Wallula is the largest vineyard we source grapes from representing about 40% of all our Riesling grapes. It is also our only Biodynamic Vineyard (the first in Washington and the largest). It is the source of our Single Vineyard Wallula, a large contributor to our Riesling made from Organic grapes and a good contributor to our Sweet Riesling. I was there two week ago to check the development of our growing season. The vineyard looked good, appropriate crop level, good growth etc… Below is a picture of how things look like:

 Of course one of the pleasure of walking at Wallula is to spot the sheeps. We use them to weed the rows (remember we don’t use any herbicide or pesticides for Biodynamic farming).  Here they are between the rows:

Wallula is a special place from many different propectives. First is is a high elevation vineyard (1,300 feet) above Missoula flood levels (click here for the story of the flood) and that is very interesting for a higher mineral content. It was also planted biodynamically from the get go and the farming practices are very unique and highly sustainable (see earlier post on biodynamic farming).  The density is high for Washington (1613 vines/ac) resulting in less crop per vine. The trellis is also very peculiar - it is a sort of a modified lyra with a tall vine (the fuit zone is 5 feet off the ground) - promoting lots of shading which protects the clusters from too much sunlight and provides a cooler environment. Finally we have a few buried drip lines that promote more root exploration enhancing mineral content. There are very few vineyards in the world that are so complex and advanced. Below is a picture of a vine so you can picture the whole thing.

Anyone that knows me is aware that I have a soft spot for Chenin Blanc in Washington. Chenin Blanc vineyards are some of the oldest in the State (our Chenin Blanc vineyards are 35 years old on average) and have exceptional depth. One of my favorite site is in the middle of the Yakima on a small south facing hill called Hahn Hill. The vineyard is 37 years old at sits at about 900 feet of elevation (picture above). Hahn Hill represents about 50% of our Chenin Blend every year. The vines are trained with the old fashion fan system (see picture below) where several “arms come out of the same plant. This training is a nice for quality grapes though quite labor intensive because the fruit zone is distributed a bit randomly (versus the Vertical Shoot positionning system where the fruit is nicely lined up on the cordon). Vineyard looks great this year. Should be a very nice Chenin year.

Both vineyards are owned by James Willard (Jim) and are in the lower Yakima Valley. Solstice is the source of our single vineyard Solstice Riesling and our block is 30 year old. The grapes are always concentrated (we go for about 3 tons/acre in that old block). The vineyard itself has a very organic feel to it (See picture below). This year the crop looks great with a modest canopy at this point.

Jim was pulling out an old Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard and he showed me the old vines (35+ year old), they were quite massive. Check this impressive picture of Jim vs the old Cabernet:

Skyline is the future source of a newly Gamay vineyard for us. The vines are now two years old so the first crop will be in 2010. Very exciting. Pictures of the growing babies below.

We are now finishing bloom in most of our vineyards. This is a good time to have a look at the growing season so far. Overall the season has been very nice to date with our Growing Degree Days (GDD) tracking close to 2003 (a warm year). Below is the current GDD chart from WSU:

GDD is computed by substracting 50 from the average daily temperature and cumulating that number over time. GDD in the Yakima Valley was 720 as of June 21st. A warm year usually means a early harvest and sometimes lower acidities. We are ready for an early one at this point!

Over the next few days I’ll post some observation and pictures of our main vineyard sites.

Dr Vino had a good post on his blog about Riesling ageability. Even though 99% of folks don’t age their wines a few of us do. Myself probably more because I forget about the wines in my cellar rather than by design. Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to taste an older Riesling regardless of its residual sugar (that would be my “gee, I did not remember I had that bottle here” moment). My rule of thumb is usually that Rieslings with a greater residual sugar have a tendency to age better, but that can be debated. The problem is not to argue if Riesling can age as it is one of the most ageworthy whites; but it is to find friends that share an interest in tasting older bottles of wine. Very often aged Rieslings taste different than younger, fresher Rieslings as they lose their fruit forwardness to gain more honey and petroleum notes. That might turn many folks away. The appreciation of an older wine taste profile brings my old philosophical dilemna; do people do not like a given wine (old or not) because it does not meet their frame of reference (It is not sweet as it should be, it is not oaky as white wine should be, etc…) OR do people do not like a given wine because hedonically it is unpleasant (ie it truly taste like hell to them). My guess is that the earlier reason is often true and that people do not truly enjoy the wine as it is but they always try to apply a frame of reference to it (either past experiences or what they have been told by others) and compare that reference to their present experience. If the reference (or expected) taste matches the current taste, they like the wine; if not, they dislike it. Well, sorry to get that deep here, but that’s what happens when you think about older Rieslings…

Last week I gave a talk to a group of importers that were touring eastern Washington with the Washington Wine Commission. My topic was Riesling acreage and clonal selection in Washington State. I wanted to put some of the interesting facts I found out on this blog for reference.

