberto is operating the forklift full time. The rest of us are on sorting detail. The bins arrive at the upper level of the winery. They are taken under an awning where a special attachment on a fork lift twists them in the air to dump them onto the sorting table. The table doesn't have a conveyor belt (for which I am very glad). Instead it vibrates which gently sends the fruit down the table to be sorted. We are looking for leaves, under ripe fruit, or fruit that just doesn't look good. Anything that's rejected is tossed into the center of the table where it

ends up in buckets that eventually have to be emptied.

We started up the sorting table once a few of the bins have arrived. It's about 8:30 or so when we begin, and we won't stop (except to eat until 9 at night.) I end up with a pretty simple job, but my back is already starting to tighten up on me. When the bins are picked up by the forklift they have to be secured in place. There is a big, heavy metal bar that is inserted into a track over the top of the bin. Then it has to be strapped in place. It gets difficult about the 300th time you do it because you're lifting something leaning over the side of the bin.

Once the bin is emptied, it has to be hosed out, and the the next one is put in place. A variety of people swing through and help out during the day. Lisa Neal and Ryan are working with Mauricio and Lisa's friend, Trisha, in the photo to the right. When I wasn't helping to strap in the bins, it was my job to get under the table and grab the buckets and empty them. I was also in charge of keeping the driveway free of grapes. In between I would step up to the table and help sort. Part of the reason for all of that cleaning is to keep the fruit flies at bay. Fortunately (well at least in this regard) this harvest is so late the most of the fruit flies have been killed by cooler weather. At noon I was thinking how great it was that we escaped the forecasted rain. After lunch the skies open up. Now I have another job. I have to make sure the the bins are always covered in plastic. Scott doesn't want to have water getting in and diluting the wine he is making. OK, I'm beat. Off to bed. It was a very long and a very satisfying day. I'll write more tomorrow.

Seven Hours and Back to the Vineyard

About seven hours from now I'll be headed back to Coeur de Terre. Tomorrow is the day that we will be harvesting most of their estate fruit. Today was all about getting ready for tomorrow. It started with a chemistry lesson. I feel a bit like a trained monkey doing the chemistry of wine making. Scott is very good about explaining what he wants done, and I can do it, but I have no idea what I am doing.

We start in the barrel room where the three fermenters that we filled with de-stemmed Pinot Noir are resting. Scott does not want them to start the fermentation process yet. The cold soaking allows more of the color and flavors to be transferred to the juice, than going right into fermentation. He is keeping that process at bay in several ways. First of all he is keeping the bins cool. Also, he has not yet added any yeast to get the process started. He also keeps a level of Co2 on the top of the bins. That is a lump of dry ice sitting on top of one of the bins in the photo on the left. The mist that flows from the ice reminds me of the fog that is settled onto the valley floor as I head to the vineyard each morning. Today is kind of a low pressure training for what we will be doing tomorrow. Scott wants the specific gravity of each bin checked. You do this by placing a hydrometer (a glass tube with a bulb on the bottom) into a solution of the juice from the bin. You record the number that is level with the top of the liquid and this is your specific gravity. Don't ask me what a specific gravity is, I don't know. We also measure the temperature. Before any of this is done we punch down the materials in the bid, pushing the grapes that have accumulated at the top down into the other liquid. Then we take a rag spritzed with alcohol and clean off the inside of the bin. After all of that is done you grab a few chunks of dry ice and throw them on top, then cover the bin and move on. Today there are three bins in the barrel room. Tomorrow there will be dozens.

At lunch I go down to one of my favorite parts of the vineyard. It is a picnic table that sits right next to the irrigation pond. The colors are beautiful today. I've learned that there is a slight click right before the propane cannons go off. If you listen carefully you can cover your ears right before they go off. I've thought that this would be a great place to bring Robin and some friends for a picnic. We'll wait until after harvest is complete, because those cannons are loud.

