2009 Wine Bloggers Conference

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the North American Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma. It is an annual meeting for members of the wine blogging community, wine industry, and wine media. It is chance for bloggers and members of the wine industry to meet, taste wine, and of course discuss the future of wine, wine media, and the internet. As wine consumers become tech savvy, wine bloggers have become an excellent new source for information and reviews. The internet and social networking are also providing great new ways for consumers to find out about, and be connected to great wines. Bloggers from all over the US, as well as one from New Zealand, converged in Santa Rosa to learn, and of course drink some wine. This year was graciously hosted by the wineries and grape growers of the Sonoma, Napa, Russian River, and Dry Creek Valleys. On Friday we had a chance to taste great wines from the region at multiple pourings with special tastings featuring Sonoma and Russian River Valleys, with many of the winemakers themselves doing the pouring. Very fun to taste wines that we don't really produce in Washington State, most notably Pinot Noirs and Zinfandels. Awards were also given to the best wine blogs for 2009. We were treated to a lovely day in Napa Valley on Saturday beginning at Culinary Institute of America at Greystone with speakers Barry Schuler of Meteor Vineyard and Jim Gordon of Wines and Vines Magazine. Next was a lunch and vineyard walk at Stag's Leap with vineyard manager Kirk Grace. This was followed by a tasting at Palmaz Vineyards featuring Viader, Madonna Estate, and of course Palmaz Cabernet. The winery is impressive. Not only do they have an amazing view of the valley but the entire production facility is built underground. Quintessa then hosted a grand tasting of an amazing lineup of producers from Napa Valley. It was a chance for all the conference goers to taste some of the best wines the Napa has to offer. There were lots of big Cabs of course, but there were interesting white wines, and bubbly, to taste as well which helped keep my palate from getting too burned out. I finished my day with a dinner at Domaine Chandon with the wines of O'Brien Estate, Louis M. Martini, Parry Cellars, Newton, and both bubbly and still wines from Chandon. Sunday was perhaps less wine filled but more educational with seminars about blogging, social networking, and the future of wine media and marketing. The end of the conference was punctuated by the announcement that Walla Walla will be the host for next years' event. Napa and Sonoma have certainly set the bar pretty high for us here in Washington to match their hospitality. Good thing we have such fabulous wines here in Walla Walla to share with the new generation of wine writers. We look forward to hosting everyone a year from now.

Summer in Walla Walla

Summertime in the Walla Walla Valley is all about harvesting. We are a long way from harvesting any grapes, we won't begin until the middle of September, but there are many other crops that are being picked across Walla Walla. The rolling hills surrounding Walla Walla are tan this time of year from all the ripening wheat that they are preparing to harvest. Peas are the other major crop that the farmers rotate with wheat. The pea harvest is coming to a close but you will still see some of the giant pea harvesting machines creeping through fields on the outskirts of Walla Walla. Most of the peas are destined to end up frozen in a grocery store near you. In our neighborhood, the sweet smell of fresh cut alfalfa is heavy in the air. Of course July is mostly all about the Walla Walla sweets. From the end of June till the end of Summer, Walla Walla is full of onions. There are bags of onions available in every type of store and roadside stand. Every restaurant in town has onion focused menus and the locals race to see how many onions they can eat before the season is over. Of course there is a sweet onion festival going on this weekend. The only catch with the super sweet onions is that the season doesn't last long and the onions need to be eaten quickly because they don't store for long. This year seems to be a great year for local cherries. The Bings and Rainiers are giant and full of flavor and available all over town. The little town of Milton-Freewater to the south has a state of the art cherry sorting house that preps all the local fruit for shipping all over the US. There are lots of other fruits in the valley that are not grown in great quantities but are a treat for the locals like blueberries, raspberries, apricots, and strawberries. There probably won't be any peaches until August but when they are ripe nothing is more delicious. Here at Pepper Bridge the only harvesting going on is the picking of lavender. We have a large patch of lavender with many different colors and types and it is finally fully blooming. We don't pick the lavender for any use here at the winery but our visitors are welcome to take some with them. It looks beautiful and you can smell the lavender all the way down the driveway. Lavender loves the hot dry heat of Walla Walla, it is a close impersonation of the south of France after all. This time of year you see blooming lavender all across the valley. It smells like summer.

