Obviously one cannot be sad enough for the terrible quake that shook Chile this week. It is all more important to me because the earthquake hit a wine producing region in the middle of their harvest. I just cannot imagine the added chaos at all those wineries. I was listening to my favorite podcast while on my bike ride this morning, and the topic of the amount of wine lost last week in Chile came up: 125 million liters. Once in the office I took my calculator to put that number in prospective, that is 33 million gallons or about 194,000 tons of fruit. Well, that is more grapes that we harvest in Washington in a whole year (we’ve harvested 156,000 tons in Washington in 2009).  If that is not enough to put things in prospective, the interviewed person from the Wines of Chile association mentionned that it was “only” 12.5% of the wine they had on hand at that time. We are just a drop in the bucket, aren’t we?

What do we do to have a certified “Made from Organic Grapes” Riesling: to be organic the wine as to 1) be made from certified organic grapes 2) be made in a winemaking facility certified to organic standard 3) follow a process filed with USDA that is organic. Pacific Rim is certified by the Washington State Department of Ag which, in turns, is certified by USDA. The process is fairly restrictive, expensive (we pay a percentage of sales to WSDA) and requires yearly inspections from WSDA and yearly filing.

Why is our wine labeled ”Made From Organic Grapes” rather than “Organic”: Everything we use in our winemaking is certified organic. We actually go beyond the regulation because 1) we do not use commercial yeasts 2) we do not add any acid to our wines. The only non organic element we use is sulfur dioxide know as sulfites (not to be mistaken with sulfides which is a term gathering a bunch of stinky rotten egg compounds sometimes found in wines). Sulfur dioxide is a very common preservative in dry fruits, pre packed vegetables and juices. It is authorized in wines up to 350 mg/L but in Organic and biodynamic winemaking it is limited to 100 mg/L which is why at Pacific Rim all our wines are bottled with less than 100 mg/L of sulphur dioxide – guaranteed. We bottle the Riesling MFOG at around 90 mg/L (or ppm). Therefore the non organic fraction of the Riesling MFOG is really 0.009%. So it is quite a pure organic wine but since it has 0.009% of non organic product we have to call it MFOG.

Why use sulfites in wines by the way?: Sulfites act as 1) an antioxidant which is very important in white wines (we don’t need much for that purpose because we use air tight screwcaps and we make sure that our wines have no dissolved oxygen when they go in the bottle) and 2) an anti bacterial and anti fungal agent which is important for us because we have residual sugars and residual malic acid (we do not do malolactic fermentations). A last bonus of sulfites is that it is a bit like salt with food (Just like sulfites, salt is not healthy if you eat too much of it!) as it highlights and focuses the aromas and flavors of a wine. Finally note that sulfites are naturally produced by yeast in the 30ppm range usually - so even an Organic wine probably contains a small amount of sulfites. 

Our style: The grapes are picked around 22 Brix which would qualify for a very ripe Spatlese in most German regions. We make it in a definite sweet style but beware the acid on that one! About 0.78 TA, 3.04 pH and 3.5%RS. I think this is a very balanced wine with always very refined aromas of fresh white flowers and some peach. This is really a chameleon wine as far as pairing goes and at 10.5% Ethanol it is easy to drink!

The ice cold temperature is not bad for everyone, at least not for Pacific Rim. As you might remember, we had left some grapes in the field this year in the hope of making a TBA of sort i.e. a botrytized wine better known as noble rot wine. It got too cold to produce a 100% Botrytis wine (though we got a good amount of botrytis) and in exchange we are getting several nights below 10F which is allowing us to make a true ice wine this year! We just got done picking today and received 6 tons of frozen grapes with lots of botrytis (yum yum). We are pressing tomorrow morning and we hope to get 500 gallons of the precious high Brix, complex juice. This should be a very very interesting wine (and yes another style of Riesling). A picture of the vineyard yesterday is above - amazing that such a odd looking bunch produces such an amazing wine.

About two weeks ago we got a hard freeze in Eastern Washington (see this post) and we are still not sure what are the long term consequences of this unusual weather event. One fact we know is that the weather stopped the growing season - drop dead.  Below is the current GDD chart (see this post about the exciting world of Growing Degree Days):

Here you can see that 2009 (the black line) was behaving much like 2003 (warm year standard in red) until the freeze in early October and from then on there no degree days that have been recorded and we might end up close to the long term average (in teal). Pretty dramatic, no?

Alright, this is the end of harvest. It got down to 20F in the Yakima valley on Saturday night frying most vineyards. Thankfully we were watching the weather channel so we were ready for it. Pacific Rim should be done picking this Thursday. Usually we have up to 10 days after a hard forst to pick the grapes before they fall to the ground. I feel that we’ve dodged a bullet here! Thank you for weather forecasting…

Great quality this year made by a great team. I look forward to share the first wines with you all.

