Finally, some clear progress for modern grapes in Europe?

 Such a simple idea, and yet it's been illegal for what seems like forever in Europe: use grapes that have both European and American/Asian heritage! This gives you no-spray disease resistance, and better adaptation to climate change. It will, in fact, save the world of wine.

See article here. (Photo is of Epona Vineyard's Labelle grapes)

Best Grapes Ever! What a great year for modern grapes in SW WA!

 Update: Harvest is complete. Only our Delicatessen hung through the 2 days of rain we just got (and desperately needed). Everything else was picked before the rains, with near-perfect wine chemistry and almost no bird loss. 

This is what I just wrote to a friend who's making a Leon Millot red wine from our grapes:

My 2021 Estate Red Batch #2 (75% Leon at 24.5 Brix field test; 25% Mindon at 26 Brix field test) is proceeding exactly according to form. So this might help you expect what you may see:

1. Commingled the fruit and crushed. Added a quart of frozen black currants from our garden (the primary flavor of Cab Sauv). Added pectic enzyme and sulfited for a day. The must showed 24.2 Brix (I was glad it wasn't as high as the field test), and pH = 3.28 (temp-adjusted). These are normal, and that pH is not a concern. It's high enough not to inhibit commercial yeast, and it will rise a lot, as you'll see. I also add a bit of tannin to this variety.

2. I used BDX yeast on this batch (I also often use RC212 as I think you did--I used it on another batch and will blend the finished wine). Punched down twice a day. Three days after pitch, SG = 1030 and pH was 3.65! All that pH rise, from the fermentation. I think some acid precipitates even at room temp, and I think the yeast action uses up other acids. 

3. I pitch MLF before others in this area do, but as I noted y'day, I have my reasons. 

4. After 6 days on skins, I pressed. The skins were looking depleted. I didn't test SG but based on poorly the cap was rising, I bet it was about 1005.

5. The ferm finished in tanks. I started watching for evidence of MLF (rush of tiny bubbles when you suddenly twist the carboy; pH rise).

6. 12 days after harvest, SG is 994, so the wine's totally dry. Temp-adjusted pH is now 3.78. I see tiny bubbles when I twist the carboy. So I know MLF is ongoing. Will watch for it to end, probably in just a few days, as the garage is hanging at about 70F and MLF can finish fast in that temp, if it has good conditions.  In a few days I'll test pH again and once pH rise seems to have stopped, I'll test for ML (I use test strips--a good kit and spendy; Kim uses (I think) chromatography).  I'm guessing the pH might stop at about 3.85.

7. Once that's done, then I'll rack off the lees onto oak, and sulfite, and add tartaric for about pH 3.6, and age through the winter. (Always add tartaric in quarter-doses, as we never know the buffering capacity of a particular wine, and if you over-acidify the wine, then you have to add K-Carb and that requires Cold Stabilization--a PITA, and it's horsing around the wine unnecessarily. I've learned that the hard way. Ditto with K-Carb--always add it in quarter-doses (25% of what the formula says you need).

This red is easy to make (once you understand how to manage its pH), and it takes oak well, and ages well for at least 5 years. In warm years with light crop, you get purple fruits, forest floor, chocolate. In cooler years, or in warmer years with heavy load (as my vines were this year, despite my dropping about 1/3 of the fruit this year) you get more cherry flavors with some purple fruit. That is what I'm tasting now, but it might change with age.

Update on what is looking to be a very great grape harvest

 We had two huge heat events this summer, so our GDDs are pretty high. Spring was a bit early also. Our earlier modern grapes are really proving their worth. Our Blattner Labelle is fully ripe (24 Brix; great flavors) and it is such an early grape that the birds are still eating our wild blackberries, so we didn't have to net and we're at only about 1% bird loss.  Also ripe are Jupiter (ranging from 21-22) and Monastery Muscat (20-21). Golubok is very close--some clusters (23 Brix) are already picked, but most (20-21 Brix) need another week. Leon Millot, which I used to think of as very early, is also close (ranging from 21-23). This all seems crazy early, but it's great. And the rumors of wine's demise in western WA were premature--we haven't had one whiff of smoke all summer, despite major wildfires all around our S, E, and N--the onshore winds from the Pacific have been consistent, and saved us. However, the later grapes are at risk of both voracious birds and smoke, and everything is affected by our drought--we're seeing some shriveling and had to do some supplemental irrigation during the summer, which is unusual. So we will see. Due to climate change I think, yields are way above average this year. 