Bottling 2007 Vintage

It has been a flurry of bottling activity here at Pepper Bridge. We just finished bottling the last of the 2007 vintage which includes the Cabernet, the Pepper Bridge Vineyard designate, and a little bit of Reserve (Yeah!). These wines will now rest in bottle for their grand unveiling a year from now. It is such a long time to wait but it is going to be worth it. The word on the street is that 2007 is really something special. The growing season was just what Jean-François is looking for, plenty of sun and heat in the summer and a long harvest with warm sunny days and very cool nights. When we get cool nights during harvest here in Walla Walla the grapes retain more natural acidity and develop more flavors and aromas. For Pepper Bridge, the resulting wines for 2007 are delicious, full of dark fruit and earth with lots of complexity. Maybe this is the best vintage to date for Walla Walla? So bottling this exciting wine is in and of itself an event, but add to it all the excitement of bottling with a brand new bottling truck. This was the debut of the brand new mobile bottling line, Bugle Bottling. This is a cooperative venture between Pepper Bridge and AbejaWineries and the Artifex custom crush facility. It has been a long time in the planning and the building and now the truck is operational and bottling wine. It is a pretty slick operation to see in action. Most of the wineries in Walla Walla depend on mobile bottling lines but this new truck is pretty high tech, lots of sensors and automation. On a personal level, I am very excited about the automated capsuling machine that eliminates my job on the bottling truck. I am sure that the computer controlled machine will do a far better job than me and will never get bored of capsuling for 8 hours straight. Special thanks to Dana Lane for the fabulous photos!

Bloom Time

It is getting on towards the end of June and the vineyards are done blooming. I get to see Pepper Bridge Vineyard on a pretty regular basis, basically everyday, so it is fun to see how the bloom moves along. Each varietal blooms at a different pace, and different areas of the vineyard move along quicker than others. Most notably, the sections of vineyard adjacent to the asphalt driveway are the quickest to bud out and the quickest to bloom. So it is easy to see all of the various stages of bloom all at the same time within the vineyard just by walking a little bit. The blooms themselves are not very impressive. Even when fully flowering the blooms are easy to miss, they look a bit more like white hairs than flowers. Grape vines are pretty amazing plants in that they don't need any assistance from insects because they are self pollinating. Once the flowers are pollinated the grapes set and little bb sized fruit starts to grow. The blooms are all finished in Pepper Bridge Vineyard and the fruit is set. It appears that the fruit has set pretty evenly given that we had a bit of damage from cold weather in the winter. Jean-François is looking forward to a nice yield this fall. In July the vineyard crew will go through and start the process of thinning out the clusters, grapes that did not set properly, and clusters that are in the wrong spots on the vine. So for now the grapes will be left alone to grow. The crew will be out in the vineyard doing some lateral thinning of leaves to give the clusters more room, air, and sunlight to get growing. We just need some more warm sunny days to get things going.

Malbec Tasting

Malbec was the subject of our most recent tasting with the Pepper Bridge/Amavi staff. Malbec has become such a hot grape here in Walla Walla, it seems like everybody is making one these days. Jean-François always makes a little bit of Malbec for blending into both the Merlot and Cab, 10 barrels in 2008 . But I do believe that it will be impossible to talk him into bottling a 100% Malbec. One on the best reasons being that at the moment there is a whopping 6 acres of Malbec planted in the Pepper Bridge Vineyard, and we only get 1 of those acres. If Jean-François were to bottle Malbec all by itself he wouldn't have enough left for blending and it seems to be one of his secret weapons, great color, great fruit, and earthiness. So we compared a classic French Malbec from Cahors, an Argentinian bottle, a local Walla Walla Malbec, and a barrel sample of 2008 Pepper Bridge Malbec. All of these wines were delicious and good representations of the varietal. The French bottle from Chateau Haut-Monplaisir was full of dark fruit and earth, very French. We tasted a bottle from 2003 and I think that it surprised everyone with how fresh and young it was. Achaval-Ferrer was our Argentinian bottle. Very fruity and food friendly and a total bargain at $17.99. From Walla Walla we tasted the 2006 Seven Hills Winery Malbec. It is a very nice bottle of wine and I think that it is a good representation of the varietal. Their fruit comes from vineyards that are adjacent to the Seven Hills Vineyard, about 10 miles from the Pepper Bridge Vineyard, the source for our Malbec grapes. The Pepper Bridge Malbec, even coming out of the barrel in an unfinished state, was fruity and floral with lots of earth and fantastic color. I would say that it seemed to fall in between France and Argentina style wise. Not as earthy and rustic as the French, and not quite as fruity and juicy as the Argentinian. Really I guess that means that Malbec does pretty well here in Walla Walla. The only unfortunate part being that the only way to taste Pepper Bridge Malbec is 3-5% at a time.