We must now be about half way through our harvest with most of the early Riesling picking done. We pick early for our sweeter styles (such as our Organic or our Sweet Riesling) so we have plenty of acid to balance the sugar we do not ferment. We are almost done with our Wallula fruit (a third of all our Riesling comes from the Biodynamically farmed Wallula) which is our warm early site. We should out of the sheeps hair in a few days, hang on girls!

Quality is high with plenty of flavors and surprisingly high acid. I think that our canopy management this summer is really paying off. I thought last year was a great Riesling year, but this year is turning out very very nice.

Another three weeks of picking fruit and we should be done….

The grapes from our single vineyard Solstice are ripening nicely. This should be (again) an outsandingvintage for what is usually our smallest bottling of the year (200 cases a year). We sold out of the 2007 and just bottled the 2008 6 weeks ago. above is a beauty shot of the clusters this year - yes, Steven, I know I am a lousy photographer and my camera stinks. I love this block, it is not good looking per se (see the old gnarly vine below), oldish (planted in 1972, just like me), naturally cropped at 2.5tons per acre, on very shallow soils straight on the fractured basalt. I think one of the most Terroir driven wine we make with some petrol notes - very Alsatian inspired. It is a bit geeky of a wine (That’s probably why Ole at Wild Ginger in Seattle liked it) but always a treat.

Here is a picture of Rick from the Hogue Ranches in the Yakima Valley (we source three Riesling blocks with those guys) posing next to their new owl houses spread out through the vineyard. They where built as a school project by a Prosser high schooler (Keith Forsyth) and placed throughout the vineyard. Likely large barn owls will move in February next year and will help control naturally the sage rat population. Thank you guys for providing a habitat for those beautiful birds and consequently reducing any needs for chemical (read poison) control of the sage rat population. This is what sustainability is all about!

The only grapes we havebrought so far are for our yeast starter. Our wines will be  again fermented with 100% native yeasts this year and we have dialed in a process to get that done. A week before we harvest any given block we bring a 700 Lbs starter from that very block of Riesling, stump it with our feet and wait for the grapes to ferment. A week later our starter is usually ready to use and inoculate a whole tank from the same block. Our first starter this year is of course for our Sparkling Riesling “white flowers”!

Alright, I have a secret projet going on and I am now ready to share a picture:

Any idea what that is? About what are we going to do with it?

Every year I receive the suggested price list and the estimated crop size from the Washington Association of  Wine Grape Grower (WAWGG for short and simple). There is plenty of information and fun comments in this very official release.

First there is an estimated crop size which WAWGG insist is not a harvest estimate. I am not sure I know the difference between an estimated crop size and a harvest estimate, but in for 2009 the estimated crop is 149,373 tons (about that for an “estimate”, glad they did not go 2 digits beyond that). That would put the crop size 3% over the actual 2008 harvest. It looks like we might have a fair amount of extra grapes on the market putting pressure on price (sounds like the car industry doesn’t it? about a cash for cluncker wines to help us out here?). The grapes with the most imbalance appear to be Riesling, Syrah, Merlot, Pinot Gris and Semillon. Cabernet and Chardonnay look to be in balance (hey guys, a bit of Riesling in your Chardonnay will make it taste great! Call me if you need any).

Second there is a list of prices per ton for each major varietal. I won’t reproduce here the list because there is an underlined statement  ”for members only” at the top and a couple statement on the bottom like “NOT FOR PUBLIC USE” and “NOT FOR MEDIA USE”. Sounds pretty secretive doesn’t it? Since I don’t want to be shot by Joe and Moe (both officially “customer service representative” for WAWGG) I won’t go into the details. Let’s say that prices are a bit softer this year on average.

Finally there is a break down of the “estimated crop size” by varietal. Good to see the Riesling is clearly #1 with a good 2,000 tons lead over good old Chardonnay. No other breaking news.

Hope I did not reveal all the secret… Please don’t send Joe and Moe….

I am so glad that we are now at a point where we can grow great canopy sizes for our Riesling. This will be a major asset with this year’s heat wave. Here is a picture of Selenium Vineyard where our grower is doing a great job (thank you Dan). With big canopies we can protect our grapes from the hot sun and keep a high level of elegance and acidity in the grapes.

Minimally Pruning has been successful for many years in Australia. Thisviticultural technique is achieved by not pruning the vines and rather form a sort of basket with the canes. This obviously leaves many buds on the vine and is conducive to a very vigorous grape vine. The theory goes that the vine will self regulate itself after a few years, the vigor slows down and the crop load settles down. The benefits of MP (for Minimal Pruning) is lower labor cost (read no need to prune!) but also more shading for the grapes (from a larger canopy), good airflow by the creation of a “dead zone” in the center of the canopy and smallclusters. I have seen several successful trials in Washington but I was not expecting seeing a MP vineyard in the Mosel (more on the not-so traditional Mosel viticulture in a later post). Guess what, I found one and the owner loved it and thought this might be the way to go for him (pictured above). This vineyard was only slightly converted since it was retrofitted on a wire system from the traditional post trellis system (note the vines were very low to the ground which I had not seen for MP vineyards). May be time for us to do our own trial in the Yakima Valley?

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.