Riesling acreage is about 145,000 acres worldwide. Most of the acreage is located in the old world (Germany and Alsace). In the new world, Australia has the largest acreage followed by Washington State. To put it in relationship with other regions, Washington has about 4,500 acres of Riesling which is about twice the acreage of California and about half the acreage of Alsace. 

Washington’s Riesling is either quite old (older than 25 years - representing 40% of total acreage) or quite young (less than 7 years - representing 40% of total acreage). This age distribution has probably to do with the early successes of Riesling in Washington followed by a low growth period (for Riesling in general) in the 90s and an accelerated growth since the beginning of the new millenium.

The acreage older than 25 year old is planted a bit everywhere throughout the State with about 25% in the Yakima Valley. Although there are no record of where the clonal material came from, one can guess about two probable sources. The first one is the stock that was brought in by Upland winery (closed in 1972) in the late 30’s on the eve of the repeal of prohibition. This selection was planted in Sunnyside and came from Germany (Upland’s winemaker was German). The second probable source is California. Before the 70’s, only clone 1 seemed to have been available in quantity. Clone 1 is also of German origin and came through Oregon State University. Those two sources are probably the origin of most of Washington’s Riesling.

The younger plantings are less scattered than the earlier ones and concentrated in the Yakima Valley (about 50% of all Riesling is grown in “the valley”) and in the Horse Heaven Hills (25% of all Riesling is grown there). The clonal selection available post 1970 was more varied since the Foundation Plant Service (FPS) in California had introduced several German clones in the 50’s. The probable materials that were brought in for newer planting (the American FPS clone number is the short number, I am including the “translation”  for reference) includes clone 9 and 24 (Geisenheim 110), Clone 12 (Neustadt 90), Clone 17 (Geisenheim 198), Clone 23 (Geisenheim 239). Other clones might have come up to Washington such as the “Martini clone” (FPS 10), the Conegliano 100 (FPS 19), the Clos Pepe clone (FPS 20), the Mendoza clone (FPS 22), ENTAV 49 (FPS 49). Of course, most new plantings might just have been propagated from the wood of older vineyards. No one know for sure, but I would guess that 80% of new plantings still come from the original selections.

At Pacific Rim, we are probably a mini sample of Washington’s Riesling. 30% of our vineyards are indeed older than 25 years. 40% of our Riesling comes from the Horse Heaven Hills (Wallula Vineyard) with the balance coming from the lower Yakima Valley (in a narrow strecth at the highest elevation available between Sunnyside and Prosser). Our newer planting are all clone 110, 239, 198 and 90 from Germany (representing about 65% of all our Riesling), who knows what the older vines are.

For the past year we have been working with our largest growers to come up with an integrated plan that would lift the sustainability footprint of all our vineyards. Together, those growers represent more than 80% of all our vineyards. We have called our team the Integrated Environmental Stewardship or IES for short. This effort is of course on top of our Biodynamic farming at Wallula and our Organic vineyards. The reason we started this group is because we could not find a single certification mechanism that met all our needs or that was economically interesting. After a year of work we have come up with a list of practices that we will monitor. Below is the list in order of importance to us:

That list has criteria (about 120 of them in total) that each farm can or has to follow in order to bge qualified as “sustainable” by our team. We are also in the process of sorting chemicals used for Herbicides, Fungicides, Insecticides and Fertilizer and agreeing of what is authorized and what is not based on several national (Organic) and international (IOBC) guidelines.

Long process, but we believe one of the most thourough out there.

30% of our grapes are grown biodynamically and to my knowledge we have the only certified biodynamic vineyard in Washington State. We also are the only certified biodynamic producer in the State. We are not fanatical about biodynamie but it has taught us many things and has connected us better to our terroir.

