Harvest 2011 At Kramer Vineyards

Did any major, life changing events happen to you in 2011? I suspect most readers here know about my move to Oregon and subsequent experience as a harvest intern, followed by my hiring as a tasting room manager. Originally I meant to write this blog post in November or December, but I kept putting it off because I could never figure out how to convey my experiences properly.

I'll give it a shot now, so please read on. Enjoy the pictures too! Here's a link to my Facebook photo gallery of Harvest 2011 pictures too.

When I first arrived in Oregon, I had no job, having quit Trader Joe's to move here. I was looking for work, sending out resumes and meeting prospective employers left and right. As you can imagine, it's a stressful time, living off one's savings and all. Becky's family (who own and operate Kramer Vineyards) was great during this period, offering me a chance to help out at the winery during Harvest. Because it provided much-needed income and gave me a chance to gain valuable production-side wine experience, I jumped at the chance.

Not so ripe, but very disease-free grapes

I got lost on the way to Kramer Vineyards on my first day. Driving along unfamiliar roads, mind racing, the pressure on, and I blew it. Thankfully I took a right turn at the next town and continued on my way. Arriving only about 15 minutes behind schedule, my first day consisted of watching the pickers lug bucket after bucket of chardonnay into the bins and peppering Kim Kramer, winemaker, with questions. I helped punch the pickers tickets, one punch per bucket, and when the fruit was in, we walked up to the winery.

Glamor? Nah.

Wine seduces us with the image of glamorous life in the vineyards, walking among gorgeous vines or gaily stomping grapes avec les pieds while a man in a vest strums a guitar in the background. When you're sitting on top of a drum press, sticky with grape juice, surrounded by yellowjackets, buffeted by cold winds, and bashing your knuckles bloody on the icy cold metal of the elevator, the romance is sucked out of life itself. All you can think about is that there are a few tons of grapes left until you're able to climb down and warm yourself next to a hissing propane heater.

Only after climbing down off that press, after the last grapes of the day were crushed to juice and fed into their respective tanks, did I begin to understand what I was a part of. We often grab a bottle off the shelf, open it, and enjoy the wine as it is. Rarely do we consider how that wine got into our glass, instead living in the moment of joy that wine brings. A sense of pride, honor, and contentment paced my fatigue, lifting my spirits as I drove through the darkness back to my home. I was finally part of creating something, a beverage that does so much for us, and for me personally.

As Harvest 2011 continued, I kept learning. Simple things like putting on a hose fitting correctly, shutting off the pump as the barrel fills up, opening this valve or that valve at the right time, and how to ignore those Yellow Jackets. Kim and Keith (Kim's dad, winemaker, viticulturalist, farmer) taught me more about wine; what goes into a press, a vat, a fermenter, a tank, a barrel, and lastly, a bottle. I learned about different yeast strains, barrel treatments, how to monitor fermentation and take notes, how to punch a cap down and how to pump over that cap. Wine began to change for me, for while I could now explore wine in more detail, and while the great ones excited me more than ever, so did I lament the bad wines ever more strongly.

By all accounts, Harvest was going very well. The fruit coming in was of excellent quality, without problems like botrytis, mildew, or bunch rot. Mid-October's string of sunny, relatively warm days provided a lifeline to 2011's growing season, allowing the grapes one last burst of ripening energy. Some blocks didn't get fully ripe though, and I learned which parts of the vineyards would ripen more fully than others. Those relatively underripe grapes went into sparkling wine (which we pressed to tank on Day 1) and rosé, one of pinot noir and one of carmine. Believe me when I tell you, those wines are going to be incredible. You'll have to wait till late spring before they're released though.

Somehow I managed these days relatively injury-free, which is an achievement. The crush pad is a dangerous place, with heavy equipment moving, hard metal protruding, winery dogs lounging, and watery grape must everywhere. At night I'd read up on the adventures of other harvest interns and winemakers, journeying with them as they struggled with weather, schedules, and all sorts of details that go into 750 ml of the good stuff.

Doing important things.

Working on a small, family owned winery also exposed me to realities of the wine industry. I was dismayed to watch critics at major publications turn in harvest reports where they talked to the folks at the million-dollar facilities and no one else. In fact, I got a little pissed because I felt that the little guys, especially ones with heritage firmly behind them, were getting hardly any coverage. Even the wine blogging set, always ones to trumpet their independence from publications, scarcely mentioned or made an effort to tell the story of what goes on at a small winery producing the best wines they can on the very fringes of the climate-zone. Laziness mixed with apathy perhaps.