After lunch I head back to the cellar to clean another of the huge wooden fermenters. First I scrub it down with a base solution, then rinse it with warm water, treat it with an acidic solution and rinse it again with warm water. It takes about three hours to finish. The pump is giving me problems, so after I am done I take apart the plug and discover one the of the wires has come undone. While I'm at it I fix another problem with the control wiring. I'm honing my mechanical skills doing this gig.
Late in the day Martin is out in the vineyard setting up the bins in which the picked fruit will be collected tomorrow. The harvesting crew arrives around six AM. We will start processing the fruit around 8:30. We will finish up sometime Saturday morning. Scott is going to let the upper part of the vineyard stay on the vine a bit longer. He had to schedule the harvest crew three days ago. I'm excited to see how everything works. It's going to be a very, very long day. I doubt I'll get a chance to write anything tomorrow. I want to get out to the vineyard early so I can get some images of the grapes being harvested.

I'm the last one out of the cellar again tonight. As I leave I strike up a conversation with the welder that Scott has hired to fix some machinery. We chew the fat for a while and then, suddenly I am very cold. It's amazing how quickly these vineyard hillsides loose heat when the sun goes down. That is part of what makes this such a perfect place to grow Pinot Noir. As I go down the hill Scott is out with Jack, the vineyard dog, shutting down the propane cannons. It's suddenly quiet and peaceful. I leave with a certain amount of sadness, but with a lot of excitement about tomorrow's harvest.

For Karlene

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of the man who was the husband of someone I care for a great deal, and the Dad of one of my best friends. In Karlene's honor today I went up to Coeur de Terre and puttered. There's really no other name for it. I just went up and did some small tasks, along with a couple of projects that I simply really like to do. But first I almost killed myself (now that would have been quite a tribute!)

I wasn't even doing anything dangerous. That is unless you take into consideration the quality of the ladders supplied to the help at CdT. I'm not saying Scott is cheap, well, yes, actually, I guess I am (I'm just hoping he'll read this and be coerced into buying a new one). The step ladder we use in the cellar is a P.O.S. aluminum that barely holds the guys who weight in at a little over a hundred pounds. For me who weighs in at just over 200, it's a scary activity. I was changing light bulbs. There were quite a few out in the cellar room, so I got to work. The ones on the wall are easy, so I did those first. Then I had to tackle the ceiling bulb that was out. They've been having some issues with the lighting circuit, so I wasn't sure if it was the bulb or the circuit. I took the protective metal cage off of the glass jar which screws into the fixture. Then, as I was unscrewing the jar I noticed that it was completely full of water, and yes, the circuit was on at the time and the ladder is made of aluminum.

After puttering a bit more, I went out to see
what Roberto was up to. He was moving the barrels outside. I'm fascinated with how the whole organizational structure of a cellar works. Scott had me move all of the barrels out of the barrel room, and I wondered if they'd just stay in the big room. No, they go outside. We just had to get them out of the barrel room so we had room for the new fermenters. Roberto had asked me earlier what Scott wanted done with the barrels. Luckily I knew. Now how do you communicate? Luckily the little I know of Spanish includes beer, so I pointed at the one with exes on them and said "Dos Equis" and pointed outside on the other side of the drive, and then at the "no-equis"

and pointed to the pad outside the cellar. Scott had gone through the barrels earlier and ex'd out the ones that he no longer wanted. Usually they were over four years old. I still can't believe that you have to pay $1,200 or so for a barrel and then only use it for three to four years.

After that wineries will usually sell them for around $50 a piece. That's quite a depreciation of an asset. These barrels are all made of French White Oak. The trees from which they are harvested are often over one hundred years old. The wood is gorgeous, and has almost vertical grain. The inside of the wood is toasted a bit. After they have been used the inside is also red from the wine. In places the wood has been eaten away. If you smell vanilla in a wine, that's the oak. Likewise if you smell smoke, that could be the toast of the barrel. Scott likes his barrels with a medium long toast.

