Tolosa Winery

Bloom

Our earliest blocks of Pinot Noir are in bloom this week. Grapes are no different than other plants, and their fruits are the product of flowers. The grape flowers are tiny, but nonetheless have a sweet aroma that can be detected by putting your nose right up against the cluster during flowering. Once you are acquainted with the perfume you can smell them quite easily from quite a distance on a warm day. I can tell when bloom begins in a given vineyard well before I'm close enough to actually see the blossoms. This is the real start of the vintage as far as I'm concerned, because shortly after bloom the berries which will make this year's wine start forming. The period from bloom to harvest is also the time period whose length is least variable. Traditional wisdom says 100 days from bloom to harvest, but my experience tells me that it is closer to 120 days most years. So for Pinot Noir for 2009 I can say with reasonable certainty that we will do our first harvesting on or about the 10th of September. You can also see variation within the vineyard at this time of year so it is important to visit all the blocks and see how evenly they are going through bloom as this will tell you whether or not the ripening will be uniform within the blocks and also between the blocks.

- Larry Brooks

 

Harvest Update 10-6-09

As we cruise into the first full week in October the days of full ripening sunlight are getting short. In general you have good ripening weather till mid October when the combination of shorter days with lower angle weaker sunlight and colder nights tends to end the productive life of the leaves.

We got a little bit of rain Saturday morning just before dawn. It barely got the ground wet and didn't do any harm to the vines. I had a friend who taught me a lot of my basic winemaking and he never panicked. When it would rain or threaten rain he'd say, "It always rains during harvest." That's true but some types of rain can be catastrophic. Luckily this wasn't one of them.

We picked our "minor whites" a few days ago. By minor I mean in quantity not quality. We brought in the Pinot Gris, the Sauvignon Blanc and the Viognier all on the same day. By juice flavor both the Viognier and the Sauvignon blanc look like they'll be tremendous wines. Crops were very light we only got a couple hundred cases of each. The Pinot Gris did a bit better. We'll have about 300 cases of that.

The very last Pinot from block 597, my favorite on the ranch was scheduled to be picked today, but we've pushed it off till the day after tomorrow. This is the block that we've made the "Beyond" bottling from the last two vintages, and it's one of the few blocks of Pinot where we use whole cluster fermentation. I'm saving some extra delicious barrels for these final two fermenters. It's likely to be one of our very best wines.

-Larry Brooks, Winemaker

Harvest Update Sept. 24th

We have taken in all of blocks 569 and 590 in the last few days - they make up 60% of our No Oak and some of the Estate Chardonnay. Sugars and acid balance are perfect for Chardonnay this year from what we have picked; We are not having to do any juice adjustments which is great. We brought in block 513 which is another Pinot Noir D667 block on the airport ranch.
It's a funny year, normally skyrocketing sugars force picking, but this year it's crashing acids that are the concern.
Another interesting aspect of this year's Pinot is that the color is very very slow to come out. We are doing longer cold soaks and longer total maceration to get color. The balance of the Pinot on Edna Ranch east will come in later this week or early next and the balance of the Dijon clone Chardonnay should also be in by the end of next week. Then it's just a matter of waiting for the late varietals such as Syrah to ripen. We have about three more weeks of good strong sunlight still available so I think that most everything will ripen.
-Larry Brooks, Winemaker