Yet the days continued, the fruit wasn't going to stop coming in just because I was full of self-righteous anger. Work needed to be done and I needed to pull my weight. After all the pinot noir was in, we turned to sorting and de-stemming the fruit. If there was ever a tedious job during Harvest, this is it. Luckily I was working the sorting table with good people, helping pass the time much quicker. The fruit quality was excellent, lots of ripe clusters, not much rot or mildew anywhere. After it passed through our table it met the de-stemmer before being unceremoniously dumped into the fermenter bins.

This is not how you work a sorting table.

In those white plastic bins the hungry yeast began to do their work. There are no expensive concrete eggs or ceramic-lined concrete tanks here because Kramer Vineyards wasn't started as a vanity project by some millionaire who wanted the wine country lifestyle. If there is "real wine", this is how it's made. Years of experience and careful attention to detail mixed in with practical application of knowledge work together to shepherd grapes into wine. Balancing what the yeast does naturally with avoidance of issues like volatile acidity and stuck fermentations requires an artist's touch.

So it went, I watched and learned, asked questions, and worked. Knowledge gained that hopefully will be put to good use this coming year. That is a hint, folks. Twelve days passed with chardonnay, pinot gris, and muller-thurgau in tanks while the pinot noir sat in bins bubbling along merrily. If you ever get the chance to visit a winery after Harvest, do so, the aroma will stay with you forever. The air is tangy, perhaps from the carbon dioxide, and carries a distinct grapey smell.

Once the yeast are exhausted, it's time to load the gloppy mess into our faithful, knuckle destroying drum press. Shoveling thousands of pounds of grapes never felt so good. Actually, it doesn't feel good at all but it's a hell of a workout. That activity helped delay my nearly inevitable Portland weight gain by a month! The Harvest Diet, eat whatever the hell you want but work your ass off. The press uses barely any pressure to gently extract the juice from the grapes, and that juice is then sent to a settling tank where it rests until the day comes when we must barrel it and put those barrels into the cellar for aging.

Anyone who's worked a Harvest and filled barrels has invariably overfilled one..or more..I miraculously got away with just one geyser-like eruption of wine, my attention wandered while I filled the barbera we'd brought in from Washington. No more than a few gallons of the vivid purple stuff were lost though.

Once the barbera was put away, Harvest was basically over. 43 tons of fruit in, all of it now resting and evolving into wines I will be proud to drink. Authenticity is a huge buzzword in the wine world right now, so I propose this: authentic wine shows grapes in their most expressive form, and authentic wines are made by small producers who are bereft of high tech tools and facilities, who labor out of passion and dedication.





Harvest 2011 was an amazing experience, the ripples of which I am still feeling.

Beau Carufel

Where Have I Been?

The eight of you that read this blog may have wondered why it's been so quiet lately. After living in San Diego for over 20 years, I packed up and moved to Oregon. Right outside Portland is a small community called Beaverton, where I'm now making my home. The drive north, up Interstate 5, took two days with a stop in Sacramento overnight. Becky had flown down the week previously and was invaluable, helping me pack and load the truck as well as keeping me entertained on the drive up.

Preparing for the move took up a lot of time and energy, so I was unable to get much writing done. As of now, I have four blog entries in the draft queue, but none are fit to print...As if anything I post is ever truly fit to print. In the final weeks of my San Diego life, I tasted through some good and not-so-good California cabernets as well as a lineup of decent carmeneres from Chile. Notes on each of those tastings will be forthcoming. More coverage of my September press trip to Navarra is also on it's way, including some of the best wine I've tasted this year. I've also a slew of single-bottle/winery reviews coming along in the pipeline, and some op/ed pieces I've been brewing in my head for a long time now.

So now that I'm in Oregon, will this blog change much? I hope it only changes for the better, with more commentary on the wine world and fewer cut and dry wine reviews. I don't think I have the energy or drive to write exhaustive articles on every single wine event that goes on, but there are some interesting tastsings coming up that I hope to attend and report to you on.

With that, I ask your pardon for a few more days as I get everything settled into my apartment in Beaverton. I'll be posting up some coverage of the harvest work I did yesterday at Kramer Vineyards, and recapping the aforementioned Curry & Carmenere tasting, as well as the (very) interesting California Cabernet tasting I did a few weeks ago.

Cheers!
Beau Carufel

A Quick and Dirty Recap of the 2011 #PinotSmackdown

Where were you last night? If you're a wine lover, specifically a pinot noir lover, you should have been drinking the stuff! Last night, Thursday August 18th, marked the second annual "Pinot Smackdown". This unique event, started by infamous wine bloggers Ed Thralls and Joe Herrig, is a massive online tasting of pinot noir from around the world. The goal, to find a winner among the world's pinot regions, by popular acclaim, instead of having some critic appoint a region as the best in the world. Cause we all know that critics suck, right?

