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.

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.

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.