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Newsletter and thoughts from Kruse Winery............................................................................................................... Monday August 16thDear Friends, All of the wines are absolutely delicious. Our vineyard produces such nice grapes that all I have to do as a winemaker is provide a good environment for the process to take place in and do things in a timely manner. Of course it took about twentyfive years to find this place. I talk to winemakers all the time and they frequently talk about total acidity, ph, and other measureable parameters. Then, when it's my turn to talk I have to honestly tell them I don't measure these things. For us, all the work went into finding this property and then planting and caring for our vineyard - Claire's Field. Then every year when we prune, each of our 8,000 vines is individually pruned according to its' needs. People in this business all agree that if you get pefect grapes then your job is, primarily, not to screw them up. There are somethings that I do measure. One is the sugar of the grapes as one of the indicators of ripeness. Then, while the grapes are fermenting I innoculate the red musts with malo-lactic cultures to bring about the malo-lactic fermentation. This changes the malic acid to lactic acid and makes the wine softer. It is almost always just referred to as ML. If I have any doubt that this is finished I do a paper chromatograph test to make sure. We also measure the alcohol of all the finished wines because it has to appear on the label and the amount of excise tax for wines under 14% is different than for wines in excess of 14%. Otherwise my chief instruments for guaging the process and deciding when to bottle are my nose and palate. Yes, I am getting older and organoleptic analysis is not as easy as it used to be. Having a really good glass is half the job. A base, stem and generous bowl with a narrow top. When I thief some wine into a glass from a barrel the surface area of the wine in the glass might be around three or four square inches. But when I swirl the wine it coats the sides of the glass and I more than double the surface area of wine exposed to the air. The volatile constituents that can break the surface tension and become airborne are also more than doubled. This is the best way to do it. You can also take a sip and lower your head and inhale air through the wine in you mouth. This allows vapors that you create to go past your olfactory nerve ending and you get more from the wine. It sounds kind of obnoxious though and is not for polite company. I saw a really neat tool at the Unified Wine Symposium in Sacramento a couple of years ago. It is called "The Vino Chapeau" (wine hat) Wine Aroma Concentrator It is a thin, clear, flexible plastic odorless disk that you can lay on the top of your glass. It clings to the glass so it won't slip off. So you pour some wine into the glass, put the Vino Chapeau on the glass, swirl the glass, wait about 30 seconds and then with your nose at the edge of the glass peel off the disk. You will find that without the opportunity for air currents to waft the aroma out of your glass it becomes enormously concentrated. While this is not something you would ordinarily do with every glass of wine you enjoy it is enormously beneficial when you are tasting critically. I think you can buy them in a set of four. Check it out at vinochapeau.com. Remember, our business depends on you. Please pass this along to your wine appreciating friends. Tom ............................................................................................................... June Quiz!Pictured below are four leaves one from each variety we grow. Each is
typical of the variety. We grow Cabernet, Chardonnay,
(And the answer is: Starting at the upper left and going clockwise the leaves are Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Tom ............................................................................................................... Wednesday June 16th, 2010Dear Friends This year has been mostly of the latter. When I walk through the vineyard I am struck by how late the vines have flowered and what a light crop has set. Mostly the reds, the Chardonnay has a fairly normal crop. This past Spring I decided I was going to collect and plant Black Walnuts
from the tree near the house. An amazing number of them sprouted and
I now have a row of Walnut seedlings next to the fence of the large garden
area. This Winter when they go dormant I will see about digging We have released the first estate bottle fermented sparkling wine from the Estate Chardonnay here. It is dryly austere and, refuses to be taken lightly. I guess I should say that I don't like the wine to be the center of attention at a meal or other occassion. It's job is adjunct and complementary. This Champagne, however, commands your attention. Not rude but assertive. If you decide to try it always chill the bottle for a few hours and serve in a pristine flute. Thanks for reading. ............................................................................................................... Tuesday May 11th, 2010Friends, There is still some green in our hills and we're approaching the middle of May! Our biggest threat is powdery mildew and to prevent this we spray the vines with sulfur. Usually we have an almost completely dry late Spring, Summer and Fall. No rain and low humidity make growing grapes in California easier than almost anywhere else in the world. If you hear a California grape grower complaining then you know you're just listening to a complainer. Yes, of course, we have concerns and worries but the weather isn't usually bad. There couldn't be a nicer place to grow grapes than Santa Clara County. In viticultural parlance we are a Region Two as far as heat summation in day-degrees. The nominal growing season for grapes is from April 1st to November 1st. The average daily temperature between high and low is measured and then 50 degrees is subtracted. That is the temperature below which shoots don't grow. For each day then, there is a day-degree facture. If the first of April had a high temp. of 70and a low temp. of 50 then the average is 60. Subtract 50 from that and for that one day, the 1st of April, you have ten day-degrees. Every day is kept track of and the whole season is added together. Region one, being the coolest, has 2,000 to 2,500 day degrees. Examples of that are Santa Cruz, most of Monterey County, the Carneros District of Napa County and so on. Region 2 is 2,500 to 3,000 day-degrees. All of Santa Clara County is in that range. Region 3 is 3,000 to 3,500 and so on. Napa County has four regions in it, the warmest area being Region 4 in Calistoga at the North end of the county. There is no bay influence there and it is roughly as warm as Sacramento. The Cabernets
Napa is know for come from a Region 3 area between Napa and St. Helena.