I'll repost the official details right here, so that you can see what you missed. *Evil laugh*
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#PinotSmackdown is an all-day global celebration of the world's most expressive wine grape combined with a knock-down, drag-out cage fight between YOUR FAVORITE Pinot-producing regions!

TIME: 24 hours in order to give everyone time to share a glass when it makes sense in their time zone.

This event is FREE and all you need to participate is wine and Twitter, Facebook or your favorite social channel. Everyone is encouraged to invite wine lovers to your location and make the Twitter stream of #PinotSmackdown tweets visible to attendees. We like to use Tweetdeck, TweetChat.com or Twitterfall.com to display all the tweets with the hashtag "#PinotSmackdown"
Here's the twist!... who makes the best Pinot you've ever tasted? To vote via your tweets simply add another 2-character hashtag after #PinotSmackdown and we'll count the votes so that region gets bragging rights for the night!
Voting region hashtags:
#OR - Oregon
#CA - California
#WA - Washington
#NY - New York
#46 - U.S. The "Other 46," outside of the Big Four
#FR - France
#IT - Italy
#DE - Germany (Deutschland)
#EU - Europe, beyond France, Germany, Italy
#CN - Canada
#NZ - New Zealand
#CH - Chile
#AR - Argentina
#AU - Australia
#SA - South Africa
#WD - World, as in none previously listed
For example, if you are drinking a Pinot from a region in California, simply tag the end of your tweets with: #PinotSmackdown #CA
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Very simple, I agree, but incredibly fun and a great way to get some people together for a night of wine and discussion.

About two weeks before the event, Ed reached out to myself and a handful of other wine bloggers with a trifecta of pinot noir samples from the Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley AVA's. Those were:
2009 Sonoma Coast Vineyards Freestone Hills - $40 SRP
2009 Windsor Sonoma Russian River Valley - $30 SRP
2010 Windsor Vineyards Pinot Noir, Sonoma County - $28 SRP
These were all wines from the Vintage Wine Estates portfolio. As a disclaimer, Ed works for them and they were a huge backer for the Pinot Smackdown.

In addition to those California (specifically, Sonoma County) pinot noirs, I opened a 2007 Kramer Vineyards Cardiac Hill pinot from Oregon to throw some contrasting style into the mix. The Kramers were hosting an event at The Friendly Vine in Forest Grove, Oregon. Apparently (according to Becky Kramer at least), the event was a real hit.

With those four pinot noirs, I was ready to go. While I could have also opened other pinots, including some great stuff from Burgundy and New Zealand, I wanted to keep it somewhat under control. I mean, I didn't want to get absolutely hammered while tasting and tweeting. Drunken tweeting, while fun, can be dangerous.

Here are the tasting notes on the four pinots I sampled last night:

2010 Windsor Vineyards Sonoma County pinot noir: Bright acid but disjointed and unbalanced. Very young and it shows. Needs time to settle down. Ripe, sweet strawberry fights with baking spices and surprisingly thick tannin. Cranberries try to come play but are smacked around and leave in tears. Perhaps a few years in the bottle will settle this wine out, perhaps not. Hardly any finish, just disappears from my palate. Tastes cobbled together, which it was. 14.5% abv.

2009 Windsor Sonoma Russian River valley pinot noir: Soft, ripe, rich, and brimming with the flavors that American oak barrels impart. This is one of those pinots that stand up well on their own due to the sheer ripeness of the fruit. Like a strawberry fruit roll-up. That's how ripe and oaky this Russian River Valley pinot is. Imagine eating vanilla-buttered raspberry/strawberry toast. If you really dig fruiter, softer pinot noir, I bet you'd love this.. 14.5% abv.

2009 Sonoma Coast Vineyards Freestone Hill pinot noir: Here we go, bright acid, restrained berry fruits, and silky tannin. Each of those three elements are in balance, creating a very nice, smooth, light mouthfeel. I liked the wild strawberry tartness mixed with a bit of raspberry puree. Both of those added depth to the mid-palate. A warm, happy baking spice flavor brought a smile to my face. While this pinot did see oak barrel aging via American oak, the effect here is merely to add dimension versus squashing the acid like in the other two California wines. 14.3% abv.