Busy Summer at PB

Wow this summer is action packed for Pepper Bridge. There are wine events and pourings every week for the next few months and Pepper Bridge staff will be all over Washington State and beyond. This weekend is the Seattle Awards' Grand Awards Tasting. The 2006 Merlot received a double gold, the highest rating, so we will be featured at this pouring along with the other award winners. It should be quite an event featuring some of the very best wines in Washington State all in the posh Rainier Club. Our winemaker, Jean-François, is in Hawaii this weekend for the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival on Maui. He will be pouring Pepper Bridge wines and participating in a seminar featuring the geology, and of course the wines of the Walla Walla Valley. Friday, June 19th we will be pairing up with Abeja and Longshadows for a winemaker dinner for the 2009 Wine Country Celebration. Dinner at Longshadows with all that great wine plus Norm McKibben? How could you go wrong? Our tasting room manager Lisa will be on hand for the Taste Washington Spokaneon the 21st of June. More than 100 wineries all under one roof, the Davenport Hotel roof, to be exact. If you are in Spokane it would be an excellent way to spend Father's Day. July kicks off with a winemaker dinner here in Walla Walla at T. Maccarone's Restaurant on July 2nd. Chef Jacob Crenshaw will be pairing a delicious five course meal with both Pepper Bridge and Amavi wines. Next, Jean-François dashes off to Bozeman, Montana for the Museum of the Rockies Wine Classic on the 11th of July. It is an excellent event that benefits the museum and features great wines from around the Pacific Northwest. Maybe there will be a little fly-fishing that weekend as well. Both Pepper Bridge and Amavi will be participating in the International Wine & Heart Health Summit on July 15th-18th here in Walla Walla. In addition to tasting great Washington wines the conference will be exploring the links between wine and health, aka drink more wine be healthier/happier. You can find out more info at winesummit@comcast.net . July wraps up with a winemaker weekend at the Marcus Whitman Hotel. Pepper Bridge and Abeja will be pairing up for a dinner on Saturday the 26th plus a reception on Friday and tastings on Saturday afternoon. Definitely a dynamic duo. So that is it so far for June and July. August updates a little later.

The Vineyard is Growing

Now that it is June here in Walla Walla, summer seems to have finally arrived. We have had a few weeks now of warm weather and the vineyard is loving it. Lots of sun shine and temperatures in the upper 80s has really kicked the vineyard into high gear. It seems like this time of year you can watch the vines growing. By the time we leave the winery in the evening the shoots seem to have grown 3 inches since the morning. All of this quick growth means lots of work for the vineyard crew. This is the time of year for shoot thinning. Even after all of the pruning from the early spring the vines still have a tendency to put out too much growth. The target amount of growth for each vine is two canes per spur on the cordon, so the vineyard crew is out pulling off the extra shoots. They have to work quickly but they do have to be careful with which shoots they remove. They have to keep an eye on which canes are bearing fruit and which canes they will want to use next year, all while trying to work quickly because the vineyard is continuing to grow and there is a fair amount of acreage that needs thinning. It always really impresses me that the vineyard crew can work so fast and be so meticulous at the same time. I know that I wouldn't be able to keep up with them.