Our understanding of Biodynamic agriculture

What we have learned from Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamic agriculture principles is that our goal should be to set the farm as a self contained entity focused on exporting goods without importing any from the outside world. The farm is in some way limited, just like our planet, and it has to become its own ecosystem to become a sustainable and perennial entity. Of course this preclude the use of any chemical at the farm unless they can be produced at the farm. For these reasons we use only natural products that could be produced at the farm that we call preparations (we actually do not make our own at this point but would like to). The preparations are numbered from 500 to 508:

This is all we use in the vineyard - no other chemical organic nor synthetic. The compost making is very important as it is the key to a healthy soil and in return to a healthy vine. Also we do use the moon cycles to do most operations in the vineyard.

Our understanding of Biodynamic winemaking

At the winery we do not correct any grape deficiencies (no acid, no sugar, no water). We do not use commercial yeasts, only the yeasts that came with the grapes. The only chemicals we use are bentonite (for protein stability, it is remove and does not stay in the wine) and we add sulfites below 100ppm.

Lesson learned

In the vineyard we understand that we do not need heavy chemicals to grow our grapes. Yes, it is more work but there are alternative ways to grow grapes in an economical way. It makes sense and it does not make us a bunch of hippies. Consequently we have pooled our growers together to find alternative ways to grow grapes in a more sustainable way and we are creating an Integrated Environmental Stewardship Charter to move our sustainability agenda forward.

At the winery we know understand that we do not need commercial yeasts and that we can also make wine with fewer chemicals. Yes, the wines might not always be “technologically” correct but we hope they taste better and are healthier for you, just like an organically grown fruit.

We hope that you care as much as we do.

Twice a year I sit down with the our winemaking dream team and we go through the latest bottling to see how our bottled wines are holding. We also remember how we made them all. It is some sort of a 360 evaluation six month to a year after bottling to gauge our performance. Below is a list of the wine we’ve tasted and our winemaking comments:

Wallula Riesling Biodynamic 2007: Great wine, aromatic and mineral, nice acidity. Would not change a thing.
Wallula Riesling 2007: Tighter than the Biodynamic version, sharp, some lime, bit austere right now but armed to age well. May be a little austere?
Solstice Riesling 2007: Very clean, intense, shows some sign of petrol, very nice right now. Recommend drinking now.
Chenin Blanc 2007: We actually did a vertical of the 06-07 and 08 vintage. Those wines really evolve nicely overtime from tight/lime to opulent/Sauvignon blanc like. The 07 is still in its lime/clean phase but is starting to show some hay from the bottle age.
Gewurztraminer 2007: Nice wine, a bit tight, we can improve on this one though this is a nice effort (FYI, the 2008 is very good).
Dauenhauer Riesling 2007: Sl mushroom/botrytis, balanced, very nice. This is one of those wines that we might never be able to do again. What a great bottle.
Sweet Riesling 2007: This is sold out (we are selling the 2008) but for those of us that are keeping the wine in the cellar it will be rewarding. the wine is totally fresh and alive.
Selenium Riesling Vin De Glaciere 2007: Clean, great dessert wine. This is built to age nicely.

If you do taste those wines and have some comments, please leave a post!

The sudden cold snap in the country has caught everyone a bit by surprise and Eastern Washington has not escaped the artic weather. We are seeing some nights below 0F and obviously at that temperature we start to worry about winter injuries on our vines.

The cold can kill the buds that we need in order to grow a new canopy in the spring and it can damage the trunks by killing the phloem or the xylem that carry the sap (more on that later if you don’t know what I am talking about). So how low of a temperature can our vines take before we get injuries that would compromise our yields? Well, the Yakima Valley farm extension of Washington State University has a method forecasting the cold hardiness of buds and vascular system (phloem and xylem) of each grape varietal in Eastern Washington. At this point, it looks like our Riesling bud are safe until -7F but would be 90% destroyed if we get below -12. The concerning area right now is the phloem cold hardiness which is rated at 0F (the xylem is OK until -14F). So it looks like that we should expect some phloem damage but we should be fine with bud and xylem damage.

The Phloem is most important because it carries the sap in the middle of the trunk and does not renew every year unlike the xylem (the xylem makes those rings every year on the plant). If the phloem on our vines gets damaged we will have to cut them to the ground and grow the vines back from the roots (which is fine since we are on our own roots with no rootstocks). Usually, when we cut our vines down we expect a shorter crop. Stay tune for more information.