Even in France, modern varieties of grapes are finally being accepted!

 Check out this article.

In the 1800s and 1900s, France outlawed modern grapes, due to the power of the vinifera grapegrowers' lobby. (They didn't appreciate the threat that the new grapes represented to the old ways.) But modern grapes don't need to be sprayed for mildew, and they have resistance to phylloxera, and these are powerful reasons to grow them. Check out my book Modern Grapes for the Pacific Northwest, for the full story.

UC Davis releases five new modern grape varieties

These are the kinds of grapes that will save the wine world. Read their description here.

None of these are early-ripening enough to grow here in the PacNW. Instead, they were bred (and it took 20 years!) to resist Pierce's Disease, a bacterial catastrophe that kills vineyards in the SE US and also in southern CA. As far as I know, these new varieties don't have immunity against powdery mildew, so that's another reason they wouldn't do well here (unless they were treated with soil fauna-killing inorganic sprays or expensive organic sprays).

The commentator in the linked article thinks the wine drinking public won't cotton to these new grapes. I think he's wrong. Although maybe half of  my wine customers aren't open-minded and don't order or even come to taste my wines made from modern grape varieties, the other half are interested, and will taste and often buy the wines.

In order to save the world of wine from the effects of climate change and environmental degradation, we growers and winemakers need to work hard to make great wines from these new grapes.

France and Spain moving quickly now to modern grape varieties, to minimize poisonous spraying

THIS is great news. We continue to see reason take hold over senseless attachment to the old ways. Lives of vineyard workers are at stake, not to mention the lives of billions of beneficial worms and microbes in the soil, which inorganic sprays have been killing for decades now.

When France allows modern grapes (after a century of senselessly prohibiting them), you know the tide is turning. Read my book! Modern Grapes for the Pacific Northwest (on Amazon).

Kenton

Wine from LaCresent, an obscure modern grape variety, wins overall top prize at major wine competition!

Read about it here.

I love this David-vs-Goliath story! A white wine from a modern grape almost nobody has heard of, beats the best vinifera wines from around the country. Even better, the winning winery is a tiny place that doesn't have a tasting room.

Epona Winery doesn't have a tasting room either. The government makes it almost impossible to have one--they can require traffic studies, and parking lot watershed studies, and they say you can't use well water to wash the wine glasses (which requires you to install a super-expensive water treatment facility), and the list of such rules goes on and on. The result is that it costs a fortune to open a tasting room. And your reward is to have limos full of drunk people come in to continue their party, while not buying much. And it increases your risk of a customer driving drunk, then blaming you for their own misconduct.

Anyway, a huge achievement for a small winery, using an obscure modern grape variety. Congratulations!

What does the recent cold in the Midwest mean for grapes?

It means if they are Vitis vinifera, they are probably all dead now. The classic European winegrapes have little resistance to extreme cold (or to various fungal diseases). But their sturdier American and Asian grape-friends have excellent cold resistance--often down to -40F!, whereas vinifera will die off at about 0 degrees F (and the Amer and Asian grapes have excellent disease ressistance, too). This is why I'm supporting grapes that are crosses between the classic winegrapes (vinifera) and the American and Asian grapes. These modern grapes also ripen earlier. The modern grapes are a win-win-win in every sense.