After I'm done puttering, I decided to walk around the vineyard. The light has gone from direct sun to overcast, so I decide to try and find the perfect cluster of Pinot Noir. It's not easy. For some reason there are wires everywhere. You'd have thought that Scott and Lisa would have been more considerate of future photographers when they planted their vineyard!

I now have so many pictures of grape clusters, and there is always something that isn't quite right. Today I was laying down in one of the rows, trying to get the light just right behind the grape cluster when one of the guys on the crew ran up with a shotgun. I wondered if he was going to finish me off.

Several people have asked me what I think of this vintage. The smart answer is we'll have to wait and see, the proof is in the glass. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's going to be awesome (with a caveat of course.) It's going to be a great year to purchase wine from more expensive vineyards with experienced winemakers who really know what they are doing. This fruit has had forever to

hang on the vine, and I think that's going to give it amazing flavors.

It also has a high acid content, and winemakers will have to know what to do with that to temper it and make it work. Maybe I just love it already because I've put so much of myself into it. I admit my objectivity may already be skewed. Look at the grapes in the photo above. Don't you think they'll make an awesome wine? In the hands of Scott Neal, I feel confident that they will.

80% Custodial Work

I'm down in the barrel room this morning. Scott has lined out a pretty simple job for me. Take the hand truck and move all of the empty barrels out to the large room, and move the full wine barrels down the the other end of the barrel room. And I can do it. I manage to move all of the empty barrels without a mishap. Roberto catches me making some mistakes and shows me the right way to lay them out. I'm fine until I start thinking. "I'm moving a lot of money." Each barrel when new costs somewhere around $1,200. They each hold about 60 gallons of wine, or enough to make 25 cases. The last two barrels I move are the Founder's Club Pinot Noir. I know that these cost $50 a bottle, so counting the barrels, I'm moving over $32,000! I start to get paranoid about dumping the whole thing over.

After (successfully) moving the barrels I get to clean out a six foot tall by six foot in diameter wood barrel fermenter. Scott has given me instructions on how to clean it. There are two solutions to use with hot water rinses after each one. The only thing he hasn't told me is how to get in. I want to drop down from the top. But you actually go in through the "man door". I'm wondering if my bulk will fit. But Scott assures me I will. Id, but just barely. I also get to try out my new waterproof overalls. They work great.

Lisa comes downstairs and finds me sweeping out the cellar room where I have just taken out all of the barrels. She tells me a story of a well knows person who was in the wine trade and then decided he wanted to make his own wine. After a few years he called it quits. He just didn't realize the making wine is 80% custodial work. You clean the cellar, you clean the equipment, you clean it again. You clean your barrels, you clean your fermenters, you clean the bins to hold the grapes, you clean the crush pad, you clean . . . well you get the idea. And then when you're done inside you go out and clean up the vineyard. I'm getting closer to being a winemaker because I have the custodian thing down.

In the afternoon we get to do our first crush. Crush is kind of a misnomer, especially with red grapes. We will not be crushing any grapes today. They are de-stemmed and left to soak in a fermenting tub. Our grapes arrived from another local vineyard from which Scott has purchased grapes to make his Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. As the bins arrive Scott looks them over, grabs a few and pops them in his mouth. Roberto is the fork lift master of the operation. He pick up the bin with a special attachment that allows him to tilt the it to one side so the grapes can flow out. I have two jobs. One is the set a bar over the bin so that lid doesn't slide off when it's tipped, and the other is . . . clean the bin out with water after it is emptied.

In the photo to the right you can see Roberto (in Red) using a tool to move the grape clusters around on the sorting table. Mauricio (on the left) and Martin (on the right) are sorting the grapes. They are removing any non grape materials like leaves, and also looking for any botrytis clusters. Botrytis is a mold that desiccates the grapes. The table that they are standing next to vibrates, and is slopped slightly away from Roberto. At the other end is a shoot where the grape clusters fall into the destemmer. This amazing machine gently removes the stems from the grapes. The grapes continue down into the the fermenting tub and the stems all come out of the side of the machine.

