Urban WineWorks

On Saturday, April 5^th we had the wine club out to taste the 2007 wines and enjoy a day at the winery. The wines showed beautifully. We chose to highlight the influence of oak on Pinot Noir. We picked wine from three different barrels. Each barrel was produced by a different cooper and the wood for each came from a separate forest. In addition the wine in each of the barrels came from its own unique block in the vineyard, was picked at separate times of the harvest season and was made up of one individual Pinot Noir clone. Each was distinct. Aromas ranged from bright cherry fruit to violets to spice, and flavors were equally diverse.

Jeff Usinowicz, Executive Chef at the new Deschuttes Brew Pub in Portland’s Pearl District cooked up an amazing meal which we paired up with ’06 Bishop Creek wines. The Braised Buffalo short rib sandwich went particularly well with the Iris Block and Whole Cluster Pinot Noirs (two small reserve bottlings from the 2006 vintage). A very successful event indeed!

We are getting ready to bottle our Start Your Own Winery Pinot Gris. One of our Start Your Own Winery club members produced some last year and it turned out to be a very nice wine, so they wanted to produce it again this year. Since Pinot Gris is produced as a white wine and doesn’t go through malo-lactic fermentation we’ll need to filter it before it goes into bottle so that we don’t end up with a secondary fermentation in bottle. It is a very dry wine with about 13% alcohol with an aromatic profile of citrus, melons and pears with a nice under toned minerality that reminds me of wet stones. On the palate it is dry and crisp with a long mouth watering finish. Stylistically more aligned with northern Italian Pinot Grigio than Alsatian Pinot Gris.

March 2^nd we are going to begin a grafting project. I picked up some Arneis cuttings from another grower in the area and we are going to graft them onto some disease resistant root stock that we raised at Bishop Creek. I am a big fan of Arneis. This variety is a native of the Piedmont region of Italy, a region responsible for the famous Barbaresco and Barolo wines that grace the wine lists of top restaurants and retail shops around the world. Arneis is a delicate white wine which expresses the place it was grown very well. Typically served with light poultry and seafood dishes, it highlights vibrant acidity and minerality. Of course we don’t know how it will express itself at Bishop Creek, but that is part of the excitement of conducting little agricultural experiments in the vineyard. Currently we have a smattering of other whites growing, including Gewürztraminer, Gruner Veltliner, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris. Together these varieties have the potential of making a lovely field blend. If the Arneis isn’t up to our standards as a stand alone wine, we can always add it to our blend.

I recently tasted the 2006 Start Your Own Winery Pinot Noir. Typical of the vintage it had nice lush forward fruit. The aromas were rich in Bing cherries and winter spices like cloves and cinnamon. What I really liked it about it though was the mouth-watering finish. The acidity was persistent, balanced and really carried all the way through to the end, leaving me thirsty for more.

The verdict is still out on the 2007 Pinot Noir, but at this point I’d have to say it is probably going to be more of a leaner style, more reminiscent of the classic Oregon vintages like 1999 or 2001. Don’t hold me to that though. I think we won’t really know what the vintage will bring for a while.

Stay tuned for future tastings!

The barrels of Pinot Noir from the Start Your Own Winery completed malo lactic fermentation. I sent samples to the lab to confirm this to be the case. The next step in the winemaking process is to add so2 to protect the wine from oxygen and other contaminants while it ages and matures. So2 bonds with oxygen, so it acts as sort of a scavenger seeking out and attaching itself to oxygen molecules that are present in the wine. Our objective is to add enough so2 to scavenge what is in the wine and to have enough “free” so2 remaining to protect the wine from any oxygen, bacteria, or spoilage organisms that may sneak their way into the wine during the ageing process. So our first addition will be fairly aggressive. Once the addition has been made we’ll want to leave the wine alone for a while, simply because It is not pleasant to drink immediately after the addition has been made. We’ll come back in about 45 days and taste again after it has settled down a bit.

• We’ll begin Pruning the vineyard in the first part of January. This marks the official start of the 2008 vintage.
•  At Bishop Creek Vineyard we employ a “cane and spur” trellis system. That means that we use two shoots from the previous vintage extending along the fruiting wire in either direction from the center of the head of the trunk. We trim a third shoot down to two buds so that we can increase our chances of having a viable shoot below the fruiting wire for the next vintage. The general rules on selecting good shoots are; 1)They’re pencil thick . 2)they have 3-4 inches of internodal spacing (nodes are spots on the shoot where leaves come out. Too much space between nodes means over vigorous, too little space means stunted). 3)they’re close to the head 4) they’re below the fruiting wire. Taking care of all of these precautions help to ensure that we have well balanced plants this year.