If you want to talk about foolishness, real foolishness is the expensive and time-consuming planting of Vitis vinifera in the Midwest, when those grapes just cannot live there. Those growers should be planting modern grapes instead. Modern grapes make great wine. When will they learn? It's a little hard to feel too sorry for them.


photo credit: alamy

Hybrid wines continue to draw hatred and fear in Europe

This article explains just how much fear and hatred the vinifera world of Europe feels towards modern grape varieties. The animosity is the result of a century of carefully-fanned flames of prejudice. Modern varities of grapes (hybrids) are the answer to Europe's dirty little secret: Growers there are killing their vineyard workers and sterilizing their soil (killing earthworms and beneficial nematodes) with nasty sprays for fungus. But the modern grapes don't need fungal sprays--due to their partial American heritage, they have resistance!

And the flavors are good, too. I win blue ribbons with these new varieties.

But Europe has millennia of well-honored tradition, and resists change.

Let's all please drop the prejudice and the hate, and start saving lives.

(photo credit Google images)

Blattner modern grape varieties do well on Vancouver Island

Here's an article about Valentin Blattner's grapes' succeeding in Canada. (Note: The link doesn't work right--you have to go the magazine's website, then enter "Blattner" in the magazine's search box, and then you can get the article.)

Exciting stuff! I imported these grapes to SW WA, at Epona Vineyard, and will have cuttings available in a couple of years. I've met Paul (that's him in the photo) and one of the winemakers mentioned in the article. And that fruit--48.05.83--is very special. It makes a good Bordeaux-blend style of wine.

Great article on hybrid (modern variety) grapes

This writer, who's a professor at Cornell, really nailed it in this article. We should all be drinking more wines made from modern grape varieties, which give us broader diversity, better disease resistance, and more-interesting flavors. To continue to focus only on evolutionarily-restrained Vitis vinifera (European winegrapes) is to head heedlessly towards extinction, just as is happening with the Cavendish banana.

2014 Grape Update

2014 in the Pac NW is a great year for grapes. Any poor wine from 2014 represents an inept winemaker.Here's my report from my winemaking:

Cayuga: Really good numbers: pH 3.38 and TA 0.68%. A really nicely low TA, due to our hot summer and long ripening period. Fermenting in carboys now; great fruit from Lon's 112 lbs and from our Le Mans vines 28 lbs. Just a great year with large clusters that got ripe with superb flavors. Will be my first dry Cayuga, given that low acid.

My Mixed Red ("Rosso Misto") from our Le Mans vines: 7 lb Cascade, 17 lb Regent; 10 lb Delicatessen. Great fruit; great flavors. I put in some Rayon d'Or (white) for color fixing but with those reds it isn't necessary. just racked onto oak and sulfited tonight. Smells good. Vivid dark rich, glass-staining purple. Drinking decently now; surprising for a raw wine. pH 3.54 and TA 0.77% (it was 1.16%!!! but MLF really took that acid down; I can drop it a further 0.05% with cold stabilization, so I'll end up with 0.72% TA, which is a bit high for a red so I might add the faintest hint of sugar to balance it up and if I do my job well the tasters wouldn't even notice.

Leon: Picked late due to my travel schedule, so the pH was higher than the target of 3.4 or less. But I wanted it to hang in our most excellent summer, to see how the flavors changed. It turned a bit bricky as pH shot up to 4.12 during primary ferm. But that was only for a few days, and I added tartaric acid to drop pH to 3.69, which returned the good purple color. When pH was 4.12, TA was 0.85%--too high--but MLF really did its job: Tonight I racked and oaked, and it tested at pH 3.73 (pretty good; wish it was a smidge lower) and TA 0.58%, which was low enough that I could add the least bit of tartaric, to squeeze down the pH and help keep the wine fresh and more-stable in terms of shelf life; I boosted TA to 0.62% and I can use CS to take it right back to 0.57% (while maintaining the new, lower pH). Color is a fairly deep purple for a Leon; I'm pleased. The wine is disjointed; hasn't come together yet, but has nice fruit. I don't pick up any off flavors that I could attribute to fermenting on the skins, but I will try a batch with limited skin contact (quick skin color transfer) next year, as an experiment, given advice received from other Leon-makers elsewhere in the US. I think adding the white grapes really does help maintain the color (the old Syrah-Viognier trick).

Need to bottle the 2013s soon. Running out of glassware!

Kenton