The grapes are partially juiced when the come out of the destemmer. Scott applies a small amount of sulphur to keep down bacteria, and a bit of dry ice to create a blanket of CO2 over the top. He doesn't want the juice to start fermenting yet. He'll add yeast later to get the process going. Some winemakers don't add yeast at all. They just let nature take it's course. I think Scott likes to have a little more control over the process than that. Scott and Roberto are consolidating two of the fermenting bins in the photo to the left. The bins are then placed in the barrel room where they will be kept at a constant temperature.

At the end of the day I'm cleaning up around the large barrel fermenters where I'd been working earlier. As I'm putting away the hoses I see something move. It's our friend. We heard him croaking when we were bottling, but we could never find him. I open the large door next to the fermenter and let him out. Roberto is transferring some wine from a large stainless steel

container into some carboys, so I go into the winery, grab a glass, go out and stick it under the stream, and . . . instant glass of wine. I take it upstairs to the deck just off of the tasting room, sit in one of the Coeur de Terre Adirondack chairs, and watch the sun go down. What a great blessing it is to have time to sit and enjoy and glass of wine and just look over the vineyard as the light starts to fade. When I'm done I pack up my things, get in the car and head down the drive to the front gate. For the first time since I've been working here I'm the last one to leave. Luckily the closed gate wasn't too difficult to figure out. On the other hand being trapped in a vineyard doesn't sound too bad at all.

The Calm Before the Storm

It was a slow day of cleaning at the vineyard today. It is so thrilling to be in a vineyard just as the first light is starting to peak over the rolling foothills that surround the valley. The colors are

so dramatic. The best lighting in a vineyard is in the early morning and later in the day toward sunset. One of the great joys of intentionally spending so much time in one vineyard is the joy of seeing it glow in all kinds of different light. The clouds pop up suddenly and just glow in the blue sky. The grape clusters grab the horizontal rays and seem to be illuminated from the inside. The photo above was taken first thing this morning the heart shaped rock that gives Coeur de Terre it's name. To the right is a beautiful Viognier cluster in the beautiful morning lighting with the eastern light flooding the vineyard that sits just beneath the rock that gives Coeur de Terre it's name.

When I wasn't out taking photos in the morning and evening I was in the cellar cleaning up. I have a strange tick about work areas. I like them to be clean. It's the one place where I like things to be organized and in their place. So, I took apart the tool boxes and cleaned them up. I helped to organize the back of the barrel room and got all of the remaining wine and materials up and on shelves. Then I took apart the junk closet!

Since there's not much to learn about wine in cleaning, (although you do a lot of cleaning to make wine) I thought I'd talk about the commute to Coeur de Terre from McMinnville. It is one of my favorite drives through back country farmsteads with perennially green fields and half dome oak trees.

Above is a picture of the misty Muddy Valley taken on my drive this morning. As you leave McMinnville on highway 18 you are in the midst of the spacious Willamette Valley. As you continue to the coast, however, you get closer and closer to the coast range foothills. In my case I leave highway 18 fairly quickly and weave my way out Masonville Road (just follow the blue signs to Coeur de Terre.) After about a mile of driving you are actually encountering the foothills of the Coast Range. At about McCabe Chapel the road curves around a big curve and suddenly you are in a much more narrow valley with foothills on both sides. This is the Muddy Valley. As the road begins to hug the western edge of valley floor it takes another dramatic turn to the right. You want to follow this road straight instead of turning with the pavement to the left. It brings you through another tight set of hills which are very close together and then quickly open to yet another valley. This is the valley in which Coeur de Terre is located.

