39. Harvest 2020 Complete, Lots of Wine, Still No Winery
This year has been unlike any before it, for everyone. I hope everyone is hanging in there. This blog post is longer than most, but quite a lot has happened since April when the last post left off.
1) Our newly planted vines have begun to grow
2) We took down our safari tent and are building something new
3) I made some big life and career decisions
4) We harvested Tempranillo at Robert Clay Vineyards
5) We almost built a winery, then we ran into trouble. Now we are searching for a new winery space
6) Yet another thing caught on fire at the vineyard
7) I drove a million miles with 3 tons of New Mexico grape juice on a trailer
8) We played with lots of compost/manure/soil/wood chips
9) We traveled to California in search of winery equipment
That was ‘tell’, now for ‘show’. Here we go!
The vines we planted in April seem to be doing well. This particular vine has really taken off.
This little vine looks particularly happy.
This picture was taken on one of the handful of rainy days we’ve had this summer. As you may have noticed the vines are still quite small despite the fact that many of the ones pictured here were planted in 2019. The arid climate, and low levels of organic matter in the soil, the decision to leave the native grasses around the vines completely intact and very limited access to irrigation water have combined to produce very low vigor in the vines so far.
Our friend Gabe made us this cool sign for our gate!
Our trusty tent was nearing the end of its third year, and its age was starting to show. We decided it was time for something new.
The tent has served us well over the past few years. I personally spent over 100 nights in this tent. It has survived a fire, snow, brutal sun and lots and lots of wind. It was a little sad to see it go, but I can’t say I’m going to miss the icicles forming on my mustache in the middle of the night.
Our roommates Melissa and Paulina and honorary roommates Promit and Tyler.
I was worried that taking the tent down would prove to be a challenge, but with all the help we had it ended up being easy breezy.
We decided to use the sturdy platform we built and replace the tent with something a little more permanent. Can you tell what it’s going to be from this picture?
The first three of the nineteen triangles.
All four of these guys have a lot more attention to detail and patience than I do. My plan to “wing it” was only salvaged by their skills and help.
It was some time about now that I realized that we were building a giant ‘A’ and ‘A’ is for Alta Marfa.
ART 1
ART 2
ART 3
ART 4
On our first trip we put up half of the triangles before calling it a day, just as the sun went down.
A few weeks later we came back to finish putting up the triangles. The peak of the roof is a little more than 18 feet above the platform.
All nineteen triangles done!
The view from the loft is great!
Paulina being artsy.
This is how it looks today. Next we will put up the rest of the plywood sheathing put on the roof.
From the other side.
Pepe and Penny did not help at all. Lulu was no doubt off somewhere else causing mischief.
I planted this lavender in 2018 the day after we finished planting all the vines and everyone left. I stayed by myself because the irrigation system still wasn’t working and I didn’t know how to fix it. I ended up getting it fixed after a few days. If it had worked the way it was supposed to initially I probably would have left with everyone else and never would’ve planted the lavender.
I started working in this building during the summer before my senior year of college. After finishing school I moved to Houston and worked there since. After 8 years I decided to leave.
After working remotely since March, I made one last trip into the office in June to turn in my laptop and to clear out my office. I walked out with only this box of stuff; it was like a movie.
I had planned to keep my day job a few more years, but as a result of COVID the company I worked for was struggling and they asked for volunteers to take severance packages. In hindsight I feel like the decision was a little rash, but now it feels like the distant past. Disconnecting from the security and familiarity of the only job I’ve had in my adult life produced a lot of anxiety at first, but I’m not sure the transition would have been any easier even if it had come later and with more forethought.
After 8 months in this barrel we opened our 2019 red Tempranillo for the first time. It’s still a long way from being fully formed, and it still may not make it, but it’s showing promise. We closed it back up, and plan to open it again in 6-12 months to see how it tastes.
This is Flynn. He has woken me up more than once this summer by him covering my face in slobber. During the lead up to our Tempranillo harvest at Robert Clay Vineyards, I periodically spent nights there to see how the grapes were coming along, or to check on our barrel of 2019 red wine. RCV is also vaguely half way between Houston and Marfa, and because we have not been flying due to COVID, the repeated 600 mile drive (one way) has become grueling. Flynn is enormous, he is already well over 100 lbs and still not fully grown. He is a big lovable dufus.
The first night I slept in the back of my little truck I did not cover it with a tarp as I did in this picture. There stars were beautiful; it was a pleasant night. What could go wrong? It started pouring suddenly around 4am. I got completely soaked and slept the rest of the night curled up in the front seat. Another night my truck bed was full of windows, so I decided to sleep in a nearby hammock. The hammock wasn’t bad, but every two hours Flynn and his sister Cleo would visit me on their nighttime guard dog rounds and try to wrestle me out of the hammock.