As some of you might know, one of our main Riesling source comes from Wallula Vineyard in the Horse Heaven Hills appellation. Our vineyard sits at about 1,200 feet of elevation and presents several unique characteristics. The first one is to be planted with high density (about 1,613 plants per acre) allowing high competition between vines. The second characteristic is the ingenious trellis system which creates a micro environment under the vines very conducive to high quality Riesling. The third characteristic is our extensive clonal selection. The last characteristic and may be the most important is that this vineyard is farmed entirely Biodynamically.
The wines from this vineyard are turning so good this year that we are considering a single vineyard bottling from this special Terroir. We have tried to go Biodynamic all the way (ie in our winemaking as well) but we only succeeded with one tank. I understand this is not too bad of an achievement for a Biodynamic rookie that I am. The wine is very exciting. Check this out: No pesticides, no fertilizer what so ever in the vineyard, handpicked, no yeast added (only the one that came with the grapes), no yeast nutrients, no acid, no nothing during the winemaking process. Now, that is as pure as it gets.

I was at the Wallula Vineyard last week with Alan Busacca, a very knowledgeable geologist that has been studying Eastern Washington for many moons. Our goal was to dig some 7-8 feet deep to see what our soils where made of exactly on that site. What we saw was straight windblown loess for 8 feet with a darker top layer from organic matters mixed with the silt and then a whitish layer from calcium carbonate deposits. Very uniform, packed with minerals soils. We did not see any ash layers trapped in the silt that would have helped us dating the soils (about 1 inch of soil is deposited by the wind every 200 years in this part of the Columbia Valley). For example Mt Saint Helen had a major eruption 14,000 years ago and a white ash layer can often been seen that help dating the soils above or below the ash layer. No matter, I have learn tons from Alan on that day and I can tell you that we have some pretty special dirt up at Wallula that will help produce some very distinctive wines with high mineral characters.

Walulla vineyard is located right at the mouth of the Walulla gap on an impressive cliff. This vineyard hosts our Biodynamic Riesling, about 140 acres in total. At an elevation of about 1,200 feet the vineyard overlooks the Columbia River which runs 800 feet below one mile South East. The cliff is quite breathtaking and can be treacherous. Bill Den Hoed told me that the day before my visit someone went over the cliff with an ATV after losing control of the speedy machine. The ATV went down 800 feet and became one with the moon like landscape by the river shore. The driver saved her life by jumping before going over the cliff. Bill told me in a funny sort of way: “The chick’s all right but the four wheeler is toast”…Bill and Andy have so many good stories about the cliff and the humans that interact with it; I love every single one of them.

The vineyard is at the image of the landscape, breathtaking and somewhat insane. We’ve done some pretty advanced viticulture designs there. First the density is very high (about 1,600 vines/acre), second it is Biodynamicly farmed, third the trellis is very special (sort of a raised lira with collapsible trellis for machine harvesting) and lastly we are experimenting with buried drip irrigation. We also have 4 clones from Germany in this vineyard.

2007 will be our first commercial harvest out of Walulla. We are planning on making a single vineyard wine with those grapes and it will be probably fermented entirely with native yeast that comes on the grapes’ skins. Be ready for a very, very interesting and distinctive Riesling from Walulla in Spring 2008!

This is the first serious episode on my quest for the perfect Riesling site in the Pacific Northwest.

I was in the Snake River Valley AVA this week. I went to see a few vineyard sites (Bitner Vineyard, Williamson Vineyard…) and visited a few wineries (Parma Ridge, St Chapelle, Koenig….) to understand what is happening in Idaho. The area is beautiful, quite reminiscent of the Yakima Valley of Washington that we call home. The climate seems pretty similar though with more precipitation (11 t 14” a year) and at a higher altitude (most grapes are grown above 2,000 feet of altitude). This was unfortunately not the cool site I was dreaming about.

One particularity of the region is the proximity to Boise and the increasing pressure that residential real estate development puts on the farmers. I saw some acreage selling for $40K/acre that would have been great vineyard land. I am not sure where the AVA is going but they will have to deal with this before long.

The wines were nice. My favorites were the Viognier from Koenig and the Syrah from Williamson Estates. Both were made by Greg Koenig and I must say that I was impressed. Koenig winery itself is worth the visit if you like eau-de-vie makers. The big dog in town is St Chapelle as it represents about 85% of all wines made in Idaho. Chuck Devlin, the winemaker at St Chapelle, produces good wines at reasonable prices.

I think I want to try to make a Snake River Riesling to see if I can produce something distinctive. I am thinking about a small 500 cases lot if I can find the right grapes. I think I have a couple of irons in the fire to make that possible. May be my dream of a pan-Northwest Riesling can come true?