2007 Kramer Vineyards Cardiac Hill Yamhill-Carlton pinot noir: Compared to the first three, this is in another part of the pinot spectrum. Earth and sour cherry show through, supported by fresh cranberry and a bit of peppery spice. Here and there, cigar-box and a hint of plum skin make tiny impressions across the mid-palate. The '07 Kramer Vineyard had a lightness to it that reminded me of a Côte de Beaune. The tannins were nicely integrated and firm enough to give this pinot noir structure and balance. A wholly different expression of the grape but one that's perhaps focused more on terroir and less on using oak and other techniques to create a wine. 12.8% abv.

What was my favorite? I picked the 2009 Freestone Hill from Sonoma Coast Vineyards last night as the "winner". The balance was impressive and no part (flavor, tannin, acid) of this wine felt muted. The winemaker used a deft touch to express the terroir of this particular vineyard. Sure, it's $40 a bottle, but that's right about the price you start to get excellent pinot noir. The reason I preferred this (on August 18, 2011) to the Kramer Cardiac Hill pinot noir was that it spoke to me more last night. It's that simple.

Enough about me, what about the rest of the world, busily tasting and tweeting away to support their favorite region! The winner, by a relative hair, was New Zealand! I was surprised! Last night (due to the time difference) I didn't notice much if any "#NZ" tweets from the "#pinotsmackdown" but apparently when us Yanks were asleep, the Kiwis were tweeting up a storm. Congratulations to them! Now let's get the exchange rate fixed and some more pinot from New Zealand into the USA, I want to taste it! In second place, Oregon, no surprise there. Perhaps the king of domestic pinot noir producing states (sorry, California), I saw a multitude of tweets in support of their pinot noirs. California brought up third place, a respectable showing and only a few votes behind Oregon.

Ed posted a great recap of the 2011 Pinot Smackdown on his blog, go read it and you'll see the amazing reach that this event has. He breaks down the numbers to show how this is a global event and impressions that were generated across all the social media platforms is truly amazing. We gotta give it up to Ed and Joe Herrig for promoting and steering this event along. Nicely done, gentlemen.

The wines featured here were provided free of charge for the Pinot Smackdown tasting event.


Beau Carufel

Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris, The Real Story!

Today at work we had a small wine tasting, four bottles ranging from a white blend by Columbia Crest, two domestic pinot grigios, and the 2010 Nobilo sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. The pinot grigios come from the Central Coast and the Willamette Valley and are under our own label. I won't name names right now for fear of getting fired, but if you know me and/or connect the dots, it should be easy to figure out where I work.

The tasting was interesting in that it showed multiple differences between the two pinot gris (grigio) versions, as would be expected. Those differences were caused (in part) by terroir and by the respective winemakers. During the tasting discussion, I pointed out that pinot grigio and pinot gris were the same grape variety, and the difference in name stemmed from regional preferences. I compared the names to the shiraz/syrah in order to help my crew use a familiar reference to understand the concept. Unfortunately a lot of them are still very intimidated by wine and think it's far too complex to ever comprehend.

img src http://wine-flair.com/

After making my comparison, my boss, who considers himself/herself knowledgeable about wine, said I was wrong about pinot gris/grigio and that they were cousins. He claimed to have read it in a book and held up his fingers an inch apart to imply it was somehow an authoritative tome about wine. Now this went contrary to everything I've learned about wine, but I was interested in what he had to say because I've been wrong many times before. He said that in his authoritative tome, the author wrote that pinot grigio and pinot gris were cousins, akin to the zinfandel-primititivo relationship, or at least what we used to think of the zinfandel-primitivo relationship.

I texted my friend Becky at Kramer Vineyards with the question, who confirmed what I originally believed and also pointed out that years ago, pinot grigio was the name used for cheaper versions of the wine whereas pinot gris was an attempt to take it up-market. After relaying this back to my boss, I was now informed that the Italians grow a clone of pinot grigio and he cited Wikipedia as his source. Again this seemed a bit off, something I hadn't heard much if anything about, but I didn't want to challenge him in front of any coworkers.

Back to Becky I went, with the new factoid, then she said she'd ask her sister Kim, the winemaker at Kramer Vineyards. Kim and I went back and forth on Facebook and I'll post that below.

Kim: "Becky tells me you're looking for comments on the difference between Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio?"

Beau: "Yea I was wondering, we had a question about it at work, whether they're the same grape with a different name or are genetic cousins the way Zin and Primitivo are."

Kim: "Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio are the same grape. Although, I believe Pinot Grigio implies a lighter, crisper, and often drier style (Italian grigios are more austere) than most of the Pinot Gris made here.

I believe the US producers who use grigio rather than gris are doing so primarily because of marketing. However, I would expect a wine that is labeled 'Grigio' to be light and crisp as opposed to the textural, fruity Alsatian Pinot Gris."