A one mile drive down this gravel road will deliver you to your destination. The iron gate at the foot of the estate welcomes you. The small house at to the right is the "temporary" housing for the owners of the vineyard. Abby's Block will follow you on the left hand side as you climb the hill. There is an old, metal out building on the right followed by the estate's root vines (they graft all of their own vines at Coeur de Terre including growing their own root stock)

As you climb the steep drive that heart shaped rock will be on your left followed by the irrigation pond. Just another small climb and you are at their beautiful arts and craft inspired tasting room. I'll be down in the cellar cleaning up no doubt

The photo above was taken in the evening. Every lighting today seemed to be more dramatic than the last. It was a good day for photography. As I'm getting ready to leave for the day Lisa drives up and asks me if I'd like to take home the wine that was left over from the tastings this weekend. It is such a silly question. I'm drinking an '09 Abby's Block Pinot Noir right now and it is luscious. The fruit is a bit darker than the rest of the estate with just a bit more mineral and spice notes. This wine is going to age like gangbusters.

As I'm preparing to leave Scott drives by on the ATV with Talula (she has a blocked named after

her too, I just didn't get to taste the wine from it tonight.) I get the feeling that this young woman is beginning her training to be the future vineyard manager of Coeur de Terre. Consider this her early training in vineyard management. She's off to see how the grapes are coming along, to scare up a few birds and just generally enjoy the vineyard. There are so many beautiful sights to take it. I wonder if you become accustomed to them over time and kind of take them for granted. I just can't imagine.

Way, Way Too Much Chemistry

I love to be in a vineyard, but I had no idea there would be so much chemistry involved in wine making. I'm a bit nervous about going back out and starting crush at Coeur de Terre. Scott Neal, the Co-owner and winemaker at CdT is a natural science geek. He loves to get into his laboratory and get out test tubes and beakers and perform archaic tests. Me, not so much. I practically flunked chemistry in high school. Part of that was due to the fact that I was a terrible student, but a big part was the periodic table. I have a good friend who thinks it is a work of art and admires how everything fits together. To me it remains a big mystery.
I was in the lab with Scott the other day and he was showing me how to figure out the total acidity of some grapes that we had selected from different vineyards. Did you know that total acidity and PH are two different things? Come on. Doesn't a PH reading tell you the level of acidity in something? No, it turns out, it does not. So we start by making a base solution, then we add 100 ml of some of the smashed up juice from the grapes. This is my first grape crush! The fact that we did it in a one gallon zip lock bag kind of took some of the romance out of it. After Scott added the juice he measures how much base solution it takes to bring the total back up to the level that we started out with. Then Scott looks at his magic book and it shows him what the total acidity is. The levels are high (or at least they were last week, it might be a bit better now.)

The tool I think is cool is the spectrometer. Here's how it works. Grab a grape, lift the little plastic lid at the end of the device, smash the grape on the glass surface, close the plastic lid, hold the eye piece up to your eye, and look towards a light. A blue bubble appears and shows you the brix level of the grapes. Brix is the level of sugars in the grapes. Last week the level was still a bit low, but any sunshine helps bring the level up. When we get to the lab Scott also does a quick test of the brix so he gets a larger picture of how they are doing in the vineyard as a whole.

We will be starting crush this week. I think Scott has scheduled the picking crew to come in on Wednesday. What will we do in the mean time? In a word, clean. Everything is cleaned. The bins that the grapes will be gathered in when they are picked are cleaned. The sorting table that they will be emptied onto will be cleaned. The de-stemming machine will be cleaned. The wine press will be cleaned. The containers that the crushed wine will go into will be cleaned. The bins that the de-stemmed red grapes will rest in for a week will be cleaned. The large stainless steel tanks will be cleaned. The hoses that we use to transfer the wine from one place to another are cleaned when we are done using them, and again when we haul them out to use again. You do not want the wrong bacteria to grow in the fermenting wine. It does bad things to the taste and aroma, so we clean, and then we clean some more.

I may or may not be able to write much later in the week. I'm assuming we'll be working quite late once crush starts, but I don't know anything for sure.

