I was out in our Lodi Zin vineyard with our grower, Kevin Soucie, a week ago checking on the grapes, complaining about the weather and watching the crew do some pretty intense leaf pulling. The crop load this year is wild. We were looking at a potential crop of 10 to 12 tons per acre, even in our 1916 block (92 year old vines.) - easily more than twice as much grape as we want on the vines.

Our Zinfandel vineyard is grown as ‘head-trained’ or self-supporting vines. Spacing is 8′ by 8′. On these vines there are generally 20 to 25 ‘arms’ with, ideally, two fruit-bearing shoots per arm with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

On trellised vines (using wires for support) you have two, sometimes four, ‘cordons’ or arms with 6 to 8 nodes per cordon and two fruit-bearing shoots per node with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

We were seeing four to five fruit bearing shoots per arm with four to five clsuters per shoot. Crazy heavy. It’s kinda hard to see in the first picture, but you’re looking at about 10 clusters when you should be seeing two or three. The immature clusters were already huge, as long as my hand - 8.5 inches. The primary cluster and the ‘wing’ as Kevin calls it, were almost the same size and the shoulders were already as big as clusters of Clone Six Cabernet. There was a considerable amount of shatter but when the grapes start to mature and fill in the shatter will aid in opening up the clusters

Kevin said he hasn’t seen this much fruit on the vines for 15 years. There’s no real way to explain why the crop load is so heavy this year. Could be lack of spring rain, could be a “light” crop last year…. no single reason explains it, but there are way too many grapes on the vines for a quality harvest.

Four to five tons to the acre is optimal production for our block of Zinfandel. More than that and the grapes don’t develop their best flavors and less than that doesn’t make much difference between “wow” flavors and “wow” flavors in the finished wine.

The fix to excess crop loads is easy but can get expensive. Essentially you just send the crews through the vineyard and reduce the crop by cutting out the excess fruit.

How is the vintage of 2008 looking? Too early to tell in Lodi. The weather has been good, but temperatures are trending cooler than ‘normal.’ Our Foothills sources suffered minor frost damage this past spring. Napa is looking at a very light year due to frost damage and I’ve heard that some people are already writing off ‘08 Napa as a “bad” year. That’s crazy talk at this point. Much depends on the weather between now and September/October.

Spring has sprung and summer is here. Significant frost hit the vineyards in NoCal a while back. Our Lodi Zin vineyard had no damage, our Fair Play Cab vineyard had minimal damage, our Napa Cab sources are suffering however. Predictions are that Napa vineyards might be down to 25% or so of last year’s crop. Hide and watch….

Lodi’s ZinFest was this past Saturday (May 17) and our booth at Lodi Lake was slammed with people. Thanks to everyone who stopped and tried the ‘06 Soucie Vineyard Zinfandel. We got a lot of “Your wine was the best all day” comments, some even from sober people!

Our new wines are officially out and I think overall the ’06s are the best wines we’ve made, but are very young tasting still. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but in my opinion the Zin, Viognier and Trio are the best right now. That will change as all the wines spend time in bottle but those three are not to be missed right now. We’ve got some ‘05 Cab, Petite and Duality in inventory though - and these wines are drinking beautifully right now, which leads me to be convinced all our wines benefit from at least a year in the bottle to show their true potential.

We’ve got a lot of events at the winery planned for the summer - June 14 is the official release date for our ‘Artist Series’ Lodi Zin. Check the events page of the web site for more events.

Yikes - winery update time…

We pressed seven tons of the Petite Sirah this past Saturday and Sunday; yield was somewhere around 1200 gallons of free-run and press wine. I’ll lose about 10 percent of that by the time it’s in the bottle due to racking losses, evaporation and so forth.

 Anyone want to come help do punch-downs and Ts and Bs??? You’re invited.

 Layne

Five point five tons of Syrah from Lani’s Vineyard in Shenandoah Valley, Amador County, to be picked tomorrow morning - two day laborers are hired to help me get it crushed tomorrow afternoon at m2 winery in Lodi. Chris is working his day job, unable to get time off during the work week during harvest this year due to extenuating circumstances - diabetes and dying relatives among them. Not him with the D&D, but people with whom he’s associated, causing me untoward difficulties, selfish bastard that I am. Ted, one of our new partners, will be by around 2 p.m., hopefully bringing beer and water.

Dave Dart, of d’Art Vineyard and Winery, also in Lodi, is coming by for moral support. He’s picking 10 tons of Cabernet Sauvignon from his home vineyard Saturday. I’ll help out as best I can with his big harvest day by taunting his friends providing free labor as well as measuring sugars, pH, TA, weighing out SO2, tartaric, etc., as needed.

We’re also probably going to do 3.5 tons of Zinfandel from Kevin’s 1916 field on Saturday as well. Today I measured 27.8 Brix, 3.65 pH and .615 TA. Fantastic numbers from this old block of vines. Higher Brix than what Kevin reported from his tests on Sunday, but that’s the way it goes.

From what I’ve seen 2007 grapes are holding higher acids than whatever “normal” is. Berries are smaller than I’ve seen in a long time. Flavors are ok, but I like l o o o onnng g hang time and superior physiological maturity. Harvest is generally early this year, at least for our usual vineyard sources.

Overall it looks like 2007 will be one of the best, most - interesting - difficult - unusual - great - ordinary - insert_your_word_of_choice_here - vintages that California has EVER seen. Shortly you can expect to see famous, nationally know wine publications quoting famous, nationally know winemakers who will say “2007 is the best year since (insert great vintage year here.) It reminds me of the great harvest of (insert great vintage year here.) And of course, you’ll see strong recommendations to buy up all the 2007 wines NOW!!! Don’t wait!!! It’s the BEST EVER SINCE (INSERT GREAT VINTAGE YEAR HERE.)!!!!! Jeez. I hate wine cliches.