In 2019 we picked the Tempranillo at Robert Clay on July 6th for our first wine, Lazer Cat. It was a very early pick for Texas, and being our harvest, it was some what of a leap of faith. We were hoping to make an acid driven refreshing wine and it worked!
This year we ended up picking the RCV Tempranillo on June 27th. Trying to maintain style continuity with the last year’s Lazer Cat, while at the same time respecting that 2020 is its own vintage, was a new challenge. The 2020 fruit has slightly more acid and lower sugars than 2019, but at the same time has more color and more ripe flavors.
When it came time to harvest, Dog Face agreed that the fruit was ready.
Beautiful fruit!
This year we were able to purchase 5 rows of Tempranillo from Robert Clay Vineyards. Last year year our total harvest was about 1,800 lbs divided between the Lazer Cat and the yet to be released red wine. This year we ended up with 2.3 tons! (~4,600 lbs)
This day was so exciting! A huge rush of adrenaline to start the day around 5 am. Julian and I finished pressing around midnight.
Perfect!
Dan (RCV owner and farmer) and both Zacks all admiring the freshly harvested Tempranillo.
The newest Olympic sport! Press racing! I’m winning! Just kidding, we all lost because it took 12 hours and over 20 press loads to finish.
We did it though! Thanks so much to Zack and Julian for helping me press all day.
Looks like Lazer Cat! It tasted like it too! Pink Lemonade!
As we loaded the fruit into the press, we set all of the least ripe/greenest fruit aside and pressed it separately. This special super acid juice will become a special sparkling wine. Can’t wait!
After the wine spent 10 days fermenting in tanks, I returned to the RCV winery and Julian and I moved the wine into our new stainless steel barrels. Despite Julian’s face, I swear we were having a great time.
Wine contains multitudes! This stuff is called ‘lees’. It is what falls to the bottom of the tank after fermentation is complete. It is a mixture of grape particles, acid crystals, dead bacteria and yeast cells.
All done! We put an air lock on each barrel so that malolactic fermentation could do its thing without pressurizing the barrels. It’s likely the sparkling wine, occupying just a single barrel, won’t even go through malolactic fermentation due to its very low ph, about 3.0 after primary fermentation. Both wines are now safe in barrels waiting to be bottled this winter.
Always great to see cool bugs like this in the vineyard.
Katie and I and our friend Gabe planted a small vegetable garden at the vineyard in May. We planted tomatoes, okra, eggplant, basil, chilies and strawberries. At the time it was so windy and hot that the baby plants took a beating. We were worried none would survive, but hey all pulled through and are now flourishing!
So much of the summer was marked by views like this. Beautiful, but also exhausting and frustrating. We constantly hoped for rain, and time after time it would rain . . . somewhere else. Ninety percent of the annual rainfall usually comes during the summer. This summer we only received a small fraction of the usual amount. I’ve never been in a position before to care so much about the rain. It is eye opening to feel so vulnerable and realize that so many people around the world who participate in agriculture for their livelihood feel the same.
Isolated rainfall
I found 35 old wooden windows for sale on craigslist. I drove to San Antonio and picked them up. With them in my little truck I could barely go faster than 65 mph. I’m planning to build a greenhouse out of them!
In July we were getting ready to pour the concrete slab for our winery when we ran into trouble. To save everyone having to hear about the unpleasantness that ensued, I will summarize this way: legal action was threatened against us should we move forward with our plans to build a winery on the lot we had purchased. Extremely discouraged, both with our business prospect and with humanity in general, we sold the lot and moved on. Since then we have left no stone unturned searching for another space. I have put print ads in local papers, posted on local message boards, scoured the internet, and have been thwarted at every turn so far. We don’t have enough water available from our well to feel comfortable putting the winery on the same property as our vineyard, and the property my parents bought earlier this year happens to be in a dry part of the county. The search continues and has extended to Houston as well.
On top of everything else, I accidentally crimped one of the power wires in the metal case while replacing the weather station battery. It shorted and caught on fire, melting the end of the battery!
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Ok! I know this is long, bear with me. We are now heading into August. We have already covered:
1) Our newly planted vines have begun to grow
2) We took down our safari tent and are building something new
3) I made some big life and career decisions
4) We harvested Tempranillo at Robert Clay Vineyards
5) We almost built a winery, then we ran into trouble. Now we are searching for a new winery space
6) Yet another thing caught on fire at the vineyard
The remaining topics are:
7) I drove a million miles with 3 tons of New Mexico grape juice on a trailer
8) We played with lots of compost/manure/soil/wood chips
9) We traveled to California in search of winery equipment
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This picture was sent to me from the Forbidden Desert Vineyard near Truth or Consequences, NM. We were introduced to this vineyard through an Instagram acquaintance and we decided to purchase 1.5 tons of Chardonnay and 1.5 tons of Chenin Blanc.