Oh, and there is another thing the crew can do when they have a spare moment. The can grab a shotgun and shoot it towards the birds. Scott considered netting his whole vineyard as the owner of the vineyard to the left has done. But he thought that the extensive losses they had last year were not going to happen again this year. Last year the birds arrived at a slightly different time, and the food they needed was in short supply and they stripped the vineyards of tons of fruit a day. This year has not been quite as bad. Sitting out in the valley it sounds like a war zone with propane cannons and real shotguns going off on a regular basis. Have you ever thought it would be fun to live next to a vineyard? Not so much during the harvest. Everywhere we traveled we could hear the explosions.

Well, I'm looking forward to crush, but not so much the chemistry.

Good Beyond Your Doing

Maybe my morning devotion just primed me for it, but this was one of the best days of my life. I got to work a bit up at Coeur de Terre, and the go around and tour other vineyards with Scott Neal. I'd been saving up about a weeks worth of questions, So I let them all fly at the same time. Scott was very patient about answering them all. I have found him to be the original multi-tasking, technology geek. He must have five or six different gadgets powered up on the dashboard of his car. I don't even know what they all do, but he seems to use two or three of them simultaneously. We drive by a number of vineyards that I didn't even know existed. Scott tells me that they are owned by some professionals, who do it on the side. He calls them petting vineyards. I almost we my pants I laugh so hard. Scott is out checking on some of the other fruit that his is purchasing to make Pinot Gris, and to add to his Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. The fruit is looking good. Despite some very badly timed rain the grapes are in good shape and ripening nicely.

After the tour we head back to the winery. They guys have made great progress on bottling the wine. There are seventeen pallets all finished and ready to go by the time the truck arrives to

take them away to the wine storage warehouse. (Most wineries do not have enough room to store their wine, so they pay to have it stored, and then have it delivered as they need it.) You can see a lot of our work in the photo to the left. There are 17 pallets with 56 cases of wine on each one for a total of 952 with 12 bottles in each one for a total of 11,424 bottles! And we broke a total of four of those bottles (and only one was full of wine.) It's really a wonderful sense of accomplishment to know that I've handled just about every one of those bottles. In the photo to the left, Maurico is stacking up the just glued up boxes to receive the newly labeled bottles. In this week of bottling and labeling we have emptied two huge stainless steel containers that were full of wine. It just feels good.

When the truck arrives there is frantic activity to get all of the pallets wrapped and ready for transport. Then, suddenly, the cellar is empty. Just a few scattered boxes here and there and the two wooden fermenters. It is such a stark contrast to just a few minutes earlier. Lisa Neal has promised us a luncheon today. I'm looking forward to it. What could be better than a luncheon at a vineyard? Time in a vineyard is always relative, and lunch is no different. We were scheduled to eat at 12:00, then 1:00, and because of the truck arrival, we sit down somewhere south of 2:00. But man, oh man is it worth the wait.

Lisa has laid out a beautiful spread of food. There is incredibly moist and delicious BBQ'd chicken, a gourmet mac and cheese, rustic bread, a mixed green salad with still warm brownies for dessert. But that's not all. We also get to pop open one of the bottles we've been bottling. Then Ryan brings over one of their estate Pinots from 2007 and its spectacular. Then a bottle of their estate Syrah arrives. O MY GOD!

And the conversations are lively and extremely entertaining. We talk about the demented cat who is attacking Jack the vineyard dog. We move on to Ryan's wonderful and strange relationship with Roberto. Scott finally shows up and we're off to Los Vegas talking about the inability of white people to dance. It was so, so, so good. These guys that I've worked so hard with this week, finally have time to sit down and talk and have fun. After everyone else leaves our wonderful hostess, Lisa finally sits down to eat. I stay behind while everyone else heads back to work and we talk some more. We talk about our parents and the world in which they struggled to make a better life for their children. Then we move to our own children and our hopes and dreams for them. Scott and Lisa talk just a bit about their lost house and how tender that spot remains for them. And then I get to go home and see my granddaughter and have dinner with Paul and Ashley and her parents. It's just too much goodness packed into one day.