I’ve had a long day - taking picking bins up to Lani’s Vineyard, answering more than 30 phone calls, I kid you not, delivering a couple of cases of wine to customers, as well as trying to finish a presentation folder design job for Ann P., which is way overdue - the design work being my feeble attempt to make a little cash in lieu of a real job.

Enough of my bitching…. off to bed with me.

Yowza, I realized it’s been July since I’ve written anything new here…

Grapes coming tomorrow, our first for 2007 - two tons of Viognier from the Fair Play AVA in El Dorado county. I’m going to do a barrel-fermentation and if all goes as planned we’ll have a great white wine for release in May of 2008.

 If you read this between now and Saturday afternoon, come on out to m2 and see what’s happening. We’ll be doing a whole-cluster press to get the juice off the skins as fast as possible, then a light bentonite fining. After settling I’ll rack clean juice into four neutral oak barrels and the balance into stainless steel kegs. The kegs will be cold fermented and the barrels will ferment at ambient temp in the winery, about 63 degrees. I’ll add dry ice pellets daily to keep the temp in the proper range if needed. We’ve never done a barrel-fermented white; we’ve done several small lots of whites in our past pre-bonded winery days - Sauv Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Riesling, so this is new.

Lots of other things have happened in the past month - Chris and I met some great folks at the Family Winemakers of California event in San Francisco August 19 & 20 - we’re exploring options on distributing m2 in Texas and Jamaica! Hey Mon! A big shout-out to Jamaica Paul and Texas Kasey, glad you enjoyed the wines and we look forward to future possibilities.

Also, Diana and Chris have done a kick-ass job at sales lately. You can now get m2 wines at Capitol Cellars in Roseville, CA. Marcus Graziano, the proprietor, loves our ’05s and carries our Petite Sirah, Trio, and Duality. He also has some of the very last bottles of the 2004 Dos Arkies in stock. You need to go check out the shop, it’s one of the best in California.

The 2005 Old Vine Zinfandel is essentially sold out. We’re holding back some cases for future library wine, but there’s no more for sale. We are offering futures on the ‘06 vintage, come taste it at the winery.

On the winemaking front, we retired a significant number of older barrels in July. I don’t like to use stuff more than six years old, so several 2000 and 2001 era barrels are now moving on to their next life as planters or decorations.

Our crush plans are now at 32 to 34 tons of fruit, scaled back from our original plans due to space constraints and budget issues. 30 or so new barrels are set for delivery in mid-September - Francois Feree, Demptos, Nadalie, Canton and Seguin-Moreau. Some of the 2006 wines will go into some of this new oak; we were a little short on new barrels last year and some of the ‘06 stuff could use a higher percentage of new oak in the mix, the ‘06 Zin especially and the Petite Sirah, both need more sweet oak notes. I bought 30 used 2005 barrels to use for our 2007 stuff from a top-notch, world-famouse Napa winery too.

Now for something completely different…. Check this out -

If you can’t read the sign on the passenger door it says ‘Allied Driving School’. I can imagine that phone call . . . “Mom! I failed driving school again. Oh, and the instructor is dead.”

I saw this car being towed to a repair shop, or junkyard, the other day driving home from the winery. It made my day.

Later doods!

Overall so far in 2007 the growing season has been near perfect, except for the lack of normal spring rainfall. Temperatures have been spot on with ‘normal’ - only three days or so above 100 in Lodi, and only a few days in the high 90s in Napa. If the temperatures stay like this I’m expecting 2007 to be a very good year for wine grapes. 

We’re adding another top Lodi Zin vineyard to our fruit sources for 2007 - Maley Vineyards, located at Woodbridge and Ray Road. Todd Maley is another 3rd generation Lodi grower and has some tragically good Zinfandel. I was out looking at our Zin today - talking to Kevin Soucie and Todd Maley about the grapes.

Kevin’s vines are 91 years old this year; the block we’re using from Maley Vineyards are about 40 years old. Kevin irrigated to make up for the lack of spring rains and has good fruit set and normal sized clusters. The Zin from Todd has quite a bit of “shot” berry and very small berries. Todd didn’t irrigate, which can account for the smaller berry size.

The shot berry is another thing; Maybe something to do with the age of the vines can account for the shot berry?? I’ve heard that a lot of Lodi vineyards, regardless of the variety, have it. (Shot berry is when the clusters don’t set fruit properly. The berries are the size of buckshot and fail to develop.) Kevin doesn’t have a lot of it, Todd does.

Veraision (when the grapes turn from green to purple) is about a week behind normal, indicating a harvest that’s right on schedule to a week or two late.

Overall 2007 so far in Lodi is looking great. I’ll be talking to our other growers next week and will report on what’s up with those vineyards soon.

I was talking today with Tim Holdener of Macchia Wines here in Lodi and he asked me if I’d been out to see the Soucie Zin vineyard yet. Of course not…. I’ve been busy. I asked a stupid question, “How long until bloom? Tim looked at me funny and said that the vines already have set fruit and berry development is well along.

Well, jeez, I felt stupid. Been so busy that I’ve paid NO attention whatsoever to what time of year it is. I’m still thinking it’s late March. Yikes - harvest is less than four months away!!!!

Springtime is definitely here. Weather today is mid-70s and the winery is finally warming up. We’ll keep it cool this summer, of course, but for now the warmer temperature is welcome as higher temps will cause the malolactic fermentation process to finish up in the 2006 wines.

The vineyards are showing new growth too.