Understanding this influences what variety you
plant,
what the row direction will be, North-South or East-West, and what
type of trellis system you train your vines to grow in. When we first planted there was an excess of fertility in our soil and the shoots would easily grow six or seven feet. This is the 13th year of growing. We have not fertilized and our winter cover crop is annual rye grass. The vines have "tamed down" now so that the shoots (canes) are about three to four feet long when they stop growing in the Fall so then they can concentrate instead on making sugar for the grapes. If you have between three and four feet of cane length, with healthy leaves, that is usually enough leaf surface area to ripen grapes. We are getting extremely good flavors from our vines and they are at the beginning of their prime. More later ............................................................................................................... Monday, February 12th, 2010Twelve Things to Remember On St. Valentine's Day
All leading to happy and successful lives. Tom & Karen More reading about champagne! Most of you know about the traditional process referred to as "a la Methode Champenoise" but for those who might have forgotten we pick the grapes for our champagne when they are at 20% sugar. This is slightly under ripe. As with all under ripe fruit they are high in acid (tart) and, because the sugar is lower than for our Chardonnay table wine, after it is finished fermenting the wine will have approx. 11% alcohol in it. So in the Spring following the making of the wine we put the wine in the bottling tank and we add a very carefully measured amount of sugar (24 gr per liter) and a new innoculum of yeast. Then we bottle this wine in the very strong traditional champagne bottle and we place a temporary cap on it. The bottles go into wooden bins, on their sides, in or cellar where it is cooler and the yeast ferments the sugar. In regular winemaking the sugar produces CO2 and it goes off into the atmosphere, but because the wine is fermenting in the bottle the CO2 cannot escape so it remains in solution and builds up pressure. Laying the bottles on their sides also exposes the yeast to the wine with a greater surface area. This imparts a yeasty character to the wine. When it is time we take the bottles out of the bins and shake them up to get all the yeast in suspension and they are placed neck down at an inverted angle. We turn the bottles (riddle) every day so that after a few weeks all the yeast is down in the neck of the bottle. I chill the bottles and freeze the wine in just the neck of the bottle. Then I turn the bottle right side up and pry the cap off. The pressure that developed in the bottle, 90 psi, blows out the frozen plug and I can put the "cork" cork and wire it down. Then we have to let the bottles come back to ambient teperature
and wash them and label them. Once I tried to count how many
times each bottle had to be handled and I gave up. Of course large producers
have
all of these processes automated. Saturday, January 9th, 2010Dear
Friends, We start the New Year here with a dormant vineyard in need of pruning. January, for us, is always a new beginning. We reflect on the harvest just over and make decisions about this coming year and what it might bring. Is there anything we want to do differently? Leave more or fewer buds (we actually count them), lengthen or shorten the cordons, fine tune the trellising and hope we have enough rain to carry us into June when we think about irrigating. Our vineyard is, perhaps, one of the finest in California. You are invited to walk around and look at it anytime. The trellis system we use is called a quadrilateral cordon. It actually takes several years to train the vines to this system but once they are fully extended on the wires this system is not only productive but it yields high quality fruit. Many of you have participated in aspects of our work in the vineyard; cane tucking, leaf pulling and harvest. These are essential to growing the best grapes. I'm grateful for your help. Very shortly I will be sending out a notice for classes we give here on grape growing. One will be a short class on pruning and the other will be an all day class on "Planting the Home Vineyard". In the meantime, I hope to see you on the 16th. ............................................................................................................... We received a Double Gold Medal!First, I want to let all of you know that our winery just received a Double Gold Medal for our 2004 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon from the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Judging - a very prestigious tasting. We are of course very proud of our wine and this award, along with others from international competitions, validates our belief that we have established a world class vineyard. |
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| Thomas
Kruse Winery - 3200 Dryden Avenue, Gilroy, CA 95020 - Krusewine
(at) aol (dot) com (no hotlink due to SPAMMers) |