The ripening grapes. This picture shows how sandy the vineyard floor is. Due to COVID we haven’t even been able to visit the vineyard yet. The vineyard was formerly owned by Gruet, a sparkling wine producer, founded in New Mexico in the early 1980’s. The vines are over 25 years old.
It was a very exciting day when our first ever wine tanks arrived!
We ordered three 200 gallon tanks for our grapes coming from New Mexico.
The logistics of picking up three tons of grapes in New Mexico and bring them back to the Robert Clay Winery in Mason, TX turned out to be quite challenging. For some reason COVID has resulted in a nationwide shortage of trailers. Go figure. I finally was able to purchase this trailer in Houston and borrowed Promit’s truck to tow it out to Fort Davis. Because I was by myself, wrestling these tanks onto the trailer and strapping them down ended up taking about 3 hours. Once everything was secure I set off for Ruidoso, New Mexico to pick up our freshly pressed white grape juice. Five hours later I arrived in Ruidoso which is high in the mountains and surrounded by pine forest.
The guys at the winery were super helpful. They had everything pressed for me when I arrived, and helped me get everything in the tanks and loaded onto the trailer in only an hour and a half. Just as we finished loading everything back onto the trailer when it started pouring. I set out for the RCV winery in Mason around 7pm in order to avoid transporting the juice in the heat of the day.
Almost as soon as I left the winery with the full tanks, in the rain, Google Maps tried to lead me on to this dirt road . . . I decided to take the long way around.
I arrived in Mason around 5am and immediately went to sleep in the drivers seat, parked in front of the winery. I slept about 3 hours until Julian arrived and helped me unload the trailer and stow the soon-to-be-wine safely in the winery.
The tanks were already starting to ferment when we unloaded them from the trailer. This wine is 50/50 Chenin Blanc and Chardonnay, and we left the skins in during fermentation, which is not typical for white wine. We also will have a 100% Chardonnay and a 100% Chenin Blanc. Both of these wines are more typical white wines and were not fermented with the skins. As I’m writing this, the three New Mexico wines are done fermenting but still in their fermentation tanks. Katie and I plan to head to Mason soon to transfer the wine into barrels.
I have a few ongoing experiments at the vineyard. All are related to overcoming the same challenges. The volcanic soil in the vineyard drains extremely quickly. What this means to the vines is that any water, rain or irrigation both, spends a very short time at a depth where it is useful to the vine roots before sinking to deeper soil strata where it is out of reach. Another aspect of our vineyard soil is that despite being very rich in minerals it is extremely low on organic matter. This is important for two reasons. First, organic matter helps the soil hold onto moisture and release it slowly. Second, organic matter in soil is what houses and feeds soil microbes. Soil microbes are important to grapevines because soil microbes interact with vine roots in a way that allows vine roots to uptake all those minerals in the soil. Without these microbe helpers, the vines’ ability to use minerals in the soil is severely impaired.
So right now, the vines are lacking water and organic matter. They are also struggling to uptake nutrition from the soil because with out adequate water and organic matter the soil microbes cannot thrive.
First experiment. I dug 6 holes between different vines and filled the holes with bokashi compost (if you are into compost stuff and don’t know what this is I recommend googling it, and also trying it out for yourself :)). This adds organic matter and active microbes to the soil. The idea is to wait and see if we detect any difference in growth between vines with bokashi and vines without.
Now we wait.
Wood chips picked up for free from the local dump. Driving down a very bumpy road shook everything down and formed this giant wood chip granola bar.
A neighbor was very kind and gave us some horse manure. I mixed the manure and the wood chips to make some more compost!
Second experiment. I removed the grass in a small radius around this little row of vines.
I then put down a layer of contractor paper. It’s just thick construction paper.
I then applied a 6-8 inch thick layer of wood chips as mulch. The idea here is to trap as much moisture as possible by preventing evaporation, and to eliminate competition from other plants close to the vines.
Just in time for a little rain!
After only a week several vines started sprouting new shoots. More time is needed to really tell, but early indications seem very promising.
Back when I thought we had a winery space secured I purchased some used winery equipment from a winery in California. My parents graciously went and picked it up for me and had been storing everything at their house for the past few months. Katie and I finally made it out to California and, with the help of my dad and my brother, got it loaded into a container to be shipped back to Texas.
Tetris
Packing Ninjas
Here I am showing my parents some of the business planning I’ve been doing. Things have been very fluid over the past few months, and now without a winery space things have become more complicated, but a lot of progress has been made toward having a completed investor pitch in order to raise some money to get our business off the ground. We are also looking into agriculture loans as an option. We are looking at every option that might allow me to avoid going back to the office again. Thanks so much to everyone that helped out giving feedback on the business plan so far.
This moth was huuuge! More than two inches long.