Beau: "So genetically they're the same, are there any clonal differences like pinot noir has? Reason I ask is that my boss claims to have read a wine book saying that they're cousins, I think he's wrong. I've never heard that before and have always been told it's a regional name difference and an implied stylistic difference."

Kim: "I think he's wrong too. There are different clones of Pinot Gris, but I am unsure as to what they are or where they are grown. I don't know what clones we grow here. I've never heard a single winemaker discuss clonal selection of Pinot Gris, so perhaps they aren't particularly important. My experience with Pinot Noir is that terroir and winemaking style often trump clonal differences in the finished wines anyway. My suspicion is that the Italian grigios are so austere because the Italians prefer them that way, like most of their whites. So, unless there has been some groundbreaking genetic research in the last few years that I'm completely ignorant of, your boss is mistaken."

Kim gave me permission to quote her in this blog post, so I thank her for taking the time to answer my questions. After emailing with Kim I also posted the question to my Twitter followers and got a couple of responses, they are below:

ReturnToTerroir: Transalpine brotha. Same grape.

KramerWine5 (Trudy Kramer): Pinot Gris is the same thing as Pinot Grigio. French vs. Italian wording. PG is a mutation of Pinot Noir.

KramerWine5 (Trudy Kramer): Pinot Gris has many other names throughout Europe.

Grooner: Pinot Grigio is the Italian name for "Grey Pinot"; Pinot Gris is the French. In Austria, it is Grauburgunder.

Again this basically confirmed that pinot grigio and pinot gris are the same grape, not cousins like my boss thinks.

My point isn't to say that I'm right and he's wrong, it's that there is a lot of false information out there even in wine books. For example, out of the wine books I own, one slightly older version says that primitivo and zinfandel are cousins, whereas a newer book says that they're genetically the same, and I've been told that primitivo is the grandfather of zinfandel by a Master of Wine before. Just goes to show you, there is information out there but you should take it all with a grain of salt.

Beau Carufel

Kramer Vineyards Makes Sparkling Muller-Thurgau, You Should Drink It!

I've been talking to Kimberley and Becky Kramer of Kramer Vineyards via Twitter for a while now. It was one of the stops I had wanted to make when I was up in Oregon last September but unfortunately I just didn't give myself enough time. That being said, I'm planning another trip to Portland in late May or June and will make a point to stop in and hang out. The Kramer sisters and their folks know I'm a big Oregon wine fan, and they were gracious enough to send me some samples to try. I've got a bottle of their 2008 Yamhill-Carlton Pinot Noir to taste soon, but tonight I wanted some bubbly.

The Kramers make a sparkling muller-thurgau, which I bet most of you have never tried before. Heck, I bet most have never tried muller-thurgau in any version. I know I've had two mullers (as the cool people call them) in my life, this is the third and has bubbles! After a long work-week capped off by an utterly horrible day today, I needed something to pick me up. I'm always amazed at how sparkling wine can do that, the pearlescent bubbles, the pop of the cork, that fizzy tickley feeling in your mouth..How can you not smile? I'm sure from the tone of my post, you can tell that this was a much needed treat for my taste buds and perhaps more importantly, my pysche.

Imagine smelling some freshly cut apples, ones you bought at your local farmers market in June. Also imagine someone left a bouquet of jasmine and honeysuckle on the table where your apples are. Finally, think of how yeasty bread dough smells. There you go, that's how this wine smells. Beautiful, accessible, fun, friendly are all  words I'd use to describe the Kramer Vineyards Celebrate Muller-Thurgau.

How does the wine taste? A lot like bottled deliciousness. More of the ripe apples, creamy yeast, a touch of sweet flowers too. I figure there's some residual sugar here but the combination of acidity and bubbles keeps that as a supporting flavor versus the wine becoming too sweet. I think it would be interesting to experiment even further with a drier version though, to see what pure, mineral driven flavors muller-thurgau is capable of.

Put simply, the Kramer Vineyards Celebrate Muller-Thurgau flat-out rocks. It's drinking incredibly well right now and is a way for you to experience a fresh twist on a very sparsely planted (and vinified) species of grape. This costs all of $15 from the Kramer Vineyards website. At that price, it's easy to buy an armful of this to have on hand to wow your guests and create some fun pairings. I made some simple quesadillas and the crisp tortillas, creamy cheese, and bubbly muller-thurgau went together like Beau and wine! A nearly perfect pairing if there ever was one. So give the bubbly a shot, support a family owned and operated winery, and drink good wine!

This was sent as a sample from Kramer Vineyards.

Beau Carufel