The title of this blog comes from Acts 14. Here is the whole quote taken from the Message version of the Bible: "God didn't leave them without a clue, for he made creation, poured down rain and gave bumper crops. When your bellies were full and your hearts happy, there was evidence of God beyond your doing.

I have so much, I am so blessed and it is way, way beyond my doing.

Stop, Look and Enjoy the Beauty

I'm trying to consciously pay attention to my surroundings. When you are walking around a beautiful vineyard like Coeur de Terre noticing beauty is easy--it's everywhere. At lunch today I hiked up the hill to the top of the vineyard and I noticed this old, gnarled oak tree. Something about it was compelling, like I'd seen it before. I couldn't really place where until I went back down to the cellar to start up bottling again and then it hit me. This is almost exactly the same picture that is on the '10 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir label. I've seen it several thousands times in the last few days!

The vineyard is always beautiful, but it is especially so right now. The colors in the nearby hillside are starting to turn, and the grapes are lush and low hanging. The lighting is saturated, causing the colors to glow even more.
The little guy swimming in the pond in the picture to the right makes me think that the bird

cannons may not be doing their job. There is one located about 20 feet from where he is swimming and he flinches a lot less than I do when it goes off.
After lunch Scott says he's going to walk around the vineyard and check sugar levels. You do this with a nifty tool called a spectrometer. You grab a grape and squeeze it and set it on a glass tab. Then you look through the lens of the device and it shows you the sugar levels (read in brix.) I ask Scott what level he needs for harvest. He says ideally he'd like to get to 23 or so. Some of grapes in the upper vineyard are reading 18 and 19

brix. Just a bit further down the hill they are reading 21 and 22 brix. Scott and Lisa do a quick

consultation. It looks like we'll start picking next Wednesday. Some of the upper vines may not be harvested until November. Scott shows me how to tell if the grapes are ready for harvest. I'm surprised to learn that you want the grapes to be just a bit soft. I would have thought you would want them to be firm like a table grape. He also shows me how you can see the inside of the grape sticking to the seeds more in riper fruit. I'm excited because tomorrow we're going to go out and look at some of the other vineyards from which Scott is purchasing fruit this year. And, the weather looks as though it just might cooperate with partly sunny weather through next week.

There's a new guy on the team today (I'm not the rookie anymore, yea!) So, I managed to get into the bottle filling

station. During a break in the action I filled up the cork reservoir and then took over controls. My goal was to fill and cork a thousands bottles of wine. I would know it was a thousand when the cork hopper was empty. It takes a long time, and just as I was getting there, Scott walked by and noticed that we needed more corks. So he filled the hopper again. By the time I was done the hopper was half way down again, so I estimate I did something like 1,500. I have experienced all of the different jobs now. Today I topped them off by putting together boxes with a hot glue gun. (That's the much less than tidy box building station to the left.) I'm glad we'll be done with this phase tomorrow. At one point when I was filling up bottles Lisa came through, pointed out one that wasn't quite right and then, said, go ahead and take one of these home when they're messed up. The problem is that never happens. I mean, we do mess them up, but there always seems to be a way to fix just about anything. If the level is too low, pull the cork, add some more wine and re-cork it. If it's too high, pop it open and pour a little bit out. If the labels aren't right, soak the bottle in warm water and scrape it off and re-label it. But today we found a problem that couldn't be fixed. Someone dropped a bottle on top of another one and broke the glass. I was going to throw it away, but Ryan said it would perfectly safe to drink. And since he's an officially trained

wine sommelier and everything, and since he agrees to take the first drink, I decide to believe him (plus, I really want to taste this wine.) And it is amazing. I just plain love it. The aroma is so rich with ripe fruit, spice and leathery notes. I've tasted wines that cost twice as much that have less complexity of taste. That you can purchase this Pinot Noir for $20 is incredible. So we end our work day by toasting all of the hard work that went into growing the grapes that made this wine. We toast the hard work of turning those grapes into wine. And, finally, we toast all the hard work of getting it into bottles and off to the store